Pantyhose on a Mermaid

Mark Twain's Advice

2009-02-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
- Letter to D. W. Bowser, 3/20/1880

Twainquotes.com

I'm Eligible to be Nominated! Who knew?

2009-02-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

Ah, there are such interesting things to be learned by Googling oneself. I admit it. I did it and guess what I learned?
I'm in my second year of eligibility to be nominated for a John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award!
I honestly have to say I have no idea how this happened, since I've never heard of this award before today. The fact that my story "Before Paphos", published in 2007 at Strange Horizons, is even eligible has to mean that someone had to notice it and like it enough to make sure it made it into the pool of eligible nominees. I think.
Being on the list of eligible nominees is a long way from being nominated and even further away from winning, but it's nice to be noticed.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for them, I don't know anyone who is a voting member or they'd be getting a few dozen pleading emails from me over the next few weeks. Do you know anyone??? :-)

Who's Looking For Love?

2009-02-06T12:23:00.000-08:00

Years ago, I entered a contest where the object was to create, using seventy words or fewer, a personal ad for a literary character. This was my entry:

About me:
I am no beauty. In truth, I am plain. However, I am clever, kind, loving, staunchly moral and upright. Perhaps I am more forgiving than I should be.

I am looking for:
A relationship with no secrets!

Note: To be considered, any swarthy gentleman in possession of a shadowy manse must agree to a thorough inspection of all buildings—attics included.

Contact me at jneyre1847@email.com

I didn't win, or even place, but I thought it was cute enough.

Okay, technically, Mrs. Rochester wasn't in the attic, but I was nipping at the word limit.

More fun with Gimp 2

2009-02-05T04:30:00.000-08:00

I used another photograph of mine to create this. I don't even know what to call these things. Maybe a digital postcard? A web-poster? Who knows.

I'm having fun with Gimp 2 though, which is free for download, by the way. Go here: Gimp.org.

Blushing

2009-02-04T05:30:00.000-08:00

One of these days I'm going to learn my lesson about poking fun at other peoples' writing, grammar or spelling errors.

A few days ago, I posted a blog entry ridiculing those who confuse these words: to, two and too.

Thinking myself clever, I used an online tool to create a book cover and called it "Using Homonyms for Idiots." Imagine my embarrassment upon discovering today that to, two and too are not homonyms; they are homophones.

I discovered this quite by accident while reading an article called "Fastidious spelling snobs pushed over the edge: Books, blogs and obsessiveness mark a brand-new war of the words" on MSNBC's website.

Just to make sure, off I went to the dictionary and wouldn't you know it, I got the two terms mixed up.

According to Dictionary.com "two words are homophones if they are pronounced the same way but differ in meaning or spelling or both (e.g. bare and bear)." Of course, the words to, too and two fall into this category.

According to the same source, a homonym is "a word having the same sound as another, but differing from it in meaning; as the noun bear and the verb bear." So, homonyms are spelled and sound the same but have different meanings, like fair (as in, "That's not fair!") and fair (as in, "Let's go to the fair.").

Yipes, I feel like the idiot now. I've learned my lesson. No more throwing stones at glass houses, while I'm obviously living in one.

By the way, I found the link to the MSNC article through my favorite news-aggregate website Fark.com. The link was accompanied by this hilarious headline, "Failing economy may be brining out more Grammer Nazi's."
Gotta love those Farkers!

Then I'm Pretty Productive.....

2009-02-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

I made this! Last Spring I took a digital picture of some flowers in my front yard. Then I used Gimp 2 to modify the picture and add the quote. I thought the quote appropriate considering....

Marion Zimmer Bradley Advice

2009-02-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

Though it was many years ago, I enjoyed reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's Avalon books. She died in 1999, but a website is still maintained by The Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust. Along with promoting reprints of her books, the site also features several articles about writing, written, of course, by Bradley.
The articles are all over ten years old, naturally, but still offer sound advice about how to get published, grammar, and a few other topics. There are only nine articles in all, but I found each one very informative.
Check it out if you're interested:
Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust

What I'm Reading

2009-01-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

I just picked up Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. I'm only about six pages in, but am already finding myself again astonished by her wonderful, poetic prose.

When I was in college, I wrote an entire essay about these two paragraphs in Cather's novel My Antonia:

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it.In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disc; the handles, the tongue, the share--black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.
Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.

Whenever I read something so exquisitely descriptive, capturing a moment in time so perfectly, I can't help but think, Oh, geez. I could never do that.

