…for the rest of the year, most likely. I reserve the right to come back and rant. It is my blog, after all.

Many projects on the table, most of which I’m behind on (oh, there’s a surprise):

• Re-doing my foyer and living room. What, you thought my DIY re publishing thing is a new development? No. I’ve been a DIYer at heart since I saw the first episode of This Old House when I was a wee bairn (as in, their first episode, too).
• Christmas chores. You all know what they are. But I’ve recently got a yen to quilt us a new tree skirt. That will have to wait until next year.
• Much cooking and cleaning in preparation for my family’s big Christmas Eve shindig. Moms, dads, inlaws, outlaws, aunts, uncles, cousins, and babies. Lots and lots of babies. Very fun having the biggest house in the family. Ah, but I love Christmas Eve, almost more than Christmas Day (you know, now that we are Santa). Also? I love my mom’s cookies. And I love my Christmas punch (see previous post).
• Probably some yard work. I really need to get out and mow my lawn.
• More weatherproofing.
• Fandamnily outing to see the Plaza Christmas lights. (Photos by Eric Bowers, KC Photographer extraordinaire who also does a lot of Manhattanscapes—you must visit his blog and galleries and message board. Really.)

(This one? 47th Street.  If you read The Proviso, you know what Giselle did near here.)

• And, last but not least, the Darling Day Job (feeling blessed at the moment).

My blue tree from the last two years turned red this year.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Mojo, Dude, XX and XY Tax Deductions!

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Originally published at Publishing Renaissance on February 12, 2009.

Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I said last week, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is the story of book 3. Read the rest of this entry »

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Originally published at Publishing Renaissance January 30, 2009.

Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I said last week, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is the story of book 2. Read the rest of this entry »

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Originally published at Publishing Renaissance January 6, 2009.

If you’ll all indulge me, I though it’d be fun to do a little series on the evolution of a cover by a non-cover artist/designer. It took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is where the cover journey begins. Read the rest of this entry »

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Yeah, we know. It’s a building year.

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I’m choking on childhood nostalgia, KCitians.

Does ANYBODY remember the mechanized dolls in the display windows at Harzfeld’s at Christmastime? And if you do, do you have a decent picture or, better yet, a line on where I can get one of those dolls or six?

There is a Harzfeld’s page and a Harzfeld’s blog, both created by historians with a book in the works, but neither has a search feature, and as far as I can tell, this is the only mention of the dolls:

A couple years ago a Dresden Doll (right), said to be from Harzfeld’s, was sold at a Kansas City area auction. This was a mechanical doll that may have been part of a Christmas window display.

(I want want want one of these dolls, even if I have to build one. I’m good at DIY! Promise!)

As an aside, I remember these chairs:

But a trip to the Harzfeld’s blog yielded something fabulous: Elle Decor featured an article on Kansas City (worth the read, even for non-Kansas Citians), and the picture gallery features the usual suspects, but gorgeous as always.

However, the ugly-ass addition to the Nelson-Atkins was extolled briefly:

“The marriage of the original neoclassical building and the stunning addition by architect Steven Holl . . . ”

I will not be happy until somebody takes a wrecking ball to that abomination. I would PAY MONEY to attend its destruction.

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June 19, 2009

A little while back, I posted on the sentimental value I hold of the 1960s ranch. Today, I’m rethinking 25 to 30 years’ worth of self-indoctrination.

Obviously the reason it holds so much appeal to me is that it was, in my teenage mind, the unattainable. I didn’t live in a house that nice, although I didn’t begrudge what I had. I liked it fine enough that I was proud to show it off to my friends, totally unable to see that what niceness I had was only that way because my mother worked so hard to make it nice with what little she had to work with. And on hindsight, I’m not sure my friends (from more chichi neighborhoods) were terribly impressed.

(You can tell my obvious slant toward the steep-roofed “French Provincial” style ranch.) Anyway, what I was doing when I was a teenager was aspiring up. That’s good to do. But somewhere, the adult me got lost in my teenage wants and conflated that to the end-all and be-all of existence.

Lately, Dude and I have been despairing over the state of our house and its issues, almost all structural, almost all of which will suck money right out of our bank account, with nothing aesthetic to show for it. Now, I’m all for infrastructure, but geez, that still doesn’t make my lawn dandelion-less. It also doesn’t account for the innumerable walls covered with crayon drawings that I would have to continually repaint to make the spaces halfway decent.

Thus, I have come to hate my house. This is a very difficult admission to make, especially when one considers how ecstatic I was over it in the beginning, and we moved in with the intention that we weren’t moving again. EVER.

A few days ago, a friend told me about a party she went to in a chichi neighborhood of L.A. and described the splendor to me. It shocked me that my first thought was, “Real people live like that?”

Today I saw a post over at The Red Brick Store about readying a house for sale. It was a gorgeous 4,000 square foot house, and the post led to pictures, which led me to search myself for flaws in my thinking. I didn’t covet the house, but it did make me wonder if I should dare to desire it at all.

Then I went to realtor.com and put in my favorite zip code (not telling which one it is) because it embodies my best childhood memories. Let’s just say it’s a rundown little village-size town in a rundown corner of a rundown state (not Missouri), and for the first time, I saw through my own little bubble of childhood memories and thought, “Am I aspiring to this? It’s 100 times worse than what I’ve got.”

Then I thought about the 1960s ranch across the street from me which inspired that other post. It’s beautiful, with lush lawn, kept immaculate at all times and with great care (care that it takes time and energy to spend, which we don’t have). You know what? Even aspiring to that is aspiring too low at this point in my life.

That gets me to thinking about my mother and what she did with what she had.

Which she hated.

Every day of the 18 years we lived there.

Knowing that we could have had something better if she and my father weren’t sacrificing a good chunk of money every month to send us to a private school.

After I revisited my childhood memories, I looked up properties in my own zip code, and thought, “THAT is what I should be aspiring to.”

We live in a neighborhood that retains its property values no matter what because A) Kansas City seems to weather recessions/depressions fairly well, even without Boss Tom, and B) the elementary school we have is one of the best in the state. People move into this neighborhood and within the school boundaries expressly for their children to attend that school. Believe me, we aren’t going to have to send our kids to private school for an excellent education, so there’s one obstacle conquered.

This has led me to some conclusions.

1) I’m far more happy with what I have right now. (That may wax and wane.)

2) We need to work on making it as good as it can be within our limitations.

3) We need to build a plan to get out of here and move up once we have accomplished #2. And I want a swimming pool.

Whether we attain #3 or not . . . well, I just don’t know. I’m still somewhat dubious of our ability to do that.

However, if we don’t make the attempt, it most assuredly will not happen at all.

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