Trevor!

It's taken me a while, but I'm just recovering from the wild Daytona 500. Trevor Bayne stunned the NASCAR world by having the best car and the smoothest, coolest temperament on the track. Victory Lane was such a joyous place, no one could object to the Wood Brothers being there with their very very rookie driver.

What is truly wonderful is how clear Trevor is in his faith, and how unafraid he is to say he prays. With his crew. Before every race. And he talks about it. What a nice change. Not that there aren't nice, even devout, drivers lining up on the track. Yet Trevor is refreshingly open and honest, not to mention grateful, for God's direction in his life.

We hope and pray he never loses sight of his relationship with his Lord.

More Daytona...

So I managed to stay awake long enough to see Michael Waltrip win the truck race on the 10th anniversary of his Daytona 500 win as a driver for Dale Earnhardt Inc. The tears were flowing, both in Victory Lane and in the Speed announcer's booth as Darrell Waltrip was remembering ten years ago along with everyone watching. What a race - Michael pulled out from behind Sadler with about a hundred yards to go and just beat Sadler to the line. I imagine Sadler didn't complain too much - the history of the moment trumped everything else.

Now for the NW race! Oh my, if this is half as good as the truck race, it's going to be a lulu.

Must make veggie soup so it can "work" while the race is on. I'll post the recipe, a family fav, when I get a chance.

Trucks!

Oh my, the engines are roaring on the Daytona track, and I'm so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. With temperatures in the seventies, I got a ton of errands run and chores knocked off my list. All of which were much more pleasant in such lovely weather, but sheesh. . . I'm ready for bed and it's not yet nine!

Staying put in front of the computer can be just as exhausting, but in a different way. I need a nice long walk with the doglet to work out those kinks and clear my mind of the aftershocks of living in a make-believe world for hours.

Must stay awake. Need to stay awake. Oh, to heck with it. I'll be perkier for the NW race tomorrow afternoon.

Rewrites

Does any writer ever feel a book is completely finished? Or it simply that deadlines must be met and the book turned in, whether or not you're happy with it?

In rereading some older books, books I thought were pretty danged good, I'm seized with an almost irrepressible urge to rewrite them, sentence by sentence. I've rationalized this scary feeling by telling myself that I'm a better writer now, that I never cease learning with each new book, and it's okay, take a deep breath, and move on. But it's not that easy.

Self-doubt about one's artistic ability seems to be inherent in the creative process. You don't improve if you think you're God's literary gift to the world. But I've countered that paralyzing demon so far by knowing that my talent isn't "mine," in other words, a personal possession. I can never explain where my ideas originate or how I express them, because I know they come from a source other than my pea-picking teeny brain. I can, and do, work on my craft. I study other writers and their techniques. I work to make the story clear and fun to read. But those are just mechanics.

As a creative person, I'm a work in progress and I don't intend to stop learning for one second how to be better at what I do.

Spoiled Brat Brian Vickers

I'm on a tear. Tear, as in "rip it up," not "tear," as in weeping. Well, maybe a bit of both. Just read the Maxim article about Brian Vickers, one of my fav drivers.

At 27 yo, he's too young to be this dissipated. Despite a scare with blood clots that almost left him dead, he's a hard-drinking partier who doesn't seem to realize the full import of the second chance he's been given. Sure, he's back in the 83 car after his docs cleared him to drive. But what did he learn when he wasn't able to get behind the wheel for ten months? Sounds like he learned he'd better drink his vodka faster and harder to make up for lost time.

How does a red-headed, munchkin-looking guy from a small town in North Carolina turn into a Manhatten club-hopper on a steady binge? Sounds to me as if his mama needs to grab him by the ear and drag him home for a good talking-to. And his daddy might use a switch behind the woodshed on his backside, for good measure.

People with talent, money, and millions of people in their corners don't need to waste their lives the way it sounds like Vickers is. If he has a death wish, he's on the right road. And it's too *$(@ bad.

Fun Times

I'm having a blast re-reading some of my older books. Books that were probably too far out there for their time, or books that just didn't fit into the regular publishing mold, have languished long enough on my hard drive. I'm reworking some of them to put them on Amazon, and if I have half as much fun as I did with THE LAST CAMPAIGN, I'm a very happy woman.

