Life in progress


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Legends of Windemere: Allure of the Gypsies Cover Reveal!

allure-final-cover

Cover art – Jason Pedersen

Book Title–  Legends of Windemere: Allure of the Gypsies

Book Blurb– The epic adventures of Luke Callindor and Nyx continue after their journey down the L’Dandrin River in Legends of Windemere: Prodigy of Rainbow Tower.

Reeling from his failures in their previous adventure, Luke leads his surviving friends to his hometown.  With his mind frayed and his confidence fractured, Luke must face the family and fiancée he left behind.  It is a brief homecoming when the vampire Kalam attacks the village, forcing Luke and Nyx to break into his lair for the key to resurrecting a fallen warrior.  It is a quest that will force both young heroes to reach new heights of strength and power that they never knew they had.

 Can Luke and Nyx escape the lair of Kalam?  And, what role will the orphaned gypsy Sari play in their looming destiny?

Release Date–  December 1st, 2013

Previous Books–

Beginning of a Hero-  http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Hero-Legends-Windemere-ebook/dp/B00BL9GBU2/

Prodigy of Rainbow Tower-  http://www.amazon.com/Prodigy-Rainbow-Legends-Windemere-ebook/dp/B00E8WUD5S/

Cover Artist Info–  Jason Pedersen http://www.jasonpedersen.com/

Author Bio – Charles Yallowitz was born and raised on Long Island, NY, but he has spent most of his life wandering his own imagination in a blissful haze. Occasionally, he would return from this world for the necessities such as food, showers, and Saturday morning cartoons. One day he returned from his imagination and decided he would share his stories with the world. After his wife decided that she was tired of hearing the same stories repeatedly, she convinced him that it would make more sense to follow his dream of being a fantasy author. So, locked within the house under orders to shut up and get to work, Charles brings you Legends of Windemere. He looks forward to sharing all of his stories with you and his wife is happy he finally has someone else to play with.

Go to Charles Yallowitz’s blog: www.legendsofwindemere.com


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The Healing Power of Vitamin C

Every once in a while I come across an opinion piece in the newspaper or on the internet, stating the importance of Vitamin C in preventing and even curing illnesses. By far the most astounding account of it is this:

http://www.sott.net/article/256313-Did-Liposomal-Vitamin-C-cure-cancer

in which Vitamin C was apparently proven to cure leukemia in a child. The data is actually quite convincing.

I stumbled across the concept by accident years ago, when I realized that if someone else in the house had a cold, or if I felt the beginnings of one in myself, if I took at least a 1,000mg (1 gram) pill, I could avoid the cold altogether. This didn’t work, however, when we all had H1N1, but then again, according to the article, maybe I just didn’t take enough.

It seems to me that there’s enough evidence that Vitamin C works, that it brings up once again the subject of the big pharmaceutical companies having the monopoly over the market, and that doctors are perpetrating their hold on our wallets.

Nevertheless, I urge anyone who hasn’t already to try taking 500 – 1,500mg per day, in the case of the common cold. You can’t, from what I understand, overdose on Vitamin C, though it is thought best to be taken throughout the day rather than in one large dose, as anything more than is necessary for your weight and size will just go straight through.

It’s cheap and it works. On what, we have to trust the “experts.”


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Nature vs Nurture in Fiction

Twins. Part of the plot in my NaNoWriMo project required a case of mistaken identity, so instead of having one protagonist, I’m writing one and a half. I call the twins “one and a half” protagonists because I’m writing in the first person – so I’m getting all of what one of them thinks and only half of what the other does. They’re both good guys, Marcel and Max are. Decent men from a good family – very much the same in many ways.

As usual, something happened in real life which made me contemplate the differences between siblings. In this case it was a  conversation with the lady who manages the dry cleaner on my paper route.  She has two granddaughters who she loves to talk about. She was telling me how unalike they are, even though they’re very close in age. This is a subject (among many) that has always fascinated me, being an only child. My own children didn’t grow up as siblings usually do, since they all have such physical differences,  so it’s something I must study from a distance.

The difficulty I’m experiencing in my novel is that the twins, Marcel and Max, sound the same when they speak. It makes sense to me that they should, but they end up coming out like these guys:

6a00d83451d77869e20133f4bccfb2970b-800wi

Not all that polite mind you, but they speak exactly alike.

Once NaNo is done and I can put some thought into it, I’ll work on finding something unique about the two, which will come out in their speech. But in the meantime, I’m wondering what about their natures, and not their nurture, can help my readers to tell them apart.

Have you ever written siblings and come across this problem? Let’s learn from each other!


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What’s in your Main Character’s Fridge?

