Pre-Game Bologna!

The Big Game is almost here! I’m not really sure why watching men in short pants and big shoulder pads run into each other and grunt a lot is considered a national pastime but each to their own. I do know that cold cuts, crackers, tiny hotdogs, and chips are nearly sold out at the grocery store. Apparently, it’s also a day of continuous grazing. 

Michelle Obama should be all over that! Put a ban on Super Bowl pigging out!

 For the children.

I prefer to watch a great movie instead of sports, with or without popcorn. Or even a pretty good movie. Now if only Hollywood would make one. Waiting…still waiting…

Football does seem to be rather popular in America. Probably because senseless violence has always been a form of good clean fun for us folks in the civilized Western world. We enjoy watching men pound each other to a pulp, whether in boxing, football, hockey, or a really lively spelling bee.

Not to say that I don’t enjoy watching a little violence myself. I just prefer mine on the big screen.

Braveheart was an exception to the rule of critics being wrong. Mel definitely deserved the Oscar!

So, when the Oscars come around, I stay up to watch (most of it) and make sure I learn which pictures win the most hoopla – cause then I’ll know which ones to avoid. The movie critics are accurate with their thumbs up about as often as a forecaster is accurate about weather. Or let me put it another way. Movie critics agree with the general public’s preferences about as often as politicians tell the truth.

This is William Wallace during halftime at SuperBowl I

I really can’t tell you which two football teams are playing tomorrow. Sorry, if you came here for Super Bowl info. I’m sort of the anti-football info blog of all time. But I do know a lot of absolutely worthless facts I learned in school. Darn those teachers! Filling my head with nonsense when I could have memorized all the sports statistics that my dad and brothers learned instead.

By the way, if you’re like me and don’t give a ring of bologna for football, download one of my books instead. Now that’s entertainment!

Get Out of Jail Free Card

It seems as though everyone tries to play a Get out of jail free card these days. If you don’t have your own card or mental illness, just watch enough reality television and you will be sure and see something that will fit your needs.

Like the man who worked for the FBI with top security clearance who managed to steal thousands of classified documents and when arrested for the crime, immediately diagnosed himself with Hoarders disease. (That would be the sickness that infects individuals with the inability to throw away a milk carton, plastic bag, or rat turd, cause someday they might need it. Or maybe they’re just saving the environment for the rest of us by sacrificing themselves on the dunghill of their own making. Not sure if we should thank them or institutionalize them.)

What was this man going to do with thousands of classified documents? Probably not sell them…right? Maybe he was out of old newspapers to line the rats nest.

I personally have never watched Hoarders or Jersey Shore or Next Top Model… I’m not bragging – just admitting my dislike of so-called reality shows. The commercials scare me enough. I once watched an episode of Survivor and started having anger management problems. I don’t think I should be allowed anywhere near an island of people that irritating. After all, Menopause is a sickness too and a pretty good card to play after taking out twelve over-tanned, bug-eating, whiny weirdos, slowly and methodically with a scope and rifle.

I think it all started with the race card that O.J.’s lawyer played and it’s just gone downhill from there. 
We’ve got the Post-Partum Blues card if you murder your children, the Kleptomania card if you’re a celebrity that likes to shoplift, the Addiction card for pretty much any and every form of bad behavior these days, the I lost my job card for men that go on a shooting spree at their last place of employment, the McDonalds served my McNuggets too slow card for crazy people that jump through the drive up window and beat the poor kid working there, the Girl’s Just Want to Have Fun card for the woman who disappears for months with the guy they met on the internet and everyone thinks they’re dead, the Devil Made me Do It card for people without an imagination, and my personal favorite – My Dead Mother Did It. Oh wait, that was Psycho. But it would be a great card to use if you owned a creepy motel and murdered women in the shower.

The Shadow of Your Smile (Book Review)

                                          The Shadow of Your Smile by Susan May Warren

About the book:
A beautiful blanket of snow may cover the quaint town of Deep Haven each winter, but it can’t quite hide the wreckage of Noelle and Eli Hueston’s marriage.
After twenty-five years, they’re contemplating divorce . . . just as soon as their youngest son graduates from high school. But then an accident erases part of Noelle's memory. Though her other injuries are minor, she doesn’t remember Eli, their children, or the tragedy that has ripped their family apart. What’s more, Noelle is shocked that her life has turned out nothing like she dreamed it would. As she tries to regain her memory and slowly steps into her role as a wife and mother, Eli helps her readjust to daily life with sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-heartwarming results. But can she fall in love again with a man she can’t remember?
Will their secrets destroy them . . . or has erasing the past given them a chance for a future?

