Thank You Time

“I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks.” - William Shakespeare

I have been a bit remiss in acknowledging the kind bloggers who have presented my blog with some very special awards, so I am using today’s post to catch up.

First, I’d like to thank Helen Ginger for the lovely You Are My Sunshine Award. Don’t you just love those yellow galoshes! If you haven’t visited Helen’s Straight From Hel blog, you need to rush right over. Every day Helen, a writer and freelance editor, offers interesting and informative posts on all things about books, publishing, and editing.

Next I’d like to thank Karen Walker who bestowed the same award upon me. It’s great to feel appreciated. Karen’s blog, Karen…following the whispers, like her memoir, Following the Whispers, is full of honesty and emotions about her past and her current spiritual journey through life. This is another blog I try to stop by as often as possible, and recommend that you pay her a visit, too.

The You Are My Sunshine award is given to acknowledge those who have a blog and spend endless hours ensuring that other bloggers get feedback on their blogs by leaving comments, adding themselves as a follower or dropping by just to let you know there are people out there.

How special to be singled out for this prestigious award more than once. I do enjoy blog hopping – I find it becomes addictive. I know how much I enjoy receiving comments and therefore I do try to reciprocate whenever possible.

Finally, I’d like to thank Roz Morris of DirtyWhiteCandy.com for the different Sunshine Award and the Fabulous Sugar Doll Blogger Award. Roz is a professional writer of nearly a dozen published novels. She lives and works in one of my favorite cities, London. Her site abounds with tips on the basics of writing and blogs covering all aspects of writing from inspiration to creative provocation. Be sure to check it out.

If, like me, you’re curious about where the name Dirty White Candy comes from, you will find the interesting answer on the sidebar of her site.

For the Sugar Doll Award, I’m supposed to tell you ten interesting things about myself. The main reason I write fiction is because my life, though I enjoy it immensely, is not all that interesting. I didn’t want to bore you to pieces so I reduced it to five somewhat out of the ordinary things.

1) I once signed my own death warrant. It was required as part of the paperwork for our move to Saudi Arabia. My shaking hand made my signature hard to read. Fortunately, I did nothing to make the Saudi officials feel the need to carry it out.

2) During my 39-year marriage I’ve lived in six foreign countries. They were Taiwan, Korea, England, Holland, Italy and Saudi Arabia.

3) My favorite family vacation of all time was a safari in Kenya. We took about a gazillion pictures (give or take). Developing all those photos (in London) increased the cost of the trip significantly. Needless to say, the vacation was before the days of digital cameras.

4) I truly believe that I once saw a ghost in our home in Dallas, Texas, after I had gone to bed one night. She was non-threatening and produced feelings of awe rather than fear. However, I never slept on that side of the bed again.

5) While visiting an area of burial mounds in Korea, I felt like a real celebrity when a busload of young Korean school kids were more interested in the “foreign woman” than the historic site they were visiting. Each asked me, in nearly perfect English, for my autograph. How could I refuse?

Oops. I'm not quite done. This past Sunday, I learned Helen Ginger had also awarded me with the Fabulous Sugar Doll Blogger Award. Thank you again, Helen.

I’m trying my best not to let all these accolades go to my head…but it isn’t easy.

I'm supposed to pass these award along. I‘m doing that by saying THANK YOU to all of you who take the time to visit and to those who go a step farther and leave a comment and/or become a follower. You make the work that goes into blogging worth it and keep me motivated to improve my writing. Please feel free to help yourself to one, two or all three of the awards. Don’t be shy. You deserve them, for without you, writing this blog would be a rather unrewarding exercise of futility.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Shakespeare, awards, Helen Ginger, Karen Walker, Roz Morris, blogging,

Great Expectations

“Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.” – Charlotte Brontë

After reading Monday’s post by Helen Ginger, “The Lost Book,” on Straight From Hel, I found myself wondering what it must be like to be Dan Brown, his agent, or his publisher this week.

As a fiction writer, I think I have a fairly good imagination. However, I simply can’t conceive of how it must feel to have a book released to such fanfare. The book became available on the 15th and has been a regular news item on local and national stations both before and after the release. Some bookstores opened at midnight so people could grab their copy immediately.

Is Dan worried that with all the hype his book won’t live up to readers’ expectations? Does it keep him awake at night? Since it’s already a best seller, and will probably stay that way for weeks if not years, does he care about whether or not he meets someone else’s expectations? Has he already put this book out of his mind so he can work furiously on his next blockbuster? Maybe if he had his own blog, I could find the answers to all my questions, but my limited search did not come up with one.

The article, “Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’: Why is the book biz so scared?” appeared in EW.com last month. The following is the first paragraph.

"There’s been much fulminating in the books world lately that The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, is bad for publishing. This week, former Publisher’s Weekly editor Sara Nelson even dubbed Brown a “Book Killer.” The theory is that Brown’s readers will only troop into stores (or go online) starting Sept. 15 to buy Symbol, probably at a deep discount, and they won’t buy anything else. Worse, the critics argue, the hubbub surrounding Symbol will drown out media coverage of other books — and eat into sales of those books too. So publishers have supposedly been shuffling the release dates of various titles so they don’t have to go head-to-head with the Dan Brown juggernaut."

I agree with Thom Geier, the author of the article, when he went on to say. “It doesn’t take a Harvard symbologist to see that this is mostly sour grapes and a whole lot of hooey.”

I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code and I plan to read The Lost Symbol, but I didn’t feel the need to stand in line at midnight to purchase it. Actually, I can’t think of anything I’d stand in line for at midnight. I take that back, I can’t think of anything that could get me out of the house at that hour line or no line. Besides, I have a feeling the book will be around for quite some time.

Did you venture out to be one of the first to own a copy? If you bought it, did you buy or look at any other books? What do you think of dubbing Dan Brown as a “Book Killer?”

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Bronte, Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, Helen Ginger,