Tag Archives: Kindle

Harder to Write Romance Than Criticize It

The Kiss

'The Kiss,' by Francesco Hayez

“If you think it’s so awful, why don’t you try to do it yourself?”

That’s the sort of thing you get thrown at you if you criticize something. No one’s said it specifically to me, even after going on and on about ‘The Trouble With Modern Romance,’ ‘Healthy Romance Makes Bad Novels,’ and ‘The Missing Ingredient in Too Many Romance Novels’ – but you may have been thinking it. Well, let me assure you that romance is one thing I write often, and it is harder to write than it looks.

Want to know if I’ve succeeded? Check out my latest short story, Johnnie’s Girl, on Amazon. Better yet – today it’s free! Let me know what you think.

Ps: You can also look at my work under the Stories tab at the top, but those are emphatically rough drafts, and they don’t come on your Kindle with a cool cover.

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Filed under On Writing

Strange Flotsam in My Bedroom – A Photo-essay

Cleaning your room can unearth the oddest things you forgot you had. I’m a bit of a packrat – a bad habit – so it was high time to do a deep cleaning and clear some stuff out. It’s a wrench to part with some of these things. In fact, most of these I ended up keeping. Such as:

To my surprise, my old piggy bank still had money in it! A grand total of 16 cents, but still…

This is apparently a tooth-holder. For putting your baby teeth in when waiting for the Tooth Fairy to come. I got it as a gift in playschool.

To illustrate my skill as an interior decorator, here is my brilliant idea to fill an old Jones Soda bottle with my dad’s old marbles. Doesn’t it just ooze with originality?

Now THIS is a pen. It would be a pretty neat idea for a pen too, if the pen actually worked. The long, skinny part detaches from his foot, which acts as kind of a pen-stand.

The dude on the left is the aforementioned pen. The dude on the right is – er… a souvenir from Holland. It actually opens in the middle, and you eat ice cream from its belly. My sister and I got one for dessert, after eating dinner at a pancake restaraunt (yes, they eat pancakes for dinner in Holland).

And lastly, my lovely bookshelf is made of vintage apple crates I rescued from my grandparents’ garage. The crates have come in very handy, actually. The one thing I’ve learned from all this cleaning is – I have too many books! Is that even possible? Maybe it’s time for me to go buy a Kindle or something.

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Filed under Randoms & My Life