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IWSG: Be more confident in four easy steps
Happy IWSG Day! For those who are new here, I participate in the monthly Insecure Writers Support Group blog hop. Details and signup here. This month’s optional question is: There have been many industry changes in the last decade, so what are some changes you would like to see happen in the next decade? I’m going to be a rebel this month and not respond to the optional prompt, because a) I’m still a novice and don’t feel qualified to talk about what’s going on in the publishing industry, and b) I want to share something I discovered last week that helped me, both in my writing life and my library…
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#SoCS: A skeezy wrestler, a skeezy pickup line… and me
This post is part of the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blog hop. Linda Hill posts a prompt every Friday; see https://lindaghill.com/2020/06/26/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-27-2020/. This week’s prompt is, “coffee, tea, or me.” Find a flirty phrase of your own or use “coffee, tea, or me” in your post. I’ve been lucky to not be on the receiving end of too many skeezy pickup lines, but one sticks out in my mind. Back in the early 1990s, my husband and I were living in northern Georgia, where we’d moved for my first job after I graduated from library school. He’d always dreamed of being a professional wrestler (hey, who am I to judge someone…
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#SoCS: When the only tool you have is a hammer…
This post is part of the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blog hop. Linda Hill posts a prompt every Friday; see https://lindaghill.com/2020/06/12/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-13-2020/. This week’s prompt: nail. As I read the news and think about the protests going on right now, I’m often reminded of the old saying, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” That seems to be one of the fundamental problems with policing in the USA (systemic racism being another, bigger, problem). When use of force is the only tool in your toolbox, when it’s what you’re trained to do, it’s what you do. When you’re trained to fight crime, you see…
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#SoCS: Fandoms (with gratuitous concert pictures)
This post is part of the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blog hop. Linda Hill posts a prompt every Friday; see https://lindaghill.com/2020/06/05/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-6-2020/. This week’s prompt: fan. Some people hear, “fan,” and think of a cooling device. Or people with their faces painted in team colors, yelling from a stadium seat while swigging whisky (note: that described most of the adults at my high school’s football games. We teenagers had more dignity). Or maybe you think of fandoms, which has a definitely nerdy connotation: Star Wars fandom, Harry Potter fandom, etc. For me, though, “fan” immediately makes me think of music. Music fandom, especially for women, has a different–and distinctly sexist–connotation that…
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My secret: I don’t live up to my writing
Happy IWSG Day! For those who are new here, I participate in the monthly Insecure Writers Support Group blog hop. Details and signup here. This month’s optional question is: Writers have secrets! What are one or two of yours, something readers would never know from your work? I struggled to come up with an IWSG post this month. Usually I have one done by no later than Monday, and I’m usually pretty happy with it, but not this month. As much as I try to shut out the outside world and focus on my writing and my day job and my family, it’s been hard these last few days. So much…
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#SoCS: chirurgie
This is my first time participating in the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blog hop. Linda Hill posts a prompt every Friday; see https://lindaghill.com/2020/05/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-23-2020. This week’s prompt: base a post on a word beginning with ch. I contemplated a few ch words: child and chair immediately came to mind. Then, from nowhere came chirurgie, the French word for surgery. Do I speak French? Non. Not a word. Well, except for merde, because I’m full of it, and one ought to be able to describe oneself in at least two languages, am I right? So why chirurgie, which I cannot spell without looking it up and am copying and pasting each time…
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My son has an associate’s degree!
This week’s post for the Celebrate the Small Things blog hop celebrates a not-so-small thing: my son is almost done with his 2-year associate’s degree! There’s no graduation ceremony this year (thanks, Microbe That Must Not Be Named), but he got a lovely box in the mail yesterday from his campus, with his class of 2020 tassel and membership card for the alumni association. My baby is an alumnus! In the fall he’ll move on to a 4-year university, but for now, we’re celebrating this milestone with him. And congrats to all the graduates out there! I’m sorry you don’t get to have big parties and ceremonies this year. I…
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My writing ritual (warning: it ain’t pretty)
Happy IWSG Day! For those who are new here, I participate in the monthly Insecure Writers Support Group blog hop. Details and signup here. This month’s optional question is: Do you have any rituals that you use when you need help getting into the zone? I hope my fellow IWSG-ers have some great responses to this question. I need all the ideas I can get, because right now my ritual for getting in the zone is pretty simple: sit my butt down in front of my computer and get to work. I wrote about that process in a post last December. Part of why I don’t employ much in the…
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Celebrate the Small Things!
I have just joined the Celebrate the Small Things blog hop. The rules are simple: each Friday, post about something you want to celebrate achieving/doing that week. This week I’m celebrating the fact that I submitted a short story to an online magazine. Big deal, right? But for me it is. Until about a year ago, I’d never shown anyone my fiction. Since then, I’ve joined a critique group, entered (and won!) a literary contest, and, just this year, submitted two pieces for publication. Will my two submissions get published? Maybe, maybe not. In both cases, I submitted to markets that are a little out of my league, but then…
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Photo safari through a historic Flagstaff neighborhood
My first novel, Vanishing, Inc., is set in a fictional mountain town in Arizona called Ponderosa. I live in Flagstaff, a not-so-fictional mountain town in Arizona that makes an appearance in my story, but since I’m writing a paranormal romance (a time travel romance, to be specific), I wanted the freedom of a fictional setting. I don’t want some overly-literal reader leaving me a one-star review because there are, in fact, no time portals in Flagstaff. Hey, you know it could happen. I’m sure plenty of tourists have walked through standing stones in Scotland and become very grumpy because they did not immediately find themselves in the arms of a lusty…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
