Make Me Think Monday

20 10, 2014

Who writes better – men or women?

By |2014-10-20T06:00:21-05:00October 20th, 2014|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

It’s an interesting question.

Female writers of the past have used male or ambiguous pennames to disguise their gender. Women like Mary Ann Evans, who used the pen name George Elliot and the Brontë Sisters, who wrote as Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell.

These days, women choose gender-neutral pen names in the hopes of increasing book sales and gaining book reviews. Consider these two NYT best sellers:

~ Joanne “Jo” Rowling chose to use J.K. Rowling for her Harry Potter series and wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling as Robert Galbraith.

~Nora Roberts, the remarkably prolific author who writes in two genres, selected the gender-neutral pen name J.D. Robb for her mystery novels.

Should women writers bother with pen names? Not according to a recent poll done by Grammarly.

As the infographic below shows 59% of the 3,000 respondents believe women are superior writers.

The poll questions centered on perceived differences in writing technique and quality based on gender. Answers indicate readers believe:

  1. Male authors “get to the point,” whereas female writers were more likely to focus on “character development.”
  2. women write about people as opposed to things
  3. women use long, wordy sentences while men write short, concise sentences

Check out the full infographic below:

MenvsWomen_Writers_infographic

I agree with Grammarly’s poll results. Probably because I’m a female author who writes character-driven love stories.

What about you? Do you believe women are better writers than men?

13 10, 2014

It’s finally here – Claiming Annie’s Heart

By |2014-10-13T06:00:08-05:00October 13th, 2014|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

I’m interrupting my regular Make Me Think Monday blog for an announcement of my latest book release – CLAIMING ANNIE’S HEART.

CAH_cover_1800x2700No, I’m not turning View from the Front Porch into a promo blog for my books–it’s just this Irish love story is special to me.

Why? Because Annie’s story is set in Ireland.

And, as most of you know (if you’ve read my ABOUT ME page, that is), Ireland is my most favorite place on earth, and I’m crazy about all things Irish.

The idea for Claiming Annie’s Heart began on one of the many, many trips business trips to the Emerald Isle with my husband.

We toured an Abbey on the rugged west coast. An English doctor built the lovely place as a home for his wife and child. When they died, the doctor left and sold the home. The castle became an Abbey and girls’ boarding school. That’s the place pictured on the book cover.

As we walked the castle and fabulous gardens, I talked with the schoolgirls. My writer’s imagination kicked into overdrive with story possibilities.

On a different trip, we spent time in Belfast during the Twelfth of July Orange Order marches. If you’re not familiar with the marches, read here. To learn more of the history of The Troubles in Northern Ireland read here.

Each trip provided a very different experience, which I combined into Annie and Chad’s love story. Here’s the plot blurb:

Annie Foster remains in Ireland after boarding school to nanny a widower’s infant daughter. Five years later, she accepts the widower’s proposal.

Her first love Chad Jones, whom she believed deserted her, arrives on an undercover assignment weeks before the wedding investigating her fiancé’s connection with terrorists. He’s determined to change her mind and her heart her because he’s never stopped loving her.  

Annie’s heart is torn between the man she’ll always love and the young daughter of her fiancé whom she’s promised never to abandon.  

Which man will win?

To find the answer, get your copy of Claiming Annie’s Heart from one of these bookstores:

AMAZON US

AMAZON UK

NOOK

iBooks

KOBO

6 10, 2014

Social Media Etiquette and Guide

By |2014-10-06T06:00:42-05:00October 6th, 2014|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

Social media has become a popular tool for presenting your agenda or product thanks to the trend set by Barrack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 political campaigns where he employed the use of sites like FB and Twitter.

Social media sites provide “A seamless communications network that has the power to cross cultural barriers and capture the attention … more effectively than ever before.”

Entrepreneurs frequently use SM as an incredible FREE marketing tool. Personally, I use most of the SM platforms to entice readers to buy my books. It’s a fantastic means for  promotion of products.

As a means for getting your message or product out there, social media is priceless.

HOWEVER, social media also comes with red flags.

Stories about stories about social media gaffes by people and businesses are commonplace. The way you and/or your public relations team conducts itself on social media can have a lasting effect.

Online-Reputation-Management-Reputation-e1399499113531If we use SM, we must guard our reputation as this Lakota American Indian proverb reminds us.

Our tracks on social media sites are embedded forever. No ocean waves can ever erase their presence.

So how do we do we guard our reputations when we don’t have an Emily Post etiquette book to guide us?

You can find 10 very specific tips to protect your web presence here

You also have to remember that management of your presence varies based on which social media sites you’re using — Youtube, Google Plus, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Facebook.

