Ten Simple Daily Pleasures

People always say to count your blessings. Here's ten of mine I enjoy everyday.

1) A cup of coffee in the quiet early morning.

2) Walking for fun and exercise while listening to music and allowing my mind to roam.

3) Walking to work, either bundling up again the snow (cozy) and chill or basking in the warm sunshine (freedom). Both have merits.

4) Midnight cuddling like a baby.

5) Poor man's massages from Faith at bedtime.

6) A late morning cup of coffee while pouring over my work.

7) The inherent rhythm of a day I've arranged.

8) A cup of frozen fruit at bedtime.

9) Listening to a person discuss something (a topic, a person, an event, a cause) that excites them (and basking in the sudden realization that I get paid to do this).

10) Taking scrambled notes (be it features or fiction) and arranging and composing them in ways that elictes interest and emotion in readers.

Steward Setback Saturday: On Becoming an Ed Calkins Wife, Part 1

Saturday, May 5, 2012

On Becoming an Ed Calkins Wife, Part 1

By Ed Calkins, the Steward of Tara

On this topic of qualifications for wives of Ed Calkins, understand that one must actually meet Ed Calkins in person (unless, of course, you're holding one of my famous dollar bills; more on this later. Or maybe you'd consider sending it back as a gift to your new hubby? If one percent responds to that favoribly, I'm buying a new car (matchbox)).

Meeting me in person is actually quite a task because I'm quite reclusive. This may surprise anyone that has actually seen me in person, but it's true. You see, I enjoy my little delusions very much and find the easiest way to confirm them is to avoid any evidence to the contrary. This means avoiding people.

Yes, I know there's alway simple denial, but that takes out all the energy for ruling my fantastical realm. In fact, it's because I'm so much of a hermit that normally, when I do get out, I have a lot of pent up socialization to unleash.

Still, its actually quite difficult to get me out of my little man cave. I have a standing date with wives one, two, and four every Friday at five o'clock, but it usually takes three or four phone calls to get me there by six (true story, all of it).

Another qualification is age. A prospective wife must be reasonably mature. Now, I know you Tilted Kilt girls are going to claim being "mature for your age," but that isn't helpfull at all. The legal age for drinking and adulthood might be twenty-one, but if you're only thirty-one and trying to marry Ed Calkins, you better look awfully old for your age. Even those women under forty-one might get adopted instead of married.

What's the difference? The later might get a rose the day after Calkins Day, the former gets a Barbie doll around Christmas (if you're good).

More later

Yours ruthlessly,

Ed Calkins, the Steward of Tara

Live Life Instead of Writing About It?

That was a line fired off to the author in Once Upon a Time, the episode Rebekah and I watched last night (We are behind).

It went off like a gong in my head. Whoever wrote it must be jealous of writers, LOL! Then again, maybe not, because the author has plenty of power in this series.

Okay, enough spoilers for fans of the show who are also behind in the episodes.

As a writer, I have never felt as if I was living life on the outside looking in. Rather, I feel humbled and blessed that thousands, yes thousands, of people have shared their grief, hopes, dreams, wishes, challanges and triumphs with me, and then allowed me to immortalize those experiences so the world can know, too.

Diversion: There was no way I could have known, that morning in my junior year of high school, when I woke up with the brand-new Styx song The Grand Illusion still playing in my head, that Dennis DeYoung would ask me, during the course of a converational interview, what my favorite Styx album was. And I could list a hundred more such anecdotes.

Now to those on the periphery of my life looking in, I may appear boring and staid. I write, spend time with family mostly, keep up with a few close friends, occasionally hang out with other writers, and write some more. I write features at work and fiction at home. When I'm done telling the stories of real people, I go home and invent people, and then tell their stories, too.

I cuddle a few cats, too.

Boring? Have you ever constructed realms from words and then peopled those realms with living, breathing people, and then shared THEIR grief, hopes, dreams, wishes, challanges and triumphs? I can assure you, it is far from boring.

There is nothing quite so hopping-up-and-down-on-my-chair exciting as reading feedback from another reader who laughed and cried with characters and booed and cheered them on.

Excuse me, but I have to get ready for church, a real church, with real people. 

But on the way up, I'll be working on the first draft for Tuesday's health story in The Herald-Ne3ws.

Denise Unland's Alternate Geneology Part 4

By now, a life of compulsion had taken its toll. Already very over weight, hopelessly in debt, over thirty, and unable to find any really good comic books; how much did Leo really have to lose? Nero had already died and with each new emperor, the Christian persecutions had expanded. Each day the coliseum’s scratch sheet listed the deaths of Christian inmates as a 'sure bet'. Why couldn't he get in on that?

The next day, Leo stood in the center of the town square and proclaimed himself a Christian. The towns folk, doubled over with laughter. Leo insisted, revealing the cross he wore under is tunic around his neck. They laughed even harder, tossed coins in his direction, and swore that this comic prop was even better then the donut stained scratch sheet he once produces when he did that bit about being 'addicted'. The more he insisted, the harder they laughed, catapulting his comedian career while doming his ambitions as a martyr.

