No New Blog ;~{{

Hello, my friends.

I am just popping into the spellroom to let you all know that there will not be a new blog this week. I am writing to deadline and my wee little brain cannot concentrate on anything else at the moment.

However, I do have big news!

The Counterfeit Bride will be released on April 1. It is my first full length novel.

Propoganda

Once again I was brought down by some very nasty germs and they kept me from you, my lovies.

Welcome back to the Spellroom.

I had wonderful plans for columns, but today they've been side-railed while I voice my political opinion and back it up with historical fact. I hope you will stay with me and read this post, but if you choose not to, I will understand and hope you will be back for the next post which will return us to less controversial subjects.

Today's topic is Gun Propaganda.

This is not about gun control! This is about the use of propaganda and outright lies to scare the community into letting the gun and ammunition companies continue to run wholesale muck through our lives.

If you are active on Facebook, then you have seen all the memes (posters) such as "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

While it is true, people who really want to kill someone can use any object to do so, it is not as easy as picking up a hunk of metal with a bore hole in it, pulling on a little piece of metal, and pointing the hunk of metal at the object you wish to annihilate with a burning piece of lead. Lead that rips apart muscles, tissues, blood vessels, and shatters bones.

If you have to use your hands on your victim, you have to get up close and personal, maybe even have to look them in the eyes as you strangle them, put a pillow over their face, or hold them under the water until there are no more air bubbles. You have a chance to change your mind before you have completed a heinous act.

It also gives you the disadvantage that the victim may be able to fight back and might even be able to take you. So if you are thinking murderous thoughts, it might be best to put your actions into a book rather than into practice.

A knife, hammer, or ax is very messy, you will end up with blood gushing all over you, and makes it harder for you to proclaim your innocence when the authorities arrive. (Most murders committed by knife, hammer, or ax are acts of extreme passion. People don't usually die after one strike of a knife or hammer. You have to repeatedly plunge that weapon into your victim. It is not a task for those who faint at the sight of blood and are afraid of gore.)

If you drop a knife, hammer, or ax on the floor, you might wipe out someone's toe or foot, but you won't obliterate their life. If you drop a gun on the floor it can discharge a bullet which could kill your wife, child, friend, or yourself. Accidents do happen and there are many careless people out there that have access to guns.

So no matter what the memes say, Guns do kill people! 

We often hear that all women should carry guns. Then there would be no rapists. Rapists do not walk up to you on the street and boldly announce, "Hi. I'm here to rape you." They don't give you time to reach for a gun or pepper spray. They sneak up on you from behind or they creep through a window and surprise you in your shower or your bed. A rapist could grab your gun before you had a chance to get it, remove the safety, and try to get a target on him. Suddenly you have to fear for more than your virtue. Your rapist now has a weapon that could massively destroy you and anyone else around you.

Today I saw the worst of the worst in gun propaganda.

Individual gun ownership would not have stopped the Holocaust. One or two Jews with guns would not have been able to fight off Hitler's armies that were dispatched into the ghettos to find the Jews. And those armies were supported by the people of Germany. 

There were a lot of contributing factors to Hitler's rise to power. Germany was going through a time of extreme inflation and overwhelming poverty due to war reparations forced on them by the Americans, English, French, and Russians. Hitler was able to use the lack of money for the common people to raise up hate and suspicion for anyone who didn't fit the norm of society. The Jews were known to have "wealth". They were the money lenders. (Even though most of the Jews were middle class people struggling to make a living, just like everyone else. Hitler was able to use rumor, innuendo, and suspicion to turn neighbor against neighbor.) Jews were different. They had a special language, they prayed differently, they had a different God! They had your money! Hitler used ancient prejudices and superstition against the Jews, the Gypsies, and the Gays and transferred blame onto them.

By getting the Germans to blame their misfortune on the Jews, the Gypsies, the Gays, the people who were different, it kept the people from blaming the government for their woes. They were told the government was working on solving the problem by getting rid of the source.

Guns in the hands of everyone may have saved some people from the gas chambers, but it is more likely that the guns would have led to a civil war as seen in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Somalia. Neighbor against neighbor.

I am not advocating for or against gun control. I am merely warning you against the lies found in propaganda. Do not buy into the memes, and understand that they are being produced by a very lucrative industry, that sells to both the victims and the criminals. 

Make your decision based on intellect, not on emotions raised by lies.

Hedda Hopper

Hedda Hopper began her career as an actress in silent movies. She was a beautiful woman who appeared in more than 120 movies in twenty-three years. In the 1930's her acting career began to wane and she needed to find a new source of income. On Valentine's Day in 1938 she became a gossip columnist and Hedda Hopper's Hollywood appeared for the first time in The Los Angeles Times. Her career made her a household name and she made regular appearances on radio and television. She wrote a regular column until her death in 1966. 

