Thank you, Lillie, for awarding me the Happy 101 Award.

As she puts it:

“To accept the award, I am to list ten things that make me happy, then pass the award to five other bloggers. Our society so often focuses on the negative rather than positive, on what’s wrong rather than what’s right, on unhappiness rather than happiness. So I’m delighted to talk about things that make me happy and hope you take a few minutes to think about what makes you happy as well.”

Sounds awesome.

So … 10 things that make me happy.

1. My dog, Chappy. Honestly, just looking at him makes me smile, and having him in the house is like having a permanent ray of sunshine.

2. The rest of my family, too. Naturally, the rest of the family is on the list, too. My parents, who are two of my best friends (hence the reason we still all live together). My sister, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew … all also put smiles on my faces. I am blessed to have a family that I like as well as love. No dreading the family holidays here!

3. Books. It’s no secret that I adore books and reading. There are few things in this world that I like better than a chance to curl up on the couch with a brand-new book by a favorite author.

4. Movie Night. Every Saturday, Mom and I watch a movie together. Usually it’s an old favorite, sometimes it’s a new one, but just about every Saturday at 8:00 we sit down together and watch something we love.

5. Knitting and spinning. You may not know (or remember) this about me, but I knit. A lot. I spin my own yarn, too, and there’s nothing quite so satisfying as running wool through your fingers and transforming it into something else. That it’s often something you can wear is just a bonus.

6. Baking. I also love to putter around the kitchen, assembling goodies to munch on, and catering to my sweet tooth.

7. My home. After the financial melt-down last year and needing to leave our home of 34 years, I am truly grateful for having a nice home in a nice location, one that we’ve all finally–even my dog–settled into.

8. My day job. Yes, really. Not only does it make meeting the rent on this home possible, but it’s in an office w ith people I’ve worked with for 19 years. The job, the position, has developed just for me, so it fits me like a glove. And, even better? There are occasional slow patches when I sometimes cheat and write. (But don’t tell my boss!)

9. Chuck, Castle, White Collar, Leverage … Yes, I DO watch television, and these are some of my favorites–especially Chuck. (If you follow me on Twitter you already know that I talk about almost nothing else on Monday nights.) These are four of my current favorites, along with Burn Notice and the Mentalist, and they make the list because they are clever, funny, dramatic, and stuffed full of just pure entertainment.

10. You. Need I say how much I appreciate all of you fine folks? I’m grateful every day that I live in the information age where I can not only learn whatever I need to know in an instant, but that I get to socialize with all of you, too.

Now, as to the five people I want to share this award with? Bloggers who make me happy?

1. Quinn Cummings at QC Report. She’s clever, she’s funny, she’s a delightful writer, and now she video-blogs, too. She does it all.

2. The Rejectionist because it’s remarkably amusing, reading all the reasons people’s books get rejected. (You know, people other than me.)

3. Liz Strauss from the Successful Blog, because it’s hard to think of somebody else who spreads as many good feelings.

4. Franklin Habit from the Panopticon. Yes, it’s primarily a knitting blog, but I’ve got to tell you, it’s hilarious knitting blog, whether you knit or not.

5. Susan Gibbs from the Juniper Moon Fiber Farm, an inspiring blog from a former CBS news producer who left the Big City to become a shepherd.

Oh, and a bonus mention for my Mom, just because. (But then, I already told you that she makes me happy.)

Hey, folks, I’m going to have a post up at Joyful Jubilant Learning on Wednesday, December 2nd … be there, or be square! The month’s theme? Returning Home for the Holidays.

Do you know what my favorite part of writing fiction is?

Putting the pieces together.

See, the best fiction … heck, the best writing … starts with a single germ of an idea. Something that sparks. Something that sets off a chain reaction.

If you’re lucky, that one thing is GOOD. It’s beautiful and holds together and deserves to be part of something bigger. But one good idea isn’t enough to make a story.

You need to start putting it together with other pieces. Pieces that compliment it. Pieces that help make that little idea GROW.

These include things like:

Three-dimensional characters. It’s characters that make a story interesting–if you don’t care about the people, who cares how brilliant the idea of what’s happening to them is? I’m a lot more likely to keep reading a less-than-stellar book if I care what happens to the characters, than to find out if the earth is going to explode.

