Coffee - The Unsung Hero of the Work Week

Today I felt like recognizing the many times that my dear sweet friend Coffee has kept me from being fired, from being slapped, and possibly out of jail. Happy rest of the work week!

Coffee, coffee, how I love thee,

Let me count the ways.

You start my mornings ever brightly

Despite the dismal days.

You give me strength to speak and smile

When I’d rather run away.

You turn monsters into people

In a cup or three a day

You fend off Armageddon

And keep it safe at bay.

But I thank you most of all

For the near impossible way

You help me cope with the masses

Whom otherwise I might flay.

What's It All About, When You Get Right Down To It?

Today's title is an homage to Sir Terry Pratchett, my favorite author, greatest inspiration, and liege lord should he ever need my services in battle. This is a question he likes to toss (albeit comically and always brilliantly) from a character's perspective when that character is forced to really stop and evaluate themselves, their routines, the world... But it is also one of my worst nightmares, leaving me quaking, nervous, and speechless in front of children, adults, and puppies alike.

The Question, so innocently posed: "So, you wrote a book. What's it about?"

This is how I picture myself scared.

What's it about?? I sweated, I cried, I struggled, I warred with editors, I went sleepless for months to write this 90,000 word novel that spans my dreams, flights of fancy, innermost conflicts and struggles, and you want me to tell you in a quick couple of sentences what it's about?  ACK!!! *This is about the point where I develop a nervous ocular twitch*

It is times like these that I realize how much I love writing and how much I hate marketing (read: detest, abhor, loathe, anathematize, scorn, curse). And, of course, this is the natural first question everyone wants to ask you as soon as they learn you're an author. I knew this was a risk when I became a writer and made the conscious decision to not use a pseudonym (and it was tempting, I'm not a public sort of gal), but despite my best efforts, I still have not been able to do more than babble off the nearly memorized text from the book jacket.

You see, I hear the question 'what's it about' and I want to tell you the story. The whole story. I can't separate an incident/person from the story as being primary any more than I can tell you that I have a duprass-mate in Steven without explaining to you the long background of the word 'duprass' (see: Kurt Vonnegut), the way our relationship developed, AND how we came to apply the word to ourselves. I suck at summarizing, I'm sick of synopsizing, and the fact that I'm resorting to alliteration should tell you how serious I am about it.

This is how I picture all salesmen.

HOWEVER, like any new author, I have to make that effort for Alice Will and figure out how to answer this question without letting my skin crawl away. That is, unless I like the idea of remaining Ashley Who the rest of my life (not so cool as the good Dr.). I've come up with a few starts so far...

The Tagline - Despite her out-of-control magic, teenage demi-goddess Trotter takes on dark gods and chatty demons while fending off the very apocalypse that everyone thinks she caused.

The Audience-Oriented Pitch - "Alice Will is a novel for every person who’s struggled with how they identify themselves and learned to define their own niche in a world that doesn't seem to have a place for them."

The Conversation Starter Pitch - “Trotter isn't your average demi-god and these aren’t your average Olympian gods. The gods of Aevum are exactly what we would be if  forced to live forever with no sense of meaning, reason, or even Prozac.”

The Dramatic Voice-over Pitch - "The lives of a demigoddess and a tiny orphan girl collide when one of them accidentally begins remaking the world according to her wild imagination."

And finally:

The What-I-Want-My-Readers-To-Take-Away-Pitch - "Alice Will is about laughing at ourselves and the empty traditions we value without knowing why. It’s about taking stock in our instincts before we let our fickle brains over-rationalize us out of the right choice. It’s about learning the hard way that maturity, at any age, is no match for experience. And finally, it’s about remembering that the right thing to do is still the right thing to do when no one is looking."

So what do you think? And for all of you writers out there, how do you go about answering this question? I'd love some advice!

Watching Out For The 'Low Men...'

I spent a little time yesterday exploring my blog stats in Blogger’s handy-dandy dashboard and learned something interesting: I’m either going to be famous or I’m going to end up on a terrorist watch list.

