Thirteen Awesome Bad Guys

Kate over on chicks-n-scratching had a good post on villains on Tuesday, and it made me think about some of my favorite bad guys. Some are favorites because they’re so cheerfully evil, and some are favorites because they are so chilling. So, here’s a list, in no particular order.

1. Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs)

2. Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty)

3. Hans Gruber (Die Hard)

4. Mr. Smith (Matrix)

5. The Joker (Dark Knight)

6. The Collector (Demon Knight)

7. Dr. Evil (Austin Powers)

8. Murphy (3000 Miles to Graceland)

9. The Sheriff of Nottingham (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves)

10. Jack Torrance (The Shining)

11. Carter/Cain/Josh/Margo (Raising Cain)

12. Hughie Warriner (Dead Calm)

13. Norman Stansfield (The Professional)

Woohoo!

You might notice that the little progress meter for Gingerbread on my page says we’re done. And we are! Gingerbread/Manporium – titled More than a Man – went off into submission limbo.

We’ll keep you posted!

Thirteen Soothing Sounds

So, my stress level is pretty high right now. GN is starting a new job that will require him to be away from us a lot. We have the financial outlay of getting that done, all the paperwork and legwork, all the attendant happy stress of knowing he will be doing this new job. I’m teaching three different classes for three different colleges in three different cities. Fortunately, one is online. Sadly, one is also 1.5 hours from home. I’m also taking classes to try to get my Ph.D. back on track. And writing. In fact, Emily and I just finished the rough draft of our latest collaborative project  – you’ll see more about that some other time.

In any case, I was thinking…what helps me be calm? What soothes me? Obviously music is a big part (duh. who didn’t see that coming?), but there are also other sounds – the music of nature, if you will. And let me just sing the praises of Grooveshark on that, because I put together a nature playlist that makes me totally mellow. Hooray!

Here are 13 sounds that soothe me. I’ll warn you, when I was writing this, I nearly put myself to sleep. Listen with caution! Do not operate heavy machinery! May cause drowsiness! Contact your physician if side effects persist!

1. Crickets and other night insects.

2. Rain.

3. Waves.

4. Buddhist chant.

5. The drone of bees.

6. Distant thunder.

7. My wind chimes. They’re pretty low pitched, very mellow. These aren’t they, but I like them.

8. Running water – like a brook or stream.

9. Wind.

10. A cat purring.

11. Frogs, especially spring peepers.

12. Rushing water - like a waterfall or fast spring.

13. Whale song. in this case, humpback.

There you have it. go forth and be soothed.

Sweet!

I recently discovered I have a reaction to glucose. Since corn syrup is straight glucose, and HFCS is just glucose with some fructose added, I have had to cut corn syrup and HFCS out of my diet. Oddly, natural disaccharides like table sugar or even honey (which actually mimics HFCS’s sugar profile pretty closely) don’t seem to do it. Just corn syrup and glucose.

Anyway, here are thirteen corn syrup-free sweet treats I can still enjoy.

1. Fruit. Obviously. Recently, it’s been peaches from the farmers market. mmmmm.

2. Cheerwine (in the glass bottles – the cans are corn syrup sweetened)

3. Kozy Shack pudding. Tapioca is my fave, but the chocolate is outstanding, too.

4. Vosges chocolate. This is Emily’s fault. She turned me on to it. I can’t vouch for every flavor, but I know my faves – Barcelona and Red Fire – are sugar only.

5. Virgil’s Cream Soda. They have root beer and other sugar-only sodas. The cream soda is my fave.

6. Homemade ice cream. Recently I’ve been playing with exotic flavors. I put the lemongrass recipe up last week, but I’ve also done lavender. That was wonderful.

7. Dark Chocolate Kit-Kat. I know, surprise! I was surprised, anyway.

8. Juice smoothies. I like the Naked ones – Gold Machine but both DH and Munchkin are fans of Mighty Mango.

9. Martinelli’s sparkling lemonade. Who knew I’d like this so much?

10. Breyer’s Ice Cream. Some flavors have corn syrup – ones with other things like cookies or candy, especially, but also one of the vanillas. Most of the basic flavors and the fruit flavors are sugar only, though.

