Monthly Archives: October 2009
Tell Me ‘Bout The Good Ole Days
What happened to the days of all the neighbor and church kids riding in my dad’s trailer as he pulled us around the neighborhood with his tractor and we went house to house and collected tons of candy. We knew every house in the neighborhood, all within a two or three mile perimeter of my Mom’s house. It was a glorious night of trick ‘r’ treating. We awoke to streamers of toilet paper in our trees and smashed pumpkins in the front yard.
I remember it raining one year and my Mom still took me out in the car door to door to the nearest neighbors who knew we’d come by. I remember a group of us kids and parents walking our streets for several hours one year collecting treats.
Years later in middle school I held a sleep over with two of my friends. We wore masks and had a mini haunted house in the front yard and gave out candy. Then, we stayed up late watching scary movies. We snuck out with a roll or two of toilet paper and rolled my own yard.
In high school, I stayed home and gave out candy and counted the number of trick ‘r’ treaters that came by. Entire church vans of kids pulled up and got out because everyone still knew everyone in the neighborhood.
As an older teen, I went out with other high school friends and rode around town. We stole a scarecrow and rolled yards of people we didn’t know.
In college, I always went out to clubs for Halloween Costume contests. I never won, but it was still fun to dress up and go out dancing all night.
For the past 3 years, I’ve put decorations out and gave out candy. We had about 25 or 30 kids stop by. We still don’t know any kids in our neighborhood to this day. Last year, we only saw about a dozen kids. With anticipation of Halloween being on a Saturday this year, I bought 9 bags of candy and put out my decorations early in the month. I even bought more decor today at the store because it was all 50% off. I rushed home to add the finishing touches on the yard. We ate dinner early so I could sit outside and pass out candy.
It’s now 8pm and we’ve had eight kids come by. The streets are empty. There are no cars. Half the street has its lights out. I’m so disappointed. And so I sit here and wonder why there’s no knock on the door, awaiting the Roseanne Halloween marathon, making coffee, and wondering what the heck I’m going to do with all this candy.
*sigh*
Despite the economy woes, and swine flu, and Halloween urban legends involving fruit and razor blades, I just wish Halloween could still be like the ole days.
Oh wait, there’s a knock at the door….
Autumn Leaves
The leaves have been so pretty this month, and have hung on to their limbs for much longer than I remember in the past. So, as October comes to a close, I thought this song was appropriate.
Facebook: I’m back! Did you miss me?
I don’t know why, but I’m back on Facebook again. I almost feel lost. Farming just isn’t the same either. It’s like moving away from home, when all your friends stayed in the town you grew up in. And then you go back to visit and realize life kept going there without you and suddenly you feel out of place. It’ll never be the same again. Life, and Facebook, is funny that way.
I guess I’ll go play Farkle now and send odd colored hay bales to my Farmville friends and hope they forgive me for leaving in the first place.
Stealing Wishes Gets a New Imprint
Sorry I haven’t updated in a while! I’ve been busy with life and things – not writing as much as I should be – and just haven’t had much to say here.
But I have a bit of good news today.
My 2nd book, Stealing Wishes, has been released under my very own imprint: Shanlian Wordlit Press.
The book is the same but it’s now lower in price. Only $12.95.
And even though the price has been lowered, I’m now making a bigger commission than I was under my old imprint! How cool is that?!
So, if you haven’t bought a copy yet and you’re dying to read my latest book (You know you are!), do me a favor and click on the book cover and buy a copy today!
A-ha!
I hate it when something has been on my mind but I can’t really remember all the details, like a movie I saw and maybe I forgot the title. I continue to think about it and think about it and more details come into the light, and finally after thinking about it so much I finally remember the whole thing or the missing part is finally revealed. I love it when that happens.
That recently happened to me when I was thinking about a trailer I saw for a spooky Halloween movie that looked really good but I couldn’t remember the name. I could only remember bits and pieces of the clip, but I wanted to look it up and see if it was out. I tried Google, but had no luck. So I resorted to putting a post on Facebook and someone else replied right away with the name. Trick R Treat! I was so happy and I immediately added the movie, which came out last week, to my Netflix Que.
Well, for years there’s been something on my mind which I just could not figure out. It was a summer miniseries that played on TV back in the 80s. The details I could remember were blurry and skewed. But anytime a group got to talking about old TV shows, I always brought it up to see if anyone else could remember it. It was about 3 guys (maybe 4) who had just graduated from high school (or college) and were going to go celebrate in an Uncle’s cabin in the woods. On the way there, they pick up a girl who is hitchhiking. One of them rapes her and they end up burying her in the wood when they think she is dead. It’s a secret they keep the rest of their lives. They go their own ways and the movie follows each of their different lives. Here’s where my memories got really sketchy because I couldn’t remember anything else except for how it ended. But no one had ever heard of it or could remember seeing it no matter how many times I had described it over the years.
