Deborah Woehr

I was looking for articles to post on The Writers Buzz and stumbled across this gem.

If you’ve ever had to get up in front of a group of strangers and speak, you’re familiar with the fear that you’re going to embarrass yourself while all eyes are on you. Worse, all that attention seems to magnify your every quirk, and your flubs can feel like they overshadow what you get right.

Even when we’re not on stage, stress makes us flounder. It’s easy to live our lives according to our values and beliefs when everything is going right; it’s a lot harder when we’re under pressure and in the spotlight.

Carl Jung named the face we present to the world, the public façade we use to hide things we don’t like about ourselves the persona. The flipside of the persona is the shadow, which is like a three-dimensional version of our physical shadows, packed full of things we’re trying to hide, sometimes even from ourselves.

To become whole, each of us needs to individuate, or integrate, all of our archetypal parts into a cohesive whole. That includes the persona and the shadow.

In any story, the mark of a good villain is his ability to force your hero into the proverbial spotlight, where he will find ways to magnify and criticize the things your hero would most like to hide.
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This guy had my family and I rolling, his laugh was so kooky. Enjoy!

Aaron Brazell has written a great post called 10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.1, which explains the bells and whistles of the latest release of WordPress. I think everyone should read this article, along with Lorelle’s Fear Not WordPress 2.1 and WordPress Plugins before they upgrade.

I’m glad to see that they’ve made improvements on the Rich Text Editor (which I’ve long since turned off since the 2.0 upgrade) and the Image Uploader. They’ve also implemented a WordPress-to-WordPress import feature that will allow you to combine two or more WP blogs. That caught my eye and made me think of my On Book Design blog, which I haven’t touched since June. I thought about importing those posts onto this blog, since I have touched on book designing when I published through Lulu.

But I’ve decided against it because users have complained about their blog rolls getting screwed up. Until I read more about that and how to fix it, I’m not going to update this blog just yet.

Over the past several weeks, my “contact me “form has been attacked by spammers. As I was writing yesterday, my email notifier kept bonging at me whenever these bots would send me their crap. I finally got sick of it and looked on the WordPress Plugin site, where I found the plugin below. It requires users to answer a simple question before hitting Send. That should take care of these intrusions, I hope.

WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection

I took the “if you were a ghost…“ quiz on gURL.com
		I am a… guide spirit Always watchful, the guide spirit is one spectre that lights the way for others. Call it compassion or just plain kindness, but it seems like you often fill a “guardian angel” role. Read more… What kind of ghost are you?

Source: Gurl.com

I’m about 1/5th of the way through the editing process for Prosperity. That’s roughly 5 chapters. I’ll admit the ending was a bit rushed, and I felt that the beginning was too wordy, compared to the rest of the story. I was working on the first chapter last night and came up with what I hope is a great hook. I’m not quite finished with it, so I’ll be working on this tonight.

So far, the editing process is going smoothly. I expected to rewrite some scenes, while polishing up some character actions/reactions. That’s it, in a nutshell.

We’ve all had at least one during our school days. During the last week of school last year, my oldest son and I saw this parent picketing next to the parking lot entrance. I rolled my eyes as I drove into the entrance to drop him off. Because the parents do not know how to drive through a parking lot (I’m not kidding.), I got to actually read this guy’s sign as I was sitting there with my engine idling.

He had tacked a picture of the eighth grade science teacher, along with a short bar graph of the percentage of kids who failed her class that year. In hindsight, I wish I had parked my car on a side street and gone up to talk to him about this teacher. If I had, I would have marched into the administration office and changed my son’s school schedule right then because he got stuck with this woman.

I won’t go into the gory details except to say that the majority of the kids in her class, including my son, are failing or are barely passing. The school district knows this woman is a loser but can’t (or won’t) fire her. My son has been teetering on failing all semester.

His final is coming up on Wednesday. I’m hoping and praying that he passes this well enough to keep his D- grade. If he does, he’ll be rid of her and moving on to technical drafting class he signed up for. If he doesn’t, he may get stuck with another semester with her.

Keep your fingers crossed, send good vibes, etc. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve never watched an entire film with subtitles before and have to admit that it felt strange at first. The storyline was very similar to the American remake, but I found that I enjoyed the Japanese version better because it focused more on the psychological horror rather than the gore aspect. The only thing that bothered me was the overdramatization, which sometimes gave away the surprise. Oftentimes, the actors would gasp at the slightest sound.

There was an innocence about these actors that I haven’t seen since the 1950’s reruns I used to watch as a little girl. The actors weren’t heavily made up or tough looking/acting. Neither did they have the “required sex scene” that has become so prevalent in Hollywood. Because of this, I would let my sons watch this movie, if they were interested in scary movies.

Overall, I enjoyed this movie and would recommend it to other people who like ghost stories. After watching this, I’m curious to see what other movies Japan has to offer. Does anyone have any recommendations?

The holiday crunch is finally over, and I’m oh-so-glad for that. My colleagues are, too. It’s been an unusually busy season for them and for me. My contract is scheduled to end on February 28, which I find gives me mixed emotions. Although the job can be tedious, I enjoy working with the people there. They’re a good bunch.

Fred’s post about a career change echoed what I’ve been feeling for the past decade. I hope he succeeds, and I hope he shares with us how he succeeds.

I went to work yesterday, thinking about what would happen if I didn’t get any more admin contracts. The only thing I’d miss is the steady paycheck and the human contact. Like Fred, I hate the career path that has sustained me off and on for the past twenty years. I’m inching my way towards changing that. So far, I’ve had modest success, but I feel that my progress is finally starting to move forward. So, it’s just a matter of being patient. I will get where I want to be.

As of 12/31/06, I’ve sold ten copies of the anthology. Almost half of these sales were from the UK, so I didn’t have to wonder if all of them came from my family. Speaking of which, I finally educated them about what a blog is!

I hope all of you had a wonderful New Year’s.