My Review: Once again Susan May Warren has written a story that is wholly relatable. Who hasn’t wondered at some point in his/her life: What if I’d done that instead of this, moved there, married that person, pursued that path… made different choices? The author has taken a well-used story arc – lost memory & forgotten family – and made it fresh again.

When Noelle falls on an icy road and hits her head, she loses more than just her memory of the past twenty-five years. She loses the middle-aged, woman she has become. She looks in the mirror and doesn’t recognize the frumpy housewife and mom staring back at her. How could she have let herself fall apart like this? Her life has taken such a one-eighty from where she thought she’d be that it shocks and confuses her. How could she possibly throw away all her dreams and move to a tiny little town far from the city and the art she loves, to live with a grumpy man who doesn’t seem to get her at all? Is this really her life??

The Shadow of your Smile takes you into the hearts and souls of a family barely hanging on to the frayed edges of their lives, marriage, and commitments. Ripped apart by personal tragedy three years earlier, Eli and Noelle have been living separate lives for a long time. With her memory wiped clean, Eli thinks he may have a chance to win her back, but secrets they’ve both been keeping may well tear them apart before love can find a way to heal the brokenness.

The Shadow of your Smile isn’t just a story about starting over or second chances, but about trust, about faith, about letting go of the death grip we have on the door to our hearts, and allowing the person that God has given us to share our lives with access to our dreams, our struggles, our pain. Because we aren’t meant to walk this road alone.

And yes – this is a three-hankie tearjerker story, so get your box of tissues and curl up for a great read!

Read the story behind the story here: http://www.susanmaywarren.com/books/the-shadow-of-your-smile.
 

Blog tour schedule:http://litfusegroup.com/blogtours/text/13448479) 

About Susan: Susan May Warren is an award-winning, best-selling author of over twenty-five novels, many of which have won the Inspirational Readers Choice Award, the ACFW Book of the Year award, the Rita Award, and have been Christy finalists. After serving as a missionary for eight years in Russia, Susan returned home to a small town on Minnesota’s beautiful Lake Superior shore where she, her four children, and her husband are active in their local church.

Susan's larger than life characters and layered plots have won her acclaim with readers and reviewers alike. A seasoned women’s events and retreats speaker, she’s a popular writing teacher at conferences around the nation and the author of the beginning writer’s workbook: From the Inside-Out: discover, create and publish the novel in you!. She is also the founder ofwww.MyBookTherapy.com, a story-crafting service that helps authors discover their voice.

Susan makes her home in northern Minnesota, where she is busy cheering on her two sons in football, and her daughter in local theater productions (and desperately missing her college-age son!)

A full listing of her titles, reviews and awards can be found at:www.susanmaywarren.com.
 
Link to buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1414334834/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=sprightly-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1414334834

I was given a free copy of this book by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are my own.

Celebration With A Giant Vice

Most of you think of today as Martin Luther King Day, but for me it's Mammogram Day. Or if you want the literal title, Stick Your Boobs in a Giant Vice and Tighten Down Day. 

Either way, it was a relief when it was over and they released me from my bondage. I was able to pull my string-tied wraparound shirt shut and meander back to my curtain-covered dressing room, pull up the objects of my husband’s affection from the floor and plop them comfortably back into my sexy Victoria Secret underwire bra where they could rest in peace. That heavy-duty wire does all the work for you these days. It’s amazing.

When I was younger and didn’t need underwire to hold things up and in place, life was good and Victoria Secret didn’t exist, which made life even better. I was comfortable watching underwear commercials back then. Now I feel like I’ve fallen into a brothel whenever one comes on.

Anyway...The good news about mammograms is that their machines are now much more “comfortable” than they used to be. At least that’s what the technician informed me of before shoving me up against the thing, pulling my breast out to an abnormal length, cranking the vice down on it until it was flat and smooth as a Cracker Barrel pancake, and then tightening the screws a bit more just for safe keeping. Honestly, if I were young again, that whole procedure would not even be possible. But with fifty years of gravity on my side, it did seem more “comfortable” than in years past.

