Anna Jeffrey's Blog: I'm Just Saying..., page 9
July 21, 2011
Progress (Maybe)
Work continues on the blog. I now have the background I want and a header that speaks of Texas. However, I'm still looking for that perfect header. And I might even change the theme.It's terrible to be such a ditherer. (Is that a word?)
The book covers are all up now–Anna Jeffrey, Sadie Callahan and Dixie Cash–but they are transferred from Flick'r and are in random order. I'm not happy about that, but I apparently can't change it. As soon as I learn how, I hope to turn the book covers into a slide show.
Anyway, the bottom line to all of this is the blog is still a work in progress.
Also, some new links are up. So if you haven't signed up for my Yahoo! newsletter that I've been sending out for years and want to, there's a link for it. If you haven't friended me on Facebook or Twitter and want to, there are links for that, too.
In the future, I'll be blogging on Tuesdays, God willing. ….. If I get smarter or if more things come up for me to talk about, perhaps I'll do it more often. It isn't that I don't have a lot to say. I'm just not sure if anyone wants to read it.
Working on this blog page is one of the most time-consuming things I've ever done. WordPress is very user-friendly, but there are so many options and figuring out how to connect all of these links has had me ready to throw my computer out the window. For a person who can barely manage a cell phone, it's a brave new world out there. I think this comes under the heading of "Trying to Teach an Old Dog New Tricks."
My latest challenge is RSS. I know that's an acronym for Real Simple Syndication (thank God for *that*) and WordPress has a link I can install, but I don't know where to get whatever I'm supposed to connect it to. And I don't know what happens next after I connect it. Comments, anyone?
Meanwhile, I'm still tearing my hair. {:()
July 15, 2011
Books and Movies
Okay, I'm going to try this again. I tried posting a blog yesterday and my amateurism came through with shining colors. The whole thing just fell apart.
I started by saying that my husband and I watched "The Lincoln Lawyer," starring Matthew McConaughey a couple of nights ago. This was a movie adapted from one of Michael Connelly's books. And any of you who have read my newsletter know I'm a Michael Connelly fan. The main character in this story, Mickey Haller, has appeared in several of Connelly's books. He's kind of a sleazy–but smart–guy who's a defense lawyer. Matthew McConaughey did a decent job portraying the character as Connelly wrote him.
It's always interesting to see who Hollywood chooses to play the various characters in movies adapted from popular books. One thing that happens with me is that once I see the movie, that character is cemented in my head. So now, in every Michael Connelly book I read from now on that has Mickey Haller in it, I will envision him looking and behaving like Matthew McConaughey.
I recall being appalled when "Lonesome Dove" was cast. I had read that book twice and no way could I see Robert Duval and Tommy Lee Jones as Gus and Call. I've read it again since the movie and I have a clear vision of their appearance and behavior characteristics when I read and I can't imagine anyone else. Of course, if those two actors had done a bad job in those roles, I would think differently.
Sometimes the casting is perfect, as in "Gone with the Wind." Can anyone imagine any performers other than Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable as Scarlett and Rhett? I watched an interesting documentary about the casting of GWTW. There was never a question who would play Rhett Butler, except for Clark Gable initially not wanting to do it. But the search for Scarlett became a national movement. Every actress in Hollywood tried for the role, including Joan Crawford. Can you imagine Joan Crawford as Scarlett? I always liked Joan Crawford, but she was no Scarlett O'Hara. LOL
Then there are all of the movies that have been adapted from Louis L'Amour books. John Wayne, Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott have brought L'Amour's characters to life in the best of ways.
Currently, there's a buzz going on about casting for Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels. I don't know if it still exists, but at one time there was a Web site dedicated to the discussion of who should play Stephanie, Joe and Ranger. The perfect actress to play Grandma Mazur, Estelle Getty, has passed on, unfortunately. I'm curious to see who Hollywood selects. ….. If they ever get around to making the movie, that is.
So what do you think? Can you think of more movies adapted from good books where the casting was perfect? Or awful? Or just so-so?
Anna
July 10, 2011
How not to be successful… :-/
As many of you know, blogging is new to me. I've discovered I'm already failure. First, I established a schedule, then I missed the deadline. Then I discovered I need a schedule of topics and some consistency. I'm a failure at that, too, because I suppose my blog is already turning out to be sort of like my life–all over the place and wildly disorganized in an organized way.
Mind you, I don't love disorganization, though it appears that I do. For instance–and no one understands this–my various research files and pictures are all over the floor, but I know where every one of them is and what's in it. As long as no one touches them, I'm fine. But occasionally my husband will think he's doing me a favor and while I'm at work at my real job, he'll pick them all up and put them in a neat stack. Then it takes me a week to find a single thing. I don't scream and berate him though, because I know he had good intentions. Need I say that he and I both spend a good deal of time just looking for things.
Then there's the writing. Someone suggested I should allow one blog day a week to write about writing. Hmm. I gave that some thought and concluded that everything I know about writing could be put in a thimble. I've read probably 200 books, maybe more, on how to and why to. I've lost count of the number of classes and courses I've taken on creative writing in general as well as specific topics that are part of the process. I couldn't begin to tell you how many fiction and non-fiction books I've read. But when I gave it serious thought, I couldn't think of anything I know that someone else probably doesn't know already. However, having said that, if I can figure out what someone might like to know about writing, I still might throw in a comment or two about it.
Then there's reading. Now I do know a lot about reading. I've been a voracious reader of everything since I was a little kid. I grew up without the distraction of TV or entertainment most of us now take for granted. Half the time, we didn't even have radio. Consequently, I read everything that came into the house from magazines to newspapers to….well, you get the idea. Nothing was off limits to us kids when it came to reading. I even read veterinary books and spent some of my youth puzzling about pictures I saw of sheep with huge goiters. (I still don't know if sheep are more prone to goiters than other animals.) In my monthly newsletter, I do comment briefly on books I'm reading.