Thoughts like this can often lead to a writer's most potent enemy: self doubt. To combat these feelings of never being good enough, I have to give myself a pep-talk. I tell myself that, no, I will never be able to write like Cather, or Kafka or Hemmingway or anyone else. I can only write like me and that has to be good enough for me.

Post Rejects

2009-01-27T12:45:00.000-08:00

For those of you not familar with the site "Post Secret," this blog may not strike you as funny, but I think it is hilarious.
Post Rejects is a parody of Post Secret. Postsecret.com is a website where people are encouraged to share their secrets via anonymous postcards. Post Secret is terribly, terribly serious and has spawned symposiums and even coffee table books (and probably some bucks for the site owner). It was inevitable that a parody site would soon arise.
Here's one of my favorites from the Post Reject parody site:

Wow, it's like they looked right into my soul....

Fridge Poetry

2009-01-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

Word play is a great way to get ready to write. I like this online "fridge poetry" site. It is oddly relaxing just to drag words around and see what happens. I like seeing what others have left behind.
Here's an example:
"You don't abuse hedgehog farms."
Hmmmmm.....
Give it a try!
isnoop

Crash

2009-01-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

I've debated with myself a while about whether to post this poem or not. I don't write much poetry, because I often feel I don't understand all the rules of meter, etc. I could never remember the difference between blank verse and free verse when I was in school. I just don't feel as comfortable working with poetry as I do with prose.
I suppose, though, that writing isn't about being comfortable. Maybe writing about what makes us uncomfortable really brings out what is important. I'm not sure.
I wrote this poem over two years ago. That woman's face still haunts me. I wonder about her and others like her. I wonder what her day was like, her yesterday and tomorrow. I wonder if there was something I could have done....

Crash
In line at the supermarket
One lane over,
She leans with her elbow on the cart, knuckles on her hip.
She stands there nonchalant,
with a shattered face.

She is old and tiny.
Straggles of gray hair
Held back from her face with a pink ribbon.
Of course, she’s wearing long sleeves and jeans,
Even in the heart of summer.

Her eyes bug out,
but only because her cheekbones are crushed.
A nose without a bridge,
just a little, fleshy bump in the middle of her face.
A face blunted, edgeless,
leveled by cudgel fists.

Ah, yes. He’s there.
The big, he-man.
He’s old too, but tall and broad-shouldered.
Pink scalp shines through the gray stubble of his crew cut.
His hands, those hands, grip the
Shopping cart handle.

Oh, I hope they hurt him.
In winter. During rainstorms.
All the time.
I hope the pain is throbbing, deep-aching,
fire needles in the joints.
A small, daily payment
For the beatings.

When he turns his head to speak to her
I see her anxious expression as
She looks up at him,
like a child, wary, frightened…
heartbreaking.
A slight rocking back on her heels, not a full step,
but enough to convince me,
her face was no accident.

Shaking, enraged, outraged, I suppress the urge
To rocket canned goods at his head or just
Take him to the floor with a running tackle and
Bash his head into the gray-spotted linoleum in
Front of the magazine racks.
I want to hurt him. I really do.
Imagine what she must want.

And yet, I do nothing,
nothing, nothing,
nothing.

A Book I'd Like to See

2009-01-23T10:42:00.000-08:00

I'm not really one of the grammar police, everyone is entitled to make a mistake or three, but some things do drive me nuts. This book should be required reading in all high school English classes.

Want to create your own book cover?

Slinging Slang

2008-12-12T08:13:00.000-08:00

It is no secret I love the English language. I'm especially fascinated by slang--how it is created, used, changed and how it creeps into standard usage.
I found an interesting article at The Nation online on the subject and thought I'd share it.

Pixies, Sheilas, Dirtbags and Cougar Bait: Modern Slang

I found particularly interesting, in this year of "Joes," the part of the article listing the various types of slang "Joe-somethings." Someone I know uses the unique (as far as I know)slang term "Joe Bag-of-doughnuts" instead of the more common "Joe Schmo" or "Joe Six-pack."

This leads me to wonder, as the author states is the case with him, whether others have personal slang that is unique to their relationships.

Share in the comments!

A Perfect Example

2008-09-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

A few days (weeks?) ago I put up a post about dangling participles. Here's what Strunk and White have to say about participial phrases.
"A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject" (13).
The same holds true for a participial phrase at the end of a sentence. In other words, writers have to make sure they are actually saying what they think they are saying.
Writers breaking this rule run the risk of making themselves look ridiculous. Even the Associated Press sometimes has trouble.

