It's cool anyway

I just went over to Amazon.com and this was the front page I saw. I know, what you see on the front page of Amazon is dictated by the things you look at most - but still, it was a pleasant surprise to see AN AFFAIR IN APRIL up there on the same page with Bella Andre.

Hashtag fabrication

I'm a tweeter. I admit it.

I've never been a big fan of social media, but I actually really like Twitter. It's like sound bites for people who read. I like making statements and then going away and coming back later and finding out if people responded to my statements.

I also enjoy making hastags. The other day I came up with two that I think I'll be using quite often, even if no one else does.

Join me, if you want to, in tweeting the following:

#whyIdeserveicecream  - Why I deserve ice cream - Have you been a good egg today? Done a good deed, or just refrained from losing your cool? You deserve ice cream. Tweet about it.

and

#whymondayssuck - Had a bad day at the beginning of a new week? Typical. Tweet about Why Mondays suck.

See you in the Twitter verse  @ClariceWynter.

Collections as art

Today I'm over at Knoontime Knitting again talking about how a collection can become a piece of art. Stop by and tell me about what you collect!

Pyramid Power!

I finished the April story today. It only took me six months to make this one work. SIX months!

I'm attributing my accomplishment to the power of the pyramids. Last night a friend who'd just returned from a trip to Egypt, brought us these cute little carvings and a little packet of sand from around the pyramids at Giza. [He didn't take the sand himself. Someone collected it for him.]

Today I bought the bottle and the placard charm at JoAnne's. I printed the little sign on my computer and made a little Egyptian display on my curio shelf. Maybe the power of the pyramids boosted my creativity so I could finally finished my draft! [And yes, that's one of my temari in the background.]

Check it out!

I have my new blog header and my new avatar! [I do miss the mushroom - because the mushroom is so me,] but I love my new blog header and my awesome cover artist, Niina Cord, who's responsible for ALL of the cover art for my series.

Here's her website - and she's still have a 40% off sale, so if you're looking for awesome cover art, check out her site!

Niina's Cover Designs

Visit me around Knoontime!

Today is my debut post over at Knoontime Knitting where I'll be blogging monthly about the Journey into 3D. My first topic is Japanese temari - come on over and visit me. I promise you'll have a ball!

Literally. I'm serious. Temari is the art of Japanese thread balls...don't take my word for it, stop by and see for yourself.

I wish...

...growing a story was as easy as growing string beans.

Aren't these cute? They look enormous but they're really very small, baby string beans. I'm excited about them because I have a notorious brown thumb, Seriously, I can't grow mold on old bread. But I have a fantasy of someday having a gorgeous vegetable garden. This year, I decided to grow some plants in pots because the groundhogs and the squirrels around here are pretty bad ass. They eat anything! Not to mention the gosh darn rabbits. I have to grow my plants on a sunny corner of the deck unless I want to build a fenced in enclosure, which I don't have the money, time, or expertise to do.

Right now, I have two pepper plants that are barely hanging on, one basil plant that looks more like a sponge, some flowers that are mostly drowning because of all the rain we've had here, my lemon tree - which is about three years old and doing pretty well, and then I have my stringbeans. If I'm lucky, eventually I'll get enough beans for one serving...but I don't care. They're my stringbeans and I'm proud of them.

Along the same lines, I'm trying to grow story #4 of my series - basically in a container between #3 and #5, which are both finished. I skipped 4 a while ago because the plot wasn't working, so now I'm trying to tease it out of the dry soil of my brain. It's not easy. The string beans are doing better, but I'll persevere.

On the upside, #1, #2 and #3 are edited and ALL of my covers are done!

How do you reward yourself?

Yesterday I tweeted about my word count for the year so far. I was pretty shocked to discover that despite the copious amount of time I waste doing things like adding up word count and surfing the web for pictures of my favorite snacks, I somehow managed to maintain the 1,000 word a day average I aspired to achieve at the beginning of the year. In fact I'm even a bit over.

As a reward for not slacking off as much as I thought I was, I'm taking it easy today [BBQ with friends and family] and I'm indulging in my new favorite guilty pleasure.

Chocolate and cookie mushrooms. OMG! I can't describe how much I love them. My husband found them at a local store and a couple of weeks ago he come home with five boxes for me. I stashed them in my home office and today I broke open a box.

If you want to try Chocorooms [and you should] you can get them at Five Below or, oddly enough, Amazon.com. How do you reward yourself when you've reached a goal?

Happy Mother's Day!

I hope everyone had a happy Mother's Day!

I spent my morning at the NYC Mineral and Gem Show. I could have spent a month wandering through all the vendor displays looking at rocks, fossils and beads...OMG, the beads!

I ended up buying myself a small dendrite...

It's a little sandstone slate with gorgeous markings on it that look like a painting of ancient plants. This picture is from Wikipedia, but mine looks similar. It makes me think of cave paintings.

After the show, I came home and actually took a nap in my new recliner on the deck! Of couse, all this relaxation means very little work got done today. So now I'm off to do some editing for novella #3 of my series.

The great news is, I now have completed cover art for novella #1 and #2 and #3 should be ready shortly. I can't wait to start unveiling them, but but my next project is a website and web design just stymies me.

Have a great evening eveyrone!