Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
Except for those little moments relieved by the occasional huge moment, everyday life can be a drudgery. Whatever you are engaged in, be it work (no matter how glamorous or lucrative it is) or raising a family or fulfilling your calling at church or attaining some long-held goal (usually all of them at once), at some point, you’ll find yourself slogging through it and wondering where the magic is. Read more
A friend wrote something on her Book of Faces, and instead of taking up all her comment space, I thought I’d put it here. I felt impressed to say a couple of words, but then it went into many words and then paragraphs. OMG I take a lot of words to say a thing.
One day I saw somebody say, “Links roundups are lame.” Well, I like them, but I have minority opinions more often than not. You know what? Fuck that. I like ’em and this is my blog.
Is ‘devouring’ books a sign of superficiality in a reader? Amongst romance readers, of course, this question is fightin’ words. Read more
So I dug an old manuscript out wondering how/if I should rehab it. I wrote it so long ago, head-hopping was still acceptable, although on its way out. It’s 84,000 words. And there are no f-bombs. (IKR?!) The thing about headhopping, at least for me, is that I could tell a story in so many fewer words with it.
This story has a story.
My 10-year-old XY TD can’t wait to see Pitch. He wants to watch it because it’s something that’s never been done before, a woman pitching in MLB.1 He doesn’t see a girl. He sees himself. In her. The underdog2,3 misunderstood, not wanted or liked, basically alone with too few allies, too different to have as smooth a ride through malehood as his peers.
Stop.
What are you doing right now? Right this very minute.
Stop for a couple of minutes and answer that question.
(Or, if I were Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter.)
Do you see this jacket? It’s an Armani jacket. [beat]
What do you think it retails for? $5,000? $7,000? That’s what Donald Trump pays for his designer suits. [beat] [audience boos]
$10,000? No. It retails for $12,495.00. [beat] [audience boos]
But I paid $12.50 for it. Why? Because it’s ugly. I went to Goodwill and I had so much to choose from, an abundance of jackets, but I chose this one. Why? Because it was the most attractive one there. [beat] [audience laughs]
Would you wear this jacket outside the house? No. Nobody with good taste would. It’s warm, I’ll give you that. And roomy. Look how roomy it is. It’s well made. It is an Armani, after all. But it’s ugly. Not only wouldn’t you wear this outside the house, you wouldn’t wear it to a job interview.
Yet that’s what most of you, our working women today, have to choose from: ugly, uglier, and ugliest. [beat] [audience laughs]
Eight years ago. EIGHT. 8!!!
I wrote this: The Perfect Bookstore.
Six years ago, I wrote the followup: The Perfect Bookstore
Today, my good friend Nate Hoffelder, digital maven and my occasional partner in crime, pointed me to this:
Paris’s first on-demand-only bookshop.
Point-by-point similarities:
Best part?
Meriot said he needs to sell about 15 books daily to break even.
That’s a margin even I didn’t foresee.
—into a deep, dark well of pain, obsession, and love; corruption and murder; lawyers, guns, and money; politics, sex, and lies.
There are no monsters here but flawed and wicked humans. There is no magic here but dark love and aching desire. There is no alternate universe here but an imaginary county in a very real city operating under its own rules.
There are no helpless, hapless ingenues here, but beautiful, mature, brilliant women who kick ass. There are no alpha male billionaires— Oh, wait. Yes, there are. My bad. They’re bad, too. Dominating, one might say. If one were saying.
Come with me, will you?
—into a world you may love or you may hate.
Hopefully both.
that compels people to reflect and grants epiphanies like a fairy godmother?
Thirty years ago, I was at the KC Royals parade after they won the World Series. You know, George Brett. Bret Saberhagen. Those guys.
I didn’t care about baseball much before or after that, not that I was ever anything but a fan-in-name-only because I didn’t understand the game. A childhood watching Little League and trying to figure out radio announcers’ jargon tends to blunt one’s enthusiasm.
And then there was college and life and the strikes and the juicing and the Congressional hearings and who wants to get into baseball when they threw a big temper tantrum for a game that’s all fake anyway? You want more money for your steroid injections? Fuck you.
And this is where slogging through Number One’s crazymaking was worth this gem: “You paid for your training in sweat, money, tears, and sometimes blood. Why are you giving it away?”
As some folks know, my day job is formatting ebooks and designing print books, and otherwise helping authors get where they want to go in the world of self-publishing. I consult with nonprofits, corporations, and churches to manage their in-house publishing divisions.