Don’t mistake the different social medias platforms as being the same. Each site has its own personality and its own unique platform for various audiences. It’s important to learn the right etiquette for each individual site whether you’re posting for pleasure or business.

SocialMediaEtiquette-2 lrg versionIvan Serrano, a business journalist and infographic specialist, has created this incredible pictorial guide to the most popular social media sites.

CJ Lyons shared Serrano’s infographic on her site along with suggestions for guarding your reputation here

Vocus.com blog also posted an in depth guide to social media etiquette along with Serrano’s infographic here.

Click on the graphic to view a full-sized version of Serrano’s infographic. You may have to click twice to get the enlarged version.

 

29 09, 2014

Harvest Time Bounty

By |2014-09-29T06:00:36-05:00September 29th, 2014|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

As fall magnifies its presence in our little neck of the mountains, my husband and I have been exploring the beauty and bounty of the season.

???????????????????????????????We recently visited an organic farm apple orchard to pick apples for applesauce and spiced apples.

Of course, we could have simply harvested from the crab apple tree in our front yard, which is loaded with tiny crab apples.crab apple

We didn’t for lots of reasons.

  1. The fruit is quite tart.
  2. Coring the tiny apples would have been nearly impossible.
  3. The mule deer love to eat the tiny apples.

And, besides, plucking the apples from the plentiful harvest at the organic farm was a great adventure.???????????????????????????????

I came away with a bag full of juicy Honey Crisp apples.

When we weighed-in to pay, we had half a bushel.

???????????????????????????????Confident we had enough for applesauce and spiced apples, we headed home to make our applesauce.

I have to tell you resisting the luscious apples was hard. So hard in fact that when we finally began to peel and prepare fruit for applesauce. The pot was hardly full.apples in pot

We ended up with only four pints.??????????????????????

 

You won’t hear me complaining because the stewed apples I made for breakfast and the apple and peanut butter we enjoyed for lunches were soooo good.

And, I’m not discouraged about so few jars of applesauce, but I am rationing.

How about you? Are you enjoying fall’s harvest?

24 09, 2014

Change – One Word Wednesday

By |2021-09-22T05:56:57-05:00September 24th, 2014|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

change_altimeter_small_0In last Monday’s blog, I talked about the changing seasons. Winter gives way to spring, spring to summer; summer to fall, and then we’re back to winter again.

There’s something comforting in the constancy of seasonal changes. We accept the change is coming, and we welcome each season for what it offers.

Why then do we perceive the small and major life changes we face with stress and fear and worry?

Life is not static, but a flow of change, never staying the same. It’s messy, chaotic, painful, sad, dirty …, and never perfect.

Bad things happen. So do good things. The sad truth is we cannot control every aspect of our lives.

We accept seasonal changes. We should also accept changes in life.

Consider this quote:

confucis

Unfortunately, instead of accepting change, we react with anger, frustration, and stress. We allow change to steal our peacefulness.

Let me propose three ways to handle change.

Laugh –  Laugh even when whatever change has thrown your way is not funny. You’ll find a certain amount of detachment which can lead to acceptance.

Breathe – When things change and anger or frustration seeps in, take a deep breath. Breathing allows you to calm down and think more rationally.

Pray or Meditate – Try the Serenity Prayer, attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous.

This counted cross-stitch of The Serenity Prayer hangs in my office. Whenever the winds of change blow my way, I find reading those words helps.

serenity prayer

No matter what happens in your world today, smile, breathe and accept whatever change may bring.

22 09, 2014

Bye, bye Summer

By |2021-09-22T05:53:39-05:00September 22nd, 2014|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

Summers Lease 2Today is the Fall Equinox and signals the official end of summer.

I know you thought Labor Day ushered out summer or the first day of school ended the carefree days of summer. Not so. Those are the traditional end of summer.

What is the fall equinox?

According to Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, a 19th-century poet who lived in Ireland with her American Counsel husband:

It is the summer’s great last heat,
It is the fall’s first chill: They meet.

According to Weather.com, “Meteorologically speaking, autumn began on Sept. 1, but the autumnal equinox marks the astronomical start to the fall season.”

Being a wordsmith, I like the dictionary definition for equinox: The twice-yearly times when the lengths of day and night are equal. At equinox, the sun is directly over the Earth‘s equator.

I’ve never clocked the hours on the day an equinox occurs, but I do know that after the date marked on my calendar daylight changes. The days start to get shorter than the nights.

