Adventures in Home-Schooling

 We’re spending a few weeks in Hawaii and this time we brought the kiddo with us, along with a backpack full of her schoolwork. She’s seven, in 2^nd grade, and not particularly quick at reading, though she loves math. This, no doubt, will be our only brush with home-schooling—at least until our next trip to Hawaii. And wow, it sure is an eye-opening experience. Here are my impressions -- so far -- of the upsides and downsides of home-schooling.

Upside:

She can flit from one subject to another, so she never gets bored with any one thing.

Downside: 

Are we encouraging ADD here? Focus, girl, focus.

Upside:

We can decide it’s a beach day and spend the morning snorkeling and catch up on schoolwork later.

Downside:

Chances of actually catching up: zilch.

Upside:

She thrives on the one-on-one attention.

Downside:

One-on-one attention = exhaustion for the parent side of the equation. Talk about a crash course in patience. Seriously, I don't know how teachers do it.

Upside:

It’s an excuse for field trips to the Mauna Kea Observatory for stargazing.

Downside:

Field trip nearly killed our truck.

Upside:

We get LOTS of quality time with the kid.

Downside:

She’s jonesing for some friend-time. It’s possible she’s getting sick of us.

Upside:

She can go to Circus Camp a couple afternoons a week and learn valuable life skills such as stilt-walking and unicycle-riding.

Downside:

Not sure stilt-walking will help with No Child Left Behind school testing.

So … the jury’s still out on this brief home-schooling experience. It’s fun, but it does take lots of time and attention from either me or her father. Overall, I think it’s a wonderful experience for her, though my own writing has taken a hit. (You probably haven’t seen me as much on Twitter lately.) But it’s worth it to have her with us for a few weeks in Hawaii, away from the coldest, snowiest Alaskan winter in memory. 

Have you ever tried home-schooling? Any tips for us? What’s your opinion on traditional school versus home-schooling?

My Daughter Would Kill Me...

...for telling you all this. But I can't resist.

My daughter-- who is a beautiful, snarky, creative and scary-intelligent girl who has a black and white view of what’s right and wrong in the world and definite ideas about how to fix it all-- turned fifteen on Monday.

Fifteen. That’s unbelievable to me. Partly because I’m her mother and that’s how I’m supposed to feel, right? But also because I think of her either as a little girl—like when we’re giggling over silly videos on YouTube or watching our favorite Disney movies together or making cookies and eating more batter than we bake—or I think of her as an adult because, to listen to her talk about world events, politics, history and sociology you would swear she was thirty.

But she’s fifteen. No question. I know because something so typically fifteen-year-old-girl happened to her the other day that my heart actually hurt.

And the story starts with three words you are probably all expecting now: There’s this boy.

Of course. All the “best” teenage girl stories start with that, right?

Well, there’s this boy. He’s been her friend for two years. And I mean, truly a friend. They text late at night, they let each other read their short stories (they’re both writers) and spend hours sending each other song suggestions on YouTube for obscure bands that they both follow. But he’s always been just a friend. And apparently as happy with that as she is.

But… well, you guessed it. The other day he told her that he wants to be more than friends.

Now, to his credit, he was smooth about it. And to her credit, she handled it well. But unfortunately, she doesn’t feel that way about him and she was quite upset… worried about losing the friendship, hurting his feelings and being awkward around each other.

She said he was okay with her saying that she’s not ready for a boyfriend right now. I thought that was a good, and honest, answer and should make everything fine. This way it’s not about him, it’s about her.

(which reminds me of one of my favorite Seinfeld moments. George's it's not you, it's me :))

Anyway, I decided to ask hubby for his opinion. His reaction was “he’s crushed”. I said, “no, she made sure he knew it wasn’t about him.” Hubby shook his head and said, “Doesn’t matter. He’s crushed. Nothing she can do about it.”

Ugh.

Then the guy bought her a birthday present. A beautiful leather journal with music notes all over it. I’m telling you, it’s classy. I told her she should rethink the boyfriend thing with that.

Anyway, they’re working through it and, so far anyway, preserving their friendship.

But…of course, my romance writer mind has taken this and wondered if she won’t someday look at him and think “when did he get hot?”

I do so love friends to lovers stories. *Love* them. Hubby and I are living one right in front of her, in fact *g*.

So if it happens to her it will be wonderful.

As long as it’s not before she’s about thirty.

Snow Day

The thing about snow days...they throw your whole schedule out of whack. And since you're all familiar with my fondness for lists, let's just skip ahead to the part where I ramble about weather. Again. :)

Things I contemplate on snow days when I'm supposed to be blogging:

1. Moving and packing. Although, I still have a few weeks to go before the last-minute-panic-and-all-around-moving-stress starts to set in.

2. How I used to spend every snow day (except if there was a blizzard) playing outside all day. Nintendo DSwhat? A sled, a cool snowfort and the promise of hot chocolate later was more than enough to sell me on the idea of numbing my little digits to the point of frostbite if other kids were around to play with.