Plot points that are interesting, creative, and believable (at least a little bit). You can be writing romance, mysteries, thrillers, or science-fiction, it doesn’t matter. What happens in your book has to make sense within the boundaries of your book. If your characters have superpowers, that’s fine, but make sure the rules are consistent. Your romantic leads can have a “cute” meeting, but don’t stretch my gullibility too far.

Because, little by little, as you add pieces and thoughts, your idea can grow into something bigger. Something you couldn’t have seen coming.

The best books, the ones I personally love the most, combine characters that I love (or at least, who evoke an emotional response, even if it’s hate) and that I’m interested in, and to whom interesting things happen. The more multi-layered and seamlessly woven a plot is, the more I like it, but it has to WORK.

All the pieces–the plot, the characters, the scope of the story–they all have to fit just right, like a jigsaw puzzle to be perfect. (Let’s not forget good writing, too, huh? Fascinating characters and an elaborate, perfect plot still won’t keep my interest if the actual writing is terrible.)

Because, when it all fits? When everything holds together, it’s like magic. One loose thread, one bad connection, and the entire thing can fall apart.

The act of finding and creating all those pieces, though? I love that part.

Write the Way You Talk

You have heard this “rule,” haven’t you? It’s all the rage these days. Internet gurus tell their initiates that all they need to do to gain thousands of readers or sell gazillions of widgets is to simply Write the Way You Talk. They insist that a dependence on grammar rules is not as important as simply saying what you need to say, without getting bogged down by pesky grammatical details.

This is a topic that actually gets discussed in my house. When my father gets some kind of marketing piece that sounds convincing and interesting, he doesn’t let a few mis-spellings or grammatical no-nos get in his way. After all, you don’t need to have been an English major in college to know good business, right? A go-get-’em entrepreneur isn’t going to let concern over the placement of an apostrophe slow him down when there’s money to be made and people to sell. His feeling is that a person’s verbal skills do not necessarily reflect their intelligence (true) or their competence (um…).

But What about the First Impression?

My mother and I, on the other hand, feel that sloppiness in the sales materials implies sloppiness in the product–or in the salesperson. That, if you can’t be bothered to proof-read the copy that’s supposed to convince people to buy your product, how can we be sure that the product is any better?

All in all, it brings up an interesting dichotomy.

Now, I’m the first one to admit that I may be more of a stickler than other readers (cough). But then, I like things neat, tidy, and organized. Piles of papers have to have their corners aligned. Crooked pictures drive me batty. I like things to be correct, accepting no substitutions.

Do You Have to be Correct to be Good?

I know, of course, that people and their writing are imperfect. I also fully embrace the fact that “good” writing is not necessarily the same as “correct” writing (especially in a sales pitch). Finding one typo in an email emphatically does not make me assume that the writer is an incompetent, lazy slob who dozed through English class in 7th grade. It just makes me assume the writer is human–which is preferable than one that is, say, a computer, or inhumanly perfect (because that would just be annoying, really). A breezy letter with a folksy tone wouldn’t sound right in itself without contractions and a certain amount of casual grammar usage.

But when there are multiple errors, and the apostrophe for “don’t” is after the “D”, I really start wondering about who is writing this thing. How smart can they actually be if they cannot spell “your” correctly?

Have you ever gone to look at a house and been greeted by a whiff of cinnamon, or baking bread, and thought “Wow, this is fabulous. So welcoming! They obviously know what they’re doing.”

First Impressions Do Matter

It all goes back to that First Impression business. A person in a suit is going to be taken more seriously than a person in a clown costume. (Crazy, right?) A house with a tidy yard is going to look more appealing than one that looks like a junk yard. A shiny, polished, immaculate car is going to inspire more interest than one that looks like it just came out of a war zone.

You don’t have to be perfect. But it never hurts to look like you know what you’re doing. And if you can’t string four sentences together without egregious abuses to the laws of grammar, you’re not going to inspire my confidence.

How do you define an ebook?

I’ve been reading a lot about ebooks lately, and it’s made me realize that there are really two, entirely separate meanings to the word.

