Hm. It’s been another 10 days since I’ve updated. Bad me.
Let’s see. I’ve been tagged no less than 4 times to do this meme. The following people are to blame for this: AJ Chase, Leigh Royals, Ally Kendall and Jodi Henley.
I’m not going to tag anyone else, but I will add my 7 Random Facts here for the curious.
1) At one time, we had 30+ gerbils in the house. This is the result of having 3 breeding pairs that kept, well, breeding. We used to trade the babies for food for the adults. After a while, you could go into any pet store in the area and you’d see ones related to ours with the cute little white bracelets against their black fur. This count does not include the hamsters we also had.
2) I’m allergic to guinea pigs, bee stings, and penicillin. My eyes water from the guinea pigs, wherever I get stung swells about 3x normal size, and I get nasty hives from penicillin.
3) I only moved once before I went to college. I was 3 at the time and my mom still lives there. After college, I moved back near campus to be closer to my now-DH. Since we were married, we’ve moved 5 times in 15 years. Two of these were only across town. We also keep moving west. Maryland->Alabama->Texas->California. I used to joke, where’re we going next, Hawaii? I stopped when DH came home with a job offer in Shanghai.
4) After 15 years, I still don’t know Spanish with any fluency. I understand more than I let on, but I’m reluctant to actually speak aloud what I do know.
5) I love Latin music. I don’t always know what the hell they’re saying, but I dig it. Gipsy Kings, Rodrigo Gabriela, Shakira, and even JLo and Ricky Martin.
6) I love Latin food. My MIL and I spent much of her visit last week trading recipes and searching for a bone-in pork leg to roast. We did find a nice hometown-style butcher shop where we can order one for her next visit.
7) In high school, I played flute and piccolo in marching and concert band. No, not “One time at Band Camp” stories! However, I really wanted to get into the jazz band, so I had to learn how to play trombone.
Phew. That’s over with. So, what besides spending time cleaning house and visiting with my MIL have I been doing?
I’ve been in study mode instead of writing mode again. I refuse to let another whole month slip by without actively working on my WIP though. Jodi suggested a couple of new craft books: 
Anyway, I just finished both books and on the surface, they really didn’t tell me anything that didn’t seem to not be common sense. And we all how how rare that is these days.
There were lines in both books that jumped out at me and I went “Aha!” or “Yeah!”, but I don’t think I’ve quite grokked (or as Jodi says, internalized) them well enough yet, but you can expect to hear a lot more on the subject in the coming days. I need to nail down my hero and squeeze another 50 pages or so out of him. To do that, I’m gonna need to know a helluva lot more about him and his motivations and goals. Sneaky bugger.
Edit: Apparently Fionn Jameson has also tagged me after the fact. 🙂
“grokked”…that’s got to be something like “meh”. My kid kept saying “meh” a few years back, and I thought he was grunting. Turns out he was doing the geek-thing, which makes sense since he used to work for the geek squad. (slang isn’t as fun for the slanger if they have to explain it in plain english to the slangee, lol)
…or your mom.
If you can take even one thing away, a book is worth reading. It’s a learning curve. There’s a BIG difference between those who refuse to see, and those who do and are trying to see more.
“internalize?”..I guess I sound like a performance eval, *sigh* I write them, it rubs off.
Meh. Grok’s not like that at all. Have you ever read Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land? Basically, to “grok” someone (or something) is to get to know them extremely well. In the book, it means a literal internalization, but I won’t spoil it.
It is slang but old, not new. =) I dread what my kids will come up with.
I find I tend to read craft books at least twice. Once for concepts and ideas and then again for application. I find I need to think it through with a concrete example in order for it to “stick” and make the most sense.
They were both definitely worth reading and I may have made it sound less useful than they were since I didn’t have/take time to pull out quotes of the things that did strike me. That’s one of the things I hope to fix this week. I need to go back and find those lovely little gems and figure out why they clicked and what they revealed to me.
Anyway, have to go get the car smogged and then have a dr’s appt this afternoon for one monster while hoping the other holds off his headache until after that’s over.
Wow! 30 gerbils???? Seriously?
Looks like you’ve got even more craft books on your TBR pile than we talked about yesterday! go you
I can tell we could road trip well together – between the music and the craft books on cd, you’d never even have to listen to me babble lol
Yeah, as in 30+ I don’t recall the exact number, but we had quite a zoo at the time. Gerbils, hamsters, fish and a labrador.
I’m caught up on craft books at the moment, but I’m sure I could find a couple to order. *grin* I’m being good and going through and trying to start the editing process. Yeah I know, I have those other pages to write still. But I have to get my head around them first.
So I’m using that page I sent you a while ago for the random sequence generator to easily jump around the pages without repeats and keep from getting too tied to the story itself.
You babble? *peer*
I would have tagged you but getting tagged twice in the same week seemed cruel.
Your latin music post made me ROTFL. Totally true for me also.
What on earth does your hub do that they wanted him in Shanghai?!