To me, the fall equinox means we say farewell to the scent of sunscreen and welcome the smell of wood burning in the fireplace. Temperatures begin to drop and leaves change color.

The signs of change are all around us. What signs of fall are you seeing?

In my neck of the woods, leaves started turning early. Some say that means a long, cold winter. That’s okay with me.

While I’ll miss summer, I can’t deny I’m looking forward to a cup of green tea beside a crackling fire and huddling beneath a quilt to read.

Are you looking forward to the change of season or do you agree with Edie Melson’s quote that summer is too short?

15 09, 2014

An Unexpected (and Uninvited) Summer Visitor

By |2021-09-22T05:50:25-05:00September 15th, 2014|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

This summer has been a revolving door of visitors at our house and we’ve loved it!

We’ve seen folks we haven’t seen in thirty years and caught up. Plus we’ve gotten to spend time with family. 

There has been, however, a surprise and frequent visitor recently. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAIt’s that time of year in the forest. Black bears, who are actually brown or cinnamon-colored, are feeding up for the long winter hibernation.  

A bear’s natural wariness to find food overrides his fear of humans and his nose is one hundred times more sensitive than ours.

Bird and hummingbird feeders provide as much as twelve hundred calories so the bears prowl around looking for easy food.  We do our part to keep the bears wild by bearproofing our house, which means we take our bird feeders in at night.  

Only, our visitor came mid-morning! 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOn his first visit, Buddy Bear, as my sister named him, emptied our homemade feeder, and ignored the hummingbird feeder hanging ten feet above his head according to the bearproofing pamphlet instructions. It was too high for him to reach. 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAFinished, Buddy sat a spell before he moseyed off. 

bear away2Buddy returned for a second sniff and, finding none, wandered off again.bear away

Next day he came again. This time sniffing no food, he sauntered up to the rock outcropping above our house. We watched him from the large dining room window.  He watched us. We wondered if he thought we were in a people zoo.

Eventually he traveled on. But Buddy returned a third day.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAFinding the feeder gone. He decided to take a rest up next to the house.

bear firecrackerThat was when my husband decided that Buddy was becoming too friendly and used one of our forest ranger provided firecrackers.

The loud bang sent Buddy scurrying away.

A fourth time, he ambled by, pausing mid-way up the hill and looking down, but kept going as if remembering the firecracker. (Bears are very smart and have great memories.) 

We’re hoping that the firecracker did its job. If you look closely, you’ll noticed that Buddy has tags on both his ears.

He’d been a very bad boy. A bear is tagged and relocated from an area where he’s done some damage or been a threat to humans.

Bears only get two chances. Third time the animal is destroyed.  

We don’t want that to happen. They lived in this place first and we’re willing to share unless the visitor is very, very bad.

Btw, we never use firecrackers on our human house guests — even if they are very, very bad.

1 09, 2014

Naming Children, Pets, and Characters

By |2023-03-19T06:17:16-05:00September 1st, 2014|Make Me Think Monday, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Naming

A person’s name has power and all sorts of things should be considered when naming a child, a pet, or a character in a book.

But choosing the perfect name isn’t easy.

After three children, eight dogs, and multiple characters in my novels, I should know.

Back when my husband and I were choosing children’s names, we didn’t have the option to know the sex. You had to come up with a male and a female name. It took us the full nine months during each pregnancy.

In fact, when our second child came early, we had no names picked out and it looked like he’d go home from the hospital as Baby Boy.

Totally not acceptable.

We finally agreed on his daddy’s name and his great-granddaddy’s for a middle name. Ultimately, we used the initials to avoid confusion between two people with the same name.

???????????????????????????????

Coming up with pet names was relatively easy.

We chose common names like Lucky and Buster. Our Old English sheepdogs we gave Biblical names: Obadiah, Micah, Rhinestone, and Tobias.

Okay, Rhinestone isn’t in the Bible, but Tobias comes from the Old Testament. Rhinestone was our rescue OES and came with her name. We didn’t want to cause her more stress by changing her name to Esther.

Naming characters for the stories I write isn’t much easier than naming children or dogs.

Sometimes authors use A & B for their character names and fill in names later using the search and replace function in their word processor. Others change their characters’ names during the editing stage.

I can’t do that. I name my characters before I write a single word. Their names give them personalities, and they become bona fide people to me.

There are all sorts of things to consider when naming a child. Here’s a list of twenty-five in case you’re interested.

There are also guidelines for naming pets. Check here.

I use many of those rules when naming my book characters. Chiefly, I consider these questions.

