Check it out... it moved

So, the deadline for the Downtown Press contest is tomorrow at 11:59 p.m. And I'm determined to finish About Last Night... and get it in.

Check it out... my word count tracker is moving! Woohoo!

Am I really so stupid that I'm going to write an entire short story in a weekend and send it in to a contest? OY.

Heh, my Vampire name is Raven Azariel. Hee. That is sooo gonna make an appearance in the story. *grin*

Literature? Really?

LITERATURE! - You have a story... Oh yes you do!
You are not quite sure what it is, but it
burns! It burns to be poured onto the page!
Write! Write I say! And thrill us with your
unique view of the world. YOU are your own
inspiration!


What Kind of Novel Should I Write?
brought to you by Quizilla

The view from the front yard. Isn't it beautiful? 

Hangin' on the Rock

So. I'm on vacation. We flew out to Newfoundland, yup, home of all the Newfie jokes, last Sunday. And I've spent pretty much the past week sitting in the basement of Mr. Pink's Cousins' house. And sleeping. And eating.

Now, the sleep, I desperately needed and I'm pretty darn glad I'm catching up on it.

The food boggles my mind. These people don't eat vegetables and it's a stretch to see more than a piece or two of fruit. Meat. Potatoes. Plenty of that goin' around. Desserts. Yup, those too. A nice salad with crisp greens, crunchy tomatoes and maybe a cucumber or two? Not a chance. Now, I admit, I don't eat that well. But I'm going through withdrawal. I've stopped craving chocolate (HORRORS!!) and I'm craving celery. Celery!! WTF?

As for the basement? Well, Mr. Pink has had a serious attack. The TN. Again. It's been going strong since a few days before we left and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere. We spent Tuesday in the hospital, where a very stupid doctor sent him home, despite the fact that he was literally screaming in pain, because he decided that the medication that two of the top neurosurgeons IN THE WORLD took Mr. Pink off of because it made him so dizzy he kept falling over shouldn't have done that, so that's all he needed... more medication. Bastard.

So I've been waffling between not wanting a crappy vacation, and feeling guilty as all heck because I don't want to have fun while he's in bed in pain. So far, haven't seen or done much, but since we leave on Wednesday, I think I'm gonna have to get over my guilt and get out there. Cuz I know I'll regret it if I don't.

I don't want to go off on a rant, but...

But if you are "Six New York Times Best-Selling Authors" and you're promoting your blog in a magazine that goes all over the world (Romance Writers' Report) you might want to do a spell check before you send the ad in.

A simple read through and a quick visit to IMDB would have caught and fixed the misspelling of Russell Crowe, which is spelled with an E and Daily, which is spelled with only one L.

And they even talk about Too Stupid To Live Heroines. Um. Yeah.

Ok. I'm the Apostrophe Nazi

The misuse of the apostrophe is rampant and it's driving. me. NUTS.

I'm sorry. Didn't we all take grade 8 grammar? Didn't we all learn how to string a sentence together? You know, noun, verb, cool other stuff to make it sound good? It just boggles my mind the kind of horrible grammar prevalent in today's society.

My absolute pet peeve though is the apostrophe. I'm not sure when it happened, but about three years ago, people forgot how to use it and started throwing it around willy-nilly. Grammar should not be willy nilly. There are rules here people! For pete's sake if the Chicago Manual of Style is too much for you... try Strunk & White's Elements of Style. But, please, please,please learn the basics of grammar.

Here's a handy-dandy rule for remembering how to use the apostrophe:
An apostrophe is used for OMISSION and POSSESSION.

Omission - if you've taken out a letter or two (i.e. don't, wouldn't, it's (yes, it's - it is, take out the second i and you have it's) )
Possession - If it belongs to the person/thing you are referring to (Pink Pen's Blog, The cat's bowl. One exception... its. Because then it would be "it is"...)

There are NO OTHER times to use the apostrophe. Want to say something is plural? No apostrophe. There are cats, there are dogs, there are books. Unless you have something that belongs to the cat or the dog or the book, get rid of your apostrophe.
Going to the store to get a new pile of PCs and DVDs and CDs? Yup, no apostrophe there either.

I don't care if you want to separate your item from the "s"... it's more confusing to have the apostrophe than to not.

Because seriously, I don't care if you're writing a blog, and email, or an official business letter, if you want to earn your readers' respect, proper grammar is absolutely necessary.

And you won't piss me off. And I'll like that ;)

I just got into a conversation with our creative director and another copywriter about this. Season's Greetings. Well say it out, Greetings of the Season. One season. You know which one. So it needs an apostrophe.
But, fellow copywriter who's been doing this for 30 years says, I've seen it the other way, Seasons Greetings. So that's acceptable. Yes, says the Apostrophe Nazi, but it's wrong. So why would we, big international department store everyone already hates, want to perpetuate incorrect grammar, just because "you've seen it written like that before?" No, no, no, no, no. Gah! It's attitudes like this that started the whole using the apostrophe wrong thing in the first damn place!