Despite this extra work, SIGNS is progressing. It needs a new title but I'm not inclined to stop the wordsmithing at this point to think of one. Titles, at this stage, tend to be utilitarian. Someday I'll relate the story about my first western, THE LAY OF THE LAND, and what my first editor had to say about its, um, other meaning. I was clueless.

Today, while most of the country hunkers by the fire and makes cocoa, we have warm winds, birds going chirp-happy, and buds on the forsythia. Yeah! I'm taking today as as omen that Spring and racing aren't too far behind.

At Last! The Last Campaign is up!


I could become exclamation point happy, for several reasons. One: THE LAST CAMPAIGN, one of my favorite westerns, is up on Amazon.com in Kindle format. Two: Its new cover is truly a work of art (thanks to JRG, artist extraordinaire) and Three: I figured out how to get it up there.

THE LAST CAMPAIGN is about the Tenth Cavalry (the famed Buffalo soldiers) and its campaign against the Mescalaro Apache,Victorio, and his men. The history alone is thrilling - filled with strategy from the wily Col. Benjamin Grierson, he of Grierson's Raid fame in the Late Unpleasantness, and running battles with guerrilla fighters like no others. I threw into the mix a Medal of Honor winner, our hero, who has grown soft in Washington D.C., hankering to find out if he's still capable of being "a real soldier," the woman he loved and left when he turned his back on his native South to join the Union Army, and the slave he freed when he did so. The kicker is that his lost lady-love, with a twelve year old son by her dead husband, our hero's best friend, is now ranching near Ft. Concho, Texas, with our hero's ex-slave. Yep, there's a romance as well, albeit nothing hot or heavy.

The story is totally PG. It could, in fact, work as a Young Adult. I hope teens and older will read it to find out about a little-known bit of American history and the people who lived it, as well as the fictional story of a man who thinks he's lost everything only to find out he has it all.

Daytona and Change

Not coin of the realm. Change as in: the new surface, lack of striping on the track, and the drivers who are testing have me both excited and sad. No Elliot Sadler. One of my fav photos is of a banana from his bay during testing a couple of years back. Don't ask. And Scott Speed, sitting at home, is a casualty of the Kasey Kahne deal struck with Hendrick to get him in a car for one year. I find myself wishing Rusty Wallace, Ken Schrader, and Michael Waltrip were still running regularly, which I guess makes me an oldie in terms of Nascar. While Sam Hornish never made a good impression on the stock car crowd, I keep wondering if he was really given a fair shake. Shouldn't he have started in trucks for a while before being thrown into the melee? I always worry about drivers who disappear from the scene, like Scott Wimmer.

The up-side is that the live streaming of testing on speedtv.com is great. Makes up, almost, for staying home this year. Locked myself in the office because I'm working hard to get some of my older westerns, including one I consider to be my best, The Last Campaign, into a format Kindle can read. Working on the third Tal Jefferson book for the same deal. Why not? I still have readers who want to know what happened to my slightly crazy heroine. SIGNS progresses slowly because it's a tricky book to write, and I'd like to nail it the first time around. Getting tired of doing a zillion rewrites. At this stage of the game, I should know what I'm doing, LOL.

This crazy cold weather is good for a writer. No temptation to work in the garden. However, the itch to do a little pre-season shopping for new plants and seeds is lurking in the background, trying to entice me into slacking off.

Get thee behind me, plant catalogue satan!

Law School and MLK Day

My law school alumni magazine contained a link to a YouTube hit called "So You Want to Go to Law School." I just about died laughing. It can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMvARyOIBLE. (Hope I entered that correctly. If not, just put in the title of the video in YouTube.) Written by a law school alumnus, it hits all the highlights of the young idealist (including switching from medicine to law because of a bad grade in biology) versus the burned-out cynic who has been through the wars.

Call me one of the burned-out cynics. On this day of remembering Dr. King, I wish I could have been more effective in protecting the rights of those the legal system has systematically treated with disdain and lack of protection of their legal rights. Whenever I had a black client in a criminal case, I knew I was already going to lose, no matter what the evidence presented. Black with a prior record? Done deal. Another black man in an orange jump suit. Now substitute cute young white guy/girl, same evidence, and it's a different story. Even if there was a conviction, time was usually suspended, probation imposed. Sorry, but those are the facts of my legal practice when I was a court-appointed defender.

