Lynn Raye Harris

So my mother calls yesterday. The woman is not known for spontaneity in large measures — though she will spontaneously hop in the car and drive a hundred miles to see a potential rare antique, for example; or will take an eighty mile side trip just to see the spot where some interesting historical person once laid his weary head. She’s very good at that kind of spontaneity. But large, spontaneous gestures like hopping on a plane to Europe in less than a week?

Color me gobsmacked. And envious. See, Mom read yesterday’s blog post about my crazy week, and my upcoming crazy weeks, and then picked up the phone and said, “Well, I guess you can’t go, but I thought I’d ask anyway. M (her friend) and I are thinking of going to Paris next week.”

What?! Paris? Next week? Seriously?

Yeah, seriously. They found cheap flights, they found an inexpensive hotel, they think they’ll rent a car for some day tripping, and they’ve plotted out a week. I’m still in shock. My mother, adventurous though she is, does not drop everything and go to Paris in a week. But am I happy about it? Oh yeah. A little over a year ago, this was the woman who worked at a job that was strangling the life and health from her. When she decided to retire (another spontaneous event, actually), it was the best thing she ever did for herself.

And now she’s planning short-notice trips to Paris. I like it. I’m shocked, but I like it. Wish I could go, but I have two problems. One, deadline. Two, I’ve had “Renew Passport” on my To Do list for months. As soon as I got off the phone with her, I went to the State Dept website and filled out the form. Now it’s printed, my old passport is sitting here with it, and all I need are two photos and a check for $75. I’m not getting left out of spontaneous trips to Paris ever again.

Have you ever done a spontaneous trip like this? Just dropped everything and jetted away to somewhere you wanted to go? Or are you a planner, someone who has to book and pay for a trip months (or years) in advance? I admit, when I lived in Europe, it was no big deal to hop in a car and go. I did it quite a lot. But I’ve never bought a plane ticket at the last minute for a big trip off the cuff.

1. Is there a rule that says once you hit a certain age, you must cut your hair short? Because I attended a function the other day where every single woman there, with the exception of me and one other lady, was upwards of 50. And they ALL had short hair. Short. Gray, white, brown and blonde — didn’t matter, every lady had short hair. Nearly gave me a panic, I tell you. I’ve already made the switch from long to layered, but I’m holding the line on that above-the-shoulder stuff. If it looked good on me, I wouldn’t be so worried. But it doesn’t. Trust me.

2. I am a horrible, horrible gadget-loving person! It’s all my hubby’s fault! I want a new MacBook Pro. I love my 13.3″ white MacBook, but I want a bigger screen. I’ve fallen in love with the sleek look of the new Macs.

3. By the same token, I want a new iPod shuffle. Why? Heck if I know! I already have an iPhone and a 32 GB Touch. I also have a first generation 4 GB Nano that I never use anymore. So why would I need a shuffle? Don’t know, but it’s so cool and little! And it talks!

4. I have already mentioned the Kindle. Still want.

5. Hubby is a shoe ho. He rivals me, though he swears he does not. The man made an *impulse* shoe buy the other day that rather surprised me. I am still recovering from the sticker shock. I could have bought a Kindle! (Well, I’d have needed to add some money, but still!) The man is insane.

6. We’re having bad weather. Tornadoes possible. I really hate this time of year.

7. I *love* the person who copy-edited my last book. My voice is intact, and she barely touched my words. Love that!!

8. Love the ideas I brainstormed with my editor for book 3. Need to get busy rewriting and moving forward.

9. Taxes. Holy cow, it’s time!

10. Dinner out with parents tonight! Dinner with friends tomorrow! Diet on Sunday!

What’s up with you?

Because I can’t think of anything intelligent to post today, I give you this picture that totally cracked me up. I laughed so hard that Hubby stared at me and asked what the heck was so funny about it. I dunno, guess it was all those hours and hours of Clue when I was a kid. It was my favorite game for a while.

There was also this one:

I looooved my Bionic Woman game. Can’t remember the point, or how you played, but I played it a lot as well. And it had a kitty on the cover, which I loved. Jamie is about to throw a big net over the cat. Hmm, okay. Why is Jamie Sommers, a woman with a million or so dollars worth of bionics implanted in her, battling big cats and not bad guys?

**Too bad they screwed up the new Jamie Sommers series last year. I thought it was HORRIBLE. So horrible in fact that I did something I have never ever done in the history of television: I wrote to the network and complained about a specific episode that irritated me.**

Do you like board games? I never play anymore, but I used to love Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble too. What vintage games do you recall? There was a Charlie’s Angels game in the late 70s as well, but I didn’t have that one. If you play games now, what are some good ones? Sometimes I think it’d be fun, but there are so many now it’s hard to know where to start.

So I finally aggregated all my blogs to Google Reader. I like it, but it actually takes me more time to read than less, I think, because instead of needing to remember a link, it’s there. *sigh*

Anyway, I was reading a post about how to blog. Yeah, I’ve been doing this for 4 years now and apparently still don’t know how to do it. This dude says to blog list style. ‘Kay.

