THE DIVISION OF LABOUR AIN'T CALCULUS

Chores. You know, they aren't called chores because they are fun. I live in a house with 3 teenagers. Two of them are the fruit of my loins, the third is a new addition, a nephew of my wife. They are all "the kids" and all part of the household. No true differentiation between them especially when it comes to chores. Now we don't ask much of the kids. Do your own laundry, don't leave food in your room, pick up your crap, you know, simple stuff. Big chores we are willing to pay for. You mow the grass, it's worth $20 bucks. You move big trash up to the curb for Big Trash Day and it's worth a tenner. Not a bad deal. The only glitch in the system is the damn dishes. The Missus recently came to the conclusion that there was no reason the two adults in the house should cook and do the dishes. So now dishes are divided amongst the three. One unloads, one loads, one has a break in a weird rotating schedule that is flexibly adjusted depending on a multitude of factors. Here's the thing. Somehow, I have a 14 year old, and 2, count 'em TWO, 17 year olds who are incapable of loading the damn dishwasher right. It doesn't matter how many times you explain that the hole in the center of the dishwasher cannot be covered by a pot because THAT IS WHERE ALL THE WATER COMES FROM, they still throw something over it. That one pan will be clean as hell, but everything else is dry as a bone. And they will either cram everything in the dishwasher, stacking things on top of each other, cups inside of glasses, bowls inside of pans... Or more commonly they throw two bowls and a cup in the top rack and proclaim the damn thing full. This is with a sink overflowing with dinner dishes left. (This especially happens when dinner runs late and there is Buffy on Netflix to be watched.) Sometimes I swear they suck at doing this so that we will take it back just to have a clean plate to eat on. They don't know us very well. lol.

Men's Work and Women's Work

by Jeffe Kennedy

Back when I was a graduate student, lo these many moons ago, I attended the Neuroscience Convention in St. Louis. There I met another gal of my same age, doing very similar work, and we quickly bonded.

She'd recently married another graduate student and they'd started up their own household. She was at her wits' end, she confided, with the easy familiarity of instant friendship, about the chores. Before they married, she and her husband had shared a communal home with ten other people. People took turns making meals for the entire house. Chores were scheduled out. It had been a great situation, with everyone pitching in, equally.

Then she and her longtime boyfriend married and moved out of the communal house. Though both of them continued with demanding PhD programs, suddenly all chores were hers alone. All the cooking. All the cleaning. All the laundry. When she drew up schedules, like the ones they'd lived with happily for years, he became angry with her.

"He keeps saying I'm his wife," she told me. "I'm completely baffled."

She was considering divorce. Or annulment.

I didn't have much advice to give her except that I think the concepts of "what husbands do" and "what wives do" are so deeply ingrained in us, that they drive us subconsciously. What could be negotiated with a girlfriend, partner or live-in companion goes out the window when she becomes a "wife."

Both genders do this, applying expectations on the other, usually cobbled together from childhood examples, good or bad.

For me, I tend to fall in the camp that the person who cares most about the thing takes responsibility for getting it done. Having a clean, neat house matters more to me than it does to David, so I do most of the cleaning. He cares about having regular meals (I'm a terrible meal-skipper), so he does the grocery-shopping and cooking. I do laundry and he handles the cars. I handle the finances, mostly because he says I'm better at it.

We haven't always divided things out exactly this way. It's changed over our 21 years together - quite a lot from when the kids were younger and living with us. It's changed according to our work responsibilities, too.

Things change and we discuss rebalancing. I think this is also the key to our many harmonious years together. We can always work things out.

My instant friendship with that young woman didn't outlast the conference, though we made the requisite promises to stay in touch.

I wonder still how things worked out for her.

My best writing advice - with a diagram!!

What a wealth of great writing advice I’ve been finding here this week. I love seeing all this and reading through it. 

 And naturally, I have some advice - what writer doesn’t? Hell, I’ve got more than advice, I’ve got a freaking diagram!

I think there are two dispositions writers can fall into. It’s kind of a spectrum. On one side is “Please affirm my talent and love me.” On the other side is, let’s say, “I’m a fierce learning and growing machine.”

I personally believe every writer travels up and down this spectrum. My best advice is to try and stay out of the “Please Affirm My Talent and Love Me” and be in the "I'm a Fierce Learning and Growing Machine" zone. 

Easier said than done!

I think most writers, including myself, struggle in the middle. Because, of course all writers want praise, and every human being wants love—every writer is pulled toward the Love Me! zone, but you can’t grow and evolve if you’re too far over on that side. It’s a constant battle to keep out of there.

For example, with a newer writer stuck in the “Love Me!” zone, if you point out a problem, they’ll explain why they did what they did, so that you understand and see that they aren’t idiots, but it’s a total waste of everyone’s time.

The "Learning Machine" writer doesn’t bother to explain—you have given her something she can use. The learning machine writer thinks, hmm, I see that at least one reader didn’t get this thing. Do I need to dumb it down? Lead a paragraph with it so it’s more prominent? Repeat it? Is this an anomaly or a theme with other commenters? “Take what you can use and discard the rest,” as Bruce Lee used to say.

“Please Love Me” keeps a writer in a place of safety that feels good—in fact, that is the goal of being on that end, safety and and even financial safety, though ironically, it keeps a writer from improving. On the other hand, the Learning Machine side is about taking risks and being okay with failure and trying new things and having people point out things that are flopping. 

I think wildly successful writers can fall into “Love Me” as easily as newbies. I think they can fall back on the shtick that has worked in the past, to kind of calcify into a mode, especially when locked into a long series. But when I look at someone like Kresley Cole, she evolves as a writer even within her series. I feel she is a writer who is on the Learning and Growiing Machine end. 

And of course, minor midlist authors like me can get into that calcification. I was thinking about this whole thing the other day - I was editing and there was this scene I was totally proud of, and it had this Carolyn Crane shtick that I knew would work well, a kind of quirky line of thinking from the heroine that got a laugh—in my mind, anyhow—and I realized the success of the humorous turn was keeping me from digging into the reality of the scene, and more than that, digging deeper would be far less comfortable  for me emotionally in a way I won’t go into. But I cut out the funny and went where I haven’t gone before, and I feel like it was really important for the book.

In a way I'm talking about staying near the edge of my work, the way an actor does. Sometimes I think staying near the edge is about creative innovation, but sometimes it’s about emotions. Like, where is my edge emotionally? Where do I not want to go?  

I have three projects going right now, and one is very much about making money (because I’m super pov right now!) but I still feel I’m finding my edge with it, going places that are daring for me personally (though they might not be daring for others.)

And as I type all this, I’m like, am I really going to post this? I sound like, all, artiste! But, oh well! 

Being in that good zone looks different for different writers. For me, being in the learning and growing zone means everyday writing, and guarding those precious hours and being okay with shitty days of writing. 

And also, it means close reading of the work of authors I admire—looking at how they construct their turns and scenes, even copying out their passages to get a feel for how they’re building. I’m not going to worry other authors will affect my style. Hell, everything affects my style! Music, TV shows, books—in my mind, that’s what growing and evolving is all about, things affecting me. 