So happy Mammogram day or SYBGVTDD day! Go out and get yours too. It’s an experience not to be missed.

The entrails of suspense accounting

It’s almost that time again. No – not the end of our New Year’s resolutions, although from the shrinking number of people visiting Anytime fitness, it’s that time too.

What I’m talking about is Tax Time. Everyone should soon be getting their W2’s or 4’s or whatever number they are and making appointments to visit their local friendly accountant.

I know all about tax time because I’m married to an accountant. You probably thought suspense writers were usually married to secret agents or tycoons, or at the very least, a foreigner wrongly accused of being a terrorist. But no – the best suspense writers are married to accountants, snowplow drivers, and grocery store managers. We have to do something to break the monotony, so we write.

People that aren’t married to accountants always think it would be great to have all that free tax information at their fingertips. Believe me, I don’t even have to use my fingers. He loves to tell me all the new rules, regulations, codes, forms, and conversations he has with IRS officials on the phone, without any probing whatsoever. The problem is, like with all free information, you tend to not remember any of it. And you don’t truly appreciate the gift you’ve been given. At least I don’t.

It’s not that I don’t want to understand, but that my brain is not wired to understand. I have what they call, Tax Law/Accounting phobia. Whenever I hear any of it, my brain freezes up, afraid that if any of this information is absorbed, I will automatically start speaking in abbreviations and get that sarcastic tone when I talk about people who think it’s okay to write off their Halloween costume as work-related attire because they wore it once to an office party.

Sometimes people ask me tax questions as though my being married to an accountant will make my answers legit. I could say anything and they’d believe me. Sure, you can get a refund for the money you spent on gas to drive 500 miles to pick up an old couch you bought on Craigslist for your home office naps. No problem. Can you reference me as your source of information? You betcha!

Accounting is an art form. One that I am not even close to understanding. Sort of like one of the art exhibits I saw recently at a university, where a young woman’s exhibit looked like the entrails of a cow slung across the floor and weird inner body parts hanging on the walls. Was I shocked? No. I’ve watched way too many episodes of CSI to even blink, but I just stood there wondering - Why?? Why go to all that trouble? Did it have a secret meaning? Was there actually something to learn from the ugly mess, or was it just her way of standing out from the crowd?

Okay, I just went down a really crazy rabbit trail. Or was that an entrails trail? Sorry.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: don’t ask a fiction writer for tax information. We love to make things up, but the IRS frowns on creative tax returns. And a word of advice: take a voice recorder to your meeting with your accountant, cause, believe me, you won’t remember a word that he says.

Ps. This was written as a glowing tribute to my wonderful, hard-working, accountant husband who won't see the light of day for another four months.

Lost his teeth and found a heartache

Writing my last blog of the year, on the last day of the year, is the last thing I had in mind to do today. But since I’ve been remiss in keeping up on blog posts during this much harried holiday season, I thought I must write one more to even the score.

There was a catastrophe in the news today. An Italian man (99) filed for divorce after discovering that his wife (96) had an affair 60 years ago. Okay, it’s not necessarily catastrophic news. If their divorce is finalized they will get to hold the world title of oldest couple ever to divorce. But with 77 years of marriage under their belt, would they view that as a failure or success?

It obviously still hurts, even when you’re nearly a century old, to learn that someone has broken your trust and your heart. But you’d think the anger and burning embers would cool quicker at 99 than they did at say, 39, when the affair actually happened. Still, she kept the letters. But maybe she kept the letters and then over the next 60 years she totally forgot she had letters, or that she once had a lover who sent letters, and when her husband said, “I can't find my teeth. Maybe they're in that locked box at the bottom of your undie drawer,” she ignored him and sat down to watch Wheel of Fortune and knit a pair of socks.

Sometimes the comments on news stories are much funnier than the actual story and in this case I thought they were. So, I’m going to share a few:

One person said, “Sounds like he’s ready to move on with his life.”

I don’t know where he’d be moving to other than a care center, but maybe he’d meet a younger woman there and start over.

Another person said, “A couple I know divorced after 75 years together. The judge asked...'Why are you divorcing now after so long together?" They replied, “We wanted to wait until the kids were dead.”

I totally understand this reasoning. Children will never truly accept their parent’s divorce. It’s just the way it is. But if you wait long enough…

A man wrote, “Good for him..Now he can go out and find a hot, young 80 year old.”