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Teacher OK after crashing into bear on a bicycle from Associated Press

Is the circus in town? Doesn't the headline make you wonder exactly where the bear got a bicycle in the first place?
A sentence in the body of the article is just as confusing.
The bear rolled over Litz's head, cracking his helmet, and scratched his back before scampering up a hill above the road.
So, the bear was wearing a helmet? (Always a good idea when biking, btw.) The bear's helmet scratched the biker? The bear stopped and gave himself some itch relief before scampering away? What? Aaaagh!
A great writing exercise would be to take the headline and that awfully confusing sentence and rewrite both.
For the headline: Bicylist Recovering After Crashing Into Bear.

Wouldn't that work better?

I suggest it would be best to break up the sentence: Litz's helmet cracked when the bear rolled over him. The bear also scratched Litz's back before scampering away up a hillside.

Whoops! I did it too! Litz's back didn't scamper up the hillside. See, the participial phrase describing the bear is too far away from the word bear. The "scampering up the hillside" is supposed to describe the bear, but because the noun "back" appears in the sentence after after the subject, the phrase now refers to "back" instead of "bear." Make sense?

Let's try again:
Litz's helmet cracked when the bear rolled over him. The bear also scratched Litz's back. Apparently unharmed, the bear scampered up a hillside.

Doesn't that better convey what most likely happened?

Writers have to analyze every sentence for goofs like this or we just end up looking silly and readers end up confused.

Romance Covers Redone

2008-09-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

You know it is so easy to make fun of cheesy romance novels, that I probably should not do it. I found this site, though, that just cracked me up.
Here's an example of Longmire's "re-imagined" romance novel covers:

And one more:

If you'd like to check out more, visit

Longmire Does Romance Novels

It's hard to know which is more ridiculous, the romance novel cover art or the stories. At least Longmire made the covers more interesting.

Flash Fiction Again

2008-08-19T05:33:00.000-07:00

My fondness for short fiction is no secret. My love for Flash Fiction isn't either. It is amazing to me, how a story with so few words can sometimes be nothing short of dazzling.

I'm late getting around to Flash Fiction Online again this month and found August's offerings a little disappointing.

The online magazine has had better months, but among the also-ran stories, there is one little gem. It is a re-telling of the Tortoise and the Hare,a tale rife with political undertones and a wonderfully snarky ending. Ah, the power of "everybody says so!" and partisanship.

Here's where you can find it:

The True Story of the Tortoise and the Hare

If you'd like to read the other stories, here's the link to the homepage: Flash Fiction Online

The Power of Wishing

2008-08-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Wait, the picture is nothing to get excited about. Such a book doesn't exist--yet. It's all about thinking positively. That's "the secret," so I'm told.
Lucky for me, I have friends who were willing to share "The Secret" without charging me thirty bucks.
So, I'm making up my own little dream bulletin board. What can it hurt, right? As long as I don't try to let the bulletin board (and wishing) do all the work, maybe that little book will no longer just be an image I downloaded and used a photo-editor on, but an honest-to-goodness object I can hold in my hands.
Wish me luck!

The Wind Out of My Sails

2008-08-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

Rejected! That word is so crushing. It must be all those hard consonants.
I'm trying to get back in the writing groove after getting a story rejected. If writing is hard, getting something published sometimes feels next to impossible.
The editor was perfectly polite, saying that she liked my idea, but that the story "never caught fire" for her. This is a very polite way of saying it was boring. Yee-ouch.
I'm trying to stay positive. If my stories are getting rejected, at least it means I'm still knocking them out and sending them in.
After a rejection, I'm often left with a dilemma. Do I trash the whole thing? Revamp, ramp up the tension and action and resubmit to another publication? I'm still not sure.
For now, I'll make like the little guy in the picture, but get back to work tomorrow.