Equality before the law is fundamental. Until we can achieve that, we're failing Dr. King's vision miserably.

Firefly and food

Watching old episodes of Firefly this weekend, and I notice Summer Glau progressed from crazy River to The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and now to The Cape. Not a great career choice, this last role. Firefly was fun and traditional while trying out both in space. Cape is just boring, so far. Guess they can't all be winners. Well, anything with Colin Firth can't go wrong.

Check out www.afantasteticfoodblog@blogspot.com for simple, cheap meals for one or two people. I love how the Internet is one big cookbook, if you care to hunt for something to cook.

Oh, The King's Speech is wonderful...

Food in America

While at the grocery store yesterday, I followed (without planning to), an elderly lady up and down the various aisles. You know how it is - you reach for something, and you glance at the cart in front of the shelf, and notice the contents without even thinking about it. I was buying salt-free green beans to add to the dog's food, and I saw that this lady was buying all the cheap, sodium-laden beans and veggies in the store's brand. Okay. Then it got worse. She bought the cheapest bread (nothing but air and chemicals), the cheapest hot dogs (don't ask), and that was it. No fruit, no fresh veggies, no real meat. The lady was living on canned beans and cheap hot dogs.

This morning's paper was filled with "how to eat right in the New Year" articles. Fresh vegetables. Add grains. Fresh fruit five times a day. Good enough. Then I thought of the price of fresh broccoli. $1.88 a pound. Canned beans? 42 cents a can. Apples? $1.89 a pound. Pepperidge Farm 15 grain bread? $3.99. Cheap loaf of white bread? 99 cents.

It's all well and good to tell people how to eat a healthy diet, but you have to be able to afford it. How I wish I'd connected the dots earlier and offered to pay that lady's grocery bill so she could have purchased some nutritious, fresh food. My lack of acumen shames me.

America, we have to do better by our less advantaged. NOW!

A New Year, Terminator, and Riddick

We're waiting for the VaTech game to start (who cares who they're playing, it's Virginia Tech!), and Terminator, the first flick, came on. We're glued to it for the thousandth time, no kidding. Everything about it has aged well, from the cyborg's metal skeleton to Linda Hamilton's messy/funky permed hair. Her jeans, however, remind me of the eighties when we all wore our waistbands high and felt fat, no matter how skinny we were. (And I was never skinny, LOL.) I still think it's a little weird that John Connor knows his father's identity and sends him back so he can be conceived. I mean, this whole deal where your father is younger than you and you send him back in time to be a sperm donor is totally sick. But who cares, it's the cyborg and Kyle Reese's story until the last fifteen minutes when Sarah Connor kicks in as an alpha female.

Speaking of alpha females, the women in The Chronicles of Riddick, the first one, kick some serious butt. In many ways, Sarah Connor is their cinematic mother. None of this passive "waiting" for what comes next, like the heroine of The Time Traveler's Wife. (I don't get why the book and flick were so popular. Can anyone explain it to me? The whole dangling-for-love shtick is such a drag.) Get on with your life, for heaven's sake.

Time for the game! Will think about alpha female heroines later.

New Toy

So I,along with with my kids,am now an iPad owner. Notice I didn't say "user." I'm typing this on a bluetooth keyboard that works if I perform tricks like a desperate pony, and I have no idea the correct sequence. Sometimes I guess correctly, sometimes I'm outta luck. The iPad on-screen keyboard makes me feel guilty because I'm touching the screen. Just can't do it. I'm determined to make it work, however! Then I can separate the laptop for work, and everything else to the iPad. However, this tiny keyboard may drive me to drink.

Enough torture for now. My hands are getting a cramp.

Please vote!