Hedda Hopper was a remarkable lady with a stunning career, but this column is not actually about Hedda. The plan is to use her name as a segue into a favorite writing topic of mine...

Today we are going to talk about Head Hopping!

Yes, Head Hopping. 

What is Head Hopping, you ask.

Head Hopping is when for no apparent rhyme or reason, you switch your Point of View character. It tends to be a novice mistake. Many of our favorite authors did this when they first began, but editors and readers both dislike the habit. It jars them out of the story, and once a reader is jarred out of the story, she may never return. That is not good.

For the basis of this article the romance genre is going to be used as the primary venue, but head hopping occurs in all fields of fiction.

In a romance there are two primary characters. The hero and the heroine. If a romance is written in first person, you only get the POV of one character. (We are not going to discuss omniscient point of view in this column, because it is obsolete in romance.) In the last century most romances were told only from the point of view of the heroine, but sometime around the mid-eighties or early-nineties, the hero started getting more of a point of view and the readers ate those romances up. Sometimes you can throw in the villain's thoughts, but if you do this, you want to give him/her a strong presence, not just throw them a line of two in order to describe what the heroine looks like, how buff the hero is, what kind of shoes she is wearing. 

When you show readers the world as seen by the point of view character, make sure it is important to move the story along, for the reader sees the world through that character's eyes.

Do not switch heads in the middle of a scene. A scene should be told by the character who has the most at stake in that scene. That way you can include their inner thoughts, their inner turmoil, which you cannot do if you give the point of view to the wrong character. (Or-heaven forbid-an outsider!)

In my current WIP, The Billionaire's Counterfeit Bride, I have a scene that has six people in it. Three are window dressing and have no dialogue, the other three characters are the American Ambassador, the hero, and the heroine. It would be easy to tell the scene through the Ambassador, but he doesn't have any skin in the game. In order to engage the reader she has to know what the heroine is feeling. This scene belongs to Cassidy and no one else.

Later in the book, Cassidy has been attacked and is unconscious. Because Cassidy is out of it, there is only one person we can live this scene through, and that is Theron, Cassidy's hero. Sure, we could later learn what happened by having Theron explain to Cassidy what happened while she was knocked out, but then we would not learn how he felt while the action was happening and the reader doesn't have the chance to see what has occurred because she is being told about it later.

Point of view is how we engage the reader, how we immerse the reader into the plot, the feelings, the adventure.

If we want to tell the reader how a character smells and we give the dog a point of view, he may tell us she always reminds him of rolling around in a field of lavender. In this instance, will the reader really relate? Especially if that dog never appears with a point of view again?

Which scene of the following scenes do you think would evoke the reader's compassion more? 

A pregnant woman staggers up to a no-name cashier at the local grocery chain and the cashier thinks, "Oh no! This woman looks like she's going to have that baby right here on my conveyor belt. Gross." 

Or: 

Dulcie felt another sharp pain in her lower back. The baby had been pressing hard on her sacroiliac for months, but it had never felt this bad before. The cash register looked like it was ten miles away. She put most of her weight onto the shopping cart and allowed the wheels to carry her down the aisle. Just a few more steps and she would be able to pay for little Chelsea's lunch. Just a few more steps. A gush of hot liquid exploded down her legs. The sound of water hitting the floor was followed by her heart also dropping to the floor. It was too soon. Much too soon. The baby wasn't due for two more months!

Finally the register was only two steps away. The cashier would have to get the manager to call 911. Dulcie looked into the cashier's eyes and the girl crumbled onto the floor. Dulcie's warped sense of humor kicked in as she suppressed a giggle and wondered who needed 911 more.

Point of view is important. Don't throw it away. Give it to the important characters. You can always find another way to let your readers know that the hero has a tattoo over his heart or the heroine is wearing Jimmy Choo's.

Blank Screen

I love it when I begin a new project and I see the blank screen. That great expanse of white is calling to me, begging me to fill it with a jumble of letters that will eventually become a story.

I, my dear friends, am a pantser. No, no, no. I do not run around pulling men's pants down to their knees. (However, it is a thought to be considered.) In the writing industry a pantser is someone who sits down and writes, no lengthy outlines, no fifty page synopsis, no binders full of notes. Just the writer, the writing instrument, and the words in the author's head.

Each word that hits the computer screen is a surprise and the story can take you places you wouldn't believe. There are times you have to rope the characters in and pull them back to the original story.

My friend Karen Frisch, author of What's in a Name is my opposite. She is a plotter. She writes extensive notes. She shuffles them around, cuts and pastes, until she has the story in the order she wants it, then she sits down and fills in the good stuff that holds the story together. She knows once she sits down that all her research is done. Her plot is set. Her clues are embedded. She has a firm road map and she knows where it is taking her.

