And from the 'You've got to be kidding me' file...

Apparently, there are a lot more people with too much time on their hands than I first suspected.

I came across THIS article today about a growing movement to ban the use of the Comic Sans font from everyday use.

The font, which I can't recreate here without a lot of switching back and forth to check styles, was created to mimic the typeface used in comic books. It's a casual font, which it seems, many people acutally find offensive when it's used for things that are not casual in nature.

As someone who believes the world would be a better place if we all just walked around in our jammies, I have to express my dismay. While I might look askance at a college acceptance letter written in word bubbles [or the font most commonly used in word bubbles] it would still be an acceptance. The crippling pain of a rejection letter might be softened a bit by a big, flowing, unpretentious font, and you can bet I wouldn't bat an eye if the million dollar check for my lottery winnings was written in any kind of type at all. [I'd even accept crayon as long as the check was good!].

So tell me, how do you feel about Comic Sans? Do you find it breezy, fun and happy or just plain ridiculous?

Being a contrary person by nature, I think I might like to spearhead the movement to keep Comic Sans alive and well, maybe have it declared the national font, or the official font of the Olympics. More so, I think I'd like to spearhead the movement to encourage people to get over themselves and not worry so much about fonts.

Balance

The art of balance. [Awesome picture huh? I found it on Photobucket under 'balance']. The reason I looked up balance was because I was just over at Romance Divas in a thread about the difficulties of balancing all the things we have to do in our lives.

The general consensus was that something has to give. When you feel overwhelmed, it's not because you are a failure and aren't managing to do everything in the right way, it's because you've taken on more than is humanly and sanely possible to do.

As I said on the thread, women especially have this problem because we tend to believe we have to be all things to all people. We must be good mothers and wives to start with, and beyond that we have to be great students, excellent employees, dedicated writers, expert promotional gurus, advocates for our own careers, partners in our health care, matriarchs of our extended families, BFFs to fistfuls of people, active PTA members and class moms, charter members of professional organizations, chapter presidents, contest judges, critique partners, captains of the neighborhood watch, concerned citizens, conscientious voters and healthy eaters.

It's nice work if you can get it, but it's also totally unrealistic and [imho] the fault of our do more, be more society.

The bottom line is we need to learn to say when enough is enough and we need to learn to be content not only with having less, but with doing less because less IS actually MORE.

Think about it. Would you rather be really good at one or two things that you love, or adequate at ten things that you hate?

Practice saying no. Practice slowing down. Balance will follow.

So says me.

Have you ever...

Written to a writer?

I’m just curious. I get fan mail on occasion and I love it. I haven’t written very much fan mail myself – not because there aren’t writers I love and whom I believe deserve lots of praise for their wonderful books, but because I always had the vision of writers as being far too busy to read my letters.

Silly me. I’m a writer and I'll make time to read fan mail. Really, I will. [That’s not a hint, by the way.] I don’t consider fan mail an imposition at all and I don’t even have an assistant whose job it is to mail or e-mail back boilerplate replies.

Nevertheless, knowing this about myself, I still don’t send out a lot of fan mail. If I happen to read a book by someone I know, let’s say having met them at a conference or through an on-line writer’s group, I will usually drop a quick note. And early on in my writing career when I was reading books by potential publishers I did take time to e-mail authors and tell them how much I enjoyed their books. I always got lovely replies and I like to think [having now been on the other side of the addy] that I brightened their days a little bit.

So my question today is, do you write a lot of fan mail? Now in the time when writers are easily accessible – most have their e-mail addy up on their website, which is easy to find with a Google search, and many have blogs where you can leave a quick comment, do you? If you do, do you tend more toward commenting to small press authors than best-selling NY authors? Do you think they’re more accessible and more likely to respond?

If you’ve ever written to a mega-best-selling author, what kind of response did you get?

Hoppy Easter!

I'm hanging with my peeps today.

What are you doing?

Just 'cause it's my birthday....

