Jen FitzGerald's Blog, page 42

Winners Get Sprinkles

Darryl "Razor" Reaugh -- color commentator for the Dallas Stars I was originally thinking of some intellectual topic for today's blog post, but after Tuesday's game and then last night's game, I decided my Dallas Stars needed some love. Not only because they won both games, but because it's been a week of really good things, so let's celebrate! 1) Andrew Cogliano played in his 1000th game last night. There are "only" 82 games a year, so this can take a while. Sadly his Iron Man streak (meaning consecutive games played; he got all the way to 830) was broken a couple of years ago due to a suspect penalty call and subsequent suspension. * On a related note, Cogs is the third Stars player this season to reach the 1000th game milestone.* On another related note, all three of those players have been with the team for a year or less. Cogs came to us this time last year and the other two were signed over the summer.* And for those two summer signings, Dallas is only the second team for each of them. They'd played their whole careers and most of those 1000 games with a single team (although not the same team). 2) Jason Robertson played his first NHL game last night and earned his first NHL point with a secondary assist on Tyler Seguin's drought-breaker... 3) Roman Polak played in his 800 game last night.
4) Tyler Seguin finally scored a goal, breaking his career long drought of 17 games. He did it in his home town of Toronto. In front of his parents and tossed the puck to his mom in the crowd.
5) Denis Gurianov, our young rookie sensation, scored his 17th goal last night and is tied for second on the team with another young stud, but only behind our captain who...
6) Captain Jamie Benn scored a hat trick during Tuesday's game, earning him that 16th, 17th, and 19th goal of the season, leaving him at 299 career goals...so #300 is on the horizon.
7) The Stars have the longest win streak in the Western Conference right now at 3. They are tied for second in the League with a New York team and trail behind the Tampa Bay Lightning who have won 9 straight games. 8) Now this point isn't just this week, but we have the best goalie tandem in the League with Ben Bishop and Anton Khudobin. We made it to the playoffs and to the second round of the playoffs last year because of these two. Three years ago, the team couldn't buy a win streak to save their lives.
Okay, I'm done gushing about my team. But they deserve it.
Have a love-filled Valentine's Day and a wonderful weekend. I'll gush abut tonight's event on Monday.

A Night of Romance

Friday is Valentine's Day and I'll be celebrating romance novels with fellow authors at a local library.

Last year I went to support my chapter mates and friends who were participating. It turned out that almost all the authors participating were or had been members of my writers group at one time or another. This year looks to be the same, but now I'll be among them.

This is my first local event. I'm careful about revealing exactly what I write. Not because I'm ashamed, but because male male romance, much like queerness in general can incite negative reactions and I don't want to put myself into an unsafe position.

But, as all the other participants are people I know, I feel confident they'll have my back should the need arise. So...

There's nothing like a last-minute event to ratchet up my stress-level. My down time this week will be spent pondering and planning my table presentation. I'm pretty sure everyone else had physical books. I don't. Everyone has swag. All I have right now are pens. But I do have cover images in stand-up frames (a trick I learned at the second GRL I attended) along with book blurbs and QR codes.


I need to buy some orange Lifesaver mints--these are the bomb and I will never do an event without them at my table/space.

Next week, I'll let you know how it goes.

Have a great rest of your week.

Getting old stinks...

I'm referring to my eyeballs...

I've had to wear magnifying glasses for many years in order to read and cross stitch--basically anything that I need to see at about a foot from my face.


In October of 2018, I went and got my eyes officially examined and walked away with two pair of prescription glasses, one pair for working on the PC as my monitors both at home and the office are about two feet from my face and one pair distance/driving. I didn't wear the distance glasses for a super long time, until driving at night a while back. Things were blurry. Not enough to cause trouble, but enough to make me nervous that it could happen if I couldn't differentiate between a car and my car's upright when checking to change lanes. So I dug those glasses out and have been wearing them to drive ever since.

And up until a few weeks ago, I've been able to watch live hockey and any kind of TV without any glasses, but now...not so much. The distance to the TV from my normal seat is about 12 feet, and the distance to live hockey from my seats at the arena is at least 100 feet, but these days my view of those two thing-- blurry!! So now...? I have to wear my driving glasses to watch TV and hockey... *sigh*

Also, I was out shopping this weekend and really struggled to see the clothing right on the rack. I'd worn the generic magnifiers over my prescription glasses and until recently they had been good enough. But not now... *heavier sigh* I don't like wearing those ones, because the are not quite wide enough to rest on top of my head when I don't need them to see. But too bad, so sad for me, I guess. I'll be carrying around that clunky plastic glasses case with me everywhere I go for a while.

I do admit I need to go back for an updated exam and probably a new prescription--and definitely new frames for at least one pair. It will have to wait, but I'm looking forward to getting that taken care of in March. I have much too much going between now and March 9th...

Hope you had a great weekend. Let's chat on Wednesday...

Slow Motion Multi-Tasking

I listened to a TED Talk the other morning on the way into work. We all multi-task. Some tasks are easy to do simultaneously: walk and chew gum, pedal an exercise bike and watch TV, cook and chat on your cell or with your family. Some things are harder to do at the same time as doing something else...

But what we're really talking about here is not really doing two things at the exact same time, but juggling multiple projects over the same time frame or introducing new ones as you finish others in a revolving process of creating.

The speaker of this TED Talk, Tim Harford, references Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin as some of the greatest slow-motion multi-taskers of all time.

So when Einstein came up against some roadblock in his research or experiments, he would switch projects--to something he was equally excited and passionate about--allowing the issue in the first project to take a back seat and give his brain a chance to noodle on it subconsciously.

