Life in progress

Monthly Archives: April 2017


by 38 Comments

The Friday Reminder and Prompt for #SoCS Apr. 15/17

Hey ho, it’s Friday and time for your Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt. The month of April, as you might have heard, is time for many of us to participate in the A to Z Challenge. With this taken into consideration, I’ll start the prompt with the letter of the day, just to potentially help people along. Here’s your prompt for this week:

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “moo.” Base your post on the word “moo” or a word that rhymes with it. Bonus points if you actually use the word “moo” in your post. Have fun!

After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page and check to make sure it’s here in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!

To make your post more visible, use our SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” “Begin with the word ‘The’,” or simply a single word to get your started.

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours.  Your link will show up in my comments for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top. NOTE: Pingbacks only work from WordPress sites. If you’re self-hosted or are participating from another host, such as Blogger, please leave a link to your post in the comments below.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.

8. Have fun!


by 15 Comments

Kindle – #AtoZChallenge

Ironically, it’s easier to set a paperback alight.

The fact that the word “kindle” in my thesaurus says nothing about the Amazon company’s hardware for reading ebooks caused me to do a little research. First, the copyright in the front of my book is 1998. I thought, ah-ha! That must be why. It is and it isn’t. Well, technically it IS–Amazon released the first Kindle in 2007–but apparently it wasn’t the first ereader by a long shot.

According to Wikipedia, the first commercially available ereader was the Rocket Ebook, which came out the same year as my thesaurus. More interestingly, as per Google, the very first automated reader was invented in Spain in 1949. I think the thesaurus was invented long before that, however. Considering its name, it could even have been dug up like an old bone.

Anyhoo, getting away from all that boring history stuff, “kindle” has some of the most amazing synonyms: “arouse,” “brighten,” “ignite,” “incite,” “sharpen,” and my favourite, “inspire,” to name a few. It’s enough to make you want to write a book. Or read one.

***

Hey, come to think of it, you know which book you should read? Mine! And you can get it on Kindle for only 99¢! Check out my A to Z Challenge-inspired novelette “All Good Stories.” It’s a romantic comedy about two best friends who belong together – Xavier knows it, but Jupiter has her eye on another guy: a shady character named Bob.

“A short funny tale of two friends” ~ Ritu, 4 stars, Amazon UK review

“Quirky and charming.” ~ Bobby Underwood, #11 top reviewers on Goodreads – 5 stars

Click the picture to find it on Kindle, or get it on Kobo here: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/all-good-stories


by 17 Comments

Jumble – #AtoZChallenge

When life is chaotic, it’s good to know a cup of tea is as close as the kettle, even if my bed is hours away.

Yippieee! Today my thesaurus has given me a word to play with that’s both a noun and a verb! That means I can jumble my jumble, or confuse my gallimaufry (which makes sense, because I have no idea what a gallimaufry is). I can muddle my mishmash, scramble my potpourri… I can even tangle my rat’s nest! Wait… my pillow does that every night. That’s what my comb is for.

But you know what? I’m too tired to mix up my miscellany tonight. My house is a hodgepodge, a farrago (another one I have to look up), a mess. It’s disarranged. Yeah, let’s go with that one. And my mind is all higgledy-piggledy, so I think I’ll just tumble off to bed and start all over again tomorrow.

Goodnight, all!

***

For more humorous reading, please check out my A to Z Challenge-inspired novelette “All Good Stories.” It’s a romantic comedy about two best friends who belong together – Xavier knows it, but Jupiter has her eye on another guy: a shady character named Bob.

“A short funny tale of two friends” ~ Ritu, 4 stars, Amazon UK review

“Quirky and charming.” ~ Bobby Underwood, #11 top reviewers on Goodreads – 5 stars

Click the picture to find it on Kindle, or get it on Kobo here: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/all-good-stories


by 33 Comments

One-Liner Wednesday – Colour My World

Almost finished April, and with time to admire it before May.

My colouring calendar.

_____________________________________________________________________________

If you would like to participate, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do,
you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post, and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.

NOTE: Pingbacks only work from WordPress sites. If you’re self-hosted or are participating from another host, like Blogger, please leave a link to your post in the comments below.

As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.

Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”

The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:

1. Make it one sentence.

2. Try to make it either funny or inspirational.

3. Use our unique tag #1linerWeds.

4. Add our very cool badge to your post for extra exposure!

5. Have fun!

#1linerWeds badge by nearlywes.com

#1linerWeds badge by nearlywes.com


by 12 Comments

Idiotic – #AtoZChallenge

I’m beginning to think my cretinous thesaurus is out to get me – I really don’t want to talk about politics, but where else are there idiots? 😉

Whether or not my thesaurus hates me this year, it sure is challenging me. So what can I say that’s idiotic? I’m sure I can come up with something. We all do idiotic things once in a while. I locked myself in my car the other day. Not that it was difficult to get out, but I set the alarm off, causing everyone in the parking lot to turn around to see who was breaking into a car. No one, as it turned out. I was breaking out. It was the second time it’s happened to me. I may have already blogged about the first… That would be a birdbrained thing to do, wouldn’t it?

I’m more likely to do stupid things when I’m tired. Trying to take shortcuts in the kitchen is a classic example of when I’m prone to breaking or spilling things. Walking into rooms and having no idea why – that’s pretty daft.

But being an idiot isn’t all bad. I often act like an idiot with my kids, dancing with them in public and just being generally loony. That they’re embarrassed to be seen with me is their problem…

***

It’s nutty, a bit sappy, it’s definitely funny, and it’s only 99¢! Check out my A to Z Challenge-inspired novelette “All Good Stories.” It’s a romantic comedy about two best friends who belong together – Xavier knows it, but Jupiter has her eye on another guy: a shady character named Bob.

“A short funny tale of two friends” ~ Ritu, 4 stars, Amazon UK review

“Quirky and charming.” ~ Bobby Underwood, #11 top reviewers on Goodreads – 5 stars

Click the picture to find it on Kindle, or get it on Kobo here: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/all-good-stories


by 38 Comments

Horny – #AtoZChallenge

The difference between erotica and pornography is not love. It is word choice.

Yes, my thesaurus stuck me with the word “horny” for the letter H. I cheated on the letter G – I couldn’t cheat twice in a row.

Yet I’ve found something to talk about on the subject, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about writing on for a week or so anyway. I’ve come across the question a few times in the last few months: “What is the difference between erotica and porn?” The answers given on the various platforms have ranged from porn is dirty and erotica isn’t, to erotica is when you have a real relationship and porn is just for one night stands. Neither of these is correct, nor is it true that erotica only includes clean words, though word choice has a lot to do with it.

The short scene I’ve included below is one I wrote about three years ago. It is erotica, it is a bit messy, there are no swear words, and there is no sex. I think I may have linked to it a couple of years ago (it was on another site), so you might be familiar with it if you’ve been following me for a long time.

Enjoy.

“If you want to be a healthy young woman, you need to eat more fruit,” he said as he placed on the kitchen table before me a peach and a bowl of blueberries.

When our relationship was new, he explained that he wanted to wait until at least the third month before we slept together. He enjoyed the anticipation, he told me on our first date. The concept was new to me, but so far I had to agree. Now, as the second month was becoming the third, we both felt the tension of our abstinence.

He told me also that he wished to take care of me. Feeding me seemed a little extreme, but I decided to go along with it for the time being. To see where he was going with it. He hadn’t lead me astray yet, after all.

He turned his chair around and straddled it, sitting at the end of the table, to my right.

“Are you hungry?” He raised an eyebrow and I took in his smile, the roughness of his five o’clock shadow, his lean body all the way down to his belt, below which I could only imagine.

“Famished.” I clasped my hands together in my lap, not wanting to look down but hoping my shirt was unbuttoned enough at the collar to tempt him with a little cleavage.

He picked up a single small blueberry from the bowl and held it to my lips. I opened my mouth but he didn’t let go of the fruit. Instead he twirled it between his thumb and forefinger.

“I want to put it on your tongue,” he said. “Don’t bite it.”

I allowed him to place it in my mouth.

“Press it against your palate with your tongue … move it around … resist the temptation to eat it.”

I moved the little nub of fruit around inside my mouth as I was instructed. It was firm and round and I couldn’t … I shifted it with my tongue to my molars and gently closed them until the blueberry exploded in a tiny burst of bitterness.

I blushed. “Sorry,” I said.

“We’ll try again,” he said, patiently. The one he brought to my lips next was larger. Softer. I knew it would be sweeter and more difficult to resist. The skin of it was wrinkled and on my tongue it felt malleable. This time when I pressed it against the roof of my mouth it gushed, yielding easily to the pressure.

“You really are hungry, aren’t you?” He smiled at me and shifted in his chair to ease his discomfort. “Let’s try the peach then, shall we?”

He held it out to me and I took it. It smelled as ripe and luscious as it looked.

“Bite it,” he commanded, his eyes half-lidded. “Open wide and …”

My teeth penetrated the delicate skin of the fruit, and the juice cascaded past my lips in a great wash of fluid. I tilted my head back to guzzle as much of it as I could, but some of it dribbled down my chin as the flesh of the peach made contact with my tongue. I took as much down my throat as I could handle; the excess dripped from the edge of my lower lip. I felt it drop and then trickle down between my breasts and I moaned.