Yesterday at work, a coworker and I were talking about V, the sci fi miniseries that also played in the 80s and has recently been redone and starts on November 3rd. I saw this as another opportunity to mention that other miniseries and while she didn’t remember it, she said it sounded a lot like a book she’d read a long long time ago called Celebrity.
I immediately looked it up and found it was written in the late 70s-early80s by Thomas Thompson and sure enough, the details of the book sounded a lot like my miniseries I’d been obsessing over. With the help of Google, I found out it was indeed the book my miniseries was based upon which had been later released on VHS. It was indeed about 3 boys graduating from high school, committing a crime that night that they keep secret, then going on with their lives and each becoming famous in their own way, and then in the end one gets tried for murder.
You don’t know how happy I was to have the pieces of this puzzle come together after all of these years. I immediately bought a copy of the book to read and I’m thinking seriously in investing in a copy of the VHS. It was like a huge sigh of relief to finally have this weight lifted from my mind. That A-ha! moment that brings it all to completion!
Falling Into It
Yesterday, I bought Halloween candy. I call it pre-Halloween candy because it probably won’t last till then, especially since it’s Kit Kats and Reese Cups.
I also turned on the heat yesterday morning because there was a chill in the house. The heat! We turned the air off weeks ago.
I brought the plants in too. Our patio and deck are so empty and dirty now, like the day after a good party. It was a good party…spring and summer I mean.
It’s hard to enjoy Fall despite the Halloween decorations I put up last weekend and the caramel and harvest candles I’m burning even now as I write this. I guess because I know there will be a frost soon, forcing the trees to finish off their changes and just drop all their changing leaves on the lawn. The grass will die. The branches will be barren. My flower beds will wilt and die.
Winter comes too soon, and I hate falling into it.
Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol
Dan Brown is one of the few authors these days that will make me stop whatever I’m reading at the time just to pick up his new release. I loved The Da Vinci Code. I thought Angels and Demons dragged on a bit too much, but I still liked it. And the same goes for The Lost Symbol. With so many other reviews having already been posted about the story, I’m going to skip all of that rather than repeat what you probably already know by now. Instead, I want to concentrate on my own personal thoughts on this book.
At first, I was very excited to have Brown finally write Robert Langdon into a story that takes place on our own soil. Our capital was a great setting, but unlike his other books, I didn’t find myself running to the computer to Google the buildings and artwork so I could see them for myself like I did with the other Langdon books. I don’t know if it was because I was already familiar with the buildings and history or just because they really weren’t that exciting to me.
The thrill ride that Langdon goes on is pretty much the same as Brown’s other books and so it becomes very predictable. He moves his characters from place to place where they discover a clue that’s strange and peculiar. Langdon decodes it just before the bad guys get there and we move on to the next piece of the puzzle. And some of those pieces just weren’t as interesting either.
The array of characters, including the “bad guy,” were each strange and peculiar as well, leaving you wondering who is on whose side for a while. Brown is definitely good at characterization. From an obsessed, castrated villain covered in tattoos to a short and stern Japanese CIA agent with a deep raspy voice, the characters were both colorful and mysterious. The confrontation between Langdon and “the bad guy” was also much more intense in this book, and Langdon’s life was literally on the line this time rather than there just being a gun or fist fight.
I did feel like the book lacked a lot of those little interesting facts and theories that I couldn’t wait to discuss with fellow readers like the other two Langdon books had, those little nuances that you also couldn’t wait to Google which really gave the book some depth. The Lost Symbol definitely had them, but just not as many. Or they weren’t quite as memorable. In fact, thinking back now, the only one that sticks out at me is the part about where the word “sincerely” comes from and why we sign it at the end of letters.
In typical Brown fashion, there’s also this constant struggle between science and religion. In The Lost Symbol, we learn about Noetic Science and the power to control things with our minds. However, a lot of the writing about it was so bland and technical that I don’t even think Brown knew what to do with it which was literally why he “blew it up” to get rid of it. Also, after the villain is caught and all is well, there was still 60 pages left to the book which Brown spent talking mostly about God and the Bible. Most people I’ve spoke to just sifted through the ending after the climactic part had come to a close.
Overall, I’m not entirely disappointed with The Lost Symbol. I did like the Code better and will indeed read Brown’s next book if there is one. I just hope that Brown’s writing becomes much more layered and less predictable. His readers know this equation by now, and while it does sell books, it’s time for something new and completely different.
