In Search of a Title

balothejester, posting in little_details:

Hello everybody!

First-time poster here, directed to you via the power of Twitter. So glad I found you.

To get right to the point: I am working on (or rather, working up to) a scene wherein one character shoots another with a pistol, and am having trouble getting details right, both in terms of the physical and mental impact of the shot and the kind of weapon the shooter is liable to have access to. This is super-detailed, so my apologies; I just want to make sure I don't get any details wrong and I am kind of intimidated by what I do not know. If you can either point me to good resources or outright explain some of these to me, I would greatly appreciate it:

Type of Firearm: The shooter is using a handgun which he procured in either California or Nevada; which is available for under a thousand dollars (including a couple boxes of ammo); and which can be concealed in a jacket without attracting any attention on the street. Said character is not experienced with firearms or concealing them, so that may be a factor in what he can be expected to hide.

Physical Impact: The actual plan for the shot is that the shooter is intending to kill his target (who is sitting down in front of him, immobilized, in case that matters), but gets jolted by intervention from another character into delivering a non-fatal shot. But I don't "non-fatal" to mean "a graze"; I actually want the character to have long-term physical effects from the gunshot to show how seriously close to death they came. Any suggested target area and resultant damage you can provide would be excellent: does it bruise, is the character liable to be thrown forward by the impact, etc.

Mental Impact: Also, how do people who are shot react? Are they really not in much pain at first? Will they be able to get themselves out of the area once the shooter is subdued, or will they need assistance? What stage of shock does that tend to put a person into? And is it true that doctors always call the police when someone is admitted with a gunshot wound?

I have plenty more, but I would go on forever if I let myself; so I'll end here and say, thank you!

dark_fetus, posting in abandonedplaces:


Letchworth Village



In 1909 the state of New York built
a facility for the aid and housing of the "feeble minded and epileptics"
Named after William Pryor Letchworth,
a key player in the creation of the facility and noted humanitarian of the time.

The grounds were set up in a college campus style.
Building were kept relatively small, and typically did not exceed two-stories tall.
They were all located within a relatively short walk of each other.
They all shared the hand-cut stone, arched-window, and stone column "Greek" aesthetic as well.

A large stream ran through the campus,
it served as a divider between male and female patients.
Letchworth Village also housed it's own power plant, farmland, waste disposal, and water supply.
Making it the first all-inclusive facility of it's kind.

Of the research performed there, one of the most note-worthy was the
development of the polio vaccines used in the Congo by Dr. Hilary Koprowski.
It was revealed that he had been the first physician to preform a polio vaccine on humans.
Those humans were twenty "mentally deficient" patients of Letchworth Village...



In the 1960's and into the 1970's Letchworth
Village began to badly suffer from overcrowding.
The then local reporter Geraldo Rivera created a documentary about the sad condition
in which many United States psychiatric hospitals found themselves.
Touching on issues such as over-crowding, neglect, and abuse...
It was titled: "The Last Great Disgrace"
Segments of the documentary were even filmed at Letchworth Village.
It was later turned into a nationally-aired documentary by ABC.

As expected, the public outcry from this was sizable.
This, coupled with the nations shift toward mental care on a smaller scale
(Such as group-homes, which is what ended a lot of these facilities lives)
resulted in the slow re-distribution of the patients of Letchworth Village.

In 1997 the last of the residents was relocated,
and the power was forever cut to the campus.



( The Last Great Disgrace... )

kaaronwarren:
One of the interesting groups of people living in Fiji is the long-term expat, mostly Brits who've lived here more than 40 years.

I love meeting them. They're without fail informed, intelligent and truly eccentric.

Last night, at the Japanese Emperor's birthday (the party of the year, J and I always say. The food! Oh, the food!) there was a wonderful old woman I hadn't met before.

When we walked in, she was sitting regally on a couch, observing. She was dressed in what I would call a little girl's dress; frills, pale blue, puffy shoulders. Very large fake eyelashes. Very bright and shiny blue eyeshadow.

Later, as we jostled for food (it really is very good. The first year we were too polite and waited till the end, and most of the food was gone) I found myself next to her. She said, "Oh, you try to take just a little bit of everything and you end up with a plateful."
She held up her plate to me. It was fully 10 or 15cm piled with food. Everything stacked on there. A dozen prawns at least.
I looked at my very restrained plate and smiled at her. "It's such lovely food," I said. You see what a diplomat I've become.
"I hope I can eat it all," she said, and she gave me a wonderful conspiratorial wink. Damn right she was going to eat it all, and come back for seconds!
I didn't end up talking to her (was distracted by a new professor who kept saying, "Oh Vancouver! I'm from there! Oh, London! I'm from there! Oh, Prague, I'm from there!") so I don't know who she is or what she was doing there.

