K.D. Dowdall's Blog, page 23

A Book Review: Sam, A Shaggy Dog Story

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“Entertaining humans for cheese is a bit daft really, but cheese is cheese!” Wise words from Sam: a smart, talented, handsome, and very entertaining Collie, who, in my opinion, is the spitting image of Lassie.

Author, Sally Cronin writes, through the eyes of her beloved Collie, Sam. It is a poignant, funny, and oh so entertaining story about life with Sam.

Sam tells us about his life, and what it is like growing up dog. I couldn’t help but fall head over heels in love with Sam! And so will you! 

Sam is very literate, he did narrate this book, after all. Sam’s memoir: Sam: A Shaggy Dog Story, is a truly incredible life story of his life as a Collie. He narrates poignantly about his first memories of being a puppy, his incredible curiosity of the world around him, as well as his travels, mishaps, and friendships, and about his great of love of cheese and sausages.

Yet, most important in his life is his great love for Sally and David, his adopted family. Sam also had a fan club of sorts; he was friendly with cats, such as Henry, an Irish feral ginger and white cat, a Spanish marmalade cat, named Mollie, and let me not forget his very favorite toy, when he was a mere tadpole, a stuffed toy lamb, named Larry.

Sam, the intellectual that he was, studied human behavior extensively. He learned to speak Cat, English, and even a little Spanish. Sam was also quite good at humming a tune or two with Sally and David, on many of their family travels. Quite an accomplishment!  However, there was a certain rationale behind his thinking…cheese and sausages. If he could entertain Sally and David’s friends, by speaking English, he would be given more cheese by these guests. One could say that Sam was an accomplished entrepreneur!

As a reader of Sam’s story, I laughed, I sometimes cried, and I fell totally in love with Sam, who was loved, beyond measure, by Sally and David, his adoptive parents. This is a wonderful memoir that will make you smile, laugh, and even shed a tear, but mostly you will feel a sense of great joy for a life well lived. 5 Stars.

 

The Dark Side of the Moon

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https://mythsofthemirror.com/2019/03/01/march-speculative-fiction-prompt/

They are gone. All of them. I am alone on this planet. A planet now little more than a dustbin of old dreams of what could have been. They didn’t heed the warnings of what was to come without change.

Perhaps, it would have happened anyway. The change in the atmosphere was a warning, dismissed as fake news, until it wasn’t. The storms grew more violent, the sea raged over embankments, sea levels rose exponentially, displacing millions of families and communities around the planet. Fierce and deadly land wars began, food shortages were everywhere. All signs that something terrible was about to happen.

It started slowly at first. The air began to lose oxygen gas, nitrogen gas, and argon gas. It was replaced with greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels: nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. The Atmosphere, Biosphere, and the Geosphere showed overwhelming signs that complete degeneration would soon happen.

The loss of the rain forests, had a big impact as well, by the greedy money hounds, and marked the beginning of the no-point-of-return. The icecaps melted on the north and south poles, causing the oceans to overtake large areas of coastal land, countries lost their eastern and western seaboards completely. The conveyor of the convection belt in the oceans of the world suddenly stopped. The oceans were too cold to be warmed, all life in the ocean ceased to survive the icy environment of the ocean.

No one believed it could happen. With no way to warm the oceans, as the planet’s electromagnetic sources diminished, and the heat that comes from the earth core, 90% fed by radioactive decay, began to diminish as the planet dissimulated, all normal weather changes, ceased to occur.  The planet was to become a snowball. It had happened four times before in the planet’s history when hit, early in it’s development, by asteroids, comets, and space debris  from the big bang billions of years ago.

The last straw was the moon, it could no longer be influenced by the conveyor and thermohaline belt, as it had ceased to be after the icecaps belted, filling the oceans beyond the reach of the moon’s influence and the influence of the planet. My last view of the planet would be the dark side of the moon, as icy snow began to fall, never ending for millions of years. https://mythsofthemirror.com/2019/03/01/march-speculative-fiction-prompt/

 

Something to Think About – The R’s of Life – Survival in a Modern World – Our Rights – Part One – Sally Cronin

Another great post my Sally G. Cronin, The R’s of LIfe:Something to Think About – The R’s of Life – Survival in a Modern World – Our Rights – Part One – Sally Cronin

Smorgasbord Blog Magazine

When I was revisiting these posts from two years ago, it occurred to me that I was ranting a bit…. well more than a bit. What also struck me is that what I thought was bad then is even worse now. The collective thinking and consideration for each other is clearly not newsworthy, and whilst I know that the majority of people work hard, take responsibility for their lives, health, children, income, housing, education, old age care, pay taxes, and contribute to the community, there are a lot more people today who feel that they have a right to leech off that sector of the comminity than ever before.

For example, recently a family who have never worked talked about how they had a right since it was government money. Sorry the government has rarely made a penny itself, but has legally and sometimes stealthily removed it from the pockets…

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How To Be An Expert Typo Hunter

This post, your post…definitely had me in mind. Thank you…I have a difficult time seeing my own errors and typos. This, I should Post on the wall in front of me. My friends would, no doubt, appreciate it. Thank you!

K.M. Allan

You’ve got to be a lot of things when you’re a writer.

Not only do you need to craft characters and worlds from nothing, bring together a cohesive story, and take hundreds of random words and arrange them into sentences that make sense, you also need to check those sentences for mistakes.

But when you’ve been working on a WIP for a long time, writing and re-writing the same sentences, it makes you immune to typos. Suddenly they aren’t just wrong keystrokes or the write right word with the wrong spelling—they’re tricksters—convincing your eyes that what they’re reading is what your brain expects.