A little background: I noticed that my page views were going up faster than they had been so I decided to look and see what was driving people to my humble blog. One of the first things I saw was a number of odd web pages listed as ‘Referring Sites,’ including buygenericsfromindia dot com (purposely ensuring this doesn’t show up as a link some innocent bystander can click) and baby-back-packs dot com.

Strange, yes.

But not as strange as a few of the ‘Search Keywords’ that led people to my blog. They start off innocently enough with: “little mermaid kiss the girl vocal only.” Not surprising at all, considering my blog in January, "The Little Mermaid," and Other Evil Deeds of the Disney Empire. Then I see that the terms “flash fiction post-apocalytpic best” and “post apocalyptic noir” referred people to the post-apocalyptic short story I posted. Still making sense.

I start really feeling odd when I see that the following search term has been entered:”ashley chappell Huntsville.” In other words, I have been Googled. While I waver between feeling pleased that someone bothered to look me up, I also find myself feeling, well, dirty.

But the final search phrase on the list is the one that causes me concern: “special ops mission chloroform.” Now I realize that this one must have led the searching party to my blog entitled Dietary Tactics: From Electroshock to Chloroform, but when I think about the kind of person that is likely to enter that specific search in a search engine only two images come to mind. 1) A fellow writer doing research for a thriller/suspense novel; and 2) a raving psychopath (not that 1 and 2 are always mutually exclusive, mind you). In fact, it also gives me a frame of reference for one of the other odd ‘Referring Sites’ that were listed: quiethits dot com. You can’t tell me that’s not a cover-up for a contract assassin employment service.

So now that I see the kind of searches in which my blog appears I can’t stop picturing a scenario in which I am abducted in the middle of the night by paramilitary thugs. When they finally remove the black bag from my head it’s to bombard me with questions about the secret communications I’m transmitting for the terrorists. “We have the proof right here, lady. Your blog is all over their search history. Just give us your contacts and we’ll put these rusty nails and jumper cables away.”

Coming up next week... look for an excessive amount of American flags, LOLcats, apple pie recipes, and Angry Birds tips. That ought to balance out my search results, right? RIGHT? 

Beware the Post-it-ocalypse

*Shhhhh* Try not to be obvious, but look at that cluster of Post-its on my monitor. Does it look like more than were there yesterday? This one... I don’t remember writing this one. It looks like my handwriting, but did I really write a note to myself to “Ck Rm in AM?” And what did it mean? Maybe Check Room, or Chuck Ram, or Cloak Room – did I leave a coat in a cloak room and forget to pick it up?

Oh, no. There’s another one, and I don’t think it was there a few minutes ago. That can only mean one thing...

I know my lunch was under here somewhere...

They warned me about this. I swear I didn’t mean for it to happen.

It began so innocently... A Post-it here, a Post-it there, just a few reminders to jog my memory, maybe a few shopping lists and even a recipe or two. Then a few more notes containing ideas and then a lot of notes with questions, and a few with answers.  I think that’s when it happened. Somehow, along the way, I have transferred my full consciousness to the now thriving colony of Post-its that surround my monitor.

The Post-it Questions without Post-it Answers have begun to collaborate with the Post-it Ideas and possibly the Post-it Recipes and are creating little Post-it Answers of their own. That’s the only explanation for how the answering Post-it for “How to compress .pdf packages” became “Blend 1 cp. .pdf with 2 GB of eggs, roll flat, bake 2 hrs.”

It can only be a matter of time now before they realize their full potential and rise up against us, ever-growing as one colony meets another, absorbing new thoughts until it becomes one giant Post-it organism, mimicking life as an amalgamation of the short, punctuated thoughts that make up the cells of the beast.

The first Post-it attempt at breeding a Post-it army to subdue the human oppressors

And here I sit in the knowledge that, through my own carelessness, I was the one who birthed this beast. I have doomed us all.

*Shhh!* Did you see that new green one? I swear it said “Redrum...”

God, what have I done?