Licking his own lips in sympathy, or perhaps it was lust, he stared at me, hard.

“Do you want some?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he whispered hoarsely.

***

If you’d like to read some more of my fiction, please check out my A to Z Challenge-inspired novelette “All Good Stories.” It’s a romantic comedy about two best friends who belong together – Xavier knows it, but Jupiter has her eye on another guy: a shady character named Bob. There’s even a touch of erotica in it.

“A short funny tale of two friends” ~ Ritu, 4 stars, Amazon UK review

“Quirky and charming.” ~ Bobby Underwood, #11 top reviewers on Goodreads – 5 stars

Click the picture to find it on Kindle, or get it on Kobo here: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/all-good-stories

 


by 4 Comments

Coming soon! “Blood Phoenix: Imprinted” by Alisha Costanzo

With an old war raging between vampires and shifters, Ria must learn to refocus her life if she’s going to survive.

Her renegade fight was just the beginning. The queen is recruiting new soldiers. Ria’s going on vicious missions with her battle buddy. And her explosive abilities are malfunctioning at inopportune moments.

So now, Ria must forgo her selfish desires to compartmentalize her life, but what’s she to do when she can’t save everyone she wants to? One girl may not be capable of taking down an empire. Good thing Ria’s got help.

Coming May 9, 2017!

An Excerpt from Chapter Eleven:

Tahe whimpered beside me as I came awake with the hot fumes of barbequed meat and blood clogging my sense of smell. Her breath fast and shallow, her nails dipped into my forearm. “You awake, red.”
“Yeah.” A mallet pounded on my temples in a steady staccato, and I rubbed them as the cracked windshield came into view.
“Good.” Her breath caught. “Need some help.”
Terror strangled me when I turned to her. A piece of metal pinned her to the seat through her abdomen. I jumped back, hitting the door handle with my shoulder blades.
“Oh shit.”
Harris blinked at me from the passenger seat, dagger handle jutting out of his chest and blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. “You bitch.”
“Red.”
I jerked back to reality and the blood spreading through her top. I peered around quick, looking for the phantoms of Harris. Nothing but woods.
“Ain’t nothing to go off the deep end about. At least it ain’t wood.” Tahe took another shaky breath. “How far out the back is it?”
The metal came out clean on the other side. “A few inches.”
“Doable.” Wetness garbled her words.
“Okay. You need to stop talking unless it’s necessary. Let me see if I can pull it out the front.” A single hole of a few inches in diameter punctured the windshield on her side, and the metal looked like one of the posts off the guardrail. The end still had a flat wire where it connected to rail and left Tahe enough room to grab hold of it with one hand. I hoped there were no jagged pieces inside that would tear her further when I pulled it out, but if it did, I’d need something to stop the bleeding.
My door was crushed shut. “I’m going to see if there’s anything in the trunk to tend the wound once you’re free, but I have to break my window. Turn away so I don’t spray you.”
Pulling my sleeve taut against my elbow, I hit the glass three times before it shattered. A small chunk fell inside, but the rest remained intact with spider-line fractures that I pushed out.
The trunk didn’t have a whole lot of useful junk: just fluids, a jack, and a spare tire. Crap. I needed to call for help. My phone proved useless with its smashed screen. Double crap.
My giant savior it was then.

Bio: Alisha Costanzo is from a Syracuse suburb. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Central Oklahoma, where she currently teaches English. She’s the author of BLOOD PHOENIX: REBIRTH, BLOOD PHOENIX: CLAIMED, BLOOD PHOENIX: IMPRINTED, and LOVING RED, and co-editor of DISTORTED. UNDERWATER, and AFTER THE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. She’s currently editing her new 2017 fire-themed anthology, writing about Ria’s father, and crafting her new YA novel for its 2018 release. In the meantime, she will continue to corrupt young minds, rant about the government, and daydream about her all around nasty creatures.


Follow Alisha at these sites:

Website: http://www.alishacostanzo.weebly.com

Blog: http://www.alishamcostanzo.wordpress.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/brokenworldauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlishaCostanzo

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/alishacostanzo/

Pinterest – https://www.pinterest.com/alishacostanzo/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4618491.Alisha_Costanzo

To enter to win an e-copy of Blood Phoenix: Imprinted, click the following link:

Rafflecopter giveaway


by 68 Comments

Self-published Books – You Get What You Pay For?

Warning: rant ahead.