11. Santa Cruz chocolate syrup. The regular kind has corn syrup, so the organic will have to do. I don’t think you can have organic corn syrup, actually, because of the processing that creates corn syrup. hm.

12. Berghoff’s root beer. Sadly, I cannot find it anywhere around here. At all. I despair of ever finding it again. Woe. Woe. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

13. Pepperidge Farm Chesapeake cookies. Dark Chocolate. Pecans. Cookie. What’s not to love?

And I hear – though I think it might be a myth – that there is sugar-sweetened Dr. Pepper floating around. Sadly, the only reliable source of this ambrosial elixir is the Dublin bottling facility in Dublin, Texas. I need to win the lottery.

What about you? Any sweet treats – non-corn-syrupy – to share?

Thirteen recipes I love

So, this week, we tried a few new recipes that I just LOVE. So I thought I’d share several recipes with y’all. I hope you find a recipe or two (or thirteen!) to try on your own. If you do, let me know what you thought!

1. Lemongrass Ice Cream (especially for Jeannie Lin) [NOTE: do NOT use metal utensils in this ice cream. It can react w/ lemongrass and throw off the flavor. Use nylon/plastic/wood/silicon - just NOT metal][NOTE2: I was skeptical, as this is technically an ice milk, rather than ice cream. However, the body is rich and smooth with the same mouth feel as ice cream. I'm a believer and will be trying this method with other variations]

Ingredients:

Continue reading Thirteen recipes I love…

It’s 4:54 a.m., do you know where your husband is?

Mine is lost somewhere in the bowels of Wikipedia, as he is every night (morning) when I roll over in bed and blink at the empty space beside me. When I quiz him about being awake so late, he replies he lost track of time after he started clicking links.

Do you have this experience at Wikipedia? I usually go, find the info I want, find a link to a more reputable source, and move on with my life. I can see how the site can function as an endless-possibilities “Choose Your Own Adventure” tale, though.

So an experiment for me. Because it’s so hot on the east coast this year, and our site is so smokin’ itself, I grabbed the first fire-related link I saw, which happened to be an entry about 2010 Russian Wildfires (I’m embarassed to admit it didn’t occur to me Russia might experience wildfire disasters).

From there, a link to the term Siberian High caught my eye (not what I expected at all).

And then I clicked off to Arctic Dipole Anomaly, which is a very brief article followed by a very long list of fascinating-looking links. I picked 2010 Eruptions of Eyjafjallajokull (which I remember hearing about but like everything unrelated to my current WIP, went in one ear and out the other), which led me to the 1783 Eruption of Laki (another Iceland volcano).

From 1783 I click ahead to 1816, the Year Without a Summer (clearly not this year…ugh), which, according to Wikipedia speculation, led to the invention of the velocipede.

And…that’s where I jumped ship and clicked away from Wikipedia, finally landing at The Velocipede Museum, concluding a pleasantly no-charge excursion.

Where has Wikipedia taken you lately?

10 Year Old’s First Flushing Toilet

Last week, my 18-year-old coworker (we’ll call him, uh, Tad) delivered* water to a 10-year-old (we’ll call her Marie) and her parents, who themselves had never lived with running water. He said the most rewarding part of the experience was the little girl’s delight as she flushed the toilet and watched water spin down the drain.

Tad spent the week in Tennessee, not in a third-world country.

The writer in me immediately started asking questions. Poor Tad, staring back at me as I asked, What do you mean, they didn’t have running water? Didn’t Marie go to school? Could she read? Did her parents work? Were they living on a farm of some sort? What kind of personality do you develop if you have no exposure to the world beyond your parents? What is her life going to be when she’s 18 or 25? Where is she going to meet someone to share her life with?