Typos are relying on the fact you know your words so well after multiple drafts they can hide in your perfect paragraphs, just waiting to be spotted by your dream agent in your submission package (that’ll show you for deleting their friends during editing pass 12!).

So what…

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The Heart Stone Chronicles: The Swamp Fairy, by Author Colleen M. Chesebro

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This mystical story is bound to capture your heart. Abigale Forester is only fourteen years old, recently orphaned, and has been sent to live with her Aunt Magnolia Forester, a woman she has never met, and is now her legal Guardian. Abigale was born with mystical gifts, inherited from her mother, along with a few hundred acres of swamp land that has been handed down for generations in her family.

This is no ordinary swamp. It is a place where mystical things happens, another realm, that is critical for the safety of mankind. Abigale has no idea what this has to do with her, but she will soon find out. In the meantime, a corrupt, greedy, and wealthy man as plans of his own to destroy the swamp and possibly Abigale and her aunt, as a form of revenge.

Danger is everywhere for Abigale as she tries to adjust to her new life. When the truth about the swamp legacy is revealed to her, Abigale is forced to make a decision about the swamp legacy and her choice is a dangerous one.

I highly recommend this mystical mystery that is so well written, by author Colleen M. Chesebro, that the story itself almost leaps off of the pages, right into your reality. It is that good. 5 Stars!

 

Smorgasbord Health Column – Size Matters the Sequel – Emotional Factor, Willpower and Childish Things

This post from Sally, who is an extremely knowledgeable Nutritionist, shares critical information about the emotional side of losing weight. It is this very complex set of emotions that often derail so many women and men from staying on a healthy eating, exercise program, and self-esteem dilemma. Learning the emotional roadblocks is key to success.

Smorgasbord Blog Magazine

Over the last few chapters, I have been exploring the physical factors behind my weight gain to 330lbs. In particular Candida Albicans and how its overgrowth in your gut can undermine your best efforts to get rid of the culprits in your diet causing you to overeat. Such as sugars.

You can find last week’s post and all the previous chapters in this file: https://smorgasbordinvitation.wordpress.com/size-matters-the-sequel/

This week a look at our emotional attachment to food and how we can flex our willpower muscles to overcome this frequent excuse to dive into a tub of ice-cream!

My life, despite all the changes due to moving around so much was within a stable family environment, I was not deprived of love, food or attention. But things did not go according to plan in my 20s and emotionally I was hit very hard. But, that is not unusual and having worked with both…

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Steve the Crossing Guard

Steve the Crossing Guard, a teacher-at-large, and his amazing gift to children.

A Teacher's Reflections

There are teachers, and there are remarkable teachers.  Steve the Crossing Guard is one of the remarkable teachers, and he doesn’t teach in a classroom. He teaches on the street at a school crossing.  The children at his crossing will often learn far more than they learn in the classroom.

I got an email from Steve the Crossing Guard at 6:39 AM.  It was titled,
“Boston Massacre 3/5/1770”.

The text simply said:

Yes, you bet we’ll discuss it, within the hour…

Have a great day!

Steve

WOW!

This is exactly what Steve the Crossing Guard does.  He is so excited for what’s to come, because he has planned questions and challenges for the students. The anticipation of knowing and then wanting to pass it on is the greatest feeling. Really.

At 8:01 PM that night, he emailed:

Jennie,

So much history tomorrow: Michelangelo’s bday; fall of the Alamo; Dred Scott…

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Getting the words right

This is an excellent portrayal of why writers write and how to be the best you can be as a writer. “To give the world life by wedding it to the self.”

M.C. Tuggle, Writer

By Gorthian – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31670340 Writers, whether new or seasoned, know well the central struggle of the craft, which is, as Ernest Hemingway put it, “Getting the words right.”

When you nail it, there’s nothing like it. The scene that sizzles, the story that moves readers — that’s what we live and work for as writers.

To me, no other fictional work has better captured the promise — and risk — of language than Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic, “A Wizard of Earthsea,” which tells the story of a boy learning the art of wizardry. The boy’s aunt, a dabbler in spell-making, introduces young Duny to the mystical relationship between the entities of our world and the names by which we know and influence them:

She praised him, and told him she might teach him rhymes he would like better, such as the word that makes…

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Worldbuilding: Culture

These six parts of a well written and engaging story are key aspects that are critically important, not only to Sci fi, but to historical, time-slip, and probably almost every book written or to be written.

Cafe Reading

Introduction

Within any story told, a world is created. Even set on Earth, your book needs to show the world around it from the smallest creature to the society and culture of your main characters.

One of the importance aspects of this is culture in your book and how it can enhance your writing.

What elements to think about?



Looking the part

What do your people look like? What kind of clothes do they wear and for what purpose? Aside from the obvious, are clothes worn for warmth or maybe as a way to show social standing?

Become an architect

Where do people live? What do the buildings look like and what are they made of? Where do the rich live compared to the poor?

Resources

Civilisations only thrive where they can be sustained. What resources do your people have to even live in the places they do? How do…

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#Photoprompt – Gaining freedom’s gate

Reblogging to K. D. Dowdall. It is such a great story!

Roberta Writes

The silver of the moon was all but extinguished by blackness. The tiny remaining sliver lit up the road as she ran, her heart thumping wildly in her chest.  Behind her the steady beat of the drums went on and on, drowning out the sound of her own footsteps and any belonging to the Searchers.

No warning of a lunar eclipse had been given to the people of the city. The Elders thrived by exploiting the superstitions of the survivors of the plague who wandered the deserted streets of this dead city.

These sad creatures eked out a miserable existence by plundering the abandoned warehouses, shops and factories of the pre-apocalyptic world. The Elders made use of their brawn and muscles to perform tasks such as clearing the city of the dead bodies in the aftermath of the plague and foraging for the fuel that kept the generators in their…

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