A Professional Dilettante

Obviously I am an utter newbie there (I've had an account for a while, but just started using it this week), and am used to LJ/DW, where my account is my living room and I can tell people I don't appreciate them being rude to me here, but does one's Facebook wall not work that way? How does one deal with someone on one's FL who decides to be a troll about something one has posted, when the rest of the time they seem to be fairly decent? (this is a fellow Bujold listee -- or, rather, he's a former Bujold listee -- and he's on the Bujold Facebook group).

Is the only option simply to defriend them once and for all? Throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Is there a tutorial out there for how to work Facebook on a social rather than technical level? That will teach me how to keep people from being ugly to me on my own wall? Because if there isn't I suspect that's going to be the end of my personal social interaction there. If I can't avoid people being rude directly at me there the way I can here, then I'm not comfortable there. And "just don't interact back" is not an option. I am not a doormat and refuse to become one.

I do love the Twisted Sifter. Some of the things they post there are amazing. Like this.

It is an amazing metal sculpture of a lion, using hundreds of separate pieces of metal.

The Seattle Seahawks are going to the Super Bowl!!!!!

23-17 over San Francisco!!!

Success, success, they did it! They did it!

Or, two more reasons I love where I live.

My friend L and I drove up to the Skagit River Valley on Sunday to see bald eagles, because it was something neither one of us had done before, and it sounded like fun.

The Skagit River (named after a local Indian tribe) is about an hour and a half north of Seattle and half an hour or so south of the Canadian border.  It’s well-known as a wintering spot for bald eagles, who come to feast on the salmon.  The locals make much of this on December and January weekends, providing various activities and visitor centers and volunteers out with spotting scopes to help those of us who are novices at this sort of thing.

The latter was a very good thing, because the only eagles we saw on Sunday were through the spotting scopes of volunteers.

As you can tell, sometimes it’s not easy to take a photo through a spotting scope.  But without the spotting scope, it was hard to tell he was even there.

We had a nice lunch at the Washington Café in the town of Concrete, then, on the advice of one of the spotting scope volunteers, we took the long way back to I-5  by way of the towns of Darrington and Arlington in hopes of seeing more eagles, but alas, with no luck.

It rained on us most of the day, but we were expecting that, so we were prepared, and it was a fun day, even if we didn’t see as many eagles as I’d hoped.

Oh, and here’s the other reason I love western Washington.  Mt. Rainier with flying saucers (aka lenticular clouds).  I took this photo today, on my way back from running errands.  Sorry about the truck…

 

Mirrored from Repeating History.

I guess I know what I’m doing, after all.  Out of curiosity, I submitted Cross-Country‘s cover to the Book Designer, a well-thought-of blog which holds an exhibition of covers for indie-published books with commentary every month, with the following explanation:  “The
photo is one I took, on the travels that inspired the book. The dark is pulled from the color of the road. I’m strictly an amateur cover
designer, for my own books only because I don’t have a lot of money to invest, but I’d like to know what you think of this one.”

And he liked it.  His exact words were, “Simple but effective, showing that even with some carefully chosen elements, non-designers can create workable ebook covers.”

Maybe “workable” isn’t the highest praise, but I think “simple but
effective” is very nice.

Anyway, here’s Cross-Country‘s cover, for you to decide yourselves.  Do you like it?  Does it make you curious?

Mirrored from Repeating History.

Via jaylake.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html?ref=opinion&_r=2&

It says my language is least like the city where I was born, and it says my language is most like Salt Lake City and Boise [g].

I always find these kinds of quizzes amusing.

And, no, I’m not going to write it in blank verse.  I’m not that crazy.

I had a terrific English teacher my senior year in high school.  I do so wish I could remember his name because he changed my life.  In addition to letting us watch Harold and Maude in class (and leading a discussion of plot and characterization afterwards) and having us read Pygmalion in parts (I was Eliza!), he cultivated an appreciation in us for Shakespeare, including taking us to a live production of Othello (I’d never seen a live play before except for high school productions), that helped me decide I wanted to be an English major in college.

Which might have been a mistake.  I had some of the world’s worst Shakespeare professors in my checkered college career (I finally graduated after thirteen years and five institutions of higher learning — purely because of life logistics, not because I was awful).  By the time they were through with me, they’d ruined Shakespeare forever.  Or so I thought.

Then, five years later, along came Kenneth Branagh and his glorious movie version of Much Ado About Nothing.  I have to admit the only reason I checked it out of the public library was because it was cataloged as non-fiction (plays — Dewey #822.3) and could be checked out for a week, as opposed to feature films, which only went out overnight.