This all really is my best advice. My personal goal is to fight to be on the learning and growing side of the equation as much possible. To be always a student instead of gunning for praise.

Most important of all, when you’re on the  “Please Affirm My Talent and Love Me” side, your happiness is in somebody else’s hands, and when you’re on the learning side, your happiness is in your own damn hands!! 

Tools in the Box

I don't know that I've ever had writing advice per se. Workshops, seminars and lectures about different aspects of the craft? Yes. I'm kind of a workshop junkie - always interested in how other people do the work. (And I'm not at all ashamed to steal someone else's mojo if I think I can use it to make my writing easier, faster, or better.) The downside of that is that up until a few years ago, I'd walk into a workshop, listen, and then have a panic attack over everything I was doing wrong. Which brings us to my number one bit of:

Good Stuff
1. Know and honor your process - Are you a plot driven writer or a character driven writer? You'll be happiest if you can answer that question. Take classes, challenge yourself to try different ways of getting your words on paper, but, if you catch yourself worrying about what you've been doing wrong all this time, stop. There is no wrong (except maybe not writing at all). Pause and remind yourself you're simply trying out a new tool. It fits your hand or it doesn't.

2. Know what works for you - You know that saying "When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail"? It does help to have more than one tool in your box, as it were. There's nothing wrong with experimenting with new writing tools or techniques. Explore. Play around with all the different ways of generating content. But at the end of the writing day, only hold on to those tools that actually do the job you want. Let everything else go without guilt. No sense cluttering up your writer's toolbelt with useless junk.

3. Be honest - respect yourself and your audience enough to be authentic. This is easy to say, it is hellishly hard to do. I think the easiest way to get to honesty is to trust yourself. What you feel, how you think, the way you perceive the world - yeah, yeah, it's all unique and we're all special snowflakes - but really, no one else the combination of experiences and filters that you do. Trust what your body, your brain and your emotions tell you.

And finally, in a refrain that should be familiar to everyone:

4. Shut up and do the work. No. Don't talk about doing the work unless you're specifically brainstorming. Work. Motivation for getting down to work? Easy. Do you want a complete story or don't you? If you do, I suspect, you'll find a way to get words down. Somebody said something in a show I was watching. "Do what you love, not what is safe, because when you do, nothing can stop you." I think I love that.

Bad Stuff
1. Anything that begins with 'should' or 'oughta' as in, "You know what you should do?" Yeah. When someone says that to you? I don't think they're talking about you. They're talking about themselves. Consider it an admission of failure on the part of the speaker - 'should' ends up describing what the speaker wishes he or she had done. Now, clearly, there are exceptions to this, all kinds of them, I suspect. I'm talking about the people who want to tell you what you 'ought' to be writing. Or how you 'should' perform in order to fit into the box of their world view. NOT talking about your critique partner saying "You know, you oughta throw some zombie squirrels into that scene!" Cause, really. Don't zombie squirrels make everything better?

2. Excuses. Life is drama.There's always some crisis or some upheaval underway. You have two choices. Let that shit derail you or take solace from it all in writing. And yes, I'm sorry, but unless you're insensate in a hospital bed, it really is your choice to write or not write. Own that. Take control of your choice. Some days, the decision not to write may be the best one. When a friend's son was dying, she'd been working on her laptop while sitting in the hospital at his bedside. Until, one day, she closed the laptop and said, "Done. This is too hard." She didn't write again for two years. It was absolutely the right decision for her at that time. It allowed her the space to focus entirely on her son and then on her mourning process when he passed away. Because she made a conscious decision, she could put the writing away without experiencing any guilt over whether or not she 'should' be working. For someone else, the few lines of text they manage to generate between crises might be the richest, most helpful therapy on earth, giving them the strength to keep going. Where's the bad thing in this? I think it's in lying to yourself - making excuses over why you aren't working rather than owning up to the fact that you've made a de facto decision. You knew I had to quote Yoda, right? "Do or do not. There is no try."


Image Source:  http://www.demotivationalposters.org/tags/zombie/2

Guest Post: Tonia Laird

*Allison pops in*

Okay - last guest post for me this week. (Come hell or high water, revisions for A Trace of Moonlight will be done by this weekend and I'll be back in the swing of things next week.)

That in mind, this week I'd like to introduce Tonia Laird, who is a friend and fellow writer/artist (She's got a super busy schedule so I was happy to be  able to snag her for a guest post here.)

<-- Check out her artwork!

OOO

So. You’re a writer. You’ve always been a writer. First, making up stories first about imaginary friends. Then, as you grow older, imagining the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are hanging out with you in the field behind your house. Michaelangelo was also so sweet, if a little slow on the uptake. Poor Leonardo, he was just boring. After that, you move on to X-Men, writing fanfics about Wolverine and his long-lost daughter, or Storm’s half-sister. (Oh, wait. So you didn’t do that? Are you sure? I mean… I can’t be the only one!)

Now you’re finished high school and you have to join the “Real World”. But really, the “Real World” is so boring. There’s barely any sword fights, and you’re still waiting for that epic mage battle to erupt in the streets in front of your house. So what do you do? You want to write for realz. How do you do that, you wonder? Well, I went down the creative writing class route. For the most part, I was ridiculously happy, almost giddy, about what I was learning and how quickly I began to recognize the problems within my own writing and how to fix them. I loved my instructors. I loved the majority of my classmates. We all had a very good thing going.

That is, until I took a fiction writing class in my second year. Normally, I’m a fantasy writer. That’s what I love to daydream about the most. However, to branch out and become “more rounded”, I took my first year and wrote in completely different styles than I was used to, thinking it would help bolster my style. And it really did. So much that I decided to take more classes outside of the “genre-realm” and save my fiction writing class to concentrate on my fantasy novel. Something I hadn’t touched for over a year.

Well, imagine my disappointment when the instructor announced in class he didn’t want any of that “genre” stuff in his class. There was a collective groan heard throughout the room. The majority of us were genre writers, and we were bloody proud of it. And now here’s this instructor, who I heard many good things about, and not only is he telling us genre isn’t allowed, but he says it with disdain. It was… disappointing.

So… instead of falling in line, which I probably should have, I thought perhaps if I wrote up my work as a period piece, I could get away with working on my fantasy novel. The instructor seemed fine with the first submission, but someone let it spill. This was a fantasy. He shook his head, but said nothing more of it.

When we had our mid-semester meeting with this instructor, he was pretty blunt. He tapped my latest submission a few times on the table, sighed, and finally made eye contact.

“You know… I know this is fantasy.”

“Yes?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Thanks?”

“You know… you’d be a good writer if you just didn’t write genre.”

And…sigh. That’s all I could do. So… if I gave up on what I’m passionate about, I’d finally excel? I didn’t buy it. And I didn’t go back to school after being an animator to write what doesn’t interest me. So what did I do with that advice? Overall? I ignored it. Well, not totally. I would pull that memory to the forefront whenever I questioned what the hell I was doing trying to pursue a career in writing.