Hey! Neat!

Ok, I should totally be working, because I went from having wayyyy too much time on my hands to having waaaaayy too much work to do.

But some cool things just happened.

1. Passionate Ink (the Erotic Romance Writers Chapter) just got approval on our name. Still no chapter approval yet, but we've got our fingers crossed. If you want to join, you'll eventually need to be a RWA member, but for now go to: groups.yahoo.com/group/erw_org and join the loop.

2. The Pink Pen Papers is listed on Romancing the Blog. Maybe people will come visit me now. Yay!

Heh, maybe not...


you are the "I hate you so bad" happy
bunny. You hate everyone and everything and you're
not ashamed of it.


which happy bunny are you?
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Ok, how many times did I have to edit the happy bunny thing to get rid of the spelling mistakes ;0

I couldn't sleep at all last night...

And surprisingly, it wasn't the heat.

I went a little crazy over the past few weeks and bought "the next in the series" of a pile of series I read. The thing is, I'm a geek, and I like to re-read all of the previous books in the series fresh right before I read the newest. (See, told ya. Geek.) So in the current list, I have:
Harry Potter #6 (I know, it's not out yet, but there's still books 1 - 5 to read.)
Stephanie Plum #10 (I keep hoping she’s gonna do something new...)
Merry Gentry #3
Plus a pile of other “new” books to read.

So this week I’ve been on Merry Gentry (Laurell K. Hamilton). And every night this week I’ve stayed up all night reading the entire book. I just couldn’t put them down. On Sunday, I read half of A Kiss of Shadows (468 pages) and all of Caress of Twilight (348 pages!). I’ve been trying to keep Seduced by Moonlight over at least a few more days, but I’m having trouble doing that. Part of it is that I hate finishing a book too quickly (I’m a really, really fast reader) because just as you start to lose yourself in the “world” the book is over and you have to leave, but the other is that I’ve realized that LKH doesn’t ever slow the action. All of her books are go, go, go, something new, something crazy, wow! hey! look at this, no, look over here! all. the. time. Now don’t get me wrong, I love a fast-paced, lots of action book. But sometimes you need to take a second to stop and smell the roses.

Even Susan Johnson, whose books are sex, sex and more sex, stops now and again for a history lesson. Or, as a fellow writer put it, a chance to have a smoke and a coffee. Now, I’ll admit a lot of LKH books is setting up the “rules” for her world, and since I don’t read a lot of faerie books, I’m not that familiar with it, but still, give me (and your characters) a chance to take a breath. Because I’m not able to find a logical place to put the book down. And I need that because when it’s 11:30 p.m. and my alarm goes off at 5:13 a.m., that’s just not enough sleep.

Pssst. Hey, I'm over here.

I started this whole post about how no one reads my blog and how I haven't figured out how to build an online presence, and blah, blah, blah, but I realized that it was even more whiny and self-obsessive than my whole blog, so I scrapped it. But I really do wonder if anyone is reading this crap, and how I get myself linked on other people's pages so readers can link back here.

Was in PA this past weekend. Next time Mr. Pink and I take a "romantic vacation":
a) it'll be longer than a day and a half so we spend less time driving, getting lost, driving more, arguing, and driving more, and more time actually romantic vacationing.
b) my goal won't be to buy an entire new wardrobe in the non-existent, semi-fashionable fat lady sizes in 6 hours or less while also making time to romantic vacation
c) I won't get a freaking speeding ticket 1 1/4 miles away from the border from a freaking training officer who didn't have it in his heart to just let me off with a warning. Now I have to either pay a crap load of undertimined money to a government I don't even live under, or cancel my trip to Newfoundland so that I can go to Niagara Falls and fight it. Ok. I was speeding. But in my defense, I was going under the usual speed limit, and they may have posted slow, construction zone signs, but they sure as hell didn't post the new, significantly lower speed limit.
d) Mr. Pink Pen won't have a trigeminal neuralgia attack and I won't get the beginnings of a migraine minutes after we buy a three pack of "for both your pleasure" condoms. Yeah, this TN thing is really pissing me off, we'd put off our romantic vacation for over a year because the attacks are getting more and more painful and more and more frequent and it absolutely kills me seeing him go through this and not be able to do anything to fix it. And yet despite the new supposedly better meds and the morphine patches he's wearing (!!!), he's still having long attacks. If the surgery to try to fix this were available in Canada, wouldn't kill or possibly paralyse him, or affect his brain so that he may no longer be the man I fell in love with, I'd be jumping up and down all day every day to make him have it.

Sigh. But I did buy a mouse for the laptop because the touchpad doesn't like me, and a really cute laptop bag ($12.48!!! how much do I love Target? I know I work for the store that would compete a lot with Target if they had Targets in Canada, but still... 12.48, compared to the over $100 I saw everywhere else on the internet is pretty darn awesome.