11/14/11
No, not a transvestite. Not that kind of tranny.
I’m talking about the transmission for a 1982 Fiat Spyder Convertible.
This is the price you pay for marrying a Georgia boy who is also a shade tree mechanic. The tranny has been sitting in my kitchen for at least nine months. There is a radiator in the downstairs den, and a floorboard in my husband’s office.
When I married this man 34 years ago, he moved into my one bedroom apartment and stashed Triumph Spitfire parts in the walk-in closet. For some women the reality of marriage hits when they discover that their husbands don’t put the cap on the toothpaste. For me — it’s grease in the kitchen sink, and I’m not talking about vegetable oil.
Good thing there are fringe benefits.
11/11/11
I’ve been working on Last Chance Christmas, and yesterday I ran into a snag.
My hero and heroine needed to go on a date and it had to be holiday themed. Also, I wanted to inject a little humor into the story, because the book has been far more emotional that I had originally planned. So I wracked my brain for fun Christmassy things that my hero and heroine could do, and every idea sounded like something right from the Hallmark Channel.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Hallmark, but I wanted something funny not sweet. The book is filled with sweet, poignant moments. I needed a few belly laughs.
03/20/11
The Adjustment Bureau: an Unexpected Romance
Last night my husband and I went to see the Adjustment Bureau. It was his turn to pick a movie, so I wasn’t surprised that he picked a science fiction thriller. I settled into my seat (Milk Duds in hand) and prepared to watch a movie with a lot of violence and a bunch of not-to-be-believed plot devices.
Instead what I got was a wonderful love story, a movie filled with antagonists who are complicated and surprisingly sympathetic even though they are determined to keep the hero and heroine apart. The plot of this movie kept me right on the edge of my seat. Once I accepted that there were a bunch of men in hats controlling everyone’s Free Will, the rest of the story hung together with nary a plot hole to be found.
The poor hero in this tale is presented with a terrible set of choices at each turn. With each decision he makes, the stakes get higher. Every scene ends with unexpected disaster. And yet there are no piled up dead bodies, and the story is, at its core, all about love.
That makes The Adjustment Bureau one of the best romance movie I’ve seen in a long, long time.
Tell your significant other that this is a great date movie. And if you’re a romance writer, I recommend it highly as a great example of how excellent writing can blend external plot action with a deeply moving internal love story.
I was not surprised as I watched the closing credits to find out that the movie is based on a story by Phillip K. Dick — an excellent Science Fiction author. I did not read his story, so I can’t tell you how closely the moviemakers followed his original, but whoever wrote the adaptation did a wonderful job.
If you like romance, you should see this movie.
08/8/10
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the grocery store. . . I made a wrong turn and ended up standing in the yarn section of my local craft store.
Now let me be clear, my mother taught me how to knit when I about ten or twelve, but I didn’t really take to it. For one thing, Mom had amazing talents with knitting needles. She knit snowflake sweaters, and cable sweaters, and even a Ramsay plaid mohair afghan once. I could not compete. For another, I had sweaty hands as a child and you just can’t knit with sweaty hands.
So, instead, I let Aunt Annie teach me how to embroider. I could embroider rings around Mom. Eventually I even bested Aunt Annie in that department, but I could never match her skill at tatting. (I still have some of her tatted lace, waiting to be put on a grand child’s dress.) But I digress.
Why was I standing there reading a Debbie Macomber book filled with knitting instructions?
Several reasons: 1) My critique partners are yarn harlots. And they have been trying to suck me in for a long, long time. 2) I hate grocery shopping, and 3) I needed a vacation . . . bad.
For the last several months I’ve done nothing on my weekends but stare into a computer screen wrestling with manuscripts, new webpages, and day-job demands. This weekend I hauled home a boat load of work-related things to do, in addition to a box filled with copy edits. I really needed to get the grocery shopping done and get back to the computer. I had a whole weekend planned — and it was all work.
But I just couldn’t do it.
So instead, ended up fingering yarn at the craft store. And the yarn won.
I bought some of it, and I started a project. I spent most of yesterday knitting while listening to the entire season of Morgan Freeman’s ‘Through the Wormhole.” In the process I discovered a few things:
1) Knitting is like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, you never forget how. I haven’t knitted since I was a teenager.
2) My hands are not nearly as sweaty as they used to me. So maybe there are some positives to being post menopausal, and
3) You can justify all kinds of procrastination when you’re actually making something.
So, here’s a photo of what I accomplished yesterday. This is the back of a basic V-neck sweater:
And yes those are watermelon earrings in the photo — a gift from Heidi Hamburg who is tickled by the fact that Last Chance has a water tower painted like a watermelon. I didn’t have the heart to crop them out of the photo.
It was really fun, yesterday, to get away from the computer and practice an art that is ancient. It really relaxed me. And I was surprised by how connected I felt to Mom, who passed away in 1997.
I’ll be posting my progress on this project from time-to-time. That way I might actually finish it. I was notorious as a youngster for starting knitting projects and never finishing them. Although I did ultimately finish the obligatory stripped scarf (Met’s colors), and the basic crew neck sweater (knit with really chunky yarn on ginormous needles.)
So, okay, CPs, you can snort and giggle and whatnot, but you finally sucked me in. You and the burning need for a vacation from the computer screen.