I'm going to miss these odd, short connections.

gillpolack:
eneit has an interesting post on where we find out about the books we want to read. She's asked for opinions. I'd love to see where other people find their reading, so please take a look and tell her what you think.

tehboypop, posting in postcardjunky:

outbox
replies
norwegianeyes x5!
khaki
ffia
sprawl
toliban
spcake
msmasucc

madwriter:

Adding three more scenes to the 1920s in The Great Valley.

PROGRESS REPORT

New Words: 2700 on chapter 2.

Total Words: 127150.

Reason For Stopping: Had to get ready for work.

Book Year: The scenes range through the mid-1920s.

Mammalian Assistance: Nate guarded the Writing Room table for me.

Exercise: None, since I let the time slip away from me while I was writing. After three scenes I happened to glance at the computer clock and thought, "Oh--I guess I ought to get ready for work".

Stimulants: None.

Today's Opening Passage: When Boone started his whiskey distilling, it had meant long hours around the stills and backbreaking work hauling fifty-pound barrels of the stuff around, but also great fun and good money. But things were changing.

After his father’s death, only two things really provided any money for the Gillespie farm, and it sure as hell wasn’t farming. One was the sawmill, and the other was distilling. But the Chestnut Blight stole away a lot of the milling business, and now something else was chipping away at the distilling bit by bit.

Darling Du Jour: “They’re from New York,” he told Boone. “They represent the whiskey runners who took your Norfolk clients. Keep your head down, Boone. These men are a different kind of criminal than you’ve ever seen before. If they find you they’ll kill you.”

But before Lee finished speaking, Boone knew he wasn’t about to keep his head down. He wasn’t going to involve Lee, either. This was mountain business.

Non-Research / Review Books In Progress: A History of Rome.

gillpolack:
Speaking about reviews, I was given a really interesting one by Alan Baxter. I now have a little trail of happy reviews. No doubt review websites will be tougher, if they review it all, but it doesn't matter: readers love my book and they're the bottom line, always. I care very deeply about fiction being accessible.

Why am I so pleased? Alan understood exactly what I was doing, and he said I did it well.

This is like the moment I read the conference paper Kershaw presented on Illuminations last year. It's not praise or attention that make me happy (though I admit I like them), it's the fact that people are reading and enjoying the precise things I want them to. My writing works.

davidbcoe:

So, I'm on my way. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday going over the support material that I received from the studio and mapping out in fairly broad terms the approach I'd take to writing the "Robin Hood" movie novelization. Today, I began the actual writing. Now, normally I write 6 to 8 pages a day -- about 1500 to 2000 words. That's a pretty good pace for me. But that pace is way too slow for this project, given the early January deadline I'm facing. Of all the elements of this project, the timeline is the part that was scaring me most.

Well, today I wrote 17 pages. Yeah, 17. 4,300 words. If I can maintain that pace, I'll have no problem with the deadline. Better still, it was enormously fun. I got to write in the point of view of Robin Hood and Marion of Loxley, of Friar Tuck and King Richard the Lionheart. How could that not be fun?

More as it develops.

punktortoise:
...just how much I hate blister packs?

I've just spent the last ten minutes trying to crack open the packaging on a pair of nail clippers I'd purchased earlier today. Eventually accomplished the task by dint of prising apart the stress-hardened, laminated, heavy-duty-adhesivised layers of cardboard that surrounded the offending plastic blister. So, not an insurmountable task, as it transpired.

But it would have been so much easier if I'd had to hand a suitably sharp object. Such as a pair of nail clippers.

cassiphone:

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

I recently put up my Best of the Year short story list up at Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth. (Alisa, Ben, Alex and Sarah have all put their lists up too) This also meant that I got to deal with my annual ‘is it okay that most of the stories I like are by women, and does that make me a hypocrite?’ qualms.

I have, on occasion, been rather scathing of Best Of lists, shortlists, and collected works which skew towards celebrating the work of male authors over and above the work of female authors. I frequently challenge the idea that “taste” matters in these cases. I do continue to believe that it is a problem when the majority of people who tell us where to find the best fiction of year have “taste” that skews towards the male. Because it ceases to become a matter of personal taste and starts to be a matter of politics when the pattern is so wide, so all-encompassing that it is considered the default.