Well, yes, either way, the “e” stands for electronic, as opposed to the “dead tree” edition of books that all of us grew up with.

But as regular usage goes, I’m noticing variations.

Self-Produced eBooks

First, there are PDF, usually self-published texts that people sell on websites and blogs. “How to Make a Million Dollars in 30 Seconds,” “A Mother’s Guide to Crayons,” “101 Steps to Perfect Fingernails.”

These ebooks are usually written and “produced” by the author. That is, the author creates the PDF on her own. (For some ebooks, the word “author” is a word lightly used, too, since some people create theirs from PLR text that they’ve bought and simply reformatted on their own. Though, that’s fine, if you’re into that kind of thing. I’m not here to judge.)

Obviously, the quality varies greatly from book to book. I’ve read some eBooks that were practically works of art in terms of production value, quality of writing, and outright substance of the content. These are usually from “reputable” writers who make a point of giving lots of value for your money. I have a nice collection of them on my harddrive.

I’ve also read truly crappy ebooks. The kind that are written in a 20-point font and have 4″ margins so that they can eke out a few thousand words of text into a “100 pages of vital information!”

These self-produced ebooks–the bad and the sublime–may be available in a variety of ways. Free. Free with purchase. For $5, $220, $50, or even $100. They may promise riches beyond your wildest dreams, or just a few (hundred) great recipes for chicken.

“Published” eBooks

Second, there are the ebooks that you buy to read on your portable electronic devices. (Kindle, anyone?) These are usually electronic versions of published books. John Grisham’s latest novel. Seth Godin’s most recent brainstorm of inspiration. A romance novel to read on your commute to work.

These are (cough) “real” books, and come primarily as text files that you can download and read. Have you heard of Project Gutenberg?

A Little Confusing, no?

Am I the only one who finds the juxtaposition of the same word for two radically different formats/structures confusing?

The most confusing part is that you can’t discuss one type with the people involved with the other. If you start discussing the “future of paper books” with someone who’s just discovered how to upload text of the latest bestseller on their Blackberry, they’re probably not aware of those ebooks people are hawking on their websites. If you write and produce your own (high-quality, content-rich) ebooks, getting your text onto somebody’s Sony Reader is probably the last thing you’re thinking about … assuming it can even handle PDFs.

How fascinating that–for now at least–we can talk about Electronic Books and have two completely different things in mind. Sure, there’s some overlap, but not enough …

Yet.

How long before self-publishing and “professional” publishing are interchangeable, thanks to the electronic age?

Hmmm…

Okay … birthday cake for everybody!

There’s a weekly meme over at Booking Through Thursday which is usually based on reading, but this week, it was geared toward writing, so I thought I’d chime in here. Everybody (meaning you) is free to play along–all you need to do is post an answer on your blog and then head over to BTT and leave a comment so the other participants can find you.

Anyway, here’s mine:

• Pick up the nearest book. (I’m sure you must have one nearby.)
• Turn to page 123.
• What is the first sentence on the page?
• The last sentence on the page?
• Now . . . connect them together….
  (And no, you may not transcribe the entire page of the book–that’s cheating!)

My nearest book is The Snake, the Crocodile & the Dog by Elizabeth Peters.

Howard arrived in time to see the end of this performance.

“Bravo!” he called as the band began to play the performers off the stage. “That looked wonderful, I can’t believe I missed it.”

“Waylaid by thieves, no doubt?” I inquired gently, inquisitively raising one eyebrow.

“Of a surity. Definite thieves. I barely escaped with my life.”

“Yet you managed to escape with your theater ticket intact. How very fortunate. Were there many of them, to detain you through the entire first act?”

“Dozens.”

“But you managed to save your wrist watch, your cufflinks, and the flower in your lapel. Are you quite certain there were more than one?”

“The plural, decidedly,” said Howard.

This was fun!

(And, actually, I was going to use the writing book I had sitting nearby and come up with something closer to this blog’s “theme,” but the two sentences, “It’s risky, what you’re doing,” and “If you’re not interested, you can be sure your reader will feel like tearing her hair out–if not yours.” But tying those two sentences together sure sounded like they were a succinct summation of my post from yesterday, so … I went with the fiction instead!)

