Spring Is Springing...

Spring is my favourite season. Summer is my second favourite, for the heat, but I love, love, love Spring for its promise. New shoots, early flowers, the clean smell in the air... Ah, Spring!

Sadly, it comes with a passing of the previous season, doesn't it? It wasn't too long ago when my daughter came home for the holidays and, with the help of her boyfriend, rolled up this stalwart guard for our driveway. 

 

A few weeks later, he got a bit goofy, doing the limbo. Actually, that was my husband and I, getting goofy with a couple of shovels as our poor snowman started to lean. Then he grew old, as we all do. I'm calling that last shot his footprint. I'm sure he just went off to colder climes. Right?

Sad as that is, it means Spring is here! It's the ides of March already! Well, that was yesterday and tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. I'm right in the middle of the middle. Lucky me, that gives me a chance to offer you a chance to get lucky. (Not that kind of lucky ~ wink!)

I'm talking about a Facebook Party with Giveaways kind of lucky. 

Yes! I'm very excited that we're having a virtual party at Grey's Saloon in Marietta, Montana tomorrow. Loads of your favourite authors will be there! Times are in Pacific and you can join us by joining Main Street Marietta on Facebook here.

9 am Charlene Sands
10 am CJ Carmichael
11 am Debra Salonen
12 pm Katherine Garbera
1 pm Kathleen O'Brien
1 pm Roxanne Snopek
3 pm Anne McAllister
4 pm Dani Collins
5 pm Jane Porter

I hope you'll come! I'll be promoting Taken By The Raider, which takes place in Spring in Chicago--one of the top places for a St. Paddy's Day celebration, right?

I hope to see you at the party tomorrow. For now, I'll leave you with this pretty shot of my current releases on a field of tulips because, Spring.

My Life's Soundtrack

by Anna Campbell

Recently on Facebook there was one of those things going around where people tagged their friends to list ten things. I find these endlessly interesting - and almost invariably surprising. So I thought I'd break out of the Facebook ghetto and ask my Tote Bag chums the same question.

This particular meme doing the rounds was naming ten albums that have stayed with you. That doesn't particularly mean your favorite albums, but the ones that had some influence over you - or at least that's how I took it.

Inevitably, a lot of the records I picked (and I'm old enough that most of them actually WERE vinyl) went back to my childhood/teens and include some records my parents played a lot when I was a wee gel.

Here's my top 10 as of today (it's slightly different to the one I posted on Facebook but that's the nature of these things, isn't it?).

1. Swan Lake Ballet - Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic

2. Station to Station - David Bowie

3. Rubber Soul - the Beatles

4. Standing on a Beach (the Singles) - the Cure

5. Beethoven's Greatest Hits - various CBS artists

6. Les Miserables - Original Stage Cast

7. The Sound of Music - Soundtrack

8. The Glenn Miller Story - Soundtrack

9. My Fair Lady - Original Stage Cast

10. Lawrence of Arabia Soundtrack

So clearly my tastes run to classical and musicals with a bit of classic pop thrown in. Yup, that pretty much describes it, with a few movie scores as runners up.

It's been great fun to revisit some of the music that's influenced me. And even more fun to look at those album covers. Talk about a trip down memory lane! 

Now it's your turn. And if you want to put in a line or two about why you made your selections, I'd be very interested!

Oh, and by the way, if you don't follow me on Facebook, you can find me at:

https://www.facebook.com/AnnaCampbellFans

I'm pretty active there and I regularly do giveaways! 

Looking forward to seeing your music lists!

Anne McAllister : : Remember High School?

Remember your high school days?

Well, I don't suppose -- unless you're under the age of 14 -- that you can really forget it.

For some it might have been the best of times. And for others it might have been the worst. It was neither to me. There are great gaps in my memories of it.

Since I moved away and never went back to live in the area once I left, except for a few brief weeks during the summer after my freshman and sophomore years of college, I have had little occasion to even think about it.

But I've just been friended on Facebook by someone from my high school.

And then another. And then a third -- and I'm suddenly seeing pictures from when I was fifteen and reliving things I didn't even remember that I remembered!

Weird. Very weird.