Basically, I used that advice as a challenge. I know that the instructor was actually trying to “help” in an old school type of way. But it’s the wrong advice. I personally don’t think anyone should try to steer a writer from what they love. What’s the point of living in your head if you’re not enjoying it?

This is my worst example, and I admit, it isn’t the tip of the iceberg for some other writers I know. And please, if you have any “bad writing advice” stories, I’d love to hear them. Commiserating is group fun!


Tonia Laird works as a writer for BioWare, is an avid monkey trainer, and wears size 6 hockey skates. One of these may not be true... Her blog, The Brawling Octopus, can be found here:   

http://brawlingoctopus.wordpress.com/

Do as I say, not as I do...unless I'm doing it well.

by Linda Robertson

As the howling winds and brought the storm to rage around the little cabin, the children roused from their sleep. They huddled together, wide-eyed and whispering in the dark. Across the room, the wrinkle-faced old woman who'd allowed them inside her rickety shack of a home, was sitting on the hearth ledge. She raised her head as high as her bowed back would allow. Her gaze slid unhurriedly from child to child. 


"She's looking at us," Cindy whispered.


Grace, the eldest of the girl scouts who'd become separated from their troop, shushed Cindy. When the rain began to drip on their heads, however, she began to doubt their safety. Her arms tightened protectively around the girls as if to reassure them, but holding on to them consoled her as well.


The old woman's hand reached out. It was gnarled. Her knuckles were huge, her nails broken. Her skin was covered in dark spots. Just when it seemed the crooked, pointing finger would the emphasize her  scolding, she gestured them closer. "Come, young ones, and let me tell you a story."


I first saw my agent speak at an RWA meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. I did not belong to the group, but I'd traveled three and a half hours to get there just to take his seminar. It was time, money, and effort well spent. I learned sooo much from him. Like:

How does your setting make people feel? 

The italicized passage above should make you worry. Do you know why?

I didn't tell you anything about where they were except that it was a little cabin with a leaky roof, Not necessarily a scary place. I didn't say it had stuffed animal carcasses and spider webs all over; I didn't say it had flowery wallpaper and smelled like cinnamon and honey, either.

So why worry?

Because the characters are worrying. They are reacting to what is around them before I ever get to describe the environment.

The story should revolve around a problem/conflict that directly affects your (hopefully) sympathetic character.

Are you starting to sympathize with Grace already? She's lost and scared, but in spite of that she's acting protective of the younger girls.

"It's warmer by the fire," the woman said. "Come along."


Grace held the girls in place and none of them moved.


The old woman glanced up at the roof. It wasn't leaking where she was sitting. She fumbled around in her apron and pulled something out. 


Grace didn't know what it was until the woman pulled the sheath off of the short blade. She gasped. Her mind raced. How would she get the girls out fast if the woman came at them? Where would they go in stormy dark that she couldn't find them?


The old woman leaned forward. Grace thought for sure the woman was going to rise to her feet and come after them, but she reached a gnarled hand into a basket at her feet and pulled out an apple, which she began to cut slices off of and eat. 


The smell of the fruit filled the air.  Each crisp bite the woman took made Grace hungrier and hungrier.


"You don't want a story?"


Grace shook her head side-to-side. She wasn't going anywhere near that old woman. She had a knife.


"What kind of story?" Cindy asked.


The woman lifted a plate from a nearby table and began slicing the apple into pieces. "The kind you tell on stormy nights."


"I don't like scary ghost stories."


She put the knife away and offered the plate to the girls. "Then I will tell you a happy ghost story."


Cindy pushed away from Grace first. She tried to hold her little sister down, but Cindy twisted as she stood and slipped away from Grace as easily as she did during tickle-fights at home. 


Uh-oh.

They're little lost children, it's night time, there's a big storm, and now, the main character's baby sister is falling for the weird old lady's tricks.

Probably the single-most important bit of advice I gleaned from my wonderful agent is:

RAISE  THE  FRE@KING  STAKES!!!

Once you have begun to give your readers the story of a character they can root for, outlined the problem, start making it worse. If the scout troop's resident booger-eating brat wanted to buddy up to the knife-wielding granny, Grace probably wouldn't try as hard to keep her back. But her own baby sister? Mom and dad might ground her for life if anything happened to Cindy.

I knew after I heard Don speak that I wanted him to represent me. He had, hands down, the BEST writing advice I'd ever heard, all in one compact hardback, in common sense language. I bought that book: "WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL" and the accompanying workbook. I fangirled at a convention months later and had him sign it for me. I can't recommend these books enough. But don't think I'm saying that I'm anywhere near having mastered story telling. I refer back to the lessons and sections of his book often as I write. Some places it shows. Some places, it doesn't. Some places I probably should have referred to the book and didn't. But I try. I try very hard to tell the story in my heart, the story that is true to my characters, and tell that story with as much impact as I can, throwing situations at my characters to test them, to watch them soar, and watch them fail...and pick themselves up again because they just won't give up on the goal. Why? Because that is life. That's what people do. That's what I do.

And, in case you're curious, Don didn't become my agent until eight or nine years after that seminar.

Because I didn't give up on my goal.

Worst Writing Advice

by KAK  

Top 5 Worst Bits of Writing Advice:

1. Write What You Know -- Gods help us, the aliens really have taken over the White House, Nostradamus is a zombie, and England is being overrun by Dukes.We don't talk about Maine. NOBODY MENTION MAINE.
2. Writing is like painting, one must copy the masters to become a master -- Pretty sure that's called plagiarism. Teachers know to copy and paste chunks of their student's papers into the search engines to check for such "practice." (We won't mention the oopsies that snuck by the publishers since the advent of the internet and web search engine.)
3. No Adverbs, Adjectives, or Complex Sentence Structure -- Apparently, the majority of Americans didn't pass 3rd grade English. See Spot read.
4. Dumb it Down / Don't Make the Reader Think Too Hard -- Right. We wouldn't want it to be known that reading could make you smarter. We get all the vocabulary we need from video games. That ability to connect the dots? Psht. That only applies to actual dots. On a tablet screen.
5. Break All The Rules -- When I grow up, I want to be internationally known as a douche. I'll show the business-side of publishing my mad genius by refusing to follow submission guidelines, meet deadlines, or accept editorial input. I'll amass hordes of fans by ignoring consumer-expectations of the genre and blurring the lines by calling my work of fiction non-fiction.

The best bit of writing advice I've received? If you read Jeffe or James's posts this week, then it isn't going to be a surprise.

WRITE.