In the days that followed, Leo's professing being Christian began to competing with coliseum attendance, creating an ancient version of late night TV wars. No matter what he tried, Leo's proclamations of Christianity were the most outrageous jokes to grace the streets. Not helpful was Leo's new addiction. No longer able to afford comic books, Leo discovered that the images in temples were far more entertaining and enjoyable than kneeing on rice. Perhaps the best joke passed around was him claiming he only went to temples for the art! Even his habit of wearing a white tunic with a red cross only got him the called "The Comic Crusader". (I wonder if Leo invited the T Shirt.) After years of this, Leo realized he would never make martyrdom.

Finally, Leo, now morbidly obese and spiritually devastated, gave in to the priest and converted to Hinduism which required a diet of only vegetable. Perhaps it was the change of diet, but Leo's addictive personality began to withdraw. Not only did he avoid bakeries, and kneeing on rice, but he stopped proclaiming, which destroyed his career as a comedian. In addition, he lost a lot of weight which didn't escape the local military. It occurred to the authorities that Leo was fasting, and probably kneeing on rice in secret. The authorities, who never really enjoyed humor, realized it first. Leo was a Christian!

Crowds gathered at his home when he was arrested, convinced that this was a comic stunt that the government was in on. They roared, rolled, and choked with laughter as Leo loudly protested that he was no longer Christian.

Denise Unland's Alternate Geneology Part 1

In Bryony, Melissa meets one vampire who stands apart from the Victorian society in which she travels with composer and pianist John Simons. That vampire is Ed Calkins, who calls himself, "The Steward of Tara."

Ed believes that it is the right of every Irishman to create myth. Under this premise, Ed penned my "Irish" geneology. The first part is posted today.


Although Denise's Irish ancestry can not be directly proven, it’s quite apparent to any rational being that lacks prejudices to the contrary.

Denise’s first known ancestor is a man named “Uly of too many children.” He was smallish man, studious, numerant, and if eye glasses had been invented before 1700 B.C. and available along the eastern Mediterranean coast, he would have worn very thin lenses.

Uly married a woman to whom he never paid much attention to, since he favored scrolls and theroms to her feminine charms. Nonetheless, she bore sixteen children, none of which were fathered by Uly. So Uly, after number 16, (which was actually the child's name because Uly was very good with numbers, but had trouble with names and complex sentence structures, although he was very good with complex equations) realized that his wife had been cheating! As he prepared to throw her out, it suddenly occurred to him that she had been gone for several months.

Anyway, poor Uly and his 16 unknown children were left to fend for themselves. What did Uly do? He took a paper route by ocean. Because this was three thousand years before the invention of the printing press, a carrier in Uly’s time had to compose the paper first, copy it as many times as he had customers, then deliver it. One could say that Uly was a publisher, reporter, and carrier. The route consisted of the ancient equivalent of a trailer court and gated community.

Each morning, Uly would compile his observations of the following day, write them on a scroll, and give it to the lowest numbered child to replicate. That child would give his copy to the child whose number was one less then his until all children were copying and all editions were written.

Uly had two publications to deliver: The Hellenic Times and the Trojan Inquirer. Each bore the same news, but the trailer court, which preferred the Hellion Times, and the gated community which received the Trojan Inquirer, were none the wiser.

In addition, it might be added that the children quickly grew bored of their coping tasks. Sometimes, bored with journalistic integrity and ready at any chance to rebel against parental authority, they wrote their own views instead of Uly's representations of the fact. Others drew comedic pictures. In this way, Uly's papers might have invented the editorial and the political cartoon.

Page Breaks

Despite incessant, over-the-shoulder nagging from my sixteen year old daughter that I was way past my bedtime, I grimly reset all the mesed-up page breaks for the first few chapters. I just HAD to make a dent in repairing those flaws before I could sleep.

For the next ten days, I ruthlessly reset those breaks page by awful page, printed each one to check margins and copy errors, and reset and retyped when necessary. I held my breath when I finally e-mailed my manuscript to Cindy Grady, WriteLife’s managing editor. I'd never make a living as a copy editor.

I spent the next two months catching up on homework, features, press releases, and Staked!, the third novel in the Bryony series. My inbox was often full of cover drafts and interior images from Kathleen. The book was coming alive!

In the meantime, my children caught a mild form of the writing bug. Daniel, 14, started a werewolf story, and Rebekah, 16, worked on her historical romance. Timothy, 19, began a story detailing the adventures of a pedantic old man whose is world is turned topsy-turvy. My twelve year old niece sent me chapters of her novel as she completed them. At the end of April, round two drafts arrived, along with a two-page letter from the editor that worked on it. I was pleasantly surprised.

Happily, I made the adjustments, added the requested scene, and sent back the manuscript within three weeks. I devoted the next couple of weeks, including all of Memorial Day weekend, to finishing a draft of Staked!