I thought I would post the cover for my upcoming Samhain release - The Matchmakers!

I know I may have said this about other stories I've written, but this book is really, honestly, truly my all time favorite. This is my sweet, cute, funny romance full of characters I love to spend time with.

Here's the blurb:

The Matchmakers by Jennifer Colgan

Coming June 2009

Nick Garret is flypaper for females, and he likes it that way. Women stick for a while, and when it’s over they fly away. So does he. Then one rain-slick night a young woman steps in front of his pickup truck, and his jaded, cynical life takes a sharp swerve toward trouble.

Calliope did the only thing she could think to get Nick to steer his truck—and his life—in a new direction. Banished from the Fae realm for granting a wish gone bad, her punishment is an impossible task; redeem the unredeemable Nick Garret. If she fails to help him pair three couples in everlasting bliss, he’s doomed to never experience real love. And she will share his fate—as a mortal.

Nick can’t decide if this charming, exasperating woman is a dream come true, or a saucy, sexy nightmare sent to drive him insane. Yet something about her makes him want to rise to her challenge. He’ll do anything to make her stick around a while.

Besides, how much trouble can one half-naked, seemingly wingless faerie be?

Stay tuned for an excerpt!

Catastrophe #142

Don't you just hate those stubborn sink clogs?

The best-laid plans of mice and men

So the saying goes. The universe cares little for the things we wish to accomplish, as I learned the hard way this weekend.

First my plan to actually get ahead financially and pay off as many bills as possible went screaming down the crapper when my car decided it no longer wanted to go in reverse.

Transmission rebuild = big bucks
Transmission replacement = sell your first born

Having no car until Tuesday the earliest meant a flurry of phone calls to work out Monday's bake sale plans. Not my biggest worry, mind you, but still.

I breathed a sigh of relief late Friday night, figuring I had everything now marginally under control. Saturday was all about editing and catching up on laundry. I had just realized that there might be an end to the laundry monster if I worked non-stop until dinner [one load an hour in between editing]. It was looking good until DS tripped in the basement and landed on his arm.

We arrived home from the ER four hours later with his arm [two broken bones] in a fiber glass cast.

I would like to state for the record that I have spent entirely too much time in hospitals over the past ten months. [Hence why I did not watch the final episode of, nor do I mourn for the demise of ER.]

Huge sigh. So, today is all about revisions - and if I finish those, back to editing, and then figuring out how to keep the boy's arm dry while he takes a shower.

Let's see how well these plans hold up.

Romancing A Cause

Help my friends from Romance Divas support a romance writer who is struggling. She and her husband have lost their home, both lost their jobs, and we don’t want them to lose hope.

Be a Diva and have a ball with these awesome books. A new auction every day! From April 1 through April 7, you can bid on print books, ebooks, writing critiques, banner creation, jewelry, baskets of soap, and other goodies galore! All of the authors are part of the writing forum Romance Divas, and include Robin L. Rotham, Gemma Halliday, Jennifer Lewis, Kate Pearce, Jennifer Colgan*, Nell Dixon, Sage Burnett, Delia DeLeest, KB Alan, Debbie Mumford, Dara England, Cassandra Curtis, Ciar Cullen, Stephanie Adkins, and many more! If you can't afford to bid on these items, even $2 will help. Paypal address for direct contributions is kbrunori@paypal.com


http://ciarcullen.wordpress.com/romancing-a-cause-auction/

* My book has already been auctioned off, but please check out all the other cool items available!

PG Post - I swear!

So DH and I are in the supermarket the other day, and he turns the corner into the soup aisle. I was following behind and when I caught up to him, he's hanging over the cart laughing.

I give him the curious eyebrow and he says look at this - even the supermarket isn't PG any more:

He of course snapped a picture with his cell phone. Another man in the aisle is also laughing and he says to DH, "I took a picture of it last week." Men.

Yesterday DH is telling a co-worker about it and the guy starts laughing. He'd seen it and taken a picture too.