If you haven’t seen it, I’ve got a guest-post over at Laura’s Writing Thoughts today.

Go over and read it and then, after, go read the rest of her blog, if you haven’t already.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make small talk and see if there’s anything else I can help her with, all while getting in her way in the politest possible way … because that’s what guests do!

 (Oh, and speaking of guest-posts, this one of Joanna‘s over at Word Sell is delicious.)

Well, I wish I’d known this yesterday….

Not only was March Fourth the only day on the calendar that is a complete sentence, but it was also National Grammar Day.

Who knew?

(I mean, other than Sharon at Daily Writing Tips, which is where I saw it.)

Of course, I should probably have posted about this earlier (and maybe gotten some more votes), but Laura over at the Writing Thoughts blog recently asked for votes for favorite writing blogs, and mine came up as one of the winners.

I’m in excellent company, and I wanted to spread some link-love to the other, no doubt more worthy, winners:

First Place Blogs

Grow Your Writing Business
Web Content Writer Tips

Second Place Blogs

Freelance Writing Jobs
Get Paid To Write Online
Inkthinker
The Article Writer
Punctuality Rules
Writing Forward

For that matter, check out the list of original “contestants,” because they’re all excellent.

Content Done Better; The CopyWriter Underground; Freelance Writing Jobs; Words On The Page; Grow Your Writing Business; Creative & Editorial Freelancing; The Writing Mother; Freelancing Journey; The Golden Pencil; Angela Booth’s Writing Blog; The Article Writer; Inkygirl: Daily Diversions for Writers; Inkthinker; Getting It Write For You; A Writer’s Words, and Editor’s Eye; Writing Spark; Writer’s Notes; Confident Writing; Grammar Girl; A Writer’s Rites; Write Stuff; The Copywriting Maven; The Copywriter’s Crucible; Drawing on Words; ChrisBlogging;
Lis Garrett ~ A Writer’s Woolgatherings; Get Paid to Write Online; Web Writing Info; All Freelance Writing; Michael Stelzner’s Blog Writing White Papers; The Writer’s Blog by Dana Prince; JCM Enterprises; Manage Your Writing; The Hidden Writer; Plagiarism Today; Kate Blogs About; The Writing Life; Wordpreneur; Writing FORWARD); Write-from-home.com; The Renegade Writer Blog; Marcom Writer Blog; and lastly, me at Punctuality Rules!

As I say, I’m in great company. Thanks so much, Laura!

Eep! My sidebar disappeared and I have NO idea why. I’m looking, but since I know practically nothing about CSS, um, well, at least the POSTS are still showing…. Any suggestions? I swear, all I was trying to do was add the phrase “Join the discussion” next to the Comments link, but when I clicked save and took a look … poof! No more sidebar.

Hey folks–I know it has nothing to do with writing or manners or any of the things I usually talk about–but if you’re even remotely a “crafty” kind of person, would you be willing to do me a favor and come take a survey about online knitting lessons? It would be greatly appreciated. As added incentive, if you complete the survey, your name will be automatically entered in a raffle.

Click Here to take the survey

Thanks, everyone! And extra thanks if you help spread the word, too–the more responses the better!

Okay, Joanna and Brad are asking about “connecting words,” and they don’t mean conjunctions like “and” or “but.” No, what they’re looking for are unique, or treasured words that we’ve found out and about in our daily travels, words that might not be common usage, or often heard, but which struck a chord for some reason.

I love the idea of this question, but I’m having the hardest time answering it. I’ve got a good vocabulary, you see. Not perfect, but except for obscure medical and scientific terms, it’s fairly rare for me to come across a word with which I’m not familiar. It happens, but not often. (Maybe browsing through dictionaries in my free time–not to mention a prodigious reading habit–really did pay off.) So, trying to identify a word . . . a real word . . . is tricky.

Because, well, first, I thought of ” Kinnearing,” which is a perfect, made-up word coined by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, and which has taken the blog-world by storm. (Heck, I saw it mentioned on the Teaching Sells forum last month, so clearly it’s spreading beyond knit-bloggers.) (Added on 12/23/07: This IS a “real” word now . . . it made the NYTimes list of Buzzwords of 2007. “To take a candid photograph surreptitiously, especially by holding the camera low and out of the line of sight. Coined in August by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee of the Yarn Harlot blog when she attempted to take a photograph during an encounter with the actor Greg Kinnear at an airport.” How nifty is that?)