What I realized -- when I realized that I remembered at all -- is that while I don't have stored up in the brain cells a lot of detailed specifics about the particular events that went on (was I in a coma, I wonder?), apparently I internalized every conceivable emotion that it is possible for a teenager to feel.

And I've been drawing on them now for years in my books!

What I mean is that those were the years when I really began to understand about relationships and emotions and the connections between the two. And because those experiences were so powerful emotionally then, I unconsciously go back to them often when I'm writing. I remember so well how I felt in those days.

I just had an email from a writer friend asking me about where I'd gone to research the sailing bits I used in an upcoming book because, God knows, I am not a sailor. I am a hanger-over-the-side sort of person, even though I wish I had better sea legs. But I seem to write about characters who sail a lot.

And I pointed her in the direction of several possibilities because I try my best to be accurate. And I do my research and I learned about sailing from books and from people I know who sail a lot.

As a writer I can always learn about things and activities I don't know first-hand -- like racing sailing and being a lawyer or a chaos-theory teaching physicist.

But it's impossible to learn emotions out of a book. And no one can tell you how to convey feelings. The emotions my characters feel have to come naturally.

I have to have felt them myself. They rise out of some personal well of deep joy and profound anguish. They derive from of the elation that comes from believing everything is going to be perfect and the despair of knowing you're an idiot and everyone knows it even better than you do.

They come from first love, heartbreak, laughing until you can't catch your breath, and the deep quiet joy of knowing you've done the right thing even though no one else knows it. All those emotions?

They come from high school.

The most profound well of emotional knowledge that I -- and pretty much everyone else -- have ever been given is high school.

That's where we were when we began to experience many of the emotions that get us through the day and keep us up at night.

Those years frequently contain the moments against which we measure other life experiences and how we feel about them.

We may not even know it. I certainly didn't consciously even think about it until these past few days. Then I remembered -- and I felt them all again. Emotional overload.

So, to all my new/0ld Facebook friends -- in my 'real life' -- thank you for providing me with such a deep and enduring well.

Thank you for inviting me to be your friend again -- or for the first time. And please say yes if I ask to be your friend because I don't want to have to learn about being crushed first hand all over again. High school? Been there, done that. Once was plenty. But I'm grateful for it.

How was high school for you? The best? The worst? Anything memorable? AnyONE memorable? And are you friends on Facebook with them now? C'mon, tell . . .

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

The other night at book club my friends and I were bemoaning what everyone's inevitably lamenting these days: the disastrous economic Armageddon plaguing the world. A few of us admitted that we've given up listening to the media doomsdayers who are bent on bombarding us 24/7 with tales of world demise, and instead have decided to tune it out in favor of more pleasant things. Except that sometimes even that is hard to find, given that we are being deluged with too much stimuli from every angle.

One popular escapist outlet is the myriad of social networking groups on the Internet, from that now-dinosaur/ADD nightmare, MySpace, to Facebook, to Twitter. Add to that blogs, grogs, Library Thing, Red Room, LinkedIn, Yahoo listserves, and niche chat sites that can run the gamut from professional networking to holistic parrot care. All this means absolutely no end to the realm of e-distractions that can drain your brain, and while you're at it, every waking moment of your life as well. I actually found a social network site called VampireFreaks.com. Seriously. That I even bothered to spend the time on the Internet researching that is worrisome to me on some level. Talk about sucking your soul.



I know many sing the praises of this profusion of Internet connectivity. But one could argue whether social networking really is a boon to society, or is merely one more distraction that's holding us back from living our lives more fully. I mean sure, thanks to Facebook (co-opted from the young, who hate us for that), you might now have re-connected with Tommy Stromboli, who sat behind you in sixth grade health class and sketched amazing pictures of Loony Tunes characters (and the occasional body part) while the rest of the class took notes. But honestly, did you need to be back in touch with Tommy? I mean, if you'd really wanted to communicate with him, would you have ever lost contact in the first place?

I have Facebook "friends" from childhood with whom was I not only decidedly not in their circle friends, I wasn't even in their galaxy of acquaintances. Interestingly, though, Facebook seems to be resurrecting that very social strata we all gladly left behind years ago. It's middle school redux: the cool kids still only chat with the cool kids and the others are left out in the cold, this time from the LED screen of your computer in the comfort of your home.

