Deborah Woehr

Amanda is free of the ghost’s clutches for now but she is still very upset by the physical attack and resists Travis’s questioning. I wrestled with this, having her cooperate or fall back on old patterns. She fell back on old patterns because, in reality, people are very slow to change. Or, they don’t change at all.

A victim of domestic violence, she has some pretty hefty issues regarding men. It doesn’t help that her ghostly attacker is a male, or the fact that Travis went behind her back and called her estranged father to ask about her psychic ability. The reader will find out about that conversation in the next scene.

ESBN 53989-060204-457024-24

I’ve just spent the past two hours trying to figure out why my screen went monochromatic on me and fretting over the cost of replacing the monitor and/or video card. Replacement parts for Macs are normally not cheap. A new video card would cost me anywhere between $99 and $300, depending upon what I wanted to get.

After a frustrating week trying to work around WordPress bugs, I did not want to deal with this. A search on Google proved futile for me, but my husband found the solution and relayed it to me as my oldest burst into my office and pressed several keys on my keyboard.

Presto! I now have color. As it turns out, he and his buddy (who is spending the night) snuck into my office while said buddy’s mom and I were visiting and toggled the screen to monochrome. I didn’t know anything was wrong until she left and I returned to my computer.

He is about to learn that age and experience overcomes youth and skill.

Melly’s Novel Covers brought back memories of MTV when I saw the link to the Cure’s Love Song at the bottom of her post. How many of you were born when they first came on the air? I was a freshman in high school.

Video Killed the Radio Star was a ridiculous song, and thankfully they didn’t play that video much. Today, MTV is nothing like it once was. I stopped watching when they started playing nothing but Rap.

Since then, I’ve relied on iTunes and the radio to listen to music. Yesterday, I browsed through iTunes and wrote down some songs that I’d like to download.

Relatively New Stuff

Yellow, by Coldplay
Trouble, by Coldplay
Such Great Heights, by The Postal Service: This song has great positive energy.
Desert Rose, by Sting: I couldn’t figure out why I liked this song so much until someone mentioned that it took them to another place. That about describes it for me.
Cornflake Girl, by Tori Amos
Beautiful, by Christina Aguilera
I’m the Only One, by Melissa Ethridge: I haven’t listened to Melissa’s newest songs, but this is the only one I’ve liked to date.
Run, by Snow Patrol
Blurry, by Puddle of Mud
Float On, by Modest House: Another upbeat song
Ghost, by Indigo Girls

Oldies But Goodies

Vision of Love, by Mariah Carey
Self Control, by Laura Branigan
Spirit in the Sky, by Norman Greenbaum: This song reminds me of being a child in the Post-Hippy Era.
Under the Milkyway, by The Church
Ah! Leah!, by Donnie Iris
Don’t Dream It’s Over, by Crowded House
Run to the Hills, by Iron Maiden
Modern Day Cowboy, by Tesla
Hair of the Dog, by Nazareth
Say Hello 2 Heaven, by Temple of the Dog
My Hero, by Foo Fighters
Wanted Dead or Alive, by Bon Jovi
Love Song, by The Cure

Bands I Enjoy

REM
Tool
Live
Metallica (S&M is my favorite album of theirs.)
Creed
Ozzie Ozbourne
Godsmack
U2
Incubus
Pearl Jam

Before this post gets obnoxiously long, I’ll stop here. What are your favorite songs? Which band would be worth driving 200 miles to go see perform?

Writing

It’s going pretty slowly, but at least it’s going. Amanda has just received a major revelation as to why she sleepwalks to cemeteries. Now, I have to get her to come to grips with her psychic ability before she goes insane.

Reading

I’ve just passed page 100 of Cell. I’m sure most of you would have devoured the book by now, but I’ve always been a slow reader. I plan on finishing it by Sunday so I may review it on Monday. We’ll see how the kids cooperate for me.

Today I received another book in the mail that looks very interesting. It’s called The Mercy of Thin Air, which is similar to The Lovely Bones in that the main character has died and is living “in between.” I’ll let you know how I liked it.

Tinkering

I’m experimenting with WordPress plugins to see how well they work on the WBA site. This morning, I went around-and-around with the del.icio.us plugin, which I still haven’t figured out how to place in my post template. I got it to work on the main page. At least that’s something.

What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3)
created with QuizFarm.com

Thanks to Michael for sharing this quiz. I don’t know about journalism, but I definitely enjoy writing.

I’ve come to love the main characters in Prosperity, but that wasn’t the case with God’s Last Twilight. The latter story is the backstory for Prosperity I’d written for the 2004 NaNoWri contest. It started out on a blog (now defunct), and I received positive feedback from my readers.

I did finish God’s Last Twilight, but the problem was I hated the character so much that I was all too glad to type “THE END.” She was an enraged soul who did horrible things to the townsfolk of Prosperity. God’s Last Twilight was the most brutal story I’ve ever written, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

The story has been sitting on my hard drive for well over a year and nagging at my mind. But I’m not ready to go back to it yet. I’m determined to finish Prosperity first.

Have you ever written about a character that you couldn’t stand? Were you able to finish the story in spite of this?

On the surface, this tool is very nice. The problem I’ve been having is with the links. Often, they won’t show up as links the first time around. When I paste a link into my post or page, it inserts an “x” between the “a” and the “href” in the HTML code. I’ve tried to fix this manually through the HTML interface, to no avail.

Excerpted from Problogger’s Ten Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.0

There are a couple problems I see, as a web purist, with this approach. TinyMCE, though it will probably continue to be improved, creates really shoddy HTML in some cases. Empty tags, funky cut-and-paste, and the now-internally-infamous shoddy image feature makes it great for quick and dirty entries but poor for day-to-day usage. I don’t use Safari, the preferred browser for most Mac users, so I can’t be sure if it works yet for you Safari users, but last time I recall it didn’t.

Turning off the WYSIWYG option in your profile solves these problems.

If you want to upload anything other than thumbnails, bypass the image uploader. Instead, use your FTP client to upload images into the wp-content folder. Then copy the URL and paste it into your post.

From there you can resize the image without sacrificing its quality. I tested this out by editing a post that gave me fits over the weekend. You can see the results by following this link. A Different Approach to Character Outlining.

I’m happy to say that this trick worked in all three of my browser applications: Firefox, Safari, and IE for the Mac. A big round of applause goes to John for discovering this loophole.

The Cell, along with another book, arrived on my doorstep right after I’d returned home from lunch. I’ve yet to put up blinds or curtains in my office window, so I always see the mailman when he’s coming. Today was no different, except that I saw the Amazon package poking out of his bag.

I made myself work on my scratchboard and managed to pump out a few words for Prosperity before I allowed myself to open the book. Despite the distractions of laughing kids and thumping Rap music, I got to Page 30.

So far so good. Unlike his other books, King dives straight for the mayhem.

I finally got Amanda out of the malevolent ghost’s clutches as of last night. I’m not finished with the scene yet, though. More details to come later.

Too much is going on for me to concentrate. Saturday involved the weigh-in for the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby, which will occur on Friday. Sunday, I just couldn’t get the words to come out.

Yesterday, it was more of the same, adding the frustration of technical glitches to both my personal blog and WBA. I’ve backed up this blog and plan to become religious about that. I’ll do the same with WBA because you just never know what’s waiting around the corner.

Today, I have mundane tasks as well as a scratchboard piece I’ve been needing to finish for the past month. So, I think I will sign off and go do those. I’ll be back later.