Amanda Torrey, author of Teen Fury Unleashed, is a plotster. She does some of her plotting ahead of time, but most of her writing comes from the seat of her pants.

I have one story, I refer to as my psychotic thriller, that I am a puzzler with. I do not work on this book often, but when scenes come to me I write them down and place them where ever they belong in the story. I had actually written the final chapter the same day as I wrote the first chapter and ever since I have been adding puzzle pieces to the middle. I'll let you know how that works out when I have a chance to finish it.

What is your method of writing?

Nom de Plume, Does a Writer Need One?

Today a friend of mine announced on facebook that she has a new "author name", and someone asked why an author would write under another name. As an author who uses a nom de plume I have decided to try to give an answer to this question.

There are many reasons for a pseudonym. The reason Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) and the Bronte sisters wrote under men's names was so that their works would be taken seriously. As recently as 1997, Joanne Rowling was told that boys would not buy a series of books written by a woman so she became J.K. Rowling.

Alice Mary Norton wrote Science Fiction from 1934 until her death in 2005 as Andre Norton, Andrew North, and Allen Weston. Science Fiction was seen as a man's bailey-wick. Alice Bradley Sheldon also wrote Science Fiction in the '60s and '70s under the name of James Tiptree Jr. for the same reason.

Samuel Clemens wrote under the name of Mark Twain, why isn't clear, there are several theories. I think perhaps it sounded more adventurous than Sam Clemens.

Others like Nora Roberts, aka J.D. Robb, and Jayne Ann Krentz, aka Jayne Castle and Amanda Quick, use different names to differentiate between the genres or sub-genres they write in. (An interesting note, at one time Jayne Ann Krentz wrote under seven different names, but now she only uses the three listed here.) Some of these name changes are at the request of publishers. 

There are some book series that are produced by book packagers. The company puts together a series idea with a free lance writer or writers. The books are written under one pseudonym even though there could be multiple authors in the series.

Stephen King was too prolific. When he was first being published his publisher believed a writer should only come out with one book a year, so he convinced Signet, his publisher, to allow him another name to write under. Thus Richard Bachman was created.

Throughout the history of writing there have been authors who either wanted to remain anonymous to society or have a more marketable name. An author named Illiterate Buttwipe probably would not be your first choice for a book of poetry, limericks maybe, but poetry . . .

I know several erotica writers who publish under a nom de plume. They are not ashamed of their work, but they are teachers, business women, mothers, daughters. They use another name to shield their families and protect their jobs.

Many writers, romance writers especially, have become targets for stalkers. (Did you know that romance books are a big hit with men in prison?) Many authors adopt a pen name for safety reasons.

Does an author's name matter? After all Shakespeare wrote:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet;

While that might be true, would you buy a love story by an author named Glorious Stinkypants or a mystery by Crude Privy?

Just as boys would not be anxious to buy a new book series by an unknown author named Joanne, most women do not want to buy a romance written by a man. There are men writing and selling marvelous romances, such as Howard Lowry aka Leigh Greenwood. The gender of the writer shouldn't matter, only the quality of the writing, but unfortunately, a book is judged by its cover and a very big part of that cover is the author's name. 

Happy reading my friends.

Father Time

Welcome Father Time to the Spellroom.

Thank you, Liberty, for inviting me here today. 

What is your job now that the Baby New Year is here?

So many people just think of me as an old man who disappears when Baby New Year enters the picture, but there are always lingering issues and projects which must be taken care of. They're still here, and so am I. I cannot retire until the old stuff is truly wrapped up and put aside. 

I wish I could spend the winter on a tropical island. Maui is my favorite. I love to surf. Maui has wonderful surfing and I get to ogle all the bikini babes. But until everything from 2012 is wrapped up, I'm still shuffling around with my walking staff and a lantern, trying to light the way for the laggards.

What advise would you give to Baby New Year?

Baby, make sure your folks stick to their goals for the year and give them an incentive to complete their goals while you are still young enough to enjoy the surfing. If your people are still sticking to their goals and resolution when you hit your teens in the spring, there is a good chance they can make it all the way, but the tricky time is between your teens and middle age, which hits in the summer. People tend to fall off schedule when they find more interesting things to do like mow the lawn or go to the lake. You just have to help them through the middle age slump and you can start to smell the board wax. Otherwise, next December 31st all the leftovers get rolled over to Father Time and bog us down for another year. 

Do you know that there are some people that are still working on goals from the 1950s? I mean really people! Join PA (Procrastinators Anonymous) and get completion, or just drop the old goals. Baby New Year gives you a chance to move on with your life, and this Father Time really wants to wax up his board and hang ten!

Wow! That is really strong!

Not really. There are too many people wishing their lives away and not doing anything active to make it happen. 

