An early dollhouse, a Tudor detailed by my creative niece, and donated to a school auction.
I’m not sure when the tradition started, but about 20 years ago is a good guess. A friend had a daughter in a local school and solicited donations for their holiday auction.
I volunteered to donate a dollhouse, and promptly enlisted my creative niece MES to help me fulfill the promise. Over the years I’ve enlisted other help, claiming it’s more fun than working alone. (Never mind that my friends and relatives are much more creative than I am. I do supply the furnishings, however!)
Here’s the “before” for this year’s house. It’s small enough that I can lift the job by myself! Maybe next year, it will be safe to have a full team working on a mansion!
2022 “before” photo. Some week in the near future, I should have the “after” to share.
Shakespeare asked the question in “Romeo and Juliet.” You remember: that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
So, names don’t matter?
They do if they live on as units.
Of course I’ve skipped ahead a few centuries, but I’ve always been fascinated by the names of units. In science, there are many that are named after key figures. We have the newton (unit of force); the ohm (unit of electrical resistance); watts (unit of power); the Tesla (yes, that one, unit of magnetic flux density); and dozens more here, including my favorite, the curie (radioactivity).
One that may also be familiar is the Mach, named after Ernst Mach whose work in aerodynamics led to the understanding of supersonic speeds. The Mach number is the ratio of the speed of an object to the speed of sound in the surrounding medium.
Why do I think of Mach today? Because this week marks the 75th anniversary of the breaking of the sound barrier. On October 14, 1947, pilot Chuck Yeager flew faster than Mach 1, the speed of sound. Details of the flight are here.
If you’re writing, or always wanted to — a novel? A short story? Your memoirs? This class emphasizes the craft of writing: plotting, developing characters, point of view, dialogue, and setting. You’ll learn techniques for submitting a proposal to an agent or publisher. Each class includes lecture, discussion, critique, and writing exercises.
— a short story by Jim Guigli, appearing in Rock and a Hard Place Magazine Issue 7
This week my guest is Jim Guigli. I’ll let him explain!
Looking for Mishka — Why?
by Jim Guigli
My short story, Looking for Mishka, is now available in Issue 7 of Rock and a Hard Place Magazine.
This
story, like most of my fiction, is about private Detective Bart Lasiter. After he had enough time serving the
Berkeley, California PD, Bart moved north to open a tiny office in Old Town
Sacramento.
While plotting a Bart
Lasiter novel, I faced a research problem.
In my respectful parody of the Marlowe/Lew Archer genre, Under the
Black Flag, an important question about the laws and legal codes directing
California private investigators stumped me and my inexperienced private
detective.
In helping a
wealthy Lake Tahoe woman deliver ransom to the kidnappers of her husband, what
were Bart’s legal obligations? His
client didn’t want police involvement. Was
Bart required to notify law enforcement?
I couldn’t find a
straightforward answer, even after a lot of online research and consulting both
a working private investigator and a San Jose PD detective. My solution was to have Bart remain as unsure
as his author:
Did he have to
report it? He wasn’t sure. He’d never had a kidnapping case before,
except for Mrs. Tereshkova’s cat.
I continued with
the novel, but Mrs. Tereshkova’s cat needed a life. In time I invented the back story that became
Looking for Mishka.
Another cat,
Aggie/Agamemnon, appears in this story.
This guy was real, our pet, until he died last year at 18. The Bart Lasiter stories featuring Aggie
describe him as he was in life — except for drinking whiskey.
I hope you enjoy Looking
for Mishka and Rock and a Hard Place Magazine.
by Anastasia Pollack and Lois Winston, her author, my guest blogger today.
As anyone who
has read about my life knows, I have many bones to pick with my author Lois
Winston. Not only is she constantly placing me in the path of dead bodies, but
she also saddled me with the communist mother-in-law from Hades. You may
remember that Lucille Pollack is based on Lois’s own communist mother-in-law. I
suppose it’s one of those “write what you know” things I’ve heard authors talk
about when they don’t know we characters are eavesdropping on them.
When I reminded
Lois of William Faulkner’s writing advice to “kill your darlings,” she told me
the saying actually comes from a Cambridge University lecture given by English
writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch about a century ago when he advised, “Murder your darlings.”
However, Lois
explained that neither Faulkner nor Quiller-Couch was talking about the
characters that populate a novel. They were referring to the need to be
ruthless when it comes to eliminating anything that an author may personally
love about her writing but has no reason for being in the story.
Quiller-Couch’s
full quote is, “Whenever you feel an impulse to
perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and
delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
Lois will tell you that one of
the best pieces of writing advice she’s ever received is that everything in a
book, whether narrative action, internalization, or dialog, must do one of two
things—either advance the plot or tell the reader
something she needs to know about the point of view character at that moment.
In other words, ditch the filler.
However, unfortunately for me,
the same is not necessarily true of the characters who populate stories. And
yes, I get it. Mystery authors need dead bodies. Otherwise, there would be
little need for me or any amateur sleuth to figure out whodunit—unless the
mystery centers around who stole the cookies from the cookie jar. And we all
know the answer to that—Cookie Monster!
Lois has a
friend who adores both me and the novels Lois writes about me—with one major
exception. With a passion bordering on obsession, this woman absolutely hates
Lucille. She has begged Lois on numerous occasions to kill Lucille off or
barring that, ship her to Siberia. However, Lois insists that Lucille is the
character many of her readers love to hate. Yes, she’s irritating, but she
provides both conflict and comic relief.