My daughter's oldest (since kindergarten) friend is on Youtube, playing her viola as an audition. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M-iEuiShwjg

Please vote for Rosalind Soltow, on the viola!
http://www.youtube.com/symphony?x=dGFiPS92b3RlL29yY2hlc3RyYWwmaW5zdHJ1bWVudD12aW9sYSZjYXRlZ29yeT1vcmNoZXN0cmFsJnZpZGVvSWQ9TS1pRXVpU2h3amc

Tacky Won, Kinda


As you can see, the bright lights won. I refrained from putting them around each window, however. And you won't get pictures of the trees in the yard, LOL. I consider this a tasteful compromise between tacky and decorous. It's fun to change things up a little, or a lot, whether in life or in your Christmas decorating.

Christmas Lights

Let me be honest - I love tacky houses. Adore the overload, the wealth of mismatched lights and decorations. Total admiration.

But when it comes to our Colonial, I just can't do it. My beloved likes some bling, but he keeps it in the yard. I get a little wild with the fresh greens and ribbons around the porch, but mostly, I like little twinkling white lights that fit the Colonial style of the house. The only problem is, this year I'm fighting a desire for wildly flashing lights and bright colors. We'll see what wins - good taste or cutting loose and getting wild!

Tried to read one of the Bourne books from the 80s, because 1) the movies were so cool and 2) Ludlum is the master of the thriller, right? OMG. SLOW. BORING OPENING. Dialogue that's dated as heck. Couldn't read it.

Today is my oldest daughter's birthday. I'm so glad I'm not in labor for 36 hours. Birthing her was a lot of work, but worth it. She's a gem and a nice young woman as well.

Post Holiday Bloat

I'm fooded out. Too much food is the diagnosis. Spicy food. Rich food. Desserts loaded with whipped cream and sugar. Even the thought has me cringing. I may never cook the Big Feast again. Just tasting the progress of everything on the stove and in the oven sent me into food-overdose. Can't even look at the leftovers in the fridge.

The only solution is shopping, right? All that walking. All that standing in line, it'll get rid of the extras in my system, I hope. Did my best this weekend to stimulate the US economy, but I don't think the jiggle in my wiggle was affected. Sigh. Time for severe austerity in the kitchen.

I really do believe all that food affects my brain. I go into this semi-awake state where every thought is an effort. Maybe it's because all my creativity heads for the kitchen? Recipes are my favorite reading? Whatever it is, the brain has to get back in shape along with the derriere. Time to give it some exercise.

Only solution: WRITE!

Time

In the background, I hear the Rolling Stones shouting "time!" At least, I think it was the Stones. I was more of a Beatles fan myself. In comparison to the Stones, the Beatles wore white hats and were squeaky clean. Although I have to admit, I want to read Keith Richards' biography, just to find out exactly how "stoned" they were. Quite a bit, is my bet.

Anywhoo, I have a new watch. A very pretty new watch. I love timepieces. Collect them. All types, all price ranges, all sizes. However, for a few years now, I've been leaving the wrist bare in an attempt to wean myself away from time: Its permutations, its limitations, its demands. I can function without one pretty well but recently, I've missed the watch as jewelry. So now I have a lovely Seiko I really really like. But am I checking the time every five seconds? I don't think so. Time is just a number. Like any other number, it only has the power you give it.

We're surrounded by numbers. Social Security, age, weight, blood pressure, deli counter lines, height, birth order, IQ and whatnot. Ignore them. They're nothing but a shell game. Who and what you are has nothing to do with time or numbers.

Christmas Shopping and oh my....

Couldn't believe it. We went Christmas shopping yesterday, instead of plunking ourselves in front of the next-to-the-last race in Phoenix. Got home in time to see Denny Hamlin fade to 12th because of fuel issues, (bet he stayed awake last night thinking of new curse words), but didn't need to suffer through the whole ESPN/Commercial show. The only good thing about the race is that JJ didn't win.

I'm out of shopping shape. Sigh. This morning my body said "what did you DO yesterday?" This may be the year Christmas comes from online vendors, LOL. Normally I've done a ton of our shopping by now, but not this November. It's hard to admit, but I'm pretty stumped. When the kids were young, Christmas was so easy it was a ton of fun. How hard is it to open the American Girl catalogue? Ah, for the good old days...

Writing is the one sane part of my day. For those precious hours, I don't worry about what to cook for Thanksgiving, when to get the Christmas decorations from the attic, or if the iPad's second generation is worth waiting for.