1. I like lists. It’s easy to remember and more effective to get information in bites, I think.

2. Two weeks with iPhone. LOVE it.

3. The App Store really makes something cool into something super functional.

4. I have a Facebook app. MySpace. Twitter.

5. Shazam will help you figure out the name of a song simply from hearing a snippet.

6. Bejeweled 2 rocks. There’s even a wormhole.

7. The Dinner Spinner is amazing. How did I live without this cool app? If I’m standing in the grocery store, I can pick a food item, whether I want a main, side, or appetizer, and how long I want to spend prepping. A list of recipes crops up. I can choose one and shop for the ingredients. How, I say again, did I live without this?

8. Let’s not forget Stanza, the e-book reader. So far, I’ve read some Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, and a couple of Wodehouse short stories. And I have my free Harlequin downloads on there ready to go. You can even get War and Peace for heaven’s sake! I simply cannot imagine reading W&P on my phone, though.

9. I also have a Bible app that will allow me to read any version I want. I choose KJV because I’m fussy that way. (Hel-loooo, language of Shakespeare. English major.)

10. Going to see Spamalot this weekend with friends. Richard Chamberlain is in it. I remember sighing over him as Father Ralph in The Thornbirds eons ago. Who knew he was gay back then, hmm?

11. I wanted to write a Thornbirds-like saga when I was young and impressionable and reading all about Father Ralph and Meggie.

12. I doubt I could even read the book again these days, though I read it two or three times in the 80s. Too long for my life now.

13. What happened to all those family sagas anyway? You never see them published anymore. Think it’s because of all the quick things we have in our lives? Internet, television, cell phones, etc. Information happens fast and furious now. Thirty years ago, not so much.

14. That’s enough randomness for one day.

What do you think? About sagas, lists, Spamalot, or iPhones? Or whatever?

Well I’m pretty much just wore out. Tomorrow night is a birthday party for a friend and I am SO looking forward to getting out of my cave, putting on my new leopard print boots, and whooping it up with a bunch of the gals. I cannot WAIT.

I didn’t realize, when I accepted the invitation, that I’d be in deadline mode. Oh I should’ve, considering how I practically had the date stamped on my forehead, but it just slipped my mind. And you know what, I’m glad I accepted, because I have about 5k maximum to wrap this book up — and over a week until it’s due. I hope to finish it today, but who knows. Or maybe tomorrow morning. And then I’ll be partying guilt free.

Until I have to reread and make revisions on Sunday, LOL. Yeah, I could take the whole weekend off and still safely get the book in on time. But did I mention I’m an overachiever? A perfectionist?

So, got any great weekend plans? (I think Hubby is doing a SuperBowl thing — but I am NOT involved in that. Going to Starbucks to write if necessary….)

In between marathon sessions at the keyboard, I noticed that Michael Jackson is once again being sued. Director John Landis is suing the former King of Pop over profits from the Thriller video.

Remember the Thriller video? See, if you’re younger than, oh, 35, you may not remember that Michael Jackson was once a super-cool, even GOOD-LOOKING guy who made what is still considered one of the most amazing videos of all time (if not THE most amazing).

Twenty-five years ago, “Thriller” debuted on MTV. It was fourteen minutes long, it was directed by John Landis (a renowned movie director), and it features zombies, a voice-over by Vincent Price, and a kick-butt song by the then undisputed King of Pop.

Jacko was not wacko back then. He was damn cool, and he did something no one else had done to that point. He made a mini-movie out of a video and people tuned in by the millions. I was in high school, and my whole family tuned into MTV that night (though my dad often griped at me about my MTV viewing habits — yeah, they used to actually SHOW videos around the clock, go figure, and I could watch for hours and hours…but I digress). We were, like most people, stunned at the production.

So fast forward all these years. The guy is a major joke now. He’s creepy. He had too much plastic surgery, too much bleaching, too MUCH. He’s just a sick and frightening joke now, and the allegations about the kids don’t help. He reminds me of Thomas Mann’s protagonist in Death in Venice, a man desperate to look youthful because he’s in “love” with a boy. Ick, right?

What’s Jacko got to do with anything? Well, it makes me think of characters. Because no one stays the same, do they? We all change over time. Our background and experiences color us, as they should our characters. Hopefully, we aren’t as wacky as this. He had the world at his feet, the adoration of millions, and now he’s a joke. Seriously, who wouldn’t be wacked out by that? But did it need to turn out this way? If he hadn’t gone all nutty at the surgeon’s, would we even be talking about this? I don’t know, but every time I see him in the news, I remember what he used to look like, how awesome he used to be. Sad.

If you’ve been living in a cave, here’s the link to Thriller. (You Tube doesn’t allow embedding of this video.)

Finally, take a look at this performance from 1983. Michael Jackson sang Billie Jean at the Motown 25 celebrations. I remember watching this on television too; it was the first time many of us ever saw the moonwalk, and everyone went nuts. (This performance, btw, is credited with making the moonwalk an international sensation practically overnight.) The glove was new as well. THIS was MJ at his height, the consummate performer. Remember, this was 1983 — every bit of this was innovative at that time.