Subjects and Verbs that Don't Agree and Dangling Participles

2008-08-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

A friend recently dropped off some books for me. The pile included a small, self-published chapbook that was put together by some other people.
While I admire the effort of self-publishing, (and, let's face it, the ability to actually finish a story or two--something I'm finding increasingly difficult)the grammar and sentence structure errors in many of the stories left me twitching, groaning and rolling my eyes.
Honestly, I'm not that much of a nit-picker over grammar. Well, maybe a little. Okay, maybe a lot. In fact, my nit-picking is why I'm so slow to produce anything. I agonize over every sentence, every comma--to the point that it often interrupts the flow of my writing. The thought of submitting a piece of writing with glaring errors makes me cringe. I still don't get it all right, but I keep trying.
The main problem in this little chapbook seemed to be subject verb agreement in some sentences.
In one story the protagonist is trying to kill a giant scorpion that has invaded her house. Here's an example of where the author has an agreement problem: "Jumping over it, I reached the closet door."
Obviously, the author meant to say that she jumped over the scorpion and then reached the closet door, but instead it sounds like she jumped over the closet door.
One of my biggest no-no's is mistakenly using the dreaded dangling participle. Like this sentence: "The baby grasped the old man's pants leg with pink, chubby fingers."
I submitted a writing exercise to my instructor that contained that sentence. She got a good laugh out of it, as I remember. Naturally, I meant to say that the baby had pink, chubby fingers, not the guy's pants.
I keep that sentence in my mind every time I'm writing to make sure my participles don't dangle.
When it comes to editing, nit-picking will only get one so far. Eventually, I have to turn my stories over to someone else, asking her to please be on the look out for grammar goofs or sentences that are unclear or awkward.
An honest, knowledgeable proof-reader is a writer's best friend. Mine is.

My first LOL Cat

2008-07-19T18:48:00.000-07:00

I really, really don't know why I get such a kick out of LOL cats. I don't even own a cat. I'm allergic--severely allergic.
There's just something so expressive about a cat when it's up to something that thrusts upon me the urge to anthropomorphize what it's doing. (Heh. Plus, I get to use a big word to describe what comes over me.)
So here's my first attempt at making an LOL cat. I had to go over to my sister's house to "borrow" her kittens for the effort and take copious amounts of benadryl afterwards.

Maybe I should use the time I'm burning fiddling with Gimp2 to make LOL cats to write instead. Nah.

Drunk on Goblin Fruit

2008-05-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

I made my visit to Strange Horizons a bit late this week, but as always found a superb short story and a new poem. This week's poem by J. C. Runolfson is not to be missed, especially for writers. Runolfson's author bio led me to a link I had to share: Goblin Fruit .
The site states they publish "poetry that treats mythic, surreal, fantasy and folkloric themes, or approaches other themes in a fantastical way," and they deliver.
This is a site that begs to be devoured. I spent at least an hour there drinking in the amazing poetry in the current and back issues. As the hapless Laura says in Rossetti's Goblin Market, "I ate and ate my fill/ Yet my mouth waters still"(166-165). I'll be going back again and again, but unlike poor Laura my thirst for the Goblin Fruit won't be denied (at least as long as their website remains).
By the way, if you would like to read the original text, from which I assume the website gained its name, the poem Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti can be found here: Goblin Market .

Emily Dickinson Poetry Online

2008-05-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

So much of the world's greatest literature is only a Google search away, especially if the work is old enough to have fallen into the public domain.
I love Emily Dickinson's poetry. It is often ambiguous and sometimes even confusing, but I like that. Her poetry sparked fun debates in English class. Is she speaking metaphorically or literally or both? What is she talking about really? I suppose only the poet herself could have told us.

You can find a list of her complete works by clicking here:

Bartleby.com

I chose this poem because I like what she has to say about the lure of conformity and how the non-conformists among us may be the bravest of all.

Part One: Life

XI

MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails. 5
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

When Ideas Fail, Post a Cat Pic!

2008-05-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

This just cracks me up every time I look at it.

More from "What's the Message?"

2008-05-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

The positive response I received from the first post about women's periodicals from the eighteenth century, along with a request for more from the essay, prompts today's post.

From the Essay:
Now, we didn’t simply make up a few attention-grabbing headlines and stick them on a copy of an engraving. These headlines are inspired by actual stories from some of the
eighteenth-century conduct books.