  • Is the name easily pronounceable or sounded out without difficulty?
  • Do the first name and surname sound good together?
  • Do the names start with the same letter or sound similar? (It may be clever in a family setting to have all the kids’ names begin with the same letter, but similar-sounding names can lead to confusion for readers.)

When I’m coming up with names, I also

  • Consider the number of syllables and vary the number in each character’s names.
  • Choose names appropriate for the story setting, era, and genre.
  • Avoid names of friends and family members.
  • Make the name fit the story and the personality of the character.

Finding the perfect name is not easy. I have been known to change a character’s name, but not often. Once in a book sequel, I killed off a character because I no longer liked her name. It’s one of the perks of being a writer. I get to kill off people. :-)

How’d you come up with the name you chose for your child, pet, or character in your book? Any hints you’d like to offer on choosing names?

25 08, 2014

Seasons – They are changing

By |2014-08-25T06:00:31-05:00August 25th, 2014|Make Me Think Monday, Uncategorized|1 Comment

My internal body clock is set for early morning wakeups. Time zones don’t matter. With or without an alarm, I’m up and moving before the sun crests the horizon.

For me, it’s not a problem. I love getting up at the crack of dawn and walking the dogs in the still of daybreak.

Living in suburban Houston, I didn’t worry about walking in the dark. Streetlights lit my way.

Now that I live in the forest in a state that supports a night sky (meaning streetlights are limited and rare), walking in the dark is a different story. Too many critters like the twilight hours for their prowling.

So before I leave the house, I check on weather.com for local sunrise time and start walking about ten minutes before or just as the sky begins to lighten.

On a recent walk, I spotted sure signs that summer is ending and fall is in the air.

fall shadowsFirst, shadows are changing. You can see what I mean in this photo.

Another clue—temperatures are dropping. This morning it was 42 degrees. The scent of wood burning in fireplaces hovered around some cabins.

For those of you facing triple digit highs, I’m sure that sounds heavenly. Truthfully, it was chilly. I was thankful for my gloves and hooded jacket.

Another hint is our shrinking population. South Fork is a summer tourist town. Our numbers swell from three hundred year round to 3,000-4,000 during May, June, July and August. RV parks are emptying. Shutters cover windows of summer cabins. The exodus has begun. Summer folk are heading home.

The absolute confirmation that winter is heading our way is found in the Aspens along our walking route.

Aspen w gold.1
aspen w gold.2

Yep. That’s yellow among the green. The Aspens are turning.

Fall is on the way, which means wildlife is on the move scavenging for food.

Bears have started their annual bulk up for hibernation and need 12,000 calories a day. That means lots of overturned trash and destroyed barbeque grills. Time to seriously heed the signs posted all along our walk.

feeding signs

11 08, 2014

Foray for Mushrooms

By |2014-08-11T06:00:51-05:00August 11th, 2014|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

Options for summer outings in our little corner of the Rio Grande National Forest are plentiful. There’s something different and fun every weekend. Don’t believe me, check out our South Fork website.

Last weekend we joined the fun on the 14th annual Mushroom Foray.

What’s a Mushroom Foray you ask?

I wondered myself knowing foray is to raid and plunder. Surely, that wasn’t the intent.

I contacted the Visitor Center for information and learned the Mushroom Foray is a simple adventure into the forest to learn to identify edible mushrooms.

And, if you check Dictionary.com, you’ll find that venturing into something new is a less used meaning of the word.

So off we went into the forest on one of the many Rio Grande Forest Service trails. We stopped at three different elevations to find different species of mushrooms.

At the first stop, we gathered our paper sacks and hiked up the hill into the woods. My husband and I were a little fearful that we’d be the only ones of the twenty folks on the foray that didn’t find specimens, but we soldiered on.

Jerry mushroom foray1Our fears were found less for we quickly located a mushroom by a fallen log and prepared to extract the bloom from its habitat. I dutifully made notes of the location on the sack and carefully dug the mushroom then dropped it in the sack. My husband, meantime, kept searching.

???????????????????????????????We found six different varieties of mushrooms and proudly dumped our cache for identification along with the mushrooms others had collected. Alas, only one of our finds was an edible variety.

On our third and last stop, we ate our sack lunch then started searching again. More sure this time of what to look for, we were careful to dig only the ones we thought were edible. mushroom (3)

In the picture below, the large white mushroom was the star of the pickings. It was the biggest example for the day of an edible mushroom…and it was ours.mushroom (2)

The day provided a truly fun foray and an educational adventure. Now, if we are ever stranded in the forest, we won’t starve. We know what mushrooms we can eat.

Although my husband isn’t so sure eating a mushroom is better than starving. Me, I love the fungus blooms.

Go to Top