And that brings us back to the care center.

My question after reading this story was:

“Why did this old man decide to go through his wife’s personal stuff all of a sudden? What man has ever cleaned out a closet or drawer without being nagged?

So here’s what I think happened (since I write fiction for a living, you can take it or leave it):

His wife wanted him to find the letters. She must have planted them smack dab in the middle of his easy chair. Otherwise, he never would have found them. It’s a universal fact that a man can’t find anything unless it's right under his nose. The letters had to have been planted.

But don’t take my word for it. Read the news yourself!

Happy New Year!

Hermit Writer

I always have these two to keep me company while I write

The holiday season has nearly sucked the life out of me. Not only is the weather cold and drab, drying my skin to the texture of fine mummy, but people are rude in stores, drive oblivious to the rest of creation on the roads, and pretty much make me want to crawl under my desk and never come out again.

I admit, as a writer, I am somewhat of a hermit, but when you’ve been locked away at your desk for so long and then are thrust naked (metaphorically speaking) into the rush of humanity at this time of year, it can be quite harmful to one unaccustomed to dealing with actual people that do whatever they want and won’t follow your author(itarian) direction.

I love to shop online, but sometimes the call of the wild still speaks to me. I dress warmly, make sure I have snacks in my purse just in case I get lost on the way to Target, and drive out of my comfortable neighborhood with my “money does grow on trees” plastic credit card to shop in the wild suburb chain stores.

If I weren’t so worried that someone would ding my car, I wouldn’t have to park a half a mile from the front doors, but I’ve got my warm wool coat and scarf, so I’m good. Then once inside, I sweat like a possum in heat from my energetic walk and because the store’s temperature just happens to be set at 95º.

I thought I’d pretty much mastered shopping without actually coming in contact with other individuals, but at this time of year that is nearly impossible – cause they’re everywhere. I often wonder why some people can’t schedule their shopping at a more convenient time for me. It’s not as if there aren’t fourteen more of this same department store planted every other mile up and down the county. Couldn’t they shop at one a bit further from my neighborhood?

Once I leave the store and head for home, I feel a rush of impatience to be back in my comfortable environment, safe from flu germs, crazy shoppers with pepper spray, making small talk with strangers at registers, and listening to one-sided conversations of people yelling into their cell phones. (They should at least put it on speaker-phone so we can enjoy both sides.)

But in spite of my Beetle’s turbo engine, I can never break the sound barrier or even the speed limit, because every driver spaces their vehicle a mere cars-length apart in both lanes and refuses to let me pass. I have never figured out why car companies advertise the number of seconds it takes to get up to 60mph, because NO ONE ever does it! I try but the CSP (citizens speed police) won’t let me.

I’m back in my safe place again, sitting at the desk, typing this blog for you. See – I like people! Just at a distance. Happy Holidays and safe shopping! 

Reading souls is a dangerous business

                       The Soul Reader by Gerard D. Webster 

Book Description

“In The Soul Reader, Ward McNulty is a man torn between seeking justice or forgiveness. It is in discovering the true identity of his father's murderer while protecting the woman that he loves that he finds both.”

My Review:

The Soul Reader is the second in a series, but although I would have liked to know exactly what went on in the first book and slowly get to know the characters better, it wasn’t necessary. The author did a good job of giving glimpses of the past without bogging down the storyline with a lot of explanation.

Ward McNulty has a gift. He can look into someone’s eyes and see the condition of their soul. In this sequel, Ward has lost pretty much everything. He is crippled from a car accident, his father was murdered, he’s lost his job and his girl and he’s left with this gift that he really doesn’t want.

His ex-girlfriend asks him to work on a book with her, exposing the very people who caused his downfall. He agrees, only because she won’t drop it, and he’s afraid she will get hurt too. Their investigation inevitably stirs up old secrets that important people wish never to come to light and once again a professional killer is sent to shut them up.

The Soul Reader is a quick moving story with enough suspense to keep you turning pages and wondering just what will happen next. It takes you on a journey with Ward as he struggles with the darkness of his own soul, unable to forgive the man who murdered his father, but knowing it is the only way to truly live in freedom. The characters are well drawn out and believable in most of their actions. It’s a good book for some light reading on your day off.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com <http://BookSneeze®.com> book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.