I plugged it into my VCR (this was in 1993), and promptly fell in love.  No, not with Branagh, although I do consider him my oldest online fandom, since he and my first home computer arrived in my life almost simultaneously.  But with the play.  The movie reminded me just how much I loved Shakespeare, and how much I loved watching the plays as opposed to dissecting them like so many frogs.

I promptly bought my own copy of the movie (for a while there I watched it once a week whether I needed to or not), and went looking for more.  I found Branagh’s Henry V and the BBC canon from the seventies (the highlight of those was a very young John Cleese as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew) and the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet (and his Hamlet, although that was not a highlight, in my humble opinion).  And, lucky me, the next few years produced almost a dozen more excellent Shakespeare films, including the Loncraine/McKellen Nazi-style Richard III, and the Trevor Nunn Edwardian-set film of Twelfth Night, among others.  Not to mention Branagh’s own four-hour Ruritanian (or Barrayaran, for those whose fandoms overlap in the same odd ways mine do)  version of Hamlet (worth every single minute).

So, thank you, too, Kenneth Branagh and the rest of the film industry, for renewing my faith in Shakespeare.  And bringing back the joy of his language and his characters.  Life has been much richer for it.

Not to mention the novel I’m writing as an homage, but more about that later.

I would love to hear about your experiences with Shakespeare, with really good or really bad teachers, or with movies or actors that have inspired you.

Mirrored from Repeating History.

2013 was a pretty good year, all in all.  I marked the twentieth anniversary of my move here to Washington state, which is the longest I’ve ever lived in one area in my life (albeit at five addresses during those two decades).

I finished my third published novel (Finding Home) and wrote a short story (“Homesick“) and a non-fiction book (Cross-Country), and started revising and adding to another manuscript that I wrote years ago, deciding that it needed to see the light of day.

I’ve been researching for a new series that will be set in the coal mining country just outside of the northwest corner of Mt. Rainier National Park, around the turn of the last century.

On the publishing end of things, I took several classes on how to create print books and make better covers, and how to write better blurbs, and one that failed spectacularly to teach me how to market my books, and another (from another teacher) that did rather better, although I’m just beginning to learn how much I don’t know about marketing.

I created print versions via CreateSpace for all four books in my Time in Yellowstone series, which was a major milestone for me.  And a huge, huge learning curve, even though I already knew how to use InDesign.

On the museum front, I finished my third exhibit for a local historical society and started a fourth, and worked with another local historical society to help them get more use out of the PastPerfect collections software they’d purchased.

And I finished a bed-sized quilt I’d been working on, off and on, since 2010, as well as several other smaller projects, both quilted and cross-stitched.

I didn’t really travel this year, except for my annual trip to visit my mother in Texas last spring, and a week’s trip down to Oregon to visit gardens and do some research for a book I’m not sure I’m going to write now [wry g].  It happens.

As for 2014, I want to finish the novel-in-progress, and write at least two more books and publish them all, and keep plugging away on the marketing thing.  And land some more museum work, and finish the new quilt, and do some more work on the garden.

And I want to go somewhere I haven’t been before.  Or at least somewhere I haven’t been since I was a kid.  But I also suspect I’ll be going back to Yellowstone, too, now that I have paper books I might be able to interest people in.  I hope.

And those are my goals for 2014.  Happy New Year to all, and to all a good night!

Mirrored from Repeating History.

Goodreads hates me. There is no question, given how it fights me tooth and nail every single step of the way when I try to update things (I'm beginning to feel like I'm Samwise vs. them as Gollum there). But I've done my best, given that I all but gave up on it a few months ago. It's as updated as it will let me make it be (which includes, coalboy, a listing for Cross-Country here [wry g]).

LibraryThing likes me much better, except that Goodreads balked again when I tried to import my library from them to LibraryThing. But I don't blame LibraryThing for that. I blame Goodreads because it refused to let me log in on the export screen. The upshot of that is I haven't gotten as many books listed on LibraryThing as I managed to do on Goodreads when I first opened that account before I all but abandoned it (as an author, I do maintain my author page there -- or do my best to do so given how ugly, in my mother's sense of the word ("don't be ugly!") Goodreads is).

So LibraryThing is going to be my main home for this sort of thing.

But I do have author pages in both places. Still, I hope anyone who reviews me there puts it on Amazon, too. For each book they review. I still don't have ten reviews for anything but Repeating History. Sigh. Maybe someday I will.

Getting there.

It took the third time as the charm (they'd clinched a playoff spot several weeks ago, but not the top seed), but after today's win -- 27-9 over the St. Louis Cardinals in the last regular season game of the year -- the Seattle Seahawks are the Number One team in the NFC! Which means a first round bye in the playoffs and home field advantage. Which is huge.

Only two home games separate them from the Super Bowl. Oh, I hope they can do it!!!

I can't believe the regular season is over already. Criminy.

Playoffs, here we come!!!