Ten years. Never in her entire life had Marie been behind a student desk, written a book report, or had a friend (according to Tad, no neighbors). Tad couldn’t help with my speculation – he just shrugged at my questions, with “I don’t know” kinds of answers, and told me he didn’t ask questions because he wasn’t there to judge, he was there to give her water. (I felt a need to explain my questions as writer curiosity, not snooty judgement.)

From a human compassion standpoint, I’m stunned and humbled (I’m not allowed to call myself “poor” ever again) and so very grateful for people like Tad who decide to leave their comfortable lives and their straight-into-college futures in order to join an organization like the Peace Corps, which is where Tad is bound provided his application is approved. (I’m grateful people who go to school and learn trades; giving of yourself in order to help better someone else is a remarkable thing regardless.)

From a writer standpoint, I’m fascinated and excited. I want to write Marie a fairytale prince and a life like the life I’ve known, complete with praise from educators and the jealousies and friendships of other kids. I want to create a person who’s lived life this way in the 21st century (because that’s where she’s been, her entire life) and really discover the kind of person she is, what inspires her imagination, how she releases curiosity.

From a reader standpoint, I desperately want her to have a hero and a happy ending no matter how humble it might be. Maybe Tad can go back to Tennessee in 10 years when Marie is an adult. He could scoop her up and carry her off and present her with her first sunset witnessed from the perspective of a Carribean beach bungalo instead of an Appalachian mountain trailer.

What a remarkable source of heroes and heroines I’d never even thought of before. If you want to discover them, too, here’s a link to Peace Corps Journals – a whole collection of blogs by people like Tad.

*delivered = dug the trenches, put down pipe, installed plumbing, rewired electricity, etc, to get water from a creek on the side of a mountain to the trailer that housed this family.

Thirteen Nuclear facts

The idea for this T-13 was spawned when GN (DH) showed me a very cool vid – as seen in number 13 on this post. While watching that, we wondered when the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed. Well, folks, the first one I can find – The Partial Test Ban treaty (signatories included the US, the UK, the USSR) was signed on this date, August 5, 1963.

In honor of that historic signing, here are thirteen facts about nuclear weapons and nuclear policy.

1. The only country to ever use nuclear weapons in a war is the United States.  The US dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

2. There are two types of nuclear reaction: fission and fusion. Fission splits the nucleus of the  atom, thereby releasing the energy. Fusion compresses the atoms and creates heavier elements by fusing lighter elements. These reactions are stronger, and in current weaponry, something of a misnomer, as most “fusion” bombs derive most of their explosive force from a secondary fission reaction (that is, the primary fission reaction sets off the fusion reaction which sets off a secondary fission reaction).

3. There is no theoretical limit to the size of a fusion weapon. By chaining reactions together, the load is limited only by the delivery system.

4. The USSR detonated a 50 megaton device, the largest ever detonated. To give some perspective, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was approximately 13 kilotons. That is, the Soviet device was nearly 4 million times the size of the device dropped on Hiroshima.

5. Originally, nuclear weapons were delivered by standard bombs out of long-range bombers. Only with the development of missile technology were pilots removed from the chain of custody.

6. Nuclear fallout is arguably as deadly as the initial blast. Have some fun playing with this interactive fallout map.

7. Though the Partial Test Ban treaty was signed on this date in 1963 by the US, the UK and the USSR, the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty wasn’t signed until 1996.

8. The Reykjavik Summit in 1986 saw a moment of interest. According to a participant, at one point Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to dismantle their entire nuclear arsenals, only to be pulled back by their respective advisors who did not favor this plan – since the US and USSR were not the only ones with nuclear weapons. Wouldn’t you have loved to be a fly on the wall for that discussion?

9. The only country to fully renounce independently developed nuclear weapons is South Africa.

10. During the BP oil spill, a Russian paper suggested using a nuclear weapon to cap the well. Since Russia has used this tactic successfully in the past as a fast answer to massive spills of the same type, some energy experts agreed with the suggestion.

11. There are currently 9 states currently considered nuclear states.  These states are the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

12. There are several states which, at one time, possessed nuclear weapons but do not any longer.  These states are South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Canada and Greece.

