Baby Blue

Yesterday morning, I contemplated not getting out of bed.  Oh, I would have had to eventually—I require food like everyone else—but it was rainy, and cold, and the sun was nowhere near ready to come out.  Finally, though, I had to do it.  Sometimes in life we delay the inevitable, and no one is better at procrastination than I am.  Laundry won’t do itself.  Someone had to vacuum.  Someone had to answer my emails, none of which are ever important.  At any rate, procrastination will never help me get another book written, though it does feel odd to be waiting for NaNoWriMo to start rather than writing on my own schedule.  That’s the biggest change.

Unwound

In my humble opinion, the best show on network television is Castle.  I can’t speak for cable or premium channels, but for me, Castle is it.  Oddly enough, in spite of my past viewings of Nathan Fillion on both Pasadena and Desperate Housewives, I might not have tuned into the show were it not for Susan Sullivan, who I love in, well, anything.  The soap star guest spots helped, too.  One problem I had was the time conflict with Hawaii Five-0 on CBS, and for a while I tried to watch both, which was hilarious.  I don’t have DVR or any of that voodoo TV stuff, and I don’t have the spare cash to buy DVD releases.  Thankfully I was given a reprieve—TNT put both shows into syndication and CBS moved H50 to Friday nights where it airs before another favorite, Blue Bloods.  But I’m getting off-track.  Thanks to the marathons I was able to catch up on Castle in a hurry.  It’s an interesting mix of crime, romance, drama, and humor.  I mean, I can’t think of many shows where you can genuinely laugh not five seconds after seeing a gruesome murder scene.  Either the show is funny, or I’m twisted.  Maybe both.  I’m also a sucker for the Castle-Beckett romance.  You can tell people have become impatient—four seasons of waiting for an admission of love, plus one more season before the next step toward commitment, nearly did a lot of fans in.  I think the romance has been nicely developed, and seeing them together is fun because the actors have a palpable chemistry when the show takes a romantic slant.  Television is more expensive than it used to be and shows have a shorter shelf-life.  I have ideas about how I would like Castle to progress, but I’m also eager to see how it all plays out.  It’s easily the best part of Monday.

Just Look at Me

Even though I’ve been slacking in the writing department lately, I decided to take the plunge and start my own Facebook fan page.  The link is at the top of the blog, but I’ll also include it here for anyone reading this individual post or perhaps viewing it in mobile.

http://www.facebook.com/tommieconradauthor

I find myself wondering about the importance of social networking, and whether or not it truly works when it comes to selling yourself as an artist, author, or performer.  I also understand, however, that I sold several books via my personal Facebook page that I might never have otherwise, and maybe I have done the same via this blog.

Bigger Man than Me

October’s arrival symbolizes different things for different people—and for the record, I’ve already put the pumpkins on display in my yard.  However, the symbolism is different for me—October marks the two-year anniversary of my last job interview.  It was October of 2011 when I last sat in an office and answered questions about myself, my skills, abilities, and viewpoints regarding librarianship.  It would be another long five months before I began to write my first novel, “Windswept”.  Approximately ten novels later find me at my present state.  I apply for jobs, and have consistently done over the years, but with no results.  Writing has been my salvation, though I will freely admit to doing nothing more strenuous than editing previous works over the past two months.  Perhaps I am doing things halfheartedly, but no one who knows me well can accuse me of doing nothing.  I can apply all of the career labels I want to myself, but I have neither the means nor the ability to make them stick.  That, faithful readers, will be left up to someone far more generous and considerate than I.

Sittin’ on the Fence

Lately I haven’t been writing, for a variety of reasons.  In the interim I have been pitching some of my work to agents and publishers and hoping for anything to stick.  In the beginning writing was a way to challenge myself, to see if I could actually do it.  Then it turned into crafting stories that I enjoyed reading.  Just because I like something doesn’t mean anyone else will, but I always hope it will speak to someone else.  You usually don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression so you’re always paranoid about your appearance—you don’t want your query to be rife with errors, and you want your opening chapter or writing excerpt to grab an editor’s attention immediately.  Any time you put yourself out there, you set yourself up for rejection.  I’m not a fan of rejection in any way, shape, or form, but I guess it’s just part of life.

Four Down and Twelve Across

When I completed graduate school, I was allowed to, along with the other students working in the university library system, to have my name placed inside a book.  I didn’t even have to think—I chose “The Boxcar Children” out of the Education Library, because it was one of my favorites when I was a kid and remains so to this very day.  My choice was not high-minded or pretentious or even academic; it was simply a work that was meaningful to my life, particularly my passion for reading.  Oddly enough I was not a shy child, but I was painfully self-conscious.  Over the years as I found out that being outgoing was a mistake more often than not, I retreated back into my shell and allowed books to be my friends.  I read all of the original Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner, as well as the ghostwritten later books, which were good but kind of amusing when you consider the arrested development of the characters.  They definitely lived a lot of life over the course of their never-aging selves.

 

Another of my favorites was a picture book, “Winston’s Red Boots”.  I’m not really sure why aside from the art and the fact that I didn’t have a lot of books or toys at that point, and thus made do with what I had.  I enjoyed it so much that I took it to school and recreated the cover for an assignment about my favorite book.  I still have the work, hardcover book on my shelf—the price tag tells me it was purchased at LA Joe for .99.  Hey, maybe that’s where my love for boots and nautical stuff originated.  Then again, Winston’s boots contained a treasure map and I always loved the ideas of maps and treasure and adventure.

 

Two more books I loved when I was older were “Gone-Away Lake” and “Return to Gone-Away” by Elizabeth Enright.  Again, I loved adventures and mysteries and these stories tied in a historical perspective and were so vivid that I could see everything in my mind as it happened, even without the aid of the books’ illustrations.

What were some of your favorite children's books?

 

Right or Wrong

I’ve joked in this blog in the past about writer’s block, but now I well and truly have it.  After writing ten novels in just over a year, with little in the way of a break, I find that for now I have no desire to muster the amount of empathy that would be required to tell someone else’s story.  I have reached this conclusion via several sources, a culmination of events that I don’t wish to share.  Needless to say, I am suffering the usual self-doubts.  I don’t possess an ounce of self-esteem so that’s nothing out of the ordinary.  For a period of time I enjoyed losing myself on the page and creating other worlds, venturing into places and relationships that I can only imagine in the depths of my mind.  Perhaps someday I will again, but I am not in the right mindset to create, craft, or enjoy the creative process.  I also understand that a lot of writing is finding your inspiration and pushing through adversity—but sometimes, I just can’t.