3. How much work I might be getting done if I only had 1 little person asking for drinks, snacks, help etc instead of 3. Ever notice how they always wait until you're finished with one before their sibling pipes up to ask for exactly the same thing they told you they didn't want five minutes ago? Yeah, it's been that kind of morning so far.

4. How much uninterrupted reading time I could be enjoying if not for drink, snack, help etc requests.

5. How many blankets and chairs it would take to build an impenetrable fort that I could use to confine my wild children. What? As if I'm the only one who's ever thought about it.

6. That I probably shouldn't wait until the last minute to come up with a blog topic.

7. That my blog post would have been up sooner if I hadn't taken advantage of a rare sleep-in morning. But really...3 kids under 10. Can anyone really blame me?

8. How many more zombies I have to kill before I reach the next stage on the Playstation.

9. That it's warm and sunny in at least a million other places right now while I'm stuck here with Mother Nature flipping me the bird for my last blog post.

10. Moving and Packing. Who am I kidding? The last-minute-panic-and-all-around-moving-stress set in the second we started talking about buying a house. :)

Guest Blogger Jeanette Grey - But What If I'm Not Normal??

One of my favorite things about writing romances is coming up with new characters. I love fleshing them out, giving them names, figuring out who they are and what makes them tick. Like many writers, I find little bits and pieces of myself seeping into my characters here and there. I mean, it's unavoidable, right? We write about the things we know, and even if we're trying not to, our own experiences color how we see things, which colors how our characters see things.

But here's the problem: Apparently, characters are supposed to be relatable. Normal, even.

Big problem. Because I'm not normal.

For starters, I've been a vegetarian for ten years. Every time I write a scene that involves food, I get all antsy, trying to decide what normal people would eat. I mean, my red-blooded alpha male probably isn't going to go for the veggie tempura, right?

For another, I'm a former science teacher who's married to an engineer. Star Trek passes for pop culture in my household, and new articles from Scientific American are fodder for small talk.

I still cling to music from the nineties. I don't understand skinny jeans, and I haven't had long, sexy locks since I was sixteen. My house hasn't been clean since about then, either.

Mind you, I'm not so out of touch with the real world that I can't glean some elements of normalcy from it and use that to help infuse my characters. It's a buffer of sorts around the bits of crazy that inevitably do find their way in. Because, sure, I try to keep my own idiosyncrasies from overwhelming my characters, but I've long since given up trying to keep them out completely.

While I want my characters to be relatable, I'm starting to get that normal is relative. Too much 'normalcy' runs the risk of becoming generic, and while a vegetarian, geeky, flannel/baggy-jeans-wearing, short-haired mess might be tipping the scales too far in the other direction, a little quirk is what makes everyone interesting.

So, yeah, I'm not normal. And my characters aren't either.

But that's okay. Because, to me at least, that makes them real.

About Unacceptable Risk:

She may learn to live for love…if vengeance doesn’t kill her first.

Plix spends her lonely, gritty life trying to solve the mysteries her father left behind. Armed with a variety of cybernetic enhancements and a talent for getting into places she shouldn’t be, she searches for clues to his murder—and who’s responsible for poisoning her city.

Waking up on a street corner with her brain wiring fried to a crisp, she figures she must have gotten close this time. There’s only one man she trusts to pull her back from the brink: a tuner who can retrieve the evidence hidden deep in the recesses of her mind. A man she dares not let too close to her heart.

When Edison downloads a secret SynDate schematic from Plix’s burnt-out circuitry, he knows with dreadful finality that nothing—not even the fiery kiss he’s been holding back for years—will stop her from pursuing her quest past the point of insanity.

All he can do, as he helps her plan her final mission, is ease her pain, watch her back…and hope one of them doesn’t pay with their lives.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Unacceptable-Risk-ebook/dp/B005OVZ7X0
Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/unacceptable-risk-jeanette-grey/1105946840
Samhain Store: http://store.samhainpublishing.com/unacceptable-risk-p-6566.html

About Jeanette Grey:

After brief, unsatisfying careers in advertising, teaching, computers, and homemaking, Jeanette Grey has returned to her two first loves: romance and writing.

When she isn’t writing, Jeanette enjoys making pottery, playing board games, and spending time with her husband and her pet frog. She lives, loves, and writes in North Carolina.

She is a member of Romance Writers of America and Carolina Romance Writers.

Website: http://www.jeanettegrey.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/jeanettelgrey

Five things I wish I'd learned about Twitter early on

1. Hashtags are a great way to spread your tweet to a targeted group--but #please don't #overuse #hashtags because that's #really #annoying! #socialmedia #socmed #tip

2. 3rd party management programs, like HootSuite, Seesmic, or Tweetdeck provide more versatility than the twitter website. You can keep track of your lists, hashtags you follow, AND your facebook profiles and pages, all from the same program. Also, these three have mobile app versions, so you can use your phone or tablet to keep up to date.