 (and stay off the internet until you've reached your daily word-count goal)

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND WRITING ADVICE

Walk into a room with 10 people and you will find a writer. Everyone is a writer, or knows a writer. I'm not knocking that. Hell, I LOVE writing. You want to write, by all means, you should. Go for it, rock it out, make it happen. So now we come to the truth of the situation though. If you have a writer in every room, you also have writing advice in every room, because the only thing we love to talk about more than writing is......well...nothing. Lots of advice on writing gets bandied about. The worst, absolute worst, piece of writing advice is anything that tells you to follow what's selling. "You should write a crappy romance with light BDSM elements because it sells." "You should write vampires because they sell." "Oh you should steer clear of vampires because nobody reads that." "You should write like Jodi Picoult" You should write like John Grisham" "you should write like YA books." SHADDUP ALREADY WILLYA! Listen to me dear readers because I am only going to say this once. IT TAKES A LONG TIME TO WRITE A BOOK. BY THE TIME YOU WRITE WHATEVER TREND YOU THINK YOU SHOULD FOLLOW IT WILL BE OVER. Plus, why would you ever want to shortchange yourself by ripping off someone else's gig? Let Jodi Picoult write her books. Let Stephanie Meyers write her books. You? You should write your own damned book. Trust yourself. Write what you want to. Go crazy. Make shit up. It's fun. Create your own world and then go in and screw with it like the maniacal, power-hungry god that you are but do it honestly. Now the best piece of advice is this: HEAD DOWN. MAKE WORDS. That's mine. I coined it. You wanna be a writer? Well listen up cupcake, writers write. It's simple. Not easy. Simple. Get to writing. And no, messing around with your author fan page or checking your twitter does NOT count. Make words appear on your screen that make a story. Get busy writin' or get busy dyin'. Seriously. Why are you still reading this? Oh, you want a NSFW inspirational Kevin Smith video? Okay, but after that you open up your damn story and you don't look away from it until you have a decent chunk of wordage. I mean it....don't make me come over there.

Remember, Always - no, wait! Never...

by Jeffe Kennedy

This is feeling like nostalgia week for me, so I decided to include a pic of me at the book launch party for Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel, lo, these many moons ago. Look at me - all rosy-cheeked with excitement. Makes me want to pat me on the head.

So, as some of you know, I've been over at Novelspot.net all week, talking in installments about my history as a writer. You can see the index here. It was illuminating for me, to review the path I've followed and see all the choices I made. I think that, as we're going along, we don't always see that we're making choices. We just do the best we can each day and hope that we're getting closer to what we want.

But we do make decisions. Every day, every time we sit down to the keyboard, we make certain choices about where we want to go as writers.

When I think about advice, being a child of the 70s, I recall Steve Martin's Grandmother's Song, which gives all sorts of instructions. It includes gems like "Be courteous, kind and forgiving," "criticize things you don't know about," and "be purple, obsequious and clairvoyant." He often gave spurious advice during his stand-up routines. One started with, "Remember: Always -- no, wait! Never..."

That's kind of how writing advice is. We're looking for guidance in making good choices, to becoming better and more successful and people mix up their "always" and their "nevers."

They're absurd concepts anyway. Sometimes I read lists of writing advice and growl. So, this is my vote for Worst Writing Advice:

Anything that includes "always" or "never."

Or that even implies a hard and fast line. If someone tells you to never use adverbs or always follow instructions, for example, pitch that out the window. Any Rules, with a capital R, really beg to be avoided completely.

Okay, so, now that I've just nuked 95% of the writing advice out there, what is the Best Writing Advice I've ever received?

Write Every Day.

Yes, I know this totally smacks of Always. It doesn't HAVE to be every damn day. You can take vacations and sick leave, okay? But otherwise, yes, writing every day makes a difference. It can make all the difference in the world. If you want writing to be your career, you have to show up and do your job every day. You want weekends off? Fine - as long as your butt is in your chair on Monday morning without fail. You need to do research? Fine - as long as it doesn't become a reason not to have to write. You're editing? This totally counts, as long as you're working on your edits in a steady, professional way.

That's what it comes down to. You want to be a career writer? Then treat it like a career.

Remember, you must always-- dammit, no. You must never-- No! I had it the first time.

Always keep writing.

Across the pond!

Nooooo! Marcella took my #1 non-US show, Sherlock. Oh, Sherlock, how I love you. Or actually your show, not specifically you, no offense. Well, I love you as a character, but you are a bit difficult! In only the best, most entrancing TV show way.

~ahem: Quick transition out of that verbal wormhole.

Actually, I want to do a quick appreciation of Martin Freeman as Doctor John Watson - I am just so freaking amazed at his beautiful, nuanced performances. He is so very much that Watson character, kind of long-suffering, but with a secret fire of his own. Are you people watching it? 

Okay, but there is another show I'm fond of, and that is the notorious Downton Abbey. Not quite as swashbuckling a pick as those my esteemed comrades have turned in, but delicious all the same. 

Downton Abbey follows the fortunes of the Crawley family and their staff of servants during the years leading up to World War 1, and then the second season spans World War 1. It's just captivating. Above, one of the Crawley girls and her fightin-Irish chauffer at a dangerous political rally!

As somebody who enjoys historical novels, I love getting this panoramic understanding of an English country estate, with story lines featuring the lowliest kitchen maids all the way up to the Earl, and seeing those stories intersect. 

There are great characters and one particularly fabulous footman-villain! Here he is above, getting pummeled by another servant, a very nice fellow whom he pushed too far. 

Picking this is a little bit of a cheat because it's a joint production of PBS and BBC. I was actually thinking it would be kind of  hilarious if it was totally an American made show and I picked it, like I thought it was non-US because of the subject matter. Well, it would've been funny in my mind! 

Happy Saturday, everybody!

BBC Sherlock

Like our esteemed guest yesterday, I have a great love for all things Red Dwarf. The writing, the sense of humor and the sense of fun the actors brought to the show all combined to make us look forward to PBS fund raising drives. To top it all off, when I retweeted the link to yesterday's Red Dwarf blog post, I got a tweet from the Ace Rimmer Twitterbot saying, "Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast." Hmph. Heartbreaker. I've heard that line so many times.

That said, there's a new show in town. BBC's Sherlock. Loves me this Sherlock Holmes reboot. It's smart and modern. I adore the alteration of Watson's character - a man you *think* has come home from Afghanistan with a ripping case of PTSD - only to find it isn't quite what you think. Sherlock has been updated, too. He's brilliant and he's clear that he's a sociopath. For those of us in the US, the show is only available via DVD rental services like Netflix or as a blu-ray purchase from places like Amazon.

Here's a season one trailer told from Sherlock's point of view (some overlap and a musical backdrop that isn't present in the show). The best stuff is left out.

The thing I like about this update is that Sherlock Holmes is still an addict - but it isn't drugs he's addicted to - unless one counts adrenaline. He's addicted to the cerebral games of one upmanship. I'm also taken with the fact that in this version, John Watson is far more his equal. Perhaps not intellectually, but in a number of other ways, he completely is. Watch the first episode (A Study in Pink). See how that ends and tell me you don't agree.

What else am I missing about the pure win of this show? Anyone?

Guest Post: Red Dwarf

Hey guys - Allison again - and yes, I'm still working away on revisions, so I'm continuing the guest post fun with my friend Simon Larter.