This mock-up feature headlines drawn from actual Female Spectator issues. (This one is in color, which would have been difficult to do in the eighteenth century, to say the least, but just play along here.)
From the Female Spectator Volume Three we find a long sermon against gossip. It begins: “Nothing more plainly shews a weak and degenerate Mind, than taking a Delight in whispering about every idle Story we are told, to the Prejudice of our Neighbors” (2).
Volume One of The Female Spectator ran a lengthy essay on the vital importance of young women choosing the right husband. It says “to be well convinced of the Sincerity of the Man they are about to marry is a Maxim, with great Justice, always recommended to a young lady” (13). The story goes on to describe a young woman who made a foolish, hasty choice of marriage partner with, of course disastrous consequences. Martesia, the young woman, ends up married to a man of dubious character, they drift apart and even begin to sleep in separate beds. Martesia has an affair and becomes pregnant. She attempts to conceal the pregnancy and delivers a still-born baby in secret. But the whispering began and she, in the end, had to flee England. With a sum of support from her husband, she went into “voluntary Banishment from Friends and Country, and roaming round the World in fruitless Search of that Tranquility she could not have failed enjoying at home in the Bosom of a Comfort equally beloved as loving” (Female Spectator 23).
Taking a cue from an actual essay in the Female Spectator Volume Two, we find the writer saying from the beginning “there is no one Thing more generally talked of, and so little understood, as the sin of ingratitude. All complain of it in others, but none acknowledge it in themselves” (2). The essay runs for several pages and gives many examples of how to avoid this particular sin.
Our last and perhaps most interesting headline come from Volume three of The Female Spectator. In it the writer tells a story of a woman named “Constantia” who though the seeming epitome of virtue finds that her husband is cheating on her. How does she defeat her rival and regain her husband’s affections? Easy! She retains “the most tender affection for her husband, but while the guilty pair imagined her easy and resign’d to her fate, she was continually laying Schemes to change it” (Female Spectator 33). Her scheme we find is to pretend to be sick and take to her bed. Also, luckily, it seems “heaven was pleased that she should prove with Child, which, together with her continued Sweetness of Behaviour, turn’d his Heart” (Female Spectator 41). So the remedy it appears is to be nice to your cheating husband, continue sleeping with him, pretend to be near death and eventually he’ll come around.
Women’s magazines are still blatantly telling women how to act, how to talk, how to get or keep a man and how to dress, though the most numerous items have to do with men, sex and relationships. In the November 2005 issue of Cosmopolitan we find these articles; “Boost His Body Confidence,” “Get the Affection You Desire”, “A Dinner He’ll Die For”, “How to Turn Him On Without Touching” and introduces a new sex position, naturally to keep a man interested.
Though they take a friendly tone, these women’s magazines, just like the examples we’ve seen from the eighteenth-century, still play on a woman’s insecurities and self doubts. They still seek to teach women (though admittedly the some of the lessons have changed). We didn’t find any eighteenth-century articles about how to be great in bed.
However, today’s magazines hold up near-impossible-to-achieve standards of beauty as the womanly ideal. The main focus is still about attracting, holding on to and pleasing men. These magazines tell a woman “you can’t possibly get along in the world without our advice. Listen to us. We are the modern sages. Behave as we tell you. Look like this girl. We’ll tell you how to behave in any situation. Style your hair like so and wear these clothes. It’s the only way you’ll ever be happy.”
Today’s magazines, just like the periodicals from the eighteenth century, still assume a woman needs instruction from self-styled experts in all areas of her life. That’s the message and, judging by the continuing popularity of women’s periodicals, its one women are still buying.

Works Cited:
Cosmopolitan 239.5. Dec. 2005

Female Spectator 1. The Spectator Project. CETH. 10 Nov. 2005.
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Female Spectator 2. The Spectator Project . CETH. 10 Nov. 2005.
.

Female Spectator 3. The Spectator Project CETH. 10 Nov. 2005.
.

The New Lady's Magazine

2008-05-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

This was a Power Point slide that was part of a group presentation for one of my college English classes. We compared the ladies' magazines of the Eighteenth Century with modern day women's mags.
The slide is a satiric representation of what the cover of an Eighteenth Century magazine might look like if the teasers for the publication were written in the breathless, urgent style of today's women's magazines.
From the Essay:

Peter Miller notes that the women’s periodicals of the eighteenth-century show “not the slightest interest … in the important social and political issues of the day” (283). Their concerns were mostly of fashion, comportment and how to attract the right kind of man and how to keep him interested. Does any of this sound familiar? Miller sums it up for us. He says “The similarity of these early ladies’ magazines to women’s periodicals today is striking” (283).

I have to chuckle every time I think about this picture, especially when I'm standing in front of the magazine racks at the local bookstore or supermarket. Who says we've come a long way, baby?

***And because I'm still an obessive-compulsive English Major at heart, here's the work cited:
Miller, Peter John. “Eighteenth-Century Periodicals for Women.” History of Education Quarterly 11.3 (1971): 279-286. JSTOR 3 Nov. 2005. .