3. The Buffer app is a great way to not only ensure that you always have tweets going out (you pre-write and queue them up), but the program analyzes your follower activity and sends out your tweets at the optimal times. I like to use this as I'm going through my RSS feed and find interesting articles to share.

 

4. Put your link 25% of the way through your tweet, and you're more likely to get click-throughs. (Courtesy of Dan Zarella)

 

5. Follow the 80-20 rule: keep self-promotion to NO MORE than 20% of your outgoing tweets. The other 80% should be general interest information and conversation. This rule holds true for Facebook too.

What have you learned about Twitter that has optimized your usage and made you a more savvy tweeter?

This Post Has No Title

Yep, that's right. No title. 'Cause I'm just that out of ideas. Blame it on the move from hell. Blame it on the migraine from hell. Blame it on depression or an excess amount of stress, or, you know, whatever.  But never mind that.  On with the post...

I took a day off this week. I mean really off. You know how people like to say that some days are just not worth getting out of bed for? That was Wednesday. I woke up with a headache (the aforementioned migraine) that I just knew was going to get worse, and I decided nothing was going to be gained by my getting up. So I didn't. And it was nice. It gave me a much-needed break and a chance to re-charge my creative batteries a little bit...or at least I like to think it did.

Anyway, that's what today's post is all about: taking a break, re-filling the creative well, all that good stuff. And, since a picture's worth a thousand words (and because, frankly, my brain's not yet up to speed anyway) I'm using pictures to make my point. Specifically, I'm using the pictures created by Julian Beever...

Julian Beever does the most amazing pavement art. Things like this:

Or this: 

Or this:

 I have to admit I love the "behind the scenes" shots just as much. I love knowing how things work. I love the magic involved in crafting illusions. Because that's really what art is all about, isn't it? Creating something that your mind or your heart or your eyes can believe in--if only for a little while.

So I love knowing that this...

Also looks like this...













Or this...

Looks like this:

To see more, check out the website at: http://www.julianbeever.net/pave.htm And TGIF. Happy weekend, everyone!

Put a Raincoat On That Soldier!

Like most romance writers, I have to write the occasional sex scene (actually, more than occasional unless you want your book to slide into the “sweet” category). And like most romance writers, I grapple with a central point—who’s going to be responsible for protection this time around?

Actually, it’s not much of a struggle. Most of us go with the guy and condoms. As a matter of fact, I actually had a reader ask me once why none of the women in Konigsburg took the pill because it seemed to him the men were always the ones who did the protecting.

I’m not sure why I do my scenes this way. But I think one reason I have my heroes doing the protection rather than my heroines may well be because I want to be very upfront about my characters using safe sex, and having the hero take responsibility makes that very obvious. Contrary to the misconceptions of some uninformed critics, romance novels have stressed safe sex at least from the nineties on (and I’m guessing it showed up in at least some novels in the eighties). We may not have the obsession with Big Ideas that characterizes our lit fic brethren, but we do have a few points most of us are adamant about, and safe sex is one of them.

Still, getting that safe sex into the book can sometimes be a pain and a half. Picture it: Hero and heroine are hot to trot. They’re shucking off their clothes and heading for the first flat surface that appeals to them. They’re there. They’re ready. And…where’s the condom? Oh, okay, it’s back in the hero’s pants. Where are his pants? Back in the hall where he shucked them. Rats.

Okay, maybe the heroine has a condom box in her bedside table. But then all of a sudden it’s the heroine who’s telling the hero she’s got condoms. And suddenly the plot takes a possibly unexpected turn. Because whenever one of the characters actually talks about protection, that makes protection itself a plot point. Now that may work (I used it myself in Wedding Bell Blues), but it may introduce a conversation you don’t need or want in a sex scene.

So assuming we’re going to let the hero do the protecting, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. If the hero is naked, he can’t whip a condom out unless he has it concealed in some really unfortunate place

2. Condoms themselves can be funny if that’s appropriate to the story. Linda Howard does this (hilariously) in Open Season.

3. Although the hero produces the condom, the heroine can always put it on him.

4. Few writers actually deal with the details of disposing of a condom after sex just because it doesn’t seem necessary. On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that multiple sex acts require multiple condoms, something erotica writers have to contend with.

Actually, I just wrote a couple of stories that had a heroine tell the hero she was on the pill, and it wasn’t that hard. Still, I’m not sure what’s going to happen from now on. It’s sort of on a case-by-case basis.

And my title? That was the advice the father of my son’s friend gave him after stumbling haplessly through the “responsible sex” lecture. It may sound a little weird, but it’s still apt.

So, dear readers, what do you think? Do condoms in a story make you squick? Seen anybody do a good job of working in birth control pills? Or do you just wish the whole issue would disappear (here’s a hint: it won’t)?