Graduating on from Facebook, we have the latest rage, Twitter, a micro-blogging site. The place to be in the e-ether. If you don't tweet, you're so out of the loop. So everyone's tweeting: a whole lot of blather bloating the e-waves. Twitterers can use no more than 140 concisely-constructed characters to condense their little moment in time for whomever in the world follows them on Twitter. A big New York editor recently endorsed Twitter to encourage writers to tighten their prose. Seems a stretch to me.

Now back when I was in school, I was a doodler. A doodler with absolutely no artistic ability whatsoever. So while I was stuck in classes like symbolic logic with my mind absolutely numb with boredom, I quickly ran out of things to doodle. After so many birds, sunshines, moons with faces, and garden-variety flowers, what was left to draw? But nowadays, instead of doodling with pen and paper, with Twitter you can doodle with your words. And instead of only Tommy Stromboli peering over your shoulder to bear witness to your mindless nothingness, well, hey, you have the entire e-world in which to infuse your verbal helium.
Just think of the people you can touch in the world with that 140-character tweet on Twitter, after all. A quick glimpse of tweets of folks I am following include: I need to shave my legs. Sigh. Or: Finally found a small carton of the elusive pink malted milk balls. Commence sugar shock. Lastly this: Wheat Ritz crackers are just wrong. Who wants a healthy Ritz cracker? There's also a link to a photo of one twitterer eating her foot. She felt compelled to post it after being proven wrong about something she insisted she was right or she'd eat her foot. Okay then.


The thing is, I totally "get" Twitter and have gotten pulled under the riptide of reading and writing tweets myself. Sometimes it's just more of a challenge to come up with something fun or stupid or entirely useless in 140 characters than it is to do something you ought to be doing. But that's the thing of it: it keeps us—i.e. however many hundreds of millions of subscribers to Twitter, Facebook, or you name the site—from doing useful things. Like talking to someone nearby, for instance. Or conducting brain surgery. You laugh, but on the news the other day (that very news we're supposed to be avoiding, due to its glum nature), I heard about doctors tweeting while removing some man's cancerous tumor in his abdominal cavity. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer my doc not tweet while in my gut.

Makes me want to dial 9-1-1, stat, because I fear we have become victims of information overload, and we're now hemorrhaging all that useless knowledge.

My tweet response to that? Remember when ignorance was bliss? Sigh.

I'm not old enough to have experienced the days when you'd pick up the phone and an operator would connect your call for you—hence adding a layer of actual human interface. But I think I miss that sort of interaction nevertheless.
Come to think of it, even more, I miss the days when social networking meant going to a really fun party.

Reading and Technology - Susanna Carr

When I started reading romances, I only knew of a couple other readers who liked romance books. They were my twin sister and a few of our friends. We traded, recommended, and discussed the books as often as we could. When we finally got our drivers licenses, we would pile up in a car and make trips to romance-friendly bookstores.

Our group of readers was small. I knew these romance readers because they were already in my circle of friends. Eventually our reading tastes shifted and developed, and we realized we wanted very different things from our books. One was really into the dark gothic stories while another was on the perpetual hunt for traditional Regencies. As for me, I couldn't get enough of the Harlequins and the contemporaries.

Then came the Internet.

I was thrilled when authors I've read for years put up their own websites. I found out more about their books, their booklists and what was coming next. I thought it was great when Harlequin developed their online community at eharlequin.com. I now could hear from others who read the same kind of books I did. I couldn't imagine anything better than that.

Until the emergence of bulletin boards and blogs. And then there was Yahoogroups, which allowed people of a specific interest to go off on their own and discuss. Suddenly there was MySpace, where a reader could gather all of her friends and her specific interests onto one page.

I've heard of Bebo and Facebook, but I haven't really looked into those to see what makes them different than MySpace. Why haven't I looked? Because I'm busy building my shelf at Shelfari.com. Add a book on the shelf and you will immediately find out who else has that book on their shelf. This is a reader's paradise.

I wished I had this community when I was a teenager and trying to find a book that would deliver what I want, but there is a price to the sense of connection. All of this technology is quickly becoming an addiction—and eating into my reading time!

Susanna

http://www.susannacarr.com/