Write completely out of your genre!

Okay, so y’all know last week I flaked on a legit blog. I had to wrap up MASTER OF SURRENDER (formerly known as KISS OF THE KNIGHT). Which I did sometime around 9ish Friday night. So, I spent the rest of Friday grinning like an idiot. I loved the story. I cried twice writing the last two chapters. So, Saturday morning I printed it out. Now mind you, I told my agent who is panting for the second part of this story two week ago this last Monday I would have it in her hot little hands in two weeks. My editor also demanded I cough it up. Enough is enough! So, Saturday night I have the entire house to myself. I take all 370 pages of my masterpiece downstairs and begin to do some layering and much needed clean up.

As I’m oh about 5 pages into the story it occurs to me that quite frankly my agent must be nuts and I must be nuts because what I have just slaved over is crap. This fact is reinforced as I read each page. I go to bed late Saturday night and wake up with a stomach ache. I soldier through but spend the rest of the night tossing and turning. Sunday morning rolls around. I get up, and get to work on the pages. Stomach still not feeling too good. I didn’t even drink coffee. My stomach felt well, like I had morning sickness. And folks if I’m pregnant then you will hear me scream. I made crab cakes Sunday night for dinner, one of my fave foods. Ate half of one. Back to the revisions. Sunday night I came to bed very late. Couldn’t sleep. Stomach hurt, wasn’t hungry. Tossed and turned and finally said, screw this and got up early. Back to work on revisions.

Hubby comes in with a cup of coffee for me. I shook my head. “I can’t drink that.”

He goes downstairs. Later he comes back up and says, “I think you need a break, let’s go for a walk.”

I felt like shit but figured it might do me good. So out we go. A beautiful morning. He starts asking about the book. I stop, double over, and dry heave. We continue to walk. He asked again. My stomach seized and I doubled over again. More dry heaves.

Finally Einstein that I am puts two and two together.
“Please, Babe, no more talk about this book. It’s making me sick.”
We finish up with me doubled over. Back upstairs I go to my office. Monday night still can’t sleep. Up at the crack of dawn the next morning and back to revisions. At 12:33 p.m. Tuesday I hit the send button and delivered the ms to my editor then my agent. I thought the pain would go away. It got worse. Way worse. Then five minutes later my phone rings. It’s the 212. I nearly puke. With my hand grabbing my belly, I answer.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Lauren.”

I didn’t know whether to cry or excuse myself and puke. I told her she had to hold on for a just a sec. I compose myself so as not to puke in my editor’s ear, and then, well, I let it all out. And god bless her, she hung in there with me. I told her how terrified I was and how I had never ever felt like this with a book. I told her I was so nervous I couldn’t even smoke! Smoking usually calms me down. (hubby if you’re reading this, I don’t really sneak. )

Needless to say we were the phone for quite a while and she calmed me down (grrr, I hate that I had to be calmed down!). I had hoped having been reassured I would feel better. While my stomach wasn’t as bad as it had been, the plastic bottle of Tums on my desk that was full Sunday is half empty. I’m still chewing them. I have the assorted beery flavor ones. My favorites are the pink ones.

As I type this, my stomach is in a flux again. The good news is my agent emailed me yesterday morning to tell me she is up to page 280 and loving the story and it’s awesome. Lauren is reading it this weekend. I guess I’ll know Monday if I should just put myself out of misery now, or wait until the next historical is due.

Okay, so when I stepped on the scale Tuesday night I had lost 5 pounds since Friday night. It was not fun, and I would not recommend. I’m trying to put it back on actually, but I have kind of gotten hooked on berry Tums and Gingerale.

How about you? Do you have any stress antidotes? And, how is the weight loss going?

Murder She Writes is pleased to have Patricia Sargeant guest blog today! (applause, applause.) Patricia writes romantic suspense for Kensington. Romantic Times said of her September release ON FIRE “Sargeant does an admirable job of dotting her romantic whodunit with unexpected events that jolt the reader and force her to pay close attention to the story. Her prose draws readers into the action, and her well-crafted characters become increasingly real as the story goes on.” Yeah! You can visit her regularly at the Pink Ladies Blog, another group author community of wonderful writers.

Without further ado, Patricia!!!

The heroine of my current romantic suspense, ON FIRE, is a newspaper reporter. One of the background issues she and her fellow reporters discuss is the responsibility of the press. The responsibility to present the facts – and only the facts – so readers could form their own opinions. (Their discussion does have a purpose within the plot. It’s not just me posing on a soapbox.)

