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Showing posts from August, 2020

Blackout Poem 8/24/2020

This is from a Washington Post opinion piece by Max Boot , found HERE .

Goodreads Giveaway!

Enter the Giveaway for a chance to win one of 100 free Kindle editions of Kathy Shearer's Second Act the first book in the Kat Steals Life Series   GIVEAWAY RUNS 8/23/2020 - 9/21/2020 Goodreads Book Giveaway Kathy Shearer's Second Act by Kayt Ludi Giveaway ends September 21, 2020. See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway   About the book:  Kathy Shearer is 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 a slight midlife crisis she works up the nerve to see if she can pull off a heist herself. The answer is that she can, and she does, and Kathy's second act, as Kat Steele, is where her l

Forecast: Continued stress with a chance of scattered nervous breakdowns

So, after two back to back 5wk summer courses - which I am thrilled I got to take, despite the workload, because they were fascinating, my one week off before the early start of Fall semester (thanks, Covid) vanished into thin air for personal reasons. Then there were snafus with publishing my novel - I hired someone to do a final proof because it's nearly impossible to catch all your own mistakes when you know what something is supposed to say - even if you are occasionally paid to proofread for others. It just takes fresh eyes to catch everything. Well, not only did the person I hired have an (understandable) emergency which delayed the process, but after I got it back I still found typos we had BOTH missed, ugh! Now, I'm behind in reading for my fall classes, am still trying to cobble together the right poems for a chapbook competition with a deadline of Aug 31st, am being harassed by code enforcement about some weeds at my vacant fixer upper which is frustratingly still n

Popular Books I've Never Read, and Why

Starting with series ... I've never read a single one of the Harry Potter series, and I don't suspect I ever will. I did see one movie once, but I couldn't tell you which one. Game of Thrones - no interest at all. Got about 15-20 mins into an episode once, and couldn't figure out the cause for all the hype. As a TV series, Vikings was way more interesting and engrossing! 50 Shades - ditto the no interest answer. Twilight - I'm old enough to recall when the cool vampire stories were written by Anne Rice (none of which I read either) so when Twilight occurred I remember doing a distinctly old lady eye roll about the return of "that stupid vampire crap." Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice - see above. Just never got the whole vampire thing. Outlande r - but I intend to! I started watching episode one during the fourth season of the show. I was so bored by the first 20-30 mins I paused it, left it for a few days, and almost didn't go back to it. On a w

Film Response - Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages - beware possible spoilers!

OK, now that this has been graded I feel like I can post my film response assignment. Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages , the brainchild of Benjamin Christensen, is an an attempt at something akin to a documentary mixed with dramatized scenes. In today’s filmic parlance it might be classified as a docudrama, but with the non-dramatized portions having the feel of an academic lecture. The film asks the question of how the witch trials could ever have occurred – how people could have believed such things and acted upon those beliefs so violently and destructively. The film then tries to answer that question with a ‘modern’ and scientific approach. Stylistically the film, despite its silent era limitations, is engrossing and impactful. Despite it being created in the early 1920s, one could easily argue there are, in fact, special effects in the film. Some scenes have a blue tint, some a reddish (sometimes almost sepia) tone – presumably to delineate day and night. There were double ex