Blog: A Good Life In Crazy Times

🍸Friday Happy Hour: Social Media Whoa(s)

This week 's Friday Happy Hour is brought to you by the color YELLOW. It's Lemon Drop season, peeps!  Happy Friday Happy Hour, Peeps! So, it’s Happy Hour Friday. Hubby brought home not only vodka and three types of olives but also lemon drop mixer! Yes, I know you don’t use the olives with the mixer. Basically, ⅔ mixer to ⅓ vodka, shake it up with ice, serve with a lemon peel. I think the mixer might also be good with sparkling water for a non-boozy sipper. DISGUISED UPDATEFor those of you who are waiting with bated breath…

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✍️Writing Wednesday: Adapt!

Focus on your goals. Adapt to circumstances beyond your control. Take pleasure in your work. All is not lost! After ranting a bit yesterday about how my idea for a cozy mystery series ran into the cold, harsh reality that someone beat me to it, I spent the rest of the day researching the market. By the time I was done, I’d come to the conclusion that I am probably not a cozy mystery writer anyway, and maybe I should take my idea and turn it into a chick lit series! As far as I can tell, this…

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👓 Doggone It: All The Best Ideas Are Taken

Is it true that all the best ideas are already taken? In a world where everyone is writing and self-publishing and traditionally publishing genre series, is there anything left unexplored?See, I have a hankering to write a cozy mystery series, one with a character I absolutely adore and want to spend many hours with as she solves puzzling crimes. Every cozy mystery series needs a hook: the main character’s a witch or owns a cat or runs a bookshop or is a member of a knitting club. I wanted to set my series in a milieu…

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☕️ Earworms, Dreams, and Flags on the Moon

I woke up this morning with the song “Dust In The Wind” by Kansas playing through my mind. An earworm, I believe this phenomenon is called. I don’t know about you, but as this pandemic progresses my dreams run through my nights like a magical film library produced just for me--vivid, strange, compelling, and with discernable, if odd, storylines. I won’t bore you with any descriptions, as we all know listening to other people’s dreams is about as interesting as watching nailpolish dry, but the line of the song that keeps reverberating over and over as if…

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🍸Friday Happy Hour, April 17, 2020

I've started sketching humorous little comics in this weird, isolating period of pandemic. --SRB I have run out of vodka. Not only that, I’ve run out of olives.  Now, there are many things about this pandemic we are in that are more important than my inability to make myself a martini at the end of the day, but I’m mourning the loss just the same. Just as you are most likely mourning the loss of something seemingly small, but none-the-less important, to your idea of “the good life.”  (If you’ve lost a person to this pandemic,…

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☕️ Writing Wednesday: 3 Cool Ways to Work Around Procrastination

For the past couple of years, I’ve worked on creating a so-called “author platform” using several engagement tools. I built a website. I constructed a blog. I deleted my old personal Facebook account and started another one specifically for my author “persona.” I began writing female-empowerment flash fictions and posting them on my FB page and in a certain fan group to which I belong.  With great trepidation, I persevered on Twitter despite my feeling that it crackles with more negative energy than a circle of hell. I gained a few more followers and followed some…

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📚 Writing Wednesday: Simplicity, Luxury, Refinement

This morning, I grabbed my usual cup of coffee (blueberry flavored with flax milk) and my current read (Wilkie Collins’s 1860s thriller, THE WOMAN IN WHITE), and headed out to my still-sparsely decorated balcony. This is how I start my days, with coffee and books and music. Today I cued up opera arias on YouTube  and settled in to the English countryside with Collins’s character, “Walter Hartwright, of Clement’s Inn, Teacher of Drawing.”  Listening to the classical music while reading paragraphs like the following sent me into a pleasurable swoon:  “I must have been hard to…

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👓 Writing Wednesday: Big Bookstack

Bookstack for the AutodidactAn autodidact is a self-taught person. That’s what the Merriam-Webster Dictionary online edition tells me when I look it up just to make sure I'm not missing any valuable nuances of meaning. The word comes from the Greek autodidaktos, didaktos in turn from the word didaskein which means, to teach.Looking up histories and etymologies of words has me asking myself if I shouldn’t, maybe, teach myself Greek. Words are so interesting! I could give up writing and instead lose myself in the intricacies of language itself. Hmmmm. Tempting. However, I’m having enough trouble scheduling in…

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🍄 Mindful Monday, February 3, 2020

  HAPPINESS  In the late summer of 2018, I arrived in San Diego and settled with my husband into a furnished apartment on K Street in the Gaslamp District. After living my entire life in Maine, I’d become used to the sight of pine trees and snow and rocky coastlines and blue foothills snuggled up against the Appalachians. I still loved the beach at Pine Point, but summer ended way too soon, and winter lasted way too long. As much as I loved my home state, I was feeling restless and bored at midlife. I wanted…

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