My Blog Archives

Welcome to 2012

Here we are, four days past the beginning of Aquarius, and I always try to write my blog a day or two before the sun enters the next sign. I sure missed it this month! Why? I’m glad to say that I’ve been busy. I’m editing new books for two new authors. One is a bloke in England who’s writing about how to improve your life. He’s giving some good advice. The other is a physician who has enduring interest in the energy of X-rays and MRIs and other medical apparati. (OK, that would be the proper plural of apparatus if apparatus were a Latin word. I like it better than apparatuses.) This physician is also interested in healing energy. He’s had encounters with the Edgar Cayce folks, attended Jack Houck’s spoon-bending workshops, and met a lot of other people who do energy work, mostly in holistic healing. Me, too. I once got a kiss on the cheek from one of Cayce’s sons, and I’ve bent spoons with Jack. And I’ve been editing for the American Holistic Health Association, whose president and founder, Suzan Walter, has been my friend since 1981 when we met at a Women In Management meeting. I’m also still editing the memoir of the solo violinist, who has had an extremely interesting life, and an author whose book I last worked on in 2006 is now coming back for more editing.

Happy holidays!

I went to the Circle of Aradia’s Yule ritual last night. It was the 40th anniversary of Z Budpest’s invention of Dianic Wicca, and Z was there as an honored guess and she and I had a nice little chat. It was also the 25th anniversary of the Circle of Aradia, founded by Ruth Barrett, the best ritualist I’ve ever worked with. It was good to see Ruth and a whole bunch of other women I haven’t seen for various reasons in five or ten years. (None of us, of course, look any older.) Among the 200 or so women in attendance was a journalist for (I think) a website in the San Fernando Valley. She was looking very bewildered at the circle casting and the dancing and chanting, so because I don’t dance, I went over to her and spoke with her for a little while. “What’s going on here?” she asked. After I explained that I in no way represent COA in any official capacity, I spoke to her about the ritual year and the Yule celebration.

How to sell more books??

When I decided to self-publish Secret Lives, I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work. I’m having an interesting adventure. Also investing a fair amount of money in the adventure. I’d like to sell more books and make a return on that investment. I suppose I could summon up some Great, Universal Mind Power and project it into the heads of every pagan or witchy woman on the planet. Buy Secret Lives. Buy Secret Lives. Buy Secret Lives. Mind Power? Yeah. Right. Like Universal Mind Power works. So I keep working on PR.

Dialogue and Dialect, Part 2

As an editor, one of the issues I often address with my authors—both those whose mother tongue is American English and those who are coming from other mother tongues—is how their characters talk. Many of my authors start out writing dialogue that is stiff and unnatural. It’s like they’re writing the stilted alien dialogue we heard in the sf movies of the 1950s. But characters in books need to talk like real people. How they talk helps readers know about them without our having to write lots and lots of exposition and description.  

Dialogue and Dialect--Talking Gooder English

As an editor, one of the issues I often address with my authors—both those whose mother tongue is American English and those who are coming from other mother tongues—is how their characters talk. Many of my authors start out writing dialogue that is stiff and unnatural. It’s like they’re writing the stilted alien dialogue we heard in the sf movies of the 1950s. But characters in books need to talk like real people. How they talk helps readers know about them without our having to write lots and lots of exposition and description. 

Publishing is an Educational Experience

Educational Experiences, of course, teach us those famous Life Lessons. Like don’t come back to the dorm at midnight after a cast party because when I was in college the housemother locked the dorm and you have to crawl in through a basement window. Which I did a couple months into my freshman year. I was grounded for a week. Like don’t believe everything an actor tells you. Like don’t cut class. It took me until graduate school to learn that lesson. Today, forty-odd years later, I am still having Educational Experiences. The big one? Publishing Secret Lives, of course. As of September 8, I have released my beloved crones and their friends to the world. The novel is now for sale on Amazon.com and the Kindle conversion is in the works. I’ll investigate B&N pretty soon and start a Nook conversion, too.

Keeping busy until Secret Lives comes out

I only allow myself to buy books and DVDs during even-numbered months. On August 1, therefore—and before 8 a.m.—I opened the catalog whose pages I’d been folding down for several days and logged on to its website. Click, click, click. OH. YEAH. SECRET LIVES. What I wanted was to be able to hold the book in my hands on my birthday last month. That didn’t happen. Then I thought it would be a book by mid-August. Well, Mercury is retrograde … so I’m working (really hard) on going with the flow.

It's My Birthday

Today is, as they say, the first day of the next year of my life. Yesterday was my birthday. So what did I do? I started the day by getting my car washed. The second thing I did for my birthday was take two slices of red velvet cake with me to visit my friend Anniitra. Then I did something I do maybe once a year. I went shopping. And I also spent an hour or so yesterday replying to birthday greetings on Facebook. With nearly every “many thanks,” I also asked, “Have you been to my Secret Lives page yet?”

My Writing Process

I’ve been thinking about this blog for more than a week. Usually, I have it written by now and just have to post it when the sun moves into the next sign. Not this time. It’s not that I can’t think of anything to write about—I always have a dozen ideas bouncing around in my head. It’s not that I don’t have time. I’m self-employed. I can work any eight or nine days of the week I want to. I can work any 28 or 29 hours of the day. Well, actually, I don’t work quite that much. By mid-afternoon most days, I get up from this chair, pick up a novel from my stack of books, and read with my eyes closed. I live like a cat for an hour to give my biological clock time to refresh.

I’m not complaining about being busy! What if all I had to do was watch daytime TV? The thought makes me shudder. This month, I am editing for my authors, writing for three Llewellyn annuals, and proofreading the pdf file of my new novel, Secret Lives, which I hope will be a Real Book by the end of July. 

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

I drove up to UCLA a few nights ago to see the Reprise Theater Company’sproduction of Kiss Me, Kate, which is one of my favorite musicals. As you no doubt know, it’s a backstage retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, with songs by Cole Porter. I was humming “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” for a week before I saw the show, and a week later, I’m still humming it. I don’t have permission to print the lyrics here (and I’m not about to commit plagiarism), so I invite you to spend five minutes watching it on YouTube  Turn your sound up loud. The song is sung by the two gangsters who … well, if I give you the whole plot, it’ll fill up this blog. They sing it in front of the curtain while the scene is changed behind the curtain. The song is hilarious. The stanzas are puns on the titles of Shakespeare’s plays. “Her clothes you are mussing” is rhymed, for example, with “Much Ado About Nussing.”

Having been a Shakespeare scholar (well, I earned my Ph.D. with a major in English Renaissance literature with an emphasis on the drama—which means Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and that bunch), I really like Shakespeare’s plays.