I’ve always been fond of the word “grembling” which was coined by Anne McCaffrey, as a blend of the Scots’ “greeting” and “grumbling” to describe a combination of whining, wailing, and general self-pity. It’s really a fabulous word, but since (to my knowledge) it’s manufactured and not a “real” word, no matter how obscure, it takes too much explanation to use it. A darn shame, that.

I like the word “goleor,” too . . . the Celtic word that is the root for “galore,” meaning a plentitude, a plethora of things. But it, too, is so obscure (although at least real), that again, it’s more or less impossible to use it. For that matter, “plethora” is a delightful word. I still remember the first place I saw it used, describing the “plethora of skirts” frothing around the ankles of native women. I’ve always rather liked “cogitate,” too, for thinking. My best friend and I used it in high school all the time: one of us would ask a question and the other, while deciding on her answer, would say, “Think, think think. Cogitate, cogitate, cogitate.”

Then, there’s family slang, like “lammies” for rubber bands, and “garjib” for garbage. (The source being we children, when we were too young to pronounce things properly.) “Xausted,” gets used quite a lot, still, as in “I’m so tired, I’m too exhausted even to use the entire word.”

Oh yes, and then, “duffel.” There’s a whole mythology of duffels in my family which also dates back to my best friend and me, when we were silly teenagers. During school shopping, Mom picked me up a duffel bag to use for my books and joked, “Now you’ll finally have some place to put all those duffels that have been running around.” We laughed, and I repeated it to my best friend and, suddenly, the Duffel was born … invisible, duffel-bag-shaped creatures with feet but no legs, that hopped everywhere they went and said nothing but “Duffel, duf, duffel.” It’s gotten to the point that, even now, we can still make each other laugh by saying “duffel,” and can instantaneously identify ourselves to one another by saying “duffel” instead of “hello” on the phone. (We even used to argue about which of us would have DUFFEL on our car’s license plate, but since she preferred the DUFFLE spelling, we worked that out.)

Hmm. Actually, I think I’m going to have to say that my favorite connecting word has got to be Duffel. There are too many giggles and laughs tied up with that word for there to be any choice. Pity she doesn’t have a blog I could link to–but I included a little of her artwork for you. Why don’t you come play, too? What words have forged connections for you?

birth[noun]1. The act or instance of being born <biology class will be showing a movie of the birth of kittens>

Synonyms: nativity

Related Words: creation, genesis, origination, rise; bearing, childbearing, labor, parturition; begetting, breeding, fathering, generation, mothering, reproduction, siring, spawning; fatherhood, maternity, motherhood, parenthood, paternity

Yep, it’s my birthday. And, see? I brought some cake.

Now, today seems the perfect time to do this meme that I came across over here yesterday:

The idea is to tell what I was doing 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30 years ago. She added 40 to this meme, so I played along with that, too. Feel free to join in and do this one as well, if you’re interested.

10 years ago: 1997. 31 years old. I had just finished taking swimming lessons for the first time in my life, and had a friend teach me to drive a stick shift (which I haven’t done since). I had figured I wanted to start that new decade off by checking a few things off my life list.

20 years ago. 1987. 21 years old. I was in London for the semester in college, my Junior year. And my actual, 21st birthday? I spent that actual day all alone in Trier, Germany, being stood up by a no-show pen-pal, while my camera broke, the batteries in my walkman died, and I couldn’t find a thing in English to read, and ended up having supper at McDonalds. Well, it was memorable!

30 years ago. 1977. 11 years old. Um . . . fifth grade. Chances are we were listening to the 1776 soundtrack in school. Honestly, I’ve got nothing.

40 years ago. 1967. 1 year old. That was obviously a big day, being my first birthday and all, but I have to tell you, I don’t remember much of it. I did, however, get my all-time-favorite doll, Buttons, that birthday. You can see her in this picture with little-bitty me. She spends her time in the guest room these days, but she’s still very much loved.