(To be honest, though, I *REALLY* wanted to make a post this week...because I would have completely focused on anime. As favorite foreign TV shows go, the Japanese completely own my heart, and even though I would love to wax poetic on the awesomeness that is Cowboy Bebop or Samurai Champloo or Hellsing or Fushigi Yuugi or Tiger and Bunny or even freaking Star Blazers...alas, I really can't. But maybe when I've got a few moments in a week or so, I'll post about them on my own website...)

*ahem*



So without further ado, here's Simon:

Simon C. Larter is a New Jersey based writer of flash fiction and short stories, who’s slowly working his way up to novellas and novels. He can be found online at simonclarter.com, on Twitter, and other social media havens. He can be found offline at your local dive bar, most likely.

It’s kind of cheating for me to write this guest post, since I wasn’t born in the US, and didn’t move here until junior high. I mean, all of my favorite shows growing up were, by definition, non-US. Long live the BBC!

Er….

Still, since my parents were pleasant luddites who only let us watch cartoons and Blue Peter (it’s not dirty, I promise) for a half hour a day on the 9” black and white telly in the cupboard off the kitchen, most of my television viewing was done in the U.S. of A., so I have to look to my adult life for the true non-US favorites. It’d be too easy, though, to default to Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Benny Hill. So I think the current frontrunner, for pure, cheesetastic amusement and ludicrous silliness has to be…

Red Dwarf

They don’t make ‘em like that any more, do they, folks? And, thankfully, the entire run of Red Dwarf is available via your friendly, neighborhood internet video rental places.

You can thank me later.

***

Oh, and since Allison’s swamped in edits at the moment and asked me to fill in for her, I’m going to go ahead and pimp my most recent publication. Where better than the Word Whores blog, right? Ri-ight?

Right.

See, I have a story in the Space Battles anthology from Flying Pen Press (along with multi-Hugo Award-winner  Mike Resnick, Hugo Award nominees Brad Torgersen and Patrick Hester, and Philip K. Dick Award nominee Jean Johnson), and if I can prove I’ve been responsible for selling 100 copies of the thing, the editor, Bryan, will buy me a bottle of vodka of my choice. It’s even written into my contract!
So why not check the announcement over at my blog, here? And if you do feel led to buy the antho on my account, send me some kind of proof, won’t you?

‘Cause I really could use that vodka. It’s hard out here for a pimp.

Are you being served?

When it comes to shows from across the pond, I like Benny Hill...but ARE YOU BEING SERVED consistently makes me crack up.

Here's a good episode. I believe it's called "Sexy Knickers."

Graham's Crackers

by KAK 

Any BBC mystery ever shown on PBS, I'm all over them. Midsommer? Yes. Poriot? Even when they should have stopped. Lewis? I'll take an extra helping of Hathaway, please.

My truest, deepest, possibly saddest devotion is to ...

Graham Norton

I know. I know. It's not a mystery. It's a talk show. Graham is full of pranks. Mischief. He's like a funnier Johnny Carson. He's not limited by US censors. Best of all, you can tell by how relaxed his guests are that they're completely comfortable with his inane humor.

Enjoy the mind candy:

"YOU'RE MISSING OUT. IT'S LIKE SEX, ONLY THERE'S A WINNER."

Fave non US show. Well, Jeffe stole my number one pick. I love Torchwood and I have blogged about my man-crush on John Barrowman previously. I do love Doctor Who, but as much as I do there is one show done on british TV that is, in my opinion, damn near perfect.

Jekyll.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Starring James Nesbitt in the title role this BBC miniseries is a POWERHOUSE OF AWESOME.

It is a modern-day spin on the Jekyll and Hyde myth. It is written by Stephen Moffat and if you don't know WHO that is then off with your head!

The series is well acted, superbly written, and will take your breath away.

Just watch this clip. This is the opening scene. Tell me at the end that you don't want more.

Captain Jack Will Get You by Tonight

by Jeffe Kennedy

Today's post is a bit of a drive-by since I'm packing up all of my ill-gotten gains at the RT Booklovers Convention and heading home. Speaking of which, if you haven't yet seen sister-Word-Whore Carolyn Crane's hysterically brilliant post on HER RT experience, you really must. So my pick for favorite non-US TV show or series? Has to be Torchwood. Mostly because John Barrowman does a superb job of playing the sexy and omnisexual Captain Jack Harkness. Never has a trench coat looked so awesome. I think partly because it is a British show, they are far more willing to break the lines that tend to confine American television. With a story that's all about challenging boundaries and ideas, this is a wonderful thing. Seriously - go watch it.

Mutual of Omaha Kitty Kingdom

Growing up, I only ever had one dog: Muffin. He was with us from when I was 5 until well after I went off to college. Muffin was a brown mutt of a dog--a terrier-beagle type with a sweet, loving, playful nature - he had to be to deal with three little girls and a practical joker of a father who loved to pretend to throw things and send poor Muffin running.

The late great Petunia. Look how fierce and kitteny!
Petunia was with my husband and me for 18 years. A loving cat &
fabulous high jumper we were greatly attached to.

They always say to not photograph pets looking up at you from the floor, because it is unflattering, but that is how Muffin was in every picture, the quintessential brown medium-sized brown-eyed, slightly overweight dog looking dolefully up at the camera. What a good boy and a perfect family dog!!

When I run around the city lakes, I love seeing Muffin type dogs. It makes me feel happy to see dogs that look like Muffin. Sometimes I dither on which Muffin-type dog I see is most like our Muffin.

One of Muffin's most distinctive markings was a pattern on his behind which, as we kids gleefully pointed out frequently, looked like a gorilla. So, no dog is truly a Muffin look-a-like unless they have the anus gorilla pattern, which surprisingly, many dogs do.

I am including pictures of pets present. Doesn't it suck
that so many pets of Christmas past  pics aren't
digitized? I need to get scanning! This is me and Oblio.
He is awesome, and has supernatural naughtiness abilities.

As an adult, I have moved to being a cat lover and owner. Not that I don't love dogs, but you have to have a certain settled life to be a dog owner. There was the gray cat, Skeletor, adopted by my friend Rachel and me, then JJ, brought to the family by my husband, then Little Ratty and Petunia. My husband and I have had as many as four cats at a time. We love dogs, too. If we ever find a dog wandering, we are always the people who are trying to catch it and get it out of traffic. We then bring  it home and search for their owners, but when we have them at home, we sort of pretend they are ours and walk them and stuff. We love dogs, too. Right now we have two cats.

Tiberius. She weighs about 3 pounds, but thanks to
expert fighting moves she shares with a certain
Federation starship captain, can often best Oblio.

Being childless artistic types, my husband and I have greatly doted on our cats over the years. Naturally we make them their own food. A sample menu item might be raw chicken, raw rabbit or raw bison we get frozen at the pet store, served with pureed organic veggies, mashed up, perhaps with a light frisson of squash or sweet potato. Does that sound like a joke? It's not.

I love animals. I can't imagine a childhood without animals, or a home without animals.

