While Green Embers is away, Charles Yallowitz is playing guest host!
Author: Marie A Bailey
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While Green Embers is away, Charles Yallowitz is playing guest host!
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Here is the fourth installment of Ten Top Lists of What Not To Do by Marie Ann Bailey of 1WriteWay at http://1writeway.com and John W. Howell of Fiction Favorites at http://johnwhowell.com. These lists are simu-published on our blogs each Monday. We hope you enjoy.
photo credit: © Hunor83 | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images 10. When trying to lose weight, do not go on a 24-hour fast and then break it with a Chinese buffet binge just because fasting is the new “in” diet and the sign at the buffet reads; “All you Can Eat Low Cal.” The rapid transition from empty stomach to a stomach brimming with hot and sour soup, General Tso’s Chicken, spring rolls, crab rangoon, snow peas in garlic sauce, fried rice, and chocolate pudding can be hazardous and explosive.
9. When trying to lose weight, do not mistake the South Beach diet for endless daiquiris and tapas in Florida.. You’ll never get into that sleek little bathing suit if you do and could jeopardize getting into the big ole one piece as well.
8. When trying to lose weight, do not sign up for your very first triathlon if your only familiarity with exercise is being able to juggle multiple remotes for your TV, DVD player and sound system. You want to lose weight, not your life, which you will likely forfeit in the first five minutes of the competition.
7. When trying to lose weight, by all means, purchase a scale for weighing your food so you can be sure of the size of your portions. Just don’t bring it with you to restaurants and weigh the food served to you. At best, your friends will find the activity of watching you trying to weigh a dollop of mashed potatoes rather boring. At worst, your food will be in an unappetizing state after the weighing.
6. When trying to lose weight, do not buy spandex for casual wear EVER! No explanation is necessary.
5. When trying to lose weight, do not try to curb your appetite with bottomless cups of coffee, bottles of diet pills, or any other substance. These have less to do with suppressing appetite and much more to do with making you so hyper that you never sleep, which, ironically, gives you more hours in which to eat.
4. When trying to lose weight, do not take any diet pills that promise to block your absorption of fat (e.g., Alli). Yes, they do work, but they work at all the wrong moments–in the middle of a business meeting, during a long commute, or while you’re sitting in the window seat of an airplane with Chris Christie next to you.
3. When trying to lose weight, do not hire a trainer that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s poor cousin and whose sales pitch is “I want to pump you up!” What you might get “pumped up” with may not be legal.
2. When trying to lose weight, do not take up colon cleansing. As with most of the items on this list, the result of too much of a good thing can result in frequent and expensive calls to your plumber.
1. Finally, when trying to lose weight, take a good long look in the mirror and ask yourself which is more important: fitting into those skinny jeans you wore in high school or feeling strong, healthy, and happy, even if you are a little soft around the edges.
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My take on Rapunzel for The Community Storyboard :)
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“The Seed” a novel by Helen Valentina – Now Available on Lulu.com!
Hi Everyone ! As promised, below you will find the links to the paperback and ebook versions of my first novel The Seed.
Over the next couple of months it will be available also on Amazon – both paperback and eventually kindle version, Apple and Nook, in global distribution. I’ll keep you up to date if any of these are preferred points of purchase. :)
In the meantime, the description of the novel is below. It is a romance, essentially, but has a dark and ambiguous undertow, which will surprise none of you familiar with my poetry!
I hope if you choose to purchase that you enjoy the novel and I’d welcome your feedback. :)
Book Description
Sara Fraser, a solitary artist, is haunted by her dreams of a past life where she is deeply in love—a concept and experience foreign to her waking existence. Just as she is becoming…
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God, I love this stuff!
READ: Research in English At Durham
In this guest post, Oliver Tearle, editor of the Interesting Literature blog, explains how and why literary research can be made interesting to a wider audience.D. H. Lawrence was fond of climbing mulberry trees in the nude to stimulate his imagination. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group once convinced the Royal Navy they were a group of Abyssinian princes by donning fake beards and painting their faces black. George Eliot was the first person to make reference to ‘pop’ music. These are just three of the things I’ve discovered in the last year, since I embarked on a project to find the interesting side of literature. I did this partly because of that perennial question, or invitation, which preoccupies (and haunts) many a PhD student and academic researcher: “Tell us about your research…”
Increasingly in Higher Education, academics are being encouraged to communicate their research to a…
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Art and Advertising? Read on for an interesting essay on famous writers who worked in advertising early in their writing careers.
Before he wrote Midnight’s Children – the 1981 novel which would win not only the Booker Prize for that year but the ‘Booker of Bookers’ award in 1993 – Salman Rushdie worked in advertising.
It was during this period in the 1970s that Rushdie came up with several classic advertising slogans: ‘Naughty but nice’ (to advertise cream cakes), ‘That’ll do nicely’ (for American Express credit cards), and ‘Irresistibubble’ (for Aero chocolate bars). He also came up with this, for the DailyMirror: ‘Look into the Mirror tomorrow – you’ll like what you see.’ Rushdie has said that his work in advertising ‘taught me to write like a job. If you have the client coming in that afternoon for his new campaign, you can’t not have it. You have to have it. What’s more, it has to be good.’
George Orwell may have described advertising as ‘the rattling of a…
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Enjoy this sneak peak from Charles Yallowitz, author of the series, Legends of Windemere!
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Here is the third installment of Ten Top Lists of What Not To Do by Marie Ann Bailey of 1WriteWay at http://1writeway.com and John W. Howell of Fiction Favorites at http://johnwhowell.com. These lists are simu-published on our blogs each Monday. We hope you enjoy.
10. If you in the wedding party, do not take off your clothes no matter what the circumstances may dictate or what you think the circumstances are dictating.