I’ve been seriously thinking about how much my own tastes influence my fiction. The other day, my characters were in a restaurant and I purposely made them order something I, personally, wouldn’t eat.

It occurred to me that maybe I’m thinking about this too much – micromanaging my story. But the fact is, they’ve gotta eat. And I find it boring and not really credible that they’d like ALL the same things I do. If for no other reason than every character in every story I ever write always eats the same group of foods, I feel like I have to change it up once in a while.

Is this something you’ve put any thought to? If you’re a vegetarian, do you ever have your characters eating a nice juicy steak?

How else do your characters not reflect your tastes?  (Human characters, that is.)


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The Trust of a Child

I read once, when my kids were very young, that a baby who laughs when it is startled is a baby who trusts his or her mother. It’s something that I found followed through to their toddler years and beyond. I joked with my kids that I was going to do horrible things with them; cook them and eat them for dinner for instance. They’d laugh, knowing I would never do such a thing, because they trusted me.

There was one instance that I will never forget and I try not to regret for the simple reason that it taught me something.

I was leaving the pool where Alex was, at the time, doing physiotherapy. He wasn’t walking yet at the time, so he must have been less than five years old. I carried him out of the building, loaded with purse, swimming clothes and Alex all in my arms. I remember it was cold. I put him down on the curb in front of the car but to the side where I could see him, so I could wrestle my car keys out of my coat pocket. Had a car come, I was prepared to stand in front of it to prevent him being hurt. I proceeded open the doors and put the bags in. Then I waved goodbye to him and pretended to get into the car, expecting him to laugh. He knew I would never leave him there by myself. But instead of laughing, he smiled at me and waved back.

Whether he didn’t understand the joke or not, the vision of that tiny little boy sitting bundled against the cold, waving goodbye to me with a trusting smile on his beautiful, innocent face, still brings a tear to my eye.

Our children live in the world we construct for them. Whether they are healthy or sick, they can learn to be happy from us as parents because they trust what they see – the example we set. Alex spent the first eight months of his life in the hospital. All he has ever known, from birth, is pain. To this day he wakes up almost every morning with reflux, trying to vomit past an operation he had at six months of age called a fundoplication – basically, a knot was tied in his esophagus to prevent anything coming up. And yet he is the happiest child I’ve ever met. Other people observe this and ask me if he’s ever unhappy. It’s all he’s ever known. He sees me deal with his morning time retching with ease and he is reassured that it’s normal.

One day I know he will find out that it’s not. Will he stop trusting me at that point? I have no idea. It’s for sure that I’ll have the task of assuring him that even if it’s not something everyone experiences, it’s just the way he is, and that’s okay.

The point I’m trying to make I suppose, is that our children are our sponges. They take from us what we show them, and whatever that is, they trust it, because from the very beginning, we are all they know. I hope, for my own part, to preserve that for as long as their personal experiences away from me will allow. And that they will continue to laugh all their lives.


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What the heck, Word Press?

I just typed three words into a new post. I saved it. It counted two words. This post counts twenty eight. There are actually twenty nine. Check it out.


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Write What You Know

Write what you know; write what you know; yes, yes, okay we get it already. But have you ever wanted to write who you know? Fictionally that is.

When I write, I write characters. Plots in my stories, are secondary. I take, for instance, a scenario, ask ‘what if?’ and off I go. Once I have a character in place, they decide what happens in the circumstance I put them in.

I know a few people very well. Family, friends – I can’t help but know them. The people I don’t know very well, I study. I watch the way their expressions change when they talk about certain topics that they love or which scare them… you get the picture, right?

But there’s that saying again. That rule. Write what you know.

Now say, for instance, I was to write about someone I adore. They probably wouldn’t mind. They’d be able to hold my bestseller up high and say, ‘This is about me!’ and they’d be proud to do it. But what if I wrote about someone who I don’t respect? Or someone whose personality is less than scrupulous? I wouldn’t use their real name, of course. And the story would not be the one they lived in real life. But they’d know. And I’d know that they knew. And then I’d have to wonder; are they planning to do something devious to smite me? After all, they aren’t the most the most pleasant person to deal with in the first place. How far will they go?

Write what you know. I know very little about ‘things,’ but I know a lot about people. About characters and what makes people tick.

Have you ever ‘written’ someone you know, fictionally? How would you feel if someone ‘wrote’ you?

Tick tick tick… boom!


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Serendipity

ser·en·dip·i·ty

noun \ˌser-ən-ˈdi-pə-tē\

: luck that takes the form of finding valuable or pleasant things that are not looked for

:  the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also :  an instance of this
The above is according to Merriam-Webster online.

The most notable instance of serendipity in my life was the meeting, for the second time, of my children’s father.