When I studied news editorial journalism at The Ohio State University countless moons ago, my professors stressed that responsibility. We had to explain why an issue is important to the community before we covered the story. We were required to interview at least three named sources. And we were not supposed to write commentary.

Today, I scratch my head at what sometimes passes for the news. I stare bemusedly at anonymous sources attributed to innocuous statements. And I wince when reporters add what so obviously are their own opinions to otherwise straight news stories.

Now, I realize people have different interests. That’s what makes the world go ’round. But when I witness a barrage of All-Paris-Hilton-All-The-Time coverage while I find out on a reader blog that yet another college student has disappeared during spring break, I can’t help but wonder about the state of the news industry.

I also realize sometimes it’s necessary to grant sources anonymity. If we didn’t occasionally acquiesce to anonymity, we wouldn’t have uncovered Watergate. However, the overuse of anonymous sources calls not only their value but also their contributions into question. For example, the New York Daily News covered the allegations of cheating by the New England Patriots football team. The Daily News quoted an anonymous source who stated the New York Jets’s head coach told the Jets organization about the Patriots’s methods of cheating. Let’s take a moment to think about this. Do we really need to grant this source anonymity? It’s football; not national security.

A free and responsible press is the cornerstone of a strong democracy. We need accurate and complete information to make informed decisions. I’ve often contacted journalists when I thought their coverage was biased or incomplete. Sometimes it makes a difference; sometimes it doesn’t. But I believe we owe it to ourselves and our communities to hold the media responsible.

I’m Patricia Sargeant. Good night and good luck.

Dog-Turds

When I was a kid, I used to love to read the dictionary. I know, I know, if that’s not the sign of a major nerd, I don’t know what is. I couldn’t help it, though. I loved, and still love, finding new words. It reminds me of Easter egg hunting. Just when you think you’ve gone over that backyard with a fine-tooth comb, BAM! you find one. A bright yellow Easter egg, sittin’ right there between the hurricane fence and a dog-turd.

Speaking of dog-turds, well, not really dog-turds but the hyphen that sits between the dog and the turds, I heard that the new Oxford English Dictionary recently came out, and it stole 16,000 hyphens from previously hyphened words. Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream, and pot-belly is now pot belly.

According to OED, The hyphen was squeezed out of these words because of the informal way we’ve been communicating in text messages, emails, and on websites. And evidently, all that informality is leaking onto the printed page as well.

It seems another factor contributing to this hyphen theft is designers’ distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words. (Poor babies…) Per designers, the hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned. (Oops, is the hyphen in old-fashioned now politically incorrect?)

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research. They claim that the whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is based on an analysis of evidence of language, not just what we think looks better. (Yeah, right.) Supposedly, this team examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, web sites and blogs (Wonder if the checked out MSW!) from the year 2000 onwards. For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube).

It’s pretty pathetic if you ask me. We spend all that time in grade school sucking up to the teacher, trying to learn EXACTLY where those little lines went between what words, and now they just up and steal ‘em from us.

Here are some other examples of what they changed….

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:
fig leaf
hobby horse
ice cream
pin money
pot belly
test tube
water bed
Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
bumblebee
chickpea
crybaby
leapfrog
logjam
lowlife
pigeonhole
touchline
waterborne

Now I ask you, honestly, don’t that beat all? Sits right up there on that pile of dog-turds if you ask me . . .

Warren Jeffs, leader of the FLDS group that marries young girls off to old, creepy men, was convicted last week. Many of you probably already knew this, but I still wanted to touch on it, as polygamy is a personal interest of mine.

My very first book, SISTERWIFE, (which you can download for FREE from my site, www.nataliercollins.com) was written before polygamy hit the media waves and began garnering so much interest in America and across the world. It was written before Tom Green paraded his bevy of Barbie Dolls on national talk shows, and before Brian David Mitchell decided young Elizabeth Smart would be a good bride for him.

I’m not psychic, but I could see–from the day I heard about it really–just how dangerous polygamy could be. Give that kind of religious belief system to a sick and twisted mind, and watch them run with it…. And boy, they’ve done some running.