Now I wonder if any of them had the...meatballs to buy it and taste it.

Farewell Lorne

Andy Hallet, Lorne from ANGEL, has passed away. May he rest in peace.

So what sucks you in?

I mean that in a PG way of course. I'm asking because lo around 12:30 am this morning [though it seemed like last night] I got sucked into curling on one of the sports networks.


Curling? You say. Are you serious? Why yes. It's one of those things that, for some reason, I just can't look away from.

The much maligned sport is an Olympic event which has it's origins in Medieval times. Wikipedia has this to say: The game of curling is thought to have been invented in Scotland, with the first written reference to a contest using stones on ice coming from the records of Paisley Abbey, Renfrewshire, in February 1541.

Apparently it's a game of strategy which involves sliding granite stones along sheets of ice. For some reason it effects me, DH and DD like a trainwreck. If we see it, we can't stop watching.

It might not have been so bad to stay up late and watch curling, except I was awakened very damn early this morning by characters. These are the ones who have been begging for a story for years - well, they already have stories, tons of them, but the stories need to be re-written and updated and at 6:30 AM this morning, the ring leader of the gang knocked on my brain and told me he'd finally figured out how to get the ball rolling in their universe and what I need to do to tell the tale.

So I'm up - of course I can't actually start writing because I need to go food shopping and then we're going to to try to take in an early show of Monsters vs. Aliens. Then I can write. But with all these ideas swirling around in my head, I'll probably go crazy before then. I could really use a nice, quiet came of curling instead.

Is it Friday yet? Yes?? Oh, good.

I kind of feel like this little guy looks. It's been a hell of a week on several fronts, but every time I sit down at my computer, I look over at my wall calendar which displays a picture of two blue-footed boobies for the month of March.

You just can't stay depressed when looking at a blue footed booby. You can't stay depressed when saying the words 'blue footed booby.' Even if the blue footed booby himself looks depressed.

I think the world would be a better place if there were more blue footed boobies.

After all, any creature that walks like this must be having a good time.

I'm off to get some sleep, and dream about blue footed boobies and hope that next week is a better week.

The one that never gets old

Edits...revisions...revisions of edits, edits of revisions...sometimes it seems like a story is never, ever done. There's always tweaking, even down to the final few weeks before a release, sometimes there are still changes to be made.

Now and then I get to the point where I can't bear to look at a story again. I've read it through so many times that I can't see any errors, I can't conceptualize a change, because in my mind, the story is written in stone. It's been on the page for so long, how can it be any different? Those are the edits that make me crazy - not because I don't still want to improve the manuscript, but because my creativity is all tapped out. It gets to be like watching a movie you've seen a gazillion times and now trying to picture a classic scene with a new element in it...it can be practically impossible.

Then there's this one story - the one I've just completed edits on for Samhain...this is the one that never gets old. I've read this story just as many times as I've read all the others, yet I don't cringe when I have to haul it up to the desk top again. In fact I look forward to revisiting every scene. Don't get me wrong, having to make major changes would bum me out, but I still haven't reached the point where I want to sent all the characters on a one-way trip to Siberia. With this one, adding a new scene was like finding an Easter egg on the movie DVD - one of those things that now that you see it you say, gee, that was good. Why wasn't that in there before?

It's nice to have edits that don't leave me pulling my hair out...not that they're ever easy, but sometimes they're actually fun.

150,000 years in the making

Okay, BSG fans, spill it. What did you think of the finale?

SERIOUS SPOILER ALERT!!!

Overall, I thought it was great. It was fast moving, poignant in the extreme and it left me with a sense that they story had been told. So many finales don't do that, so kudos there.

BUT...I was also left with a lot of questions, maybe because I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes. Maybe you can enlighten me...

1. If Baltar is not a cylon, how come his 'ghost/angel' kept showing up? I kept saying to DH, "So Baltar has to be a cylon, right?' and he just looked at me like I was nuts. Was he there because he's the 'human' half of the equation?