That kind of multi-tasking, Mr. Harford says, is why people like Einstein and Darwin were productive and successful through the whole of their lives.

An interesting concept and I'd encourage you to have a listen for yourself.

I don't know if it's a process that works for writing multiple books. Book 7 remains stalled and I have a second short I'm planning on publishing in time for my conference. I'd love to get Book 7 done and published too. I have a schedule in place for the two, but one is scheduled after the other, they're not intertwined. But maybe, just maybe, I can schedule days for working on Book 7 and try to make progress...

I hope you have a great weekend.

St. Louis here I come...

It's official. I have signed up for GRL 2020. As the blog post title suggests, it's in St. Louis. A city that I can drive to and that has a hockey team. Had it not had both of those things going for it, I might have opted to not go this year.


I also decided to up my attendance tier...only that tier sold out within 11 minutes and now I'm on a waiting list. The tiers are for readers, authors, and featured authors. I've been a "mere" author for the last two years and decided to up my visibility.

As a featured author, I'll be able to participate in one of the hourly panels (there are 2 options, Q&A or Storyteller Series), I'll get a second lounge slot, and I'll get to participate in the Saturday book signing as opposed to the Thursday morning book signing.

"Lounges" are time slots where you set up shop at a table in the areas outside the rooms the panels are being held in with books and swag in order to visible and to meet people and get your books in the hands of potential new readers / fans. I learned that I get more visibility if I sign up at certain times and get a slot close to a more well-known author.

Either way, I get to see and room with my good friend Char who introduced me to this conference in the first place.

Now, if I get a slot as a featured author, the question becomes: do I do a Q&A or do I attempt to submit a proposal for a Storyteller Series presentation? I'll be brainstorming possible topics which A) I know something about and B) would (hopefully) be of interest to enough people. I'm leery of the Q&A as I don't think well on my feet, but do I have any sort of pertinent knowledge of interest....?

The good thing is...I have time to ponder / brainstorm. The conference isn't until October.

Hope you're having a great week.

Nine ways to Sunday...

I meant to post Friday, but I was churning through so many tasks, I just didn't. I opted to take sanity breaks instead of thinking up a topic and writing about it.

But over the weekend I finished a huge phase of a project I'm in charge of, so I'm feeling all sorts of WHEW.

I'll be blowing and going most of February, too, so no rest for the wicked, but the really stressful, time-consuming thing is done.

I hope you had a good weekend and here's to a quiet, but productive week.

Be loud. Wear green. Go Stars!

My best girl and I are going to tonight's game.
Keep your fingers crossed for a win.
See you Friday.
I'll let you know how it turns out. :0)

New book, new book, new book...

I started on one of the two books I'm writing this year.

I piddled with it last week, but it wasn't really flowing and I then I had a think about things and realized I was probably starting in the wrong place.

Lo and behold, when I sat down to write yesterday morning, over 900 words came pouring out of me. This morning, another 627 appeared on the page. :0) Off to a decent start, so that's a relief.

In other news, we had a wonderfully foggy morning when I left for work.



In other news, hockey's back. DD and I will be at the game tonight. Be loud, wear green, GO STARS!!

Have a super week.

Picasso--America's favorite wild horse

I came across this article on Facebook and in a effort to expend my blog topic horizons, I thought it was the perfect thing.

Image from iStock Photo, obv--Picasso is the horse on the left.
Read about Picasso, America's favorite wild mustang--an inhabitant of the Sand Wash Basin in Colorado.

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Thanks to my uncle who shares the images, I've followed this group on Facebook called "Nebraska Through the Lens" and it's awesome. As the name implies, it's just members posting photos of life in Nebraska. While I grew up in California and live in Texas, Nebraska will always be the state of my heart. I don't know that I'll ever get back there for anything other than visits because my hubster and my life is in Texas. And also I hate the cold...

I wish I could share some of the pictures, but I can't...but you could go find it and see for yourself, if you're so inclined.

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Hope your week is going well...see you Friday.

Rain Rain Go Away ~ Writers Retreat

This was the view from the dining room of the rental house we stayed in for the retreat. It rained Thursday afternoon and drizzled or rained most of Friday. We don't complain much about that in Texas in January because we always need rain in Texas no matter the time of year. But Saturday and Sunday were bright and sunny though chilly. But--January.

My goal for the weekend was to plot out the next anthology entry, write its synopsis, and come up with a title. While plotting is still a skill I feel insufficient at and need to work on, I still need to do it. So...I used one of my favorite tools after utilizing various other ones prior to the weekend and came away with decent story arc. I also wrote a new synopsis based on the plot points I came up with. As for the title...well, those are trickier. And sometimes (most times for me) the book needs to be written before the title becomes clear. And it's not written, so titling fell by the wayside.

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In other news, I hadn't realized how anxious I was about my writers group meeting until I was staring down the barrel at it. As president, I run the meeting, so I was worried about the conversation in terms of what's going on with our parent organization getting heated and out of hand.

I mean--no one had sent angry emails asking us (the board on behalf of the chapter) to protest or make demands or anything of that nature, and I tried to send out periodic reports so they knew the board was aware and following the goings on. But you never know. The one person who I was unknowingly worried about the most didn't attend the meeting, so there was that whoosh of relief at not seeing her.

On the other hand, several other members expressed their appreciation for the board's lack of a knee-jerk reaction and that our first priority was our members and our group. So a very big WHEW for me.

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Today I'm back to work and business as usual, both from a writing perspective--up early to exercise and write--and from a day job perspective.

Have a great week.