WIP

Hates Posting "I'm still alive" entries, but...

Yes, I'm still alive and as you can see - ready for summer flowers, warm breezes, and lots and lots of sunlight. I need to get back into blogging and sorting out a schedule and topic schpeels.

May was an interesting month.

I did not do much writing, thanks to a busy schedule of doing other mysterious things which escape the memory at the moment. Ditto reading.

I did start writing a new WIP based on a conversation I was having with one of my sisters. This had to do with my impatience and bemusement about how people behave online (and I'm including myself in this group) as opposed to how they behave in person. It really is very easy to be dishonest and exagerative without even intending to be. Simply because you want to seem more interesting and exciting that that DULL person who had a 7-5 job in an office and spends most of the time shuffling papers and operating office machinery. :)

I did create a sorta-real facebook page. It's under my 'fake name' and I'm trying very hard to keep my real life seperate and the tone neutral on fb. I guess more than Twitter where it is very easy to get lost in the shuffle, you feel that much more vulnerable and nervous about coworkers and bosses checking up on what you're saying. Or maybe it's just all of the warnings I've heard on the news concerning that reality. One thing I do like about Facebook as opposed to Twitter = I can post random comments galore and I don't get porn-spammed to death. Yay.

That said, I will still use my Twitter page, at least in checking up what's going on in the industry and following friends. :)

I will have to post pictures of my garden - only I'm waiting for a drier/dryer (read, less mosquito ridden) day to go out back into the garden. My rose garden looks simply heavenly. They are all blooming, including one bush that had gone to root and switched from a hybrid to a more old fashioned wild rose. Only downside would be my irises which objected to being dug up and replanted - though I thought I was doing them a favor in rebuilding their turf so they weren't sitting directly in what was essentially a clay pot. <- I have to build up all my gardens so they have better drainage. The dirt is a very thick and sticky clay. It is good for the septic field beneath, but horrible for gardening on.

Plans for the month of June (late, but what the hey):

Read 5 books, including:

Spirit Bound (Richelle Mead)
The Reckoning (Kelley Armstrong)
Little Vampire Women (I don't remember the author's name)
Insatiable (Meg Cabot)
Reread of all my Diana Wynne Jones Books*
Random other 2 books I eyeballed gluttonously at Target <- I don't remember the titles atm.
Shiver (Maggie Stiefvater)... maybe.
Twilight New Moon.

Yes, more than five but I'm just dwelling on a disappointing visit to Target where I begged a surprised passing shopper to help drag me out of the book aisle emptyhanded. Miserable tight budget... :[

*Per something I read on fb, a letter posted by Maggie Stiefvater, Diana Wynne Jones stopped treatment for her lung cancer. Even though I felt the quality of the last two or three books was not the same quality as her earlier books... um, this will be an obvious loss to the Children/YA book world. I find it very hard to imagine a JK Rowling coming of age without somebody like DWJ paving the way for female fantasy writers. DWJ, more than anyone else, showed how it is possible to take a traditional fantasy plot and give it a twist beyond our world.

Speaking for myself here, I never would have cared very much about scifi concepts if I hadn't read Archer's Goon, Homeword Bounders, Dogsbody, and Hexwood. And even her Crestomanci books helped bridge the gap between fantasy and scifi for readers who might have otherwise been stiffish at the concept of wizards from far away worlds in other dimensions.

God bless her for everything she's done for fantasy writers and readers, and I hope she does not suffer but goes peacefully from this place to the next one.