My cards on the table: I skew towards the celebration of the female. This isn’t a political decision on my part. I don’t set out to ’see’ the value of women’s art over that of the male. I just do. I was raised by a very feminist single mother who made sure that I was exposed to female artists and themes. I was very aware from a very young age about how this stuff works – how themes preferred by female artists are often treated differently to those preferred by men. I saw my mother and other women at the Art School (especially the very male-oriented Sculpture Department) risk failing grades for making art about motherhood. So there is that political edge there, and it has informed the construction of my personal taste, in that I was never taught to not value women’s art.

When I make a list of stuff I liked, it’s exactly that. Stuff I liked. And generally speaking, when it comes to short stories, I come up roughly 75% stuff I liked by women, and 25% by men. My lists with novels skewer much higher, because unlike short fiction, I often self-select male authors out of the equation. Male writers have to be very, very good and come recommended by people I trust for me to spend time on them. My current tally for 2009 is 12 – 2 non fiction, 4 fiction and 6 anthologies written, edited or co-edited by men. Which sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Though it is out of a total of books read of 108…

I’m okay with my reading choices. I read for several reasons: enjoyment, to increase awareness of what’s going on currently in the fields of literature I’m most interested in (children’s, YA, fantasy, some crime, some SF), to educate myself about the classics, and to find good books to recommend to others. The aspects of my current reading I feel most guilty about lately are: not reading enough classics (particularly those by female authors) and not reading enough “grown up books” (YA tastes so gooood). Not reading enough books by men doesn’t actually bother me at all.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

edienippoli, posting in abandonedplaces:

Featured in Weird Florida, the Popash School was something of an old friend to me. My family used to drive past it on the way to Boca Grande down south all the time when I was a child, and it was always fascinating. I watched it deteriorate throughout the years but never thought to take a picture until about four years ago when I made the trip back to Boca Grande with a friend during summer. I'm very glad I did because it's gone now, it was torn down in January of this year. I'm sorry I couldn't have taken more shots of it, or taken any inside shots but the whole place was fenced off and it was along a very busy highway. I had another shot - a closeup of the doorway - but I can't seem to find it on my hard drive.

As for the school itself it was part of a now deserted town called Popash here in Florida in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it sort of faded away after a railway was built but bypassed it in favor of Zolfo Springs. There's not much left of the town, save for an abandoned church, its graveyard and some houses. That's sort of the brief rundown of it, I'm sure you can find better info on it elsewhere.

I'd love to go back and get photos but I live in Orlando and I haven't been down that way for oh, about 4 years. But if any of you others here are in Florida, I'd really recommend going and checking out what's left of Popash.
( Larger shot under cut )

realthog:

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

flinthart:
I'm not normally an allergic sort of person. I've spent most of my life with some minor asthma, but that's it. Oh, sure -- here in Taz, when springtime really goes berserk, I'll occasionally have a day or two of sneezes. But lately... holy shit!

I've been waking up every day for the last month or so with sinuses full of concrete. Sneezing attacks that would do credit to Godzilla have ambushed me at regular intervals. One day, I literally sneezed myself hoarse.

Yesterday, I finally figured out what the frock is going on. Y'see, from 2006-2008 inclusive, we missed the winter rains, and spring was pretty damned patchy. This year, we had a seriously wet winter. Spring was marked by beautiful warm spells, interspersed with nice quantities of rain at useful times. Summer is behaving much the same so far, though a little cooler.

In other words, we've had one hell of a lead-up to the spring growing season, and it shows. The greenery around here could scare the brogue off a leprechaun.

So I finally got a new battery for the tractor, and put it back in the machine. Yesterday, seeing the weather report, I decided I needed to do some slashing while I could. I hopped on the tractor, and happily beetled off: cut the long grass that's been confounding the archery first. Then cleared around the kids' cubby. Then ducked down to the paddock below the house, wherein I have slowly been establishing many kinds of fruit trees. All up, I spent about two hours on the tractor.

It was about a half-hour in when I noticed I couldn't smell that lovely new-mown grass scent any more. In fact, my sinuses were starting to get that brutal, burning, crushing feeling going on... and that was when it clicked. For the first time in four years, we are knee-deep (on me!) in vibrant, green, uber-healthy flowering grass. It's fucking pollen central out there.

Didn't help my evening yesterday, I can tell you. Simultaneously organising dinner for two medical students, plus one of my older ju-jitsu students who is having an English exam today... he wanted help with the poetry side of things, and when he mentioned "Wilfred Owen", I said "Oh -- Dulce Et Decorum Est, right?" and he looked at me like I was some kind of evil wizard. But then I explained that the poem in question is the only one that high-school teachers ever seem to cover from Wilfred Owen, and it's probably the best known of all WWI poems, so it wasn't that clever of me.