Yesterday I threw out karate belts I earned between the ages of 18 and 20. They were musty. Hidden away, like all the stuff I haven’t found places to display yet. I like space. I value space. Open, empty space and shelves that say, “We don’t need to be filled to feel important.” What they need to be filled with is essentials for survival, but that’s another story.
A friend on Facebook asked me how I could bear to throw them away because I earned them. I see her point; they are a trophy and I did earn them. All these years I have not wanted to throw them out (if I thought about it), but something’s been changing in me for a while now, about carrying baggage and grudges.
But the truth is that I am just really tired. Perhaps the vacuum in affect attested to by the accumulation of emoticons and emojis has little to do with the flattening effect of digital communication. Maybe feelings are simply exhausted.
Well, Dude and my mother liked it. I can’t stand pineapple, so I was having none of it. Neither was XY TD, who ate about two cans of green beans by himself. XX TD had some but she’d been noshing all day and wasn’t hungry (also, she ate all the pineapple I carved out of the middle).
Depending on how you define “hit,” it was one because the person I made it for liked it. A lot. And he is grateful for a plethora of leftovers.
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Note: The smoker instructions called for 5 hours. I roasted mine, checking at 3 hours expecting the thermometer to register 120F or something, and shot to 180F before I pulled it out.
My mother felt the need to say to me, “Oh, c’mon, just one bite. If I tell you it doesn’t taste like pineapple will you have a bite?” “Mom, I MADE this. I can turn my nose up at it if I want to.”
I will not be making this again, so if you do, good luck. Also, invite Dude. And my mother.
I don’t know where I ran across the “Swineapple” recipe, but it got posted to Reddit not too long ago and immediately went semi-viral.
She wasn’t the worst cat I ever had, but the worst one was the one I hand-raised, and apparently human hand-raised cats are psychopaths.
Razzy peed everywhere. She sprayed me once. Maybe twice. On purpose, looking at us, she’d squat and pee on the carpet if she knew we couldn’t catch her.
Anyway, I knew something was wrong with her. Read more
Title: APOCALYPTIC MONTESSA AND NUCLEAR LULU: A TALE OF ATOMIC LOVE
Author: Mercedes M. Yardley
Publisher: Ragnarok Publications
Genre: Horror
Year Published: 2014
Number of Pages: 175
Format(s) Available: ebook, paperback, audiobook
Amazon Kindle ASIN: B00HWMK298
Reviewed by miztrniceguy aka Dude*
Originally posted on Amazon
burn baby, burn!
This story is very dark and twisted, but at the same time it’s a sweet love story. I was surprised at the tenderness between Lulu and Montessa. I was hoping for a different ending and was surprised by it.
This is my first book I have read by Mercedes Murdock Yardley, but won’t be the last.
I am sitting at a table in my local public library, my laptop, a bottle of water, and my Galaxy Note in front of me. I have headphones on and I am listening to nature sounds because the not-very-socially-graced woman behind me (she and I have a history) is muttering to herself loudly enough that it’s clear she wants someone to ask her what she’s working on and her laptop is making funky bubble-popping sounds loudly.
I am at the library to escape loud mutterings, machine-made noises, and children who don’t care if they’re worming into my brain space.
A child, boy, ~9ish, whom I have never before seen in my life, comes up to my table as if I had birthed him and almost leans on me.
ME: [taking off headphones, trying not to look as annoyed as I am] What can I do for you, sweetie?
HIM: [looking at laptop] Can I play on that?
ME: [?] Play on what?
HIM: [pointing to the Galaxy Note without bothering to open his mouth when he actually needs to answer a question] [the exact same way XY TD does]
ME: [dumbfounded] Um… NO.
HIM: Never mind.
ME: [waiting for him to leave] [which he is not doing] I have a question.
HIM: Never mind!
ME: No, wait. I’m just curious. Why do you think it’s okay—
HIM: Never mind! [scurries off]
A child is perfectly comfortable with almost-snuggling up to a strange woman who’s obviously trying to block out the world, asking if he can play on an expensive device.
It never occurred to him I’d say no.
If the strangers won’t go to them, they will go to the strangers.
“Any halfway decent artist can outline,” she sneered.
You can’t sneer a statement.
She raised her eyes to his.
What’d she do, pick them up off the floor?
Long ago and far away, when I first had this thing called a critique group, a thing that was foreign to me, I was taught these “rules.” I had never heard of these “rules.” I didn’t know what was wrong with raising one’s eyes or sneering one’s reply. I found such phrasings helpful and I read lots of books that had such things in it, lots of books by famed (and good) authors.
They were “rules,” I was told, lectured upon at workshops and conferences at RWA by editors and agents and teachers of writing classes. Ah, well, if it came from editors, it must be true.
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We are Sisyphus.