2. So once Caprica Six lost her baby, Saul lost all interest in her? [I get that he had his wife back, but still, this bothers me.]

3. What the heck was Starbuck? Was she a Cylon? Why was her body on old Earth and why did her father teach her the Cylon music? How did she just disappear when Lee was talking to her?

4. How come Lee/Apollo seemed to age backwards? Was I the only one who thought he looked about ten years younger in the finale than he'd been looking? [And I don't just mean the flashback scenes to when he WAS ten years younger, I mean the ending scenes on 'new' Earth.] And what was with that hair?

5. How come they never unveiled the 'Daniel' cylon? I was sooooo hoping to find out who he was. 13 colonies, 13 cylon models...hello?

6. So 'mitochondrial' Eve was Hera? This means, humans have always [or nearly always] been part Cylon anyway.

7. I have to say, I love the 'long time ago in a galaxy far, far away' idea. Soooo much better than, dare I say it, Galactica 1980. LOL. The writers really outdid themselves by tying the whole story back to human history on Earth. Very nice work.

8. So we suppose the people who will spring up on Gaelen's island in the northen highlands will be speaking 'Gaelic'? ROFL.

9. Did we need to see Adama throwing up in the street after drinking too much with Saul? Bad form. Not necessary. Why waste the audience's time with crap like that?

10. Who's going to be watching 'Caprica'? And how come the people in the 'prequel' series have more advanced technology than the people in BSG?

11. Are you a Cylon? Apparently we all are...just a little.

I blame the daffodils

This is actually supposed to be yesterday's post, but I just didn't have any spare time yesterday to blog.

I decided it had to be the fault of the daffodils that the first day of spring began with a snow storm.

It was one of those where the flakes are big and wet and gloppy and they stick to everything. It happened, I assume, because the other day when I pointed out to DH that my daffodils had begun to bloom, he said, "That means it's going to snow, just for spite." Well, lo and behold it did. Winter basically said, "I'm not finished here yet."

I was in fact, all ready to be annoyed the whole day - BUT I have to say, winter redeemed itself. Not only did the snow not have to be shoveled, it looked absolutely beautiful on the trees. My drive to work was stunning, especially when I caught sight of a line of just-starting-to-bloom weeping willows in a corporate park. Covered with their layer of snow, they were the prettiest shade of pale, pale green. They looked like they were glowing.

So, yes, I blame the daffodils for the snow, but they had the right idea. It was a nice way to say goodbye to winter [hear that, winter? I said GOODBYE now! Be on your way, thankyouverymuch.]

Next up: Tomorrow, let's dish about the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA finale!

The Non-Hero Strikes Again

I spent last night glued to a book. You might think that's a good thing, but I wasn't reading it because I loved the characters or because the writing was especially moving.

I couldn't put the book down because I was desperately hoping the heroine would kick the hero in the gonads and send him packing.

SIGH. This was a book I had heard about and have been waiting with bated breath to read because it sounded really interesting. I suppose on some level it was because I read it in two sittings - [would have been one but I had to make dinner and it was an ebook so I couldn't read while I was cooking.]

I knew going in that the hero was one of those 'arrogant bastard types' but I've read books where that type of hero redeems himself, so I kept an open mind. Alas, I was disappointed in him. He sunk to quite low depths in his quest to dominate and 'claim' the heroine and it was her humiliation at his hands that seemed to spark his falling in love with her. No time was spent on him actually discovering her as a person or becoming enamored with who she was - his feelings seemed to spring from his own remorse at being an arrogant bastard.

I kept hoping she would really hand him his head, either literally or figuratively each time she suffered for his actions, but of course, she fell in love with him instead.