9. If you are not in the wedding party, see number 10.
8. If you are the best man or maid of honor, do not cry when you describe your love of the bride or groom in your toast and eliminate the word “amazing” from your speech.
7. Do not decide to try and set an all-time personal record in the number and kinds of drinks that you intake simply because they are free.
6. If you do set an all-time personal record of kind and number of drinks, do not ask the bride or groom for a kiss or worse for a date. (same goes for the best man and maid of honor)
5. If you are not in the wedding party, do not offer a toast even if several of your friends are clapping and saying your name followed by the chant “toast, toast, toast.”
4. If you brought a wedding gift to the reception, do not take it home with you no matter what.
3. Do not pretend to be someone else or use a made up name when you are introduced to others even if you may never see these people again and you think it is soooo funny.
2. If you came with a date to the wedding, do not go home with someone else.
1. When you leave the reception do not thank the bride and groom’s parents with a juicy kiss. -
I’m currently participating in Camp NaNoWriMo but have been negligent with working on my novel. I also owe a number of book reviews. So I thought, why not try to do both? Work on my novel and a book review at the same time. Granted, this is not the kind of book review I would post to Amazon or Goodreads. I’ll have to snip away the dialogue and narrative for that, but those reviews will be posted. Many thanks to Briana Vedsted for her patience and her talent in storytelling.
An excerpt from WIP: The Widow’s Club: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Melissa sought to distract Tupper by telling him about a novella she had read. It was The Night I Walked Off of Boot Hill by Briana Vedsted. She had noticed a stack of worn paperback books in the cabin, at the foot of the cot, most with pictures of cowboys on horses. She could make out the names Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. She smiled at the thought of this young mountain man being taken with horses and life out on the plains. The landscapes of Grey and L’Amour probably seemed like foreign countries, even distant planets, to Tupper.
She rested her fingers on the top of the stack, noting how well-thumbed the books looked. “Have you ever read anything by Briana Vedsted?” Her voice was low, wanting to get his attention, but not wanting to startle him since they had been quiet for so long now.
He turned toward her. When he saw that she was looking at his books, his face lit up. “No. Does she write stories like those? I’ve read those books over and over. They belong to the library, you know.” His cheeks turned pale rose as he admitted to having overdue books.
“She doesn’t have a book in the library … yet.” Melissa realized that he may not understand electronic books and the Internet and she didn’t have the energy to explain all that to him. Better to just gloss over that part, she thought. “I have a copy of a novella she wrote, called The Night I Walked Off of Boot Hill. I can … read it to you someday.” She wasn’t sure about showing him her Kobo Reader, either. What would he make of something like that? And if she offered to read it to him, maybe he’ll consider helping her get down the mountain and back home.
“Can you tell me about it?” He sat on the floor in front of her, as she sat cross-legged on the cot. He was so big, she thought. He had to be at least 6 feet tall, if not more, and no less than 200 pounds. She couldn’t quite tell because he was fully dressed, but she suspected that he was all muscle. Living on the mountain, all that hard labor just to find food. She smiled at him as he looked up at her, eager for a story.
“Sure, it’s a ghost story, but a nice one, not a scary one. It starts with a man waking up in a cemetery on Boot Hill. It takes a while for him to remember his name, Barbados Tom, and to gather his last memories before waking up on the hill. The thing is, he doesn’t know if he is dead or alive.” Tupper’s eyes grew wide and the smile faded from his face. Melissa marveled at the thought that he could be scared by a story when for years he had been living alone in this isolated cabin on the mountain among bears and other predators. Yet, that didn’t seem to scare him.
“The whole story is about Barbados Tom remembering who he is and what he did and where he needs to go. The reader is taken along on this journey, learning about him just as he learns about himself. Along the way he meets up with a young man, Jim McDougall, who also seems lost and alone. They have adventures along the way.” Melissa glanced over at the stack of paperbacks. “Lots of horse riding and meeting up with Indians and traveling through lonely ghost towns. Tom wonders if they are both dead. And yet they feel hunger and the cold, they need sleep, they feel pain. Tom can’t figure it out. He was supposed to be hanged. He remembers that he was an outlaw and that he had been captured and sentenced to death. And, yet, here he is on a journey. He knows where he needs to go, but he doesn’t know why.”
“So he was a bad man?”
“Well?” Melissa paused. She didn’t want Tupper to think that it was okay to be a bad person, to hurt people and maybe get away with it. “The thing is he had done bad things and he had to be punished. But he also had a heart, a good heart, and he was trying to make things right again. He started to think of Jim in a fatherly way, watching after him and planning for his future.”
“How does it all end?” Tupper sat up a little straighter, eager to know how anyone could make right the bad things they had done. How could someone be condemned to death, and yet be worthy of life.
“I can’t tell you that. It would be giving away the whole story.” Melissa felt a little anxious, wondering if teasing Tupper with only part of the story would backfire. “It’s a very good story, and it has a happy ending. But I can’t tell it right. I need to read it to you.”
Tupper looked down at his hands and frowned. Melissa’s heart started beating hard and she felt a chill down her back. So far he had treated her well, but she still didn’t know if she could trust him.
“Does he ever figure out if he’s a ghost?” He looked up at Melissa, a child-like plea in his eyes. “Does he get any peace?”
Melissa smiled, relieved that he seemed only concerned about the story, about Barbados Tom.
“We never know if he’s a ghost or not, but that’s okay, because in the end, he’s happy. Everyone is happy.”
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This review is based on my own purchased copy of The Night I Walked Off of Boot Hill by Briana Vedsted. You can buy your own copy at Amazon. It is available in book e-book at 99 cents and in paperback currently for $5.94!
Marie at 1 Write Way 