Cats, Always, the Cats

This handsome fellow is the most recent of the Pets Past. Great guy. He thought I walked on water. He was convinced I knew how to turn off the rain (and that I just wouldn't do so when he wanted - this resulted in a few dirty looks during the Seattle winters). When western Washington suffered an earthquake, I was braced in an archway next to my kitchen counter. Copernicus jumped up on the counter and gave me the MOST accusing glare - he was certain all that shaking was my fault. Nothing like having all those super powers in the eyes of some critter that likes to curl up in the curve of your stomach every night.

For my family, it's always been cats. My folks had cats before they had kids. Long before they had kids. When I came along, a Siamese queen named Natoa had prior claim in the title of 'eldest' by a whole six months. She apparently decided that I was as much her responsibility as I was my parents'. As I was learning to crawl, Natoa would hide around a corner, wait for me to draw even with her, then she'd leap out of hiding, slap me upside the face a few times (soft paws!), then turn tail and race away. This, my mother tells me, amused me to no end. Natoa stuck around to participate in rearing me until she died when I was 16.

By that time, we'd had Katmai, who gave us two kittens - Skepna and Tyggja (say Tig-ya). They were followed by Pharoah, Isa, Alexander, Leo and Tabitha. Somewhere in there, I grew up, went to college and established a life of my own. Once I did, I needed felines to be the visible soul of my home (“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” ― Jean Cocteau) I was working at a large software company that shall remain nameless and was a member of a group of cat lovers. I'd been doing feline rescue with the group when a woman emailed that she had a pair of kittens who needed a forever home and fast. My husband and I went out to meet with the lady. We walked in. The kittens oozed out from under the bed to come check us out. They looked exactly like my husbands' childhood cat. We ended up going home with that pair of fluffy white kittens and their kitty condo. That was Copernicus and his sister Eratosthenes (Erie). We lost Copernicus at 8 years old to aspiration pneumonia, but Erie is still with us. She'll be seventeen this summer.

The creatures who share our lives change us and encourage us to live up to their considerable expectations, I think...even if I really don't aspire to causing earthquakes. Honest.

Guest Post: Revenge of the Rat Queen

Hey guys, Allison here - I'm in the middle of revision hell for the next few weeks and decided lining up a few guest posts would be in everyone's best interest, so without further ado, I give you Delilah S. Dawson!


Revenge of the Rat Queen

I was recently asked in an interview if there’s any one thing my books have in common, and this was my answer: murderous rodents.

Not love. Not redemption. Not man’s eternal struggle for… whatever.

Just killer rats.

The funny thing is, I’m not a hater. I’m a cheerleader for the small and twitchy. When I was little, I loved animals, probably because most other kids found me annoying and strange. But my pets liked me well enough, even if it was just because I was the one holding the bag of alfalfa. I was a miniature Doctor Doolittle, with cats, a dog, a piano-playing rabbit, a well-trained parakeet, and a tank full of fish all named, oddly enough, after the rabbits of Watership Down.

But the strangest of all my pets, at least so far as everyone else was concerned, was my rat, Baby. She was an albino rat, the sort scientists use in labs and people use for snake food. She chose me when she was just a little peanut, running up my arm and perching on my shoulder. And, yes, her red eyes looked a lot like LifeSavers holes and her tail looked like a worm. But she was intelligent, clean, and affectionate. I even got permission to take her in to school when I had to give a speech. The topic was RATS, and my goal was to change everyone’s mind about the much-denounced vermin.

Guess what doesn’t make the unpopular weirdo popular? A rat crawling down her shirt.

And yet rats captivate me to this day. The middle grade book that caught my agent (but didn’t sell) was about rats that were actually goblins. My next middle grade book (that also didn’t sell) included venomous silenodons. And my debut steampunk paranormal romance, Wicked as They Come, includes cat-sized, rust-colored, blood-thirsty rats that are a bigger threat than the vampires.

Of course, the real crowd favorites among my readers are the bludbunnies, which look just like normal, fluffy, adorable, innocent rabbits—right until they bite you. And eat you.

Then again, I’ve always loved the odd things, the slimy things, the supposedly unlovable things. From snakes to lizards to tarantulas to vampires, I feel a kinship with the outcasts. When I was little, I loved movies like Piranha and Ben and Troll and Night of the Lepus. And when I got to college and had to read about all the rapes and assaults that happened around campus, I didn’t get pepper spray—I got a red-tail boa constrictor and carried him around my neck to class.

So maybe that’s why I like to give my rats teeth: so they can bite back at a world that rejects them. Wicked as They Come is a love story and a steampunk adventure and trip down, I hope, an Alice-like rabbit hole. But it’s also a story about prejudice and the predator-prey relationship, about what would happen in a world where vampires were just people, and not necessarily the ones with power.

If you ever get mail from me, expect to find a rat on my stationary. I never want to forget that the world’s most hated pest was once my best friend and that giving Baby a taste for human blood helped me become an author.

*
Delilah S. Dawson is the author of Wicked as They Come, out now and the first in a three-book series from Pocket/Simon & Schuster.  It’s a sort of steampunk gypsy vampire circus adventure romance with lots of murderous rodents.

Website: http://www.delilahsdawson.com

Book: http://books.simonandschuster.com/Wicked-as-They-Come/Delilah-S-Dawson/9781451657883

Pets

I'm taking classes every evening this week, so my post is short and sweet.


The pet I wish I had:

The pets my family thinks I have:

The pet I actually have....

asleep, and using the table leg as

her pillow....

The Hairy Beasts

by KAK 

I like my men like I like my dogs ...

Hairy.

What? I don't have Daddy Issues. I have Doggy Issues. For my earliest years, I was the youngest in my family. Yes, even the family dog had more seniority than I. A fact my sister relished. Heck, even my grandparents' dog out-ranked me. I was totally okay with that. Why? Portable blankets that ate my vegetables and gave me baths.

Hey, you're not clean until you're dog-snarble clean.

My baby blanket has dog hair embedded in it. Ninety percent of the family photos have an ethereal glow due -- not to some cheesetastic amateur photography diffusers -- but to the dog hair clinging to our clothes. Hell, I used to get called out of school because my dog had escaped the yard.

 
Fetch, Girl, fetch. Go fetch the dog.

Once upon a time, for three years, there was no family dog. The elder statesmen had passed. We were out of country, traveling most weekends to exotic castles and battlefields. My poor father has never been nagged so much in his life as he was for those three years. Once we returned to the States ~baboom~ D.O.G.

Dog. Dog. Dog.

Yes. Dog. There are no cats, guinea pigs, hamsters, snakes, bunnies, fish, or iguanas in my household history. I know this shocks many of our loyal readers.

If it's not hairy, it's not mine.

In truth, there have been the occasional dragons, but that's another post.

Pets back in the day.

I'm with my fellow Word Whore Jeffe in that while I remember pets I have owned in the past, I don't really have pictures.