Are we doomed to get ridiculous as we age, do you think? (Man, I hope not.) Wasn’t he just adorable in the Motown video? That’s a man with star quality. What the hell happened, right?

My academic minor is history (naturally, English is my major!) so I tend to get a little caught up in the historicity of events. And there is no doubt, no matter where you land on the political scale, that yesterday was an amazingly historical event. I watched far more of it than I should considering how my deadline is approaching at light speed (I like science, but that’s not my specialty so don’t analyze that analogy).

What struck me: the crowds. I attended Clinton’s first inauguration because I was living in DC at the time and wanted to see it. Um, it was so darn cold I went home again before the parade and watched that from the warmth of my living room. I remember walking over half the Mall that day — and the crowd wasn’t *anything* like the one yesterday. I also don’t remember jumbotrons anywhere. There were loudspeakers, and we could hear everything, but no television screens that I remember (I could be wrong).

But you know what I remember most about that day? Maya Angelou. Yep, the English major in me remembers her poem above all else. Of course!

I also remember buying a button that had Clinton on it and a little saxophone hanging from it. I’m sure I still have it somewhere.

I did not attend the second Clinton inauguration (by the time Bush was inaugurated, I no longer lived in DC). And while I understood why all those people would want to be in DC for Obama’s, I highly doubt I’d ever attend another one. Too cold! I see more in my house than I do in the audience. And I get to stay warm while I do so.

Historically, what a day. I love being witness to history. My father-in-law drove a Greyhound bus to Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech. He brought a group from Buffalo. But he said he didn’t hear the speech. I think that’s a shame. Still, to have been there on that day — wow. Can you imagine?

What’s the coolest historical event you’ve attended? I can’t think of a specific event, but I did once stand on the front row during a speech Reagan gave at the Vietnam Memorial. I have pictures of him and Nancy. It was cool, but OMG, it was 21 years ago…..

Don’t forget about the auction to help a homeless teen and her mother! You can bid on a one chapter + synopsis critique from me. Or many other cool things! Click here.

It was a busy weekend. I don’t know where the time went, but it flew. Things I’ve realized:

1. I need to stick to a diet. I feel like cheeseburger cat.

2. I need to reacquaint myself with the treadmill. And the weight bench.

3. I need to paint my house. Went on a holiday tour of homes in the historic district and came away feeling like my house is crap. Crap, I say.

4. I need more than paint, but at least it’s a start. Tired of builder paint on my walls.

5. Ate a Whopper. Still don’t like Burger King all that much. Or many fast food burger joints, in fact. (Though this burger place we went to in San Fran was pretty good! I was surprised.)

6. Never let a store employee get the best of you when it’s your money. Got my $30 additional discount by threatening to bring the whole darn thing back.

7. I love my RWA chapter. And my friends there. I don’t feel like an outsider, like I did nearly 2 years ago when I first arrived in this state.

8. I have the coolest job in the world.

9. My hubby cracks me up. It takes some doing, since I know him pretty well, but he’s still funny when he’s just being him.

10. Thank heavens for Spanx!!

Well, I got nothing interesting today. Yesterday, I went to Costco. How’s that for fascinating? No overly perfumed people this time. But I did cut myself on a Christmas display. And had to go searching through the store for a napkin to stop the bleeding. I was looking at a mantel display thingie, and trying to see what the bottom was, when one of the blasted ornaments sliced the back of my finger.

Aside from that, I meandered the aisles. Of course I was supposed to be home writing! But I’d had to go to the Post Office to mail my contracts, so I decided I needed to make a wine run. Which turned into a meander through the aisles run.

I love the food section. I can spend a lot of time looking at cheese and various other nifty gourmet things. And yes, going back to Monday’s Velveeta blog, you CAN buy imported French cheese for what you pay for Velveeta. Is that wrong or what?! I rarely buy these things though because you have to buy in bulk most of the time. Do I really need a 3 pound hunk of imported parmesiano-reggiano? What about those 30 lb sacks of potatoes?!

Anyway, after Costco, I came home. Hubby arrived shortly thereafter and I talked him into taking me for dinner. We went to a local restaurant that serves Cajun food. And the owner remembered me as an author and said that the waiter who served us last time has been asking if I’d come back yet. Who knew that being a romance novelist could be so exciting? He wants to do a book launch party in the restaurant. Why not? Jambalaya is a take off on paella, so perhaps I can tie the Spanish theme in somewhere.

That was my seriously exciting day. How did yours go? What do you think of book launch parties? Ever been to one? I hadn’t actually planned one since Harlequin does such fabulous promo for the lines, but maybe it’d be fun….

To the people who keep typing some variation of “how to kill my spouse” into their search engines and clicking over here, there is NO WAY to kill your spouse and get away with it. It’s wrong, it’s immoral and illegal. Get a divorce. Go to counseling. But do NOT think you’re going to kill your spouse and get away with it.

This is the post that’s popping up in the search engines. It was a tongue in cheek statement that a writer can put anyone she is mad at in a book (as a character, duh) and then do what she wants to them. It’s not a treatise on how to get away with murder.

What’s on your mind today? If you blog, what’s the top search phrase (or the weirdest) that brings people visiting?