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Showing posts from July, 2020

Final Book Cover Design and Tentative Release Date!

I did it, I finally settled on a cover design for the first novel in the K at Steals Life series; Kathy Shearer's Second Act. I spent months going back and forth between two, unable to decide. But just like in most areas of life, if something doesn't jump out at you immediately, it's probably not right for you. The moment I saw this one I knew this was it. Now that this is settled, I'm fairly certain I can publish next month. And just because I like the look of the repetition in 8/8/2020, that's the date for which I am now aiming. Hope I can finish the edits/proofing in time! EDIT: REVISED RELEASE DATE NOW 8/18/2020! The Kat Steals Life series is about a woman turning 40 - divorced, no kids, no family besides her cat, and in a dead-end job that sucks the life out of her daily. She's always loved crime/heist/police procedural books and shows, so in the midst of this slight midlife crisis she works up the nerve to see if she can pull off a heist herself. The an

6 Random Word Poem for 7/29/2020

Words I had to use: smoke, picture, perfume, morning, together, broken. Words I didn't have to use (but did): be.

Cat herding progress

Not only is the reference to herding cats accurate in the sense that my characters (or more precisely my MC) where being unruly, but I also find it a slightly funny (though completely inside) joke since my MC is called Kat. But I decided to suck it up and put on my big girl pants and let her do what she wants. In the process of letting go of who or what I thought my MC should be the strangest thing happened. I am not only probably just one more editorial pass away from publishing book one in the series, I got about 1300 words into book two in about an hour and have sketched out the general path of a 5 book series in the little notebook I call my brain. I say sketched out because I am not by any stretch of the imagination a person who likes or ever uses the word outline.  So I am calling my quickly scribbled notes anything but an outline. They are just brief paragraphs of things I don't want to forget to include in each book. Please don't be pedantic (aka accurate) and insist I

Blackout Poem for 7/27/2020

Today's offering is from an article by Apoorva Mandavilli from the NYT, found HERE .

Blackout Poem for 7/21/2020

I made another blackout poem. This one is based on NYT opinion piece by Jemelle Bouie about what's happening in Portland. The entire article can be found here .

Another O Bheal poem 7/20/2020

Based on the O Bheal 5 words for July 14-21: lace lip steal ice familiar

6 Random Word Poem 7/18/2020

Finished Poem: How I got there:

Random Word Poetry

For a long time now I have been doing daily (or almost daily) poems based on random words. I got the idea originally from a poetry contest which offered 5 random words for you to use. I found it on twitter so I turned it onto a personal challenge to write a poem based on those 5 words that would fit in a tweet (back when they were 140 characters long). I'm so weird I found the challenge to be loads of fun. Eventually I moved to using an app which generated 6 random words, and I would handwrite a poem (of any length) in a journal I kept just for this purpose. That worked fine for years, but I found the writing/revising process rather messy when done with regular pen and paper - as a result my poetry journal became a lot of crossed out words, words written over other words, and arrows indicating how something should be moved from point A to B. There was also the added factor of wanting to post said poems online (instagram, twitter, a blog???) but in a photo/word art format. Since th

Book Review - Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon My rating: 5 of 5 stars It's taken me almost a month to write this review. And I feel like I'm still trying to wrap my head around this book - in a good way, not a bad one. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I am attempting to implement and follow the advice within it. But, I keep bumping up against this internal wall I have about sharing things in progress. For reasons that would probably require a psychologist to decipher I have an aversion to showing/discussing anything from a work in progress to my plans for next month (or even tomorrow). I'd rather just do it and then share the result; having hidden all the messy meandering between the beginning and the end. However, I'm sure that the admonitions in Show Your Work are right and true and good, not only because they feel that way, but also because I know I enjoy finding out about the people and the process behind the writers I like. I e

Blackout Poem for 7/13/2020

My blackout poem for the day, based on a Washington Post article found HERE by Eli Rosenberg

Witchcraze - a Reading Response

In the 5wk class I'm taking on "Witchcraft and Heresy" we read Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts by Anne Llewellyn Barstow this past week. As an assignment we were given the following prompt on which to base our discussion post: Chapter One is titled, "Why Women?" How would you answer that question after reading the chapter?  Ask the 'cui bono' question...who benefits? How does Barstow explain the structure of the  witch hunt? Chapters three and four look at different geographies. Did place (local context) matter? If so, how? My response is below, though I am going to write a more in-depth / proper book review for goodreads ASAP:      The answer to the question of “why women?” is both simple and too complex for me to explain successfully. The simple answer is that women were on the margins of early modern European culture. Though society had not always been so unapologetically patriarchal and punitive, sixteenth century European w

First O Bheal poem in awhile

I used to do this years ago, but just fell out of practice I guess. Anyway, I thought it'd be fun to do again.

Blackout Poem for 7/10/2020

My blackout poem for the day, based on a New York Times piece by Michelle Goldberg, found HERE .

Blackout Poem for 7/3/2020

My blackout poem for the day based on a New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof found HERE .