There was Zeus, the rottweiler/lab mix. He was a good dog. Big and scary looking but sweet as hell. Minded pretty well unless he got free and then all you could do was send up a prayer for his safety cause he was gone. No looking back, just running wide open. He'd come back in a few hours and lay on the carport until he was let back in. lol.
I would probably still have him today. I moved into an apartment that did not allow pets so I had a friend take him for a bit until I could move to a different unit that did allow pets. It took a month and by that time he was living like a king in a neighborhood full of kids who would get off the bus and go get him and take him through the woods on adventures. Plus my friend had truly fallen in love with him so I left him with her and her husband.

Back in the day, when I was a wee child we had a dog named Tiger. She was a German Shepard mix. Wonderful dog. Sweet, protective. She was always there when we were outside, watching over us. My mother still tells the story of going inside to get something and leaving me in the yard. A moment later she heard me start screaming so she came a running. I was on the edge of the yard, standing there trying to get in the road and Tiger had me by the cloth diaper, holding me back. I was apparantly mad as hell about it, hence the screaming.
Tiger was a good dog, lived a long life and finally died of old age.

I've had cats here and there, but most of them were crappy. I am not a cat fan. Even the coolest cat winds up peeing in my laundry basket....the clean one.

I did have a 10 ft Burmese python named Abigail that I traded a tattoo for. She was beautiful, but very scary. A 10 foot snake is twice the size of my bicep all the way around. She's a 10 ft tube of pure muscle designed to kill things. I lived alone when I had her and I always thought to myself "If this snake decides to take you out while you hold her, what could you do?" Nothing....hope I could stagger outside with 100 pounds of snake wrapped around my face and convince my neighbors to call the cops instead of pointing and laughing.

Abigail went to live at the animal preserve outside of Cleveland Ga.

Now I have a house full of pets. 6 dogs, 1 cat, 1 bird, 1 hamster.

But this one is mine. His name is Cash and you have my permission to "awwwwwww".

Pets of Christmas Past

by Jeffe Kennedy

One of the great drawbacks of these "historical" topics, like this week's theme of childhood pets, is that I suffer from the lack of access to photos. I can picture the photo albums in the living room armoire in my mother's house in Denver and the exact pictures I would show you.

Then I start thinking, for the umpteenth time, how I *really* need to get after digitizing all those photographs.

You can picture those old photographs, from the 60s, barely in color, square with those white borders around the edges. There's the one of me peering at a jack o'lantern with our kitty, Punky, sitting nearby. My dad grins with a hand on Shadow, the Weimaraner, who figures prominently in my early childhood stories. How I learned to walk by pulling myself up on patient Shadow. How my mother would send Shadow to find me if she couldn't spot me in the yard. Shadow always knew. After my dad died when I was three, and we went to live at my grandmother's house in Denver, and Shadow knocked an enormous bowl of spaghetti with marinara over on her kitchen carpet, Shadow went back to live with my North Carolina grandparents. The photo I would show you is one taken by their back garden gate, with Shadow gazing up in soulful concern. It feels like a betrayal that I don't really have any of my own memories of him.

Punky, though - short for Pumpkin - a cranky, marmalade cat lived with us for many long years. When I was seven, Stormy came to live with us. My mom gave her to me for Christmas. A particularly blizzardy Christmas, which is how Stormy got her name. She was my best pal and companion, and lived until I was in grad school in my mid-twenties. I'd show you that picture, too - me in my velvet Christmas dress, my hair up in a bun, and the utter, ecstatic delight on my face as my mom set the kitten in my lap.

I still remember the joyful surprise of that moment.

Those pets gave way to other cats and dogs. All companions to various stages of my life. Their affection is constant. Their simple pleasure in living provides a constant reminder of the daily small events that form the fabric of our lives.

Love to you all.

A lazy girl's guide to humor!

As you may have noticed, we Word Whores are blogging about where we go for funny stuff on the Internet. There are so many funny things out on the Internetz! I see my pals here have alerted readers to many of them! Drat being on Saturdays! No, actually I like it.

I don't have a regular place I go for funny stuff. I more get drawn to funny things by twitter and other people. And then I forget about them. Like the fickle whore I am!

Basically, I depend on others to alert me to things. Ah! But who alerts me? Often Twitter, but there are two awesome funniness alerting blogs...

One of my fave sources of funny stuff is the Friday Links roundup my neighbor and galpal Chris from Stumbling Over Chaos puts out. These links are a gold mine of cool stuff in general, but there is a whole LOL section that always has something funny. Just yesterday, Chris kindly alerted her readers to Kate Roman's awesome tumblr full of vintage unintentionally homoerotic ads such as this one:

And this, from Bronwyn Green's Pinterest, from a few weeks ago, also via Stumbling Over Chaos. 

I feel bad for baby seals! But I laughed so hard. Shows the importance of commas! 

Another of my blogger/writer galpals, KT Grant (aka KatieBabs) does WTF posts every Sunday, which are hilarious. I don't know where she finds this stuff! She turns up a lot of questionable book covers, as well as other items, like this, from Regretsy:

As you see, this falls squarely into the WTF category. Thanks, KT & Chris, for helping my lazy self find endless funny and weird stuff. 

It's All About the LOL

Websites I go to for the funny. Easy. LOLCats wins. Paws down. Yep. Geek, crazy cat lady, and sorry, just not that hip. It's a curse.

Maybe you have to be a cat person to appreciate the original LOLCats site (which really is mostly cats). But now, there's a LOL site for just about everyone. Just remember, if you click on the Poorly Dressed tab - What has been seen cannot be unseen.

Two Lumps used to be one of my favorites and I still visit the site from time to time, but at some point, a writer who intends to make her deadlines has to stop screwing around on the interwebs, yes? It's no longer a daily addiction, but here:

 Then there are the geek jokes. Oh. Yeah, that's right. This is all 100% geek-fodder, isn't it? Oh, well. Like Jeffe, I too, have a fondness for XKCD - there's a stip about that childhood game we all played - Bloody Mary - perhaps it's telling that it's a strip that amuses me to no end. I was apparently unduly affected by that game. But tell me. When you get up in the middle of the night to pee, do you avoid looking in the bathroom mirror??

This one hurts to laugh at because I was once the poor sod with the pager who got paged at 2am because some self-important git would pull this crap. In my defense, I never had to be escorted out of any of the buildings by security - but it may have been a near thing. This is only funny now because there's a decade between me and my last pager duty shift. My husband, who is a programmer, finds it annoyingly entertaining.

Finally. Stories. These are the websites that have no photos - they're the stories people tell about their experiences. The stories have a slow-spread viral quality and you run across them by happy accident when someone sends you an email or posts it to some social media and you're bored enough to click through. This one is the great Squirrel Versus Man on Motorcycle story. Read it and weep with laughter. I do. Which, again, may say far more about me than about what's actually funny.

Funny Bones

by Allison Pang

The thing about humor is that it's so often in the eye of the beholder, particularly when it comes to geek humor. Lots of inside jokes abound on the internet, and unless you're in the know because you're part of a particular fandom, or you're aware of certain memes or whatever, a lot of jokes can fall flat.

That being said, there's a fair number of places I go through the week to find me a little something to laugh about, so I'll start with there.

