• Who is this chick anyway?

Nova Terra

~ Just another way of stalling on my other writing

Nova Terra

Tag Archives: humor

Woo-Woo Scale for New Age Books

04 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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Tags

humor, life, New Age, reading, religion, writing

1—My Journey

2—Crystals  are Our Friends

3—My Trek Through Holistic Healing: Drugs You Have to Google

4—Karma: Love It or Hate It?

5—All You Need to Do is Breathe. Or Cleanse. Whatever.

6—Whaddya Mean, You Don’t Have the Money to go to X and Experience Y?

7—Our Upcoming Evolution

8—Jesus Helped Me Write This

9—My Dog Helped Me Write This

10—(must bring in saucer people in a meaningful way)

Duct-Tape: The Fifth Force of the Universe

25 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by lionsofmercy in Fiction

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Tags

child care, duct tape, humor

The silence in the car was punctuated by Allie’s sniffles and Desiree’s snores. You’d have thought one would have cancelled out the other, peaceful baby making happy mommy and all, and after about five miles, I tried logic.

“It’s not like they hurt her,” I said. I knew I sounded defensive. “And we did spring her on them at the last minute. And they had all the couch pillows underneath–”

“Shut up, Henry!” Allie yowled. Desi woke up and began to cry. I couldn’t blame Desiree. She’d been a good sport. But when Alison walked down the stairs and saw our five-month-old duct-taped to a wall of my best friend’s man-cave, something changed in our marriage, and not for the better. Before tonight, I’d always thought that “good sport” described my wife as well. Guess not.

Maybe it was genetic. We’d spent the night bailing my pouty and ungrateful mother-in-law out of jail after a drunken spree with her four best buddies. They had all won motorcycles on a trip to a game show in New York. Instead of selling them to cover the taxes, they had named themselves the Hogettes, and proceeded to act like it.

So when we got the call, we thought we were making the right decision when we dropped Desi off with “Uncle” Jaffe and his poker game instead of hauling her to Night Court with a gaggle of septuagenarian biker chicks.

Jaffe ran the town’s auto body shop and tutored the high school kids in physics in his spare time. He had a theory that duct tape could do anything, and I was willing to admit it did just fine as a baby wall-chair. He’d even noosed Mr. Daddles next to her without so much as damaging his plush. It made sense, as there was no space in Jaffeland that could even remotely be called “child-safe.”

But when I pulled up to the house, Allie snatched Desi out of her car seat as if she’d rescued her from ravening wolves pursuing the chaise. “You can sleep on the couch tonight, Mr. Thinks It’s Funny! Maybe you can make yourself a blanket out of duct tape.” We have a door at the top of the steps to the bedrooms and all, a leftover from when her mom used to live in the house, and it slammed and clicked. Lucky there was a powder room downstairs, I guess.

So I went on the Internet and then back to Jaffe’s, seeing as the hardware stores were closed, and he fixed me up. Can’t say it didn’t take me a while, but I made me my blanket out of duct tape. All different colors, too. Man, it pissed Allie off that next day.

What’s a fella to do?

Like Me! Please Like Me!

16 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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Tags

cleavage, humor, memories, smart mouth, waiting, Whole Health Action Management, writing, writing groups

I’m hunting for a writing group. I’ve been advised to do this by many people, and now I’ve been semi-forced into it by WHAM (Whole Health Action Management). For those who didn’t click the link, this is a group I help run which meets for two months and has you choose a goal in the middle which you then pursue with peer support. It works pretty well–you’d be surprised what having to report on your new good habit will do for keeping it going. In the past, I joined a gym, made some progress on the meditation issue (which we’ll address here some other time), and now it’s time to enlarge my social circle. Aieeee!

So I went to Meetup, found a likely group that didn’t sound too scary, admitted my desire to commune with other sufferers and confessed my fetish for Victorian and genre novels. And now the moderator has to see. Oh dear. As if sending out query letters wasn’t bad enough.

That’s not going too well, either. One of the few people decent enough to get back to me at least cared enough to have his form letter say that he found my query interesting, but was overwhelmed with work at the time. SO much nicer than the standard refusal, which intimates that surely somebody somewhere will like your piece of dreck, but not them, no sirree Bob!

Well, we shall see on both counts. Meanwhile, I have been triggered into the dilemma of Wanting People to Like Me. I thought I was over that. In my salad days, I was a sex & drugs bimbo, seeking approval through suitable application of my ample cleavage. Bless the few people who saw past my people-pleasing facade and realized I was smart and funny too. Nowadays the whole mechanics have changed, and smart and funny’s all I’ve got: My cleavage is still ample, but even if I could tuck in selfies with my QLs, it would rather count against me.

“Smart and funny” is an almost infinitely harder job than “high and easy.” Smart requires treating my brain well, and being careful what I program it with. Funny chiefly requires NOT saying half the stuff that comes into my head, and this I owe to the beautiful Angie M. back in high school.

She was a senior, I was a freshman, and I had a massive schoolgirl crush on her, which she was kind about. And one day in Drama Club, after I’d called out something that the recipient took in the wrong way (which, hindsight admits, was the only way possible), Angie hauled me aside, sat me at her feet and said, “Look, Honey.” (I was in my mid-twenties before ditching this nickname, although some of my best friends are grandfathered in.) “You and I are Scorpios, and a lot of the time we think something is funny–but it’s not funny at all to other people.” Ah, puppy love. If only this 17-year-old mentress could have kept re-programming my brain for years: I heard her, and I never forgot it. I apologized to the girl I offended (who got over it in, oh, about two years) and have tried to watch my mouth ever since.

I can’t tell you how much of Max I’ve deleted because my beta reader pointed out that I would possibly offend somebody. Sigh. And this is important, because I want people to like my book. To like . . . me.

Part of me sheeping HATES THAT, but it is how it is.

 

Nova Terra

just another way of stalling on my other writing

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