I've heard men like this called Anti-heroes - the bad boys who take no prisoners in the game of love and who require a skillful and special woman to tame them, but this characters was not that. To me, he was nothing more than a non-hero. A man who fit the iconic definition of 'romance hero' - the brooding gaze and dark eyes, the impressive physical attributes, the money, the power, the self-confidence to do and say anything that pleased him. He starts out seeing the heroine as a prize to be won and he wins her by leaving her so emotionally unbalanced that she clings to him for safety when she should be kicking him in the nuts.

I just don't get the appeal.

How about you? Do you see the anti-hero and the non-hero as two different entities? Do you enjoy the redemption of the arrogant bastard and how much or how little does he need to redeem himself to become a true hero in the classic sense?

What kind of luck are you having today?

I'm over at Star-Crossed Romance talking about luck. Drop by and tell me about some good luck you've had!

Ode to DH!

It's done! My new room is finished - and let me start by giving kudos to DH who worked for 12 straight hours yesterday to make it happen.

We started about 9:00 AM, hauling stuff out of the room which looked like this:

After we cleared everything out, we painted, let it dry and then DH assembled my new desk and book shelf. Then we hauled everything back into the room and it ended up looking like this:

Today he hooked up all my cables and what not so I can use all my stuff and here I am, back in cyber world! The cats have already taken over the chair, but later I hope to evict them and actually sit down and relax in my new space. Saber has been moved to the living room - he's not happy there, though, so we may end up getting him a new bed and moving him back into the den once all my junk is properly dispersed.

Now we both need a week of rest to recover, but it was well worth all the effort.

Tecnhology rocks...but...

Here I am taking a break from painting my den/home office. [Don't worry, pictures will follow shortly. I took before pics and some during pics of the room completely empty with the new paint on the walls.]

Anyway, I'm sitting in the living room with my laptop [the rest of the slackers are playing Wii] and I'm even on battery power! I'm connected via the WiFi we just had installed. Who would have ever thought back when I was my daughter's age, that computing would be this easy and this much a part of our everyday lives.

I remember back when we had to save data on cassette tapes and the only programs the computer could run were written in basic. Now I can instantly publish a blog entry with photos and everything from the comfort of my lap on a computer I can carry around in a book bag.

And yet, I still have to slap paint on the wall with a roller and a brush. Can someone explain to me why computer technology has advanced from the stone and chisel era to warp drive in my life time, and yet painting a 10 x 12 room is still an all day process?

Oh well --- and here's an update on the color - Arabian Sand...think of a box of Crayola Crayons - remember the color they use to call Flesh, and now they call it Peach?? Yeah. That's the color.

Not sandy at all.

But it still looks nice. Now wish me luck getting DH to assemble my new desk and book case.

Doing my part for the economy

Last month I kept the economy alive by dropping $250 at the vet's office. [Topper had an eye infection which required two visits to the vet and four prescriptions - two of which he turned out to be allergic to.]

This month, I'm keeping the economy alive by redecorating my home office. It's been sea-foam green for a while now and I'm soooo tired of it. Not just the color but the arrangement of furniture, the accumulation of junk etc.

So over the weekend I dragged DH to Wal*Mart and bought a new desk - it's a sleek corner model that should free up a whole wall of space. I also bought a taller bookshelf to replace the too small one I have.

My plan was to get rid of the big, bulky desk and the old credenza under the windows and the little bookcase and go with s much smaller workstation, then put a chair in the opposite corner where I can acutally sit and read, write, work on my laptop [where I do most of my work these days anyway] and relax. I'm tired of feeling like I'm trapped in the living room when I want to relax or do anything other than watch TV or watch the kids play video games.

DH shocked me by offering to paint the room! So tonight we went out and picked up the paint. I went with a color called Arabian Sand. I plan to go with white curtains now instead of the matching sea foam ones, and hopefully by Sunday I will have a whole new space to call my own!

This may mean I'll be off line completely on Saturday and Sunday, but what the heck, it will be worth it to have a comfy place to plop my butt and relax. Wish me luck! Home improvement projects are always scary at my house. Hopefully all goes well.