This week, I'll probably be devoting a lot of time to figuring out Facebook, Twitter, Good Reads and other similar sites and how to get them all linked. And how to get my blog moved from "Unclassified" to classified as something. For a novice like me, all of this is a challenge.
Anyway, until I get everything figured out, anything is liable to crop up on my blog. I hope you'll bear with me.
Anna
July 5, 2011
Blogging Tomorrow…
You might notice I've changed the name of the blog.Hopefully, this one will work out better.
Tomorrow I'll be blogging at Sweethearts of the West. Here's the address: http://sweetheartsofthewest.blogspot.com/
"Cookin' and Eatin' in the Olden Days" is the name of my post. I'm making a short comment on something Nellie Witt Spikes wrote in "As a Farm Woman Thinks." I would almost swear that woman sneaked into my grandmother's and great-grandmother's houses and spied on them, except I know that what she wrote was how life was with everyone in West Texas. Until the oil boom, things in that part of the world progressed at a slightly different pace from say, life in Dallas or Houston.
Cooking has always interested me. I'm a frequent visitor to the Food Network online and I watch many of the cooking shows on TV when my husband is out of the house. He equates watching those shows with watching paint dry. That's a curious thing to me because he does like to eat. I can't recall how or when I first developed the interest in food preparation except to say that I learned how to cook at a young age, then took a few classes on cooking this and that throughout my life. Let's face it. We all have to eat. And one look at me tells you I've eaten pretty well. As you who've read my books know, I often include scenes related to food and cooking in my stories. In fact, the heroine in "Sweet Water" managed her mother's cafe.
So drop by Sweethearts of the West if you have a moment and read an interesting piece of trivia about how eating used to be. No fast food, no frozen dinners, no pre-prepared skillet meals to which you just add water. Imagine how different your life would be if you had to depend entirely on your ability, or someone else's, to garden and preserve food. Or if you had to raise your own chickens or steers or hogs for meat, all of which my grandparents did. And maybe yours, too. Nowadays, all of that is a scary thought to me. I cringe when I think of something destructive happening to the trucking industry that hauls our food from Point A to Point B.
Though I grew up with gardening going on all around me, I really don't know how to be successful at it. My pathetic attempts at tomatoes and green peppers and a few onions show me that I would flat starve to death if I had to grow my own food. For instance, my husband and I bought a green pepper plant in a pot. The plant grew to be more than three feet high and had blooms all over. I argued that some of the blooms should have been pulled off, but he didn't pluck them. Finally, baby peppers appeared and that's what they remained–baby peppers. I have one in my refrigerator right now that's the size of a golf ball. It's green, it has the right shape, but it's a poor excuse for a green pepper. And I haven't had the nerve to taste it.
How about you? Are you a gardener and a food preserver? Will you be able to survive if the trucking industry collapses?
Anna
July 1, 2011
You Never Know….
Thanks to all of you from my newsletter who came and subscribed to the blog. I recognized most of your names. Also thanks to the Entangled authors who subscribed.
Changes are already in the works. I'm so naive about blogging, I didn't think to Google the name of the blog before I posted it. Consequently, I didn't know another Anna Jeffrey had aWordpress blog called "Anna Jeffrey's Blog." ….. Oops. ….. I would've thought WordPress would've made me aware of that duplication when I was signing up and working on the nuts and bolts, but they didn't. Aside from that, how could there be another Anna Jeffrey in the world blogging on WordPress? Anna Jeffrey seems like an unusual name to me. Another example of how small the world is.
The other Anna Jeffrey has made only one post and it's from last year. She starts out with "For a long time I thought that the idea of a blog was narcissistic." Wow. Of all the things I think about blogging, the last thing I would think is that bloggers are narcissists.
Actually, I think bloggers are brave. The fact is that bloggers, on occasion, have made pivotal changes in world events. One of the things that has kept me from doing it is fearing putting my thoughts and opinions out there for the world to see. It isn't quite the same thing as writing a novel. Even though all writers hope to see the world read and embrace their words, there's still an arcane veil of privacy between the novelist and the reader. Blogging seems more personal. I know that's weird logic, but that's my thinking.
Having said all of that, I'll be changing the title to something like Anna Jeffrey Says or Anna Jeffrey's Comments or Thoughts or something like that. If you have some suggestions, by all means, let me hear them.
Smiles and have a good day, Anna
June 29, 2011
Hello, World….
This is my first post on Anna Jeffrey's Blog. So if you're reading it, welcome. I hope you'll subscribe and come back often. A special hello to any of you who have been getting my newsletter for the past several years. Here, I'll be doing much the same thing that I've been doing in my newsletter–commenting on writing and the writing life, reading and publishing, all of which are changing as I type.
For you who don't know me, I write character-driven contemporary steamy romance novels. I call them mainstream romances about real people and how they deal with and do or do not resolve real problems in their everyday lives. Sort of like soap operas on paper. A list of my Anna Jeffrey and Sadie Callahan books is posted in the side panel.
I'm also the co-author of a zany comedy/romance series written under the pseudonym of Dixie Cash. I hope to add those covers as soon as I figure out how to do it. I'm not exactly the smartest person in the world of electronics and computers.
I'm presently embarking on a new contemporary trilogy for Entangled Publishing, called the TEXAS TRILOGY. This is a 3-book saga (sort of) of a wealthy, but dysfunctional old Texas family. Think the TV show, Dallas. It's slated for release in February, so I'll be posting pertinent information as the process goes along.
So that's it in a nutshell. Thanks for stopping by and I'm looking forward to seeing you again.
Anna
