The Winter Crazies

Why do they have to have graduation pictures in January? I've been teaching for fifteen years and every year the last two weeks of January roll around and it's time for graduation pictures. The high school placement and entrance exams are all finished, they're waiting for word, and everything is going along just swimmingly and bam! Let's have graduation pictures. That won't make them ricochet off the walls at all.

We had snow too on Friday. Yipes! Add snow to that mix and you have a special kind of crazy. Not only at the middle school. We've been so spoiled this winter. I think it's interesting that all the experts predicted a colder than normal, wetter than normal, snow up to our eyeballs winter and it's been warmer than usual. Admittedly, we got about six inches of snow on Friday and the commute home was a little longer than usual--an hour rather than my usual 20 to 30 minutes, but that's not that bad. We're used to digging out around here.

Did I just jinx us? And what does that say about me, I wonder? I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. If something goes wrong I assume it's because of something I did and when something goes right I keep waiting for it all to fall apart on me. I suppose when I got my latest rejection letter I really wasn't all that surprised. I'd gotten one book published, another written, and am working on a third. Something had to give and this one getting rejected AGAIN really didn't surprise me. Is it my Midwestern, Italian Catholic upbringing shining through?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adventure in Self-Publishing

So, I'm attempting something this summer that I've never before thought I'd attempt. I'm going to try to publish a couple of smaller pieces myself instead of going through my publisher. Now, that doesn't mean that I have anything against my publisher. I don't. I love my editor and I've had nothing but a positive experience with them. However, I've been hearing over and over at the various conventions I've gone to this year that indie, what used to be called self, publishing is the way to go to really earn money. Here's a fact of life in publishing, no matter the means....you need to spend money to make money. That doesn't mean that you pay a vanity press to publish your manuscript. No, a publisher should always pay you and not the other way around. What I mean is that the publisher or the author, depending on who is putting out the book, is going to need to pony up some cash for marketing. Now, unless you're Stephen King or your publish
Read more

And Promo is the Name of the Game

We're at T-2 days until the start of summer vacation. Ah yes, summer vacation....that time of year when I can have bathroom breaks when I want them, take more than 10 minutes to eat lunch and I can drink a pot of coffee after 3pm. Glorious days. Anyway, back to the point. This summer, I decided that in order to make a little money, I'll have to spend a little money. I heard something at the RWA (Romance Writers of America) Chicagoland Spring Fling this year, "you have to give away a bunch of books before you sell a bunch of books." Huh? That refrain, have free stories, novellas even novels up on Amazon was repeated over and over again. Of course, I thought, these are those people who can crank out two hundred pages in two weeks. That's not me. I am a slow writer. A book and a novella a year, maybe with another story tossed in, is as quick as I can write. Can I? Well, this got me thinking. So, during May I set aside the full-length novel I was working on (another
Read more

Girls with Spunk

Katniss. Hermione. Lessa. Polgara. Lady Macbeth. Alright, I'll even give you Jane Eyre, but I refuse to add Bella into the mix of heroines who I believe are really kick ass. Now, admittedly, most of them are grown women, so I don't think it's fair to really pull them into the mix. I'll stick to the girls in the group--Hermione and Katniss, and because she's their exact opposite in all ways, Bella. Think about it. Back when all we had were fairy tales told to scare children, the spunkiest of the fairy tale heroines was Gretal who had the wherewithal to shove the witch in the oven and free her brother. I suppose she was one of the first heroines who really took the story in her own hands and proved to the world that we were more than damsels in distress waiting languidly in some tower for Prince Charming to rescue us. Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White--all waiting around for a prince to come and save them. Or in Cinderella's case weeping for a Fairy Godmot
Read more