1) Oglaf.

Not even remotely safe for work. At all. But full of odd sexual fantasy humor that makes it particularly amusing for the D&D set. It updates every Sunday.

2) The Oatmeal

Also not really safe for work sometimes, but tends to have some excellent satire, particularly about things in the news right this moment...or sometimes it's about that motherfucking pterodactyl.



3) Hyperbole and a Half

Funny because so much of it is so damn true. (Even though it's also sometimes rather sad.)

You've probably seen that particular image if you've been on the internet anytime in the last few years or so - it's spawned a million tumblr memes alone.

Still funny, though.





4) The Bloggess

Jenny is crazy. And awesome. And has a book coming out this month full of her crazy and awesomeness. (And she gets to chat with Wil Wheaton. And Neil Gaimen. And Amanda Palmer and Felicia Day and wow am I jealous.)

5) Tumblr

I'm just putting down Tumblr as a whole here, because if it's anywhere on the internet, it's also on Tumblr. But the beauty of Tumblr is that you can follow people who are like minded - so even though I follow a lot of art tumblrs, I follow a huge number of gaming and geek girl type of tumblrs as well. (And yes, there's a fair amount of gay porn and kittens in that mix, but who's counting, right? Right.)

I usually have Tumblr up all damn day. And I laugh a lot more than I used to. And this is a good thing.

Show me the funny!

First, CONGRATS to sister word-whore, MARCELLA BURNARD on ENEMY MINE's release. HAPPY DANCE!!!

For my funnies, like Jeffe, Damn You Auto-Correct

is a favorite that leaves me in tears of laughter every time. EVERY time. Because of stuff like the image here...

on Damn You Auto Correct, it never ends. Some of it seems faked, but who cares. It's ridiculous.

I like to listen to the explicit comedy channel on Slacker.com at work. Since The hair hides ear buds quite effectively, people look at you funny when you're all alone and crack up for no apparent reason.

Then there's http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/

I'm a sucker for Chuck jokes. I know so many by heart that when I start...well, most people walk away groaning now.

At least, I hope it's because of the jokes...

Pimping My Enemy

By KAK

Oh, thank the gods I'm pimping today, because my choice in funny websites is highly, uhm, alienating. There's Unfollowing Jesus and The Daily Squib for starters. What, you ask, could possibly be more important than my utterly questionable sense of humor?

Today is RELEASE DAY for Friday Word-Whore Marcella Burnard!

Enemy Mine

Berkley/Penguin

It was a priority-two alert for beautiful Commander Cashel Khaleize: a contract put out on the life of Xiao Zhong. Professionally, Xiao was the Captain she reported to. Personally, he was man she desired.  But as female Guild Assassin Mekise Tollenga closes in, Xiao wonders if even Cashel can be trusted with his safety. And with a tenuous bond between them, Cashel wonders how far she’s willing to go to earn that trust.

buy from Amazon     buy from Barnes & Noble 

buy from Penguin

No, this is not the 1985 Dennis Quaid / Lou Gossett, Jr. movie spawned from a Star Trek episode.

Marcella's Enemy Mine is an e-novella -- a hot kinky Sci-Fi tale -- that gives some lusted-after characters from her full-length Enemy Sci-Fi Romance novels the chance to show their fight for love and freedom. It's not all leather, aliens, spaceships and big guns ... well, far be it for me to deny your appreciation for the double entendre. ~brow waggle~

I know you've read Enemy Games and Enemy Within. You have. You, good readers, would never pass on award-winning novels. Marcella was nominated for the Romance Writers' of America Oscars-equivalent for this series and won the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice award for Enemy Within. It only makes sense for you to jump on this chance to read Cashel and Xiao's story.

Right Now.

Yes, that's what I thought. Right now you are downloading Enemy Mine to your Kindle, Nook, iPad or other e-reader. Good. We do love our loyal clientele.

PUT DOWN THE MILK LEST IT SHOOT OUT THY NOSE.

Sorry to all of you for completely dropping the ball last week.

This week though I am here and ready to go.

Now I don't usually troll the interwebs for funny. I don't check Failbook or any of the others. I go straight to the youtube and find things to laugh at.

such as this:




HA! I will watch that video over and over....Cats getting theirs is funny to me...Maybe it's because I have never owned a cat that didn't begin using my laundry basket for a litter box. I am not a cat fan.

Then there is the ever lovely ASK A NINJA. I will get wrapped up in these for hours..it's funny, charming, smart, and can sneak up behind you in a an alley and slit your throat.

Hi larious.



They can throw a shuriken, then jump on top of it. It hits you in the neck and they punch you in the face.


And finally, I love Louise CK. He's raunchy and wrong, and listening to him will make you feel really bad for laughing, but he is so frakkin funny.

Here is a clean bit he did on late night tv that is funny and poignant.




Okay...one more. Stephen Lynch. Funniest man with a guitar....this is about the only clip safe for work so enjoy it. Click on any of his others at your own risk.

Daily Laughs

by Jeffe Kennedy

This week is for telling you about our favorite websites for laughs. Since today is April Fool's day, I was thisclose to posting all the really disturbing sites out there, like anti-birth control forums.

Then I decided that is just not funny on any level.

So, I'm playing it (more or less) straight. I have a folder in my Favorites called "Dailies." These are the sites I visit every day, if I can, that nearly always make me smile.

(I'm leaving out all the advice columns I also click on daily, because those aren't really for laughs. Those are more so I can gossip about people's life choices with sister INTJ Laura Bickle.)

I led off with XKCD, above. It's described as A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. I love that I have to think about it sometimes, before I get the joke.

I've been reading Cathy for a lot of my adult life and she still makes me laugh. Cathy Guisewite has retired it now, but they're recycling all the ones from the 80s. Which are surprisingly still pretty damn accurate.
I read Heather Armstrong religiously. Ha! that's a joke - if you read her blog, you'll get it. The post I linked to with her pic is a good example. (All of the pics and comics are linked to the sites, for your acquisition pleasure."

Ah, Doonesbury - another lifelong pleasure. Just when I think I'm the only one wondering about how absurd things have gotten, Trudeau does a strip on it. Thank you.

I tried to grab just one panel of Questionable Content, but no dice. It will be too small to read - just click to go to the site. This one is a serial story, so you kind of have to get into it before the real funny emerges. Totally worth it. (And no - it's not always on a space station. That's just the recent thread.)A day without Damn You Autocorrect is a day without sunshine. All from the mistakes people make with the predictive text on smartphones. Priceless.

I admit it - I love to rubberneck at the fashion fails on Poorly Dressed People of the World. Maybe it's more of a grimace sometimes than a laugh. But wow. Just wow.

Finally, my new very favorite: The Moment Junkie. They won't let me swipe their pics, so you have to go look. It's all wedding photos, and it's more of an "Awwww" experience than a laugh, but it's so wonderful to see people being emotional in a joyful way. Love, love, love to visit this site.

Now I'm looking forward to the rest of the week, to see what I need to add to my folder!