13. And the thing that spawned this post: A video depicting every known nuclear explosion.  This is very, very cool. It takes a while to watch the whole thing, but it’s worth it. It breaks it down chronologically and by nation while placing each explosion on a world map. Very, very interesting.

Blogging from Conference

Well…Symposium. And non-conference. This week and weekend, I’m educating myself with a variety of workshops arranged by Savvy Authors and presented in the Savvy Authors Symposium, as well as workshops organized by Romance Divas and presented in the Not Going to Conference Conference.

Workshops-wise, I’ve decided I prefer the online format. I’m getting much more for my $30 than I got for my $475 at RWA Nationals, partly because I learn better from the written word than from the spoken word. And partly because I’m not missing out on one workshop by choosing to participate in another – I can multi-task, jumping from topic to topic, whereas the physical event would leave me committed to one room and one room only.

The virtual bar’s not quite as hopping as the Nationals conference bar, but if I had as many real drinks as I’ve consumed virtually, I’d be passed out in my Disney hotel room missing everything anyway.

Some highlights from the NGTCC:

I won something! Soul Stealer by Kimberly Troutte won’t get bent up in my suitcases on the return flight.

I’ve gotten to chat a teensy bit and soak up authorial goodness from Joey W. Hill and James Buchanan and while I haven’t participated in the steampunk workshop, I’m happy to have it all saved for future reading.

From the Savvy Authors Symposium:

I haven’t won anything yet, but I have hope.

I started the event with an a.m. chat presented by Rory Miller, who just might be my new Internet and hero research obsession. Can’t wait to get my hands on his book MEDITATIONS ON VIOLENCE and I’ve already penciled his next workshop on my calendar.

I learned three words that have totally made my week: “erotic category romance.” Thank you Laurie Saunders, editor of Black Velvet Seductions.

And I’m not, but I might after lurking on the “What Kind of Private Eye Are You Writing?” workshop hosted by two working PIs.

Additionally, I’ll be able to go back and peruse workshops on muse-feeding, series-building, deep POV, pitching and blurb writing…in general, well worth the money to me.

Best part? I haven’t had to wear shoes for anything.

Spending a few days haunting the Savvy Authors Symposium has inspired me to sign up for a few more workshops coming up, including undercover op info, how to make book trailers, and…something else I know I paid for but don’t remember. They have an interesting and diverse lineup and I’m already picking the workshops I want to participate in as distant as November 2011.

Neither the NGTCC nor the Symposium are over quite yet. I’m off to make the most of the last couple days.

The Last of the Pearl, CO Carvers and My First M/M (And More)

Ethan Carver (All the Trees in Pearl) wasn’t supposed to be the start of a mini-saga. His story was supposed to be a quick foray into sexy historical westerns, which I’d never written before. In and out, move on to the next time period, subgenre, and set of characters.

Yeah, not so much. The Carver family decided they had a bigger story than I had in mind. Too much time passed, then Ethan’s sister Collette (All the Women in Pearl) finally gave up her perspective. After that, while waiting for baby brother James to start talking, I found a few people connected to the Carvers had some passion of their own to explore (Interlude in Pearl).

When, a year after I wrote Collette’s story, James still hadn’t talked, I really began to worry I’d have to leave the whole thing unfinished. I’d brainstormed and outlined and created three different women for James but he didn’t want any of them. No, instead of Astrid, instead of Lily, James wanted Max.

Once I said “fine” to Max, All the Secrets in Pearl fell out of my brain over the course of two weeks (thank God). Last Monday, I signed the contract and picked the cover art, and hopefully soon, I’ll have a release date.

In the meantime, my friend Seeley has launched a new blog, Naked Romance, and the inaugural nakedness belongs to Ethan. I hope you’ll click over for a teensy excerpt and to say hello to Seeley – and I hope you’ll check back during the next month or so for more information about the release of All the Secrets in Pearl.

While you’re at Naked Romance, look around and send Seeley an email. If you’re a writer, your mantitty could be up next!