Unfortunately
for this friend, as well as yours truly, Lois plans to keep Lucille around. She
justifies this by citing the reader backlash when Elizabeth George killed off a
beloved character years ago. Although, I doubt any of Lois’s readers would
classify Lucille as a beloved character. Even Lucille’s son, AKA my deceased
husband, liked his mother best when an hour’s drive and a river separated the
two of them.
Thanks to Lois,
Lucille is back again, causing more trouble for me and my family in Guilty
as Framed, the newest Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery
Are there
characters you’ve come across that you wish the author would kill off? What
about characters you wish an author hadn’t killed off? Let’s hear from you. And
feel free to tell me what you really think of Lucille. Misery loves company!
When an elderly man shows up at the home of reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack, she’s drawn into the unsolved mystery of the greatest art heist in history.
Boston mob boss
Cormac Murphy has recently been released from prison. He doesn’t believe Anastasia’s
assertion that the man he’s looking for doesn’t live at her address and
attempts to muscle his way into her home. His efforts are thwarted by Anastasia’s
fiancé Zack Barnes.
A week later, a
stolen SUV containing a dead body appears in Anastasia’s driveway. Anastasia
believes Murphy is sending her a message. It’s only the first in a series of
alarming incidents, including a mugging, a break-in, another murder, and the
discovery of a cache of jewelry and an etching from the largest museum burglary
in history.
But will
Anastasia solve the mystery behind these shocking events before she falls
victim to a couple of desperate thugs who will stop at nothing to get what they
want?
USA Today and Amazon bestselling and
award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense,
chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction under her
own name and her Emma Carlyle pen name. Kirkus
Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery
series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition,
Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework
designer who often
draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her
experiences in the crafts industry. Learn more about Lois and her books at her
website www.loiswinston.com where you can
also sign up for her newsletter and follow her on various social media sites.
I’m counting on a poor memory on your part as I fall back on last year’s holiday weekend blog! Would it excuse me if I whined about having to submit grades for 30+ students a week ago, and how fall classes start this Sunday (yes, Labor Day Sunday) with 50+ students this term. (Never mind that I love teaching these classes!)
NO BAKE MINI HAMBURGER DESSERT OR
SNACK
TIME TO PREPARE:
about 15 minutes
YIELD: 12 mini
hamburgers
INGREDIENTS:
I box vanilla wafers
1 box soft chocolate cookies (SnackWells or the equivalent)
1 tube green frosting
1 tube red frosting
1 tube yellow frosting
1/8 cup sesame seeds (optional)
DIRECTIONS:
1. Arrange 12 vanilla wafers, flat side up, on a tray or
platter. These are the bottoms of the “hamburger buns.”
2. Using the green frosting tube, squirt a ring around the
edge of each wafer. Using your finger or a toothpick, rough up the frosting so
it resembles ragged lettuce.
3. Place 1 chocolate cookie (the meat!) on top of each
green-ringed wafer.
4. Using the red frosting tube (ketchup!), squirt a ring
around the flat edges of a dozen additional wafers (the tops of the
“hamburger buns).
5. Using the yellow frosting tube (mustard!), squirt a yellow
ring over the red ring of Step 4, allowing the two colors to mix in places.
6. Place each newly ringed wafer, flat side down (top of the
bun!), on top of a chocolate cookie/wafer.
DONE! You now have 12
hamburgers, with lettuce, ketchup, and mustard.
7. (optional) Dot the top of each “burger” with
egg white, and use as adhesive for a few sesame seeds.
Be creative: add a smooth ring of white frosting for an onion, a square of orange frosting for cheese, or smooth the red ring so it looks more like tomato.
Happy Labor Day Weekend — let me know if this recipe *works* for you!
It seems everything I buy lately comes with a manual. And it
takes a manual to decipher the manual.
Some examples:
• A car. This is a big one, of course, and takes 3 manuals. Our car is a year old and I still can’t figure out how to adjust the side mirrors. I think they have their own manual.
An old bed. Maybe some duct tape will do?
• A bed. Our 20+ year-old bed needs replacing. All I wanted was the same brand, same size, just new. Yeah, right. The manual for this is actually a folder of materials, starting with instructions for the day before the bed arrives (in 6 weeks!), the day of the bed’s arrival, and, of course, the care, feeding, and controls for the bed. (I did order a bed and not a baby, right?)
• Zoom. Here’s a sentence from the Zoom manual:
You manage what you’re sharing in its own window or portion of a window, while Zoom uses the floating window as with Speaker view’s full-screen mode, as shown in Figure 31 in Speaker View and Figure 57, below. (from p. 146 of 280)
• A Turntable. A friend told me she just bought a turntable so she could play old records. You guessed it. It came with a manual. No longer just “lift needle and place at edge of record.”
I've been a factory worker, a translator, a teacher, an experimental physicist, a nuclear safeguards engineer, a writer, a waitress, a miniaturist, a paralegal, a nun, a minister, a short order cook, a ticket taker, an editor, a crafter, and a cotton candy twirler.
I am still some of these, plus a wife.
No wonder I still have a spectrum of stories to write.
Filed Under : 
Oct.26,2022