Human's are so lucky. They can do anything they want. They can fly in the air (hot air balloons, airplanes, gliders), they can swim with the fish, they can climb the highest peaks, and yet there are so many that choose to sit on their duffs and say, "why me?".

People, you want something, make it happen, and soon. I want to ride my board and hang with the Wahine Nani (pretty girls)!

What is the saddest thing you have ever heard?

I wish I had . . .

The solution is simple. If you want to do something, find a way to do it, but make sure you find a legal way to do it. I'm not visiting you in jail, it's bad juju.

You were humming a song when you walked into the Spell Room, what was it?

It was the saddest song I know, "If I Could Turn Back Time". 

Stop living in the past and live your life to the fullest in the present. There is no reason to mope. There is so much ahead for those who live life now. Do not wait for another Baby New Year or Father Time to pass through your life. Work for what you want now!

Thanks for having me, Liberty.

Do you have to leave so soon?

Surfs up! Gotta go wiki wiki! 

>>whosh<<

Ah, thank you, Father Time. I'll hang your robe in the closet until your next visit. Nice board shorts.

Happy New Year

The New Year is upon us and many people are making their New Year Resolutions. Are you one of them?

What is it you would like to change about yourself or you hope to do better in the New Year?

You say you'd like to lose weight. That is something you have some control over. It requires you to stop eating the stuff you really love, (ice cream, candy, bread products) and exercise.

I have made it my mission to help you with the exercise part. (I had thought about helping with getting rid of the ice cream and candy, too, but then I thought of the mess my postal carrier would have to deliver. Ooey gooey ice cream! Moldy bread! CANDY!!!) I digress.  

Exercise is an important part of living. When we were young we ran down the streets, we biked to our friends, we danced in basements to the latest beats. We had fun and we were fit. Then we learned to drive cars and worked at jobs that kept us stationary. It is time to get out the hula hoop and jump rope (if your bladder can handle it). If you don't currently walk, get out everyday and walk. Start with a short walk. If around the block is too far to begin with, walk to the corner and back again. Do not park in the spaces too close to the store. Park further away and walk to the doors. This will improve your health in more ways than one. You will be walking and getting some of that exercise component in and you will also be saving your blood pressure from having to deal with the others that are trying to get all the "prime" spaces.

My favorite way to lose exercise is to get up and dance. You may not want to go out clubbing every weekend, but you can dance everyday. Even at work. If you have a device which will play music, such as a smart phone of some type or ipod (sorry, I'm not up on the latest and greatest technology) you can program songs in through Pandora or record music to take with you.

You should get off your duff at least once an hour and dance. If you are at work and the work space is not conducive or dance friendly, you may have to use the break room or even the rest rooms. Get up, turn on your music and dance. You don't need to know any special steps, just move your feet, shake your booty, and wave your arms around in the air. And don't forget to jump! You don't have to be graceful or make it look pretty. You're not about to get a spot on "So You Think You Can Dance" or "Dancing With the Stars" just have fun with it. (You may want to also carry your deodorant in case you need a touch up before going back to your station.)   

Taking special dance classes may be fun, but a Zumba class or step aerobics will not get your blood flowing on an hourly basis. (When you have good blood flow to your brain, your brain will work better and you will be a better employee.)

Below I have compiled a brief list of some of my favorite dance tunes. It is a good place to start if you are wondering what music is best for you. I am always looking for more dance music, please leave me your favorites in the comment section. Also feel free to FB.

Dropkick Murphys - I'm Shipping Up to Boston

Bob Segar - Old Time Rock and Roll

Dan Seals - I Want to Bop With You Baby

Mary Chapin Carpenter - Down at the Twist and Shout

Chubby Checker - Let's Do the Twist

Freddie & the Dreamers - Do the Freddie

The Kingsmen - Louie Louie

The Ventures - Wipe Out

Billy Joel - Still Rock and Roll to Me

John Cougar - Hurts So Good

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - Bad Reputation

Aerosmith - Walk This Way

Jerry Lee Lewis - Peggy Sue

Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lot of Shaking Going On

Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls of Fire

Jerry Lee Lewis - Wild One

Trace Adkins - Hot Mama

Trace Adkins - Honky Tonk Badonkadonk

Jo Dee Messina - I'm Alright

Pam Tillis - Queen of Denial

Dolly Parton - Romeo

Brooks & Dunn - Boot Scootin' Boogie

Alabama - Dixieland Delight

Dropkick Murphys - Anything by Them!!!

In the course of writing this I had hoped to be a lazy bum and not practice what I am preaching, however, I have instead decided to make this a challenge. I am not divulging my weight, but I will keep you updated on anything that drops off. I hope you will do the same.

Even if you are at your ideal weight, I am issuing the dance challenge. It will be fun to dance and get your blood flowing.

Now, please excuse me, I hear the Dropkick Murphys and Tessie calling to me.