In his trial, Jeffs admitted he was not a prophet. He was just doing what he’d been told to do. What his father had told him would be his calling. And what the beliefs of Joseph Smith told him were “the true and everlasting covenant.” While I know this is hard for modern-day Mormons to here, Jeffs and his cronies are living the LDS Church like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young taught it. Some of them, like Jeffs, don’t even really believe it.

And how sad is that for the young girls they are sentencing to a life of servitude and sexual slavery, and the young men they are ousting from their homes and communities. Utah’s Lost Boys are just as much victims of this horrible way of life.

I would hope the conviction of Jeffs is just one more nail in the coffin of this type of depravity.

And speaking of depravity, Britney Spears has temporarily lost custody of her children. To her HUSBAND, mind you. Who would ever have thought Kevin Federline would end up being the responsible parent?

Britney is one MESSED UP little girl, and I say little girl, because she and all her fellow partiers, many of whom are now comdemning her, have no grasp of reality. Too much money, too much fame and too many yes people all gathered around her have resulted in twisting her grasp of reality. In short, our society has created this monster. Now don’t get me wrong, I feel like she was a harm to these children. She didn’t ever think this would happen, as she went PARTYING a day or days before she was due back in court to prove to the judge she DIDN’T party.

And maybe this was just a way for Kevin Federline to get more money out of the cash cow, but whatever his reasons were, he now has the kids. What’s going to become of them? Again, the children are the victims.

I see it as another tiny bit of justice that the courts would say to Britney, “You can’t DO this. You can do drugs, and drink irresponsibly, and hit someone else’s car and just drive away. It doesn’t WORK that way. These are babies, we have laws, and it doesn’t matter HOW much money you have, you have to pay the piper.”

But she probably looked at OJ Simpson, and figured, “Hey, he killed his wife, ya’all, and he got away with it. What’s a little ecstasy when you have money?”

I don’t know what the ultimate outcome for Britney will be (Weenie Rat Face, as I like to call him, is going to PRISON, baby), but the ultimate LESSON should be TAKE CARE OF YOUR KIDS. You had these babies, now it’s time to raise them. Will it happen? Who knows.

So there’s my rant for the day. Speak up. Any opinions?

Oh, and don’t forget to check out TAPPED OUT, available today! It’s the second book in the Jenny T. Partridge Dance Mystery Series, and I hope you like it!

In Illinois, they found the solution to bullying…

Ban hugging.

Yup, that’s the solution folks. Now we know. Stop that dangerous hugging.

Okay, toning down my sarcasm, here’s the deal, Percy Julian Middle School decided that students hugging one another, and engaging in “hugging lines” distracted the kids from school. So as part of the no bullying, no fighting ban, they included hugging. You can read it here this article

Frankly, I think it’s just ridiculous. They could stop a hugging line clogging hallways if that’s really the problem. But stopping hugging? Nope, I don’t think it’s because hugging lines were clogging hallways.

I think it’s fear. Administrators are in constant fear of lawsuits, trouble from overreactive parents, and for missing the signs that could lead to serious disaster. And so we are trying to create this perfect society, free of all sexual threats, hurt feelings, etc. And to do that, we are now punishing kids for being kids.

Schools have to be the most insane places. In Oregon two 13 year old boys were ARRESTED for patting a girl on the butt. It’s bad behavior, don’t get me wrong. But they arrested the boy and wanted label him a sex offender. Those boys spent 5 days in jail. Talk about an over-reaction. This is typical middle school boy behavior (and girl) and it’s the perfect place to teach them what is acceptable and what it not.

When did we lose sight of the fact that schools are for learning? Both academic and social skills? Butt slapping is inappropriate and should be stopped. But to arrest boys for that? Do you know how many middle school boys would be in jail?

But hugging? It’s a normal form of expression, particularly for girls. And sure, boys might try to sexualize a hug and dang it, that’s what teachers are for. I spent a lot of time on my kids middle school campus and most of the teachers were sharp and perfectly able to apply common sense to situations. They walked by and told those hugging too long/ too close to knock it off without making a big deal out of it. If a “hugging line” clogged the halls, they put a stop to it. COMMON SENSE without having to answer to the social forces that want to make every touch and actions sinoster or sexual.

Do we want to teach out kids that hugging is bad?

I don’t know. I’m tired, it’s been a long weekend, a friend of mine’s son is really sick…and damn it I think we should have more hugging in the world. Do we have to take this all or nothing approach in our school? What happened to apply rules with a dose of common sense? What’s your opinion?