There’s a discussion going on in one of my Facebook groups and I’m having a very hard time staying out of it. So lucky you, you get to hear the side that’s going on in my head.

The complaint was a misused word. The sentence they are “Ugh!”ing over included the phrase, “something worst.” The original complainer called it a grammatical error. I pointed out it could have been a typo, and asked if it was one of many. She said it was the only one she’d found, so I said it was understandable: even a spellchecker wouldn’t have picked it up, to which she replied, “True probably self published.” Note the total lack of grammatical issues with her reply. (Sorry, I get sarcastic when I’m pissed off.) What I wanted to say was that even had it been edited and proofread professionally by a traditional publisher’s editing department, they hire humans. And humans are fallible.

Oh, but this isn’t the worst of it all. Someone in the group actually had the gall to say that with cheap, self-published books, you get what you pay for. First let me say that we self-published authors, no matter how much effort we put into a book, have to stay competitive. That means charging less than the big publishers do, because we don’t have the fan base who will buy anything as long as it has our name on it. That means, yes, undervaluing our work much of the time. But even so.

Name one profession other than writing where you can pay the person producing the work under five dollars for five thousand hours of work. Think about it. How long does it take you to read a three hundred page book? Do you think the writer wrote and edited it faster than you read it? Did you pay minimum wage for the number of hours it took you to read it? I don’t care who you’re reading, you’re getting much more than you paid for, and chances are if it’s a self-published author, you’re getting a lot more of their blood, sweat, and tears than you are of an author with a team of editors and marketers behind them.

End rant.


by 39 Comments

#SoCS – Giddiness – #AtoZChallenge

Give me a glass of wine, and I’ll show you one light-headed lady.

I admit it – I cheated. I said I was going to write a post on whatever word showed up on the right-hand page, second from the bottom in my thesaurus, no matter what, but the word I found today was “genocide.” I’m not going to apologize for turning the page. So what did I get instead? “Giddiness.” Couldn’t be more opposite.

Anyway, welcome to the Stream of Consciousness version of the A to Z Challenge, where nothing is deleted and nothing is planned. Also, nothing but typos are edited. Yeah, yeah, sometimes I go back and fix the punctuation. But that’s mostly for your sake. If I didn’t, you might not be able to figure out what I’m trying to say. …or maybe you can’t anyway…

It’s been a less-than-giddy-inspiring day today. My darling son is up to his antics, whining over a game he’s been playing all day. Oh, he’s as good as gold for ten minutes if I threaten to take it away. But every time I walk away, he’s at it again. He’s sitting beside me now, leaning on me, “singing” in his own way – he’s Deaf, so it’s more like a one-note elongated scream – knowing there’s nothing I’m going to do about it because I’m typing. If I don’t do it (post this) now, it’s going to be so late that I won’t feel like doing it. All freakin’ day it’s been like this.

So after he goes to bed, I think I may open a bottle of wine and get… let’s look in the thesaurus… (I’ll take all the “-ness”es off the words, since the original has it.) Dizzy, faint, light-headed, nauseous, vertigo, wobbly, or woozy. I see a few there I definitely don’t want to become. Wobbly sounds good. I remember when I was younger someone calling beer “wobbly-pop” on a regular basis. It fits.

Okay, the kid’s getting overwhelming again. Wish me luck. And wine.

This wobbly post is brought to you by Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Click the link and learn how you, too, can join in the fun! https://lindaghill.com/2017/04/07/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-apr-817/


by 25 Comments

Fen – #AtoZChallenge

I refuse to be bogged down by semantics.

I opened my thesaurus to find my random word of the day, and lo and behold, I’ve learned something new! A “fen” is, apparently, a “bog, marsh, morass, muskeg quagmire, slough, swamp.” And I can’t for the life of me figure out why I would want to call any of those things a “fen.” Or at least I couldn’t, until I looked up the definition. According to Google, a fen is not only characterized as marshy land that’s frequently flooded and has an “alkaline, neutral, or only slightly acid peaty soil,” but it’s also a particular area, described as, “flat low-lying areas of eastern England, formerly marshland but largely drained for agriculture since the 17th century,” known as the Fens.

Giggidy, as Quagmire would say.

***

Wanna read a fen-tastic book? Check out my A to Z Challenge-inspired novelette “All Good Stories.” It’s a romantic comedy about two best friends who belong together – Xavier knows it, but Jupiter has her eye on another guy: a shady character named Bob.

“A short funny tale of two friends” ~ Ritu, 4 stars, Amazon UK review

“Quirky and charming.” ~ Bobby Underwood, #11 top reviewers on Goodreads – 5 stars

Click the picture to find it on Kindle, or get it on Kobo here: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/all-good-stories