Luc and I first met when we worked together in Aurora, a small town just north of Toronto. He came into my workplace and asked for my boss. The first time I laid eyes on him I remember thinking to myself, “And what the fuck do you want?” It had been a hectic day, or so I tell myself twenty-eight years hence. I was, hours later, to find out that he was my new manager, and I thanked the heavens above that I hadn’t said out loud what I was thinking. We’ve laughed about it many times since.

Months passed, and he and I got along well. He’s a nice guy. Then he was transferred. A few weeks later I found out that he’d broken up with his girlfriend. I, too, had broken up with my boyfriend and was looking for a roommate. I offered, he refused. Shortly after he decided to go back to Montreal, to be close to family and we lost touch completely.

Seven years down the road found me living close to Ottawa. I’d been there for a couple of months and was heading back home to see my mom near Aurora and I stopped for gas. Luc was there, working at the pumps. It was serendipity – fate, if you will. A year later we moved into our own house and I was pregnant with our first son.

Three kids plus a few years later another seemingly serendipitous event occurred in my life. As it turned out, it wasn’t so lucky and my relationship with Luc ended. Perhaps it was fate, but if it was, I haven’t seen many benefits from it. I am single, yet again.

This all comes to mind because I met someone online, a couple of days ago, with whom I have a great deal in common. Whether it will continue into a lasting friendship or fizzle into nothing as these things sometimes do, remains to be seen. But for now it feels like fate.

We never know what fate will drop in our laps in the next instant. We can only hope to have great serendipitous events, that brighten our outlook, that give us hope for the future, and that help us to believe that maybe there is such a thing as good luck.

Serendipity can take us to important periods of our lives, which may seem to have been fated to happen. On the other hand it could be some little thing, like losing and then finding a piece of jewelry. Just about everything leads to something, right?

What is your best serendipitous event? I’d love to hear about it. If it’s really wonderful, why don’t you blog about it? Just please be sure to put a link in the comments here, so I don’t miss it.


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If Only, part deux

real

I find myself saying ‘If I could only just…’ a lot.

If I could only just find more time to write…

If I could only just have more money…

If I could only just find true love…

It goes on, ad infinitum. But all these things denote that I’m not content, when for the most part, I am. I have my children here with me, we have a roof over our heads, the air inside is warmer than outside, and there is food in the fridge. And I’m keeping up with my writing quite well, although sometimes it’s a struggle to do anything else.

So what is it which makes me wish for more?  Is it simply the human condition to keep striving? It’s hard, for me at least, to keep my mind from going, from wandering, and from wondering what it would be like if I had just a little more.

ghost

Now if only I could consume nothing but coffee and chocolate and wine and cheese …. then I’d be happy.

What would make you happy?


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Word Press Views and What I’ve Discovered

It’s been a week since I posted Getting Views is Like Pulling Teeth in which I complained that since the reader went all to hell my view count has gone down, so I thought I’d post a follow-up on the conclusions I’ve come to.

As Chris McMullen (http://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/) pointed out, the new pop-up window in the reader does seem to provide us with what counts as a view. I know this because I’m now getting as many views as I am ‘likes.’ This is something they’ve fixed recently, obviously, because last week when I posted, I wasn’t. I’d be happy to know if anyone else is finding the same result.

But at the same time I’m finding my views per visitor as dropped substantially and I think this is really where the problem lies. While it’s great to have lots of views for the post we just published, the pop-up window still discourages people from visiting our sites, from following, and from seeing what else we have to offer. It’s especially damaging for those of us who are selling something on our websites, particularly if we’ve paid for the site in order to do just that.

I encourage everyone who has a problem with this to complain.  Here is the link to the forum which discusses it: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/reader-changed?replies=284

They have already addressed the issue of my initial complaint, (not to me personally) which was to please put the word count back in the reader for each post. If you click on the word count, now that it’s back, you bypass the pop-up window and go straight to the original site. If you click on the title of the post, you get the pop-up window. However, if the post is short and doesn’t have any more words than fit in the reader preview, it’s obviously not an option – you just get the pop-up.

I did change my reader view to “Read full post…” and I believe that has helped my view count at least. You can do this by going here, and I quote: “In your dashboard go to Settings/Reading and then scroll down to “For each article in a feed, show”. Select either Full Text or Summary.” Thanks to mewhoami (http://mewhoami.wordpress.com/) for this tip.

Anyone who is still following this thread and is still interested in this topic, I’d love to know if you’ve made or seen any changes in the past week and have come to the same conclusions, or if you plan to write and mention your dissatisfaction with this awful ‘improvement’, in the forums. I think the more we talk about this issue with Word Press, the more we’re likely to have something done about it.

Thanks very much for being on board with me on this. 🙂