Nevertheless: I was cooking like crazy, making Chinese-style steamed chicken dumplings, and chicken-and-sweet-corn soup, and setting up to make citrus ice cream when El Studento arrived. That was okay, because the kids promptly set upon him and took him on an extended tour. But then the med students (Grace and Kerri) arrived, so I had to start plating dinner. At this point, I was working through an extended analysis of the poem, handling three courses of food, and wrangling the kids to the table all at once, and frankly, I think things were starting to get fuzzy around the edges.

Happily, Grace and Kerri took over the soup (it only needed rice noodles by that time), and El Studento took time out to fang into the dumplings, so I had a free hand to drag kids into position, set plates, cutlery, drinks, etc. And then Natalie finally made it home.

Must say: the citrus ice cream over fresh rockmelon slices was pretty freakin' good. (I scalded lemon and orange zest in a little cream, and let it cool. Then I took that cream, and combined it with the regular ice cream ingredients, plus a little mascarpone to help it set. Ohhhh, yeah.)

Anyway, today I woke up yet again with killer snot, after a night of very limited sleep. So I popped a couple of commercial anti-snot drugs, but apparently they contained one of the sleepy-type antihistamines. Lately I've been getting plenty of exercise, minding my food, and not drinking too much, so the level of fitness has climbed a bit. As a result, the goddam snotkiller drugs acted very much like Stoopid Pills. I felt like a grade-A maroon all morning.

I have now sourced some of those one-pill all-day Wondersnot drugs. And having popped one, I'm enjoying both breathing, and wakefulness. It's an interesting change.

About time, too. Aside from the fact that the two junior medics will be back tonight for dinner (marinated charcoal-grilled chicken, smoky vegetable salad and chocolate-orange mousse, all entirely without gluten, thanks) we've got our regular Friday Night movie thing planned. And tomorrow, we've got the ju-jitsu demonstration. And then the boys are on the Cub Scout float. And afterwards, I'll pack up all three kids, go to the airport and collect another medical student (Chrissie. Yay!) who will be around for a couple weeks.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Kerri gets a lift into Launceston, having done her stint for the year. Monday I will be frantically writing and working, because Tuesday, I've done something... well, not stupid, but definitely pushing the limits.

The Dalai Lama is speaking in Hobart on Tuesday afternoon. Elder Son and I have tickets. So I shall drive down in the morning, spend a couple hours soaking up karma-intensive presence and explaining to Elder Son why the guy on the stage is worth hearing. Then we'll turn around and drive right back again...

I sure hope the Dalai Lama appreciates the effort I'm going to!

snopes_dot_com:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/haroldestes.asp

Letter purportedly written by nonagenarian Navy veteran criticizes President Obama.

xkcd_rss:

http://xkcd.com/671/

shadowhelm:

I know it's late when I accidentally blow away an article I was working on.  I guess I should consider myself lucky that I only lost the first finely crafted sentences and the references. I should've saved it, but I hadn't even finished the paragraph that it didn't seem worthwhile to save -- that is, until I blew it away.  Interestingly enough, I was writing about gongfu-style versus gaiwan brewing for tea (yeah, esoteric stuff) and when I blew it away, I decided that Ti Kuan Yin, the Iron Goddess of Mercy, was having no mercy upon my writing and I should work on it tomorrow.  After all, if I wrote something brilliant now, just think how brilliant it will be if I'm actually awake.  <snort>

Today I woke up cold because I had a struggle trying to get the fire working last night. In a perverse turn of events, somehow the fire decided to catch at 10 am and all I had to do was add another log to get a hot fire going.  Which is good, because I don't think the temperatures got above 20F.  Tonight, it's supposed to get to -2F.  But if you think that's impressive, we're supposed to get -18F Monday night.  Yeah, that's cold.  Really cold.  We're supposed to get snow Friday night too.

You know it's cold when we bring out the bison blanket.

gillpolack:
I've overused the word 'interesting' today, but I finished the editing I needed to finish and I'm powering my way through the books I need to complete (including the one with the too-creative cover) so I don't care. Well, not much, anyhow.

I do care a little. I care enough not to call dinner 'interesting.' I need to call it something. It's cooking away while I type, and it's very much creative leftovers. The rice is generously laced with fresh ginger and coconut milk and will be pandan-green and scented with lotus root. I'm going to stir-fry some chopped fresh vegies in a moment and sprinkle them with chilli and much lemon, or maybe lemon and much chilli. And that will be dinner. Green rice and vegetables!

One day my pantry will be dull, but today is not that day.

buffysquirrel:

• 01:17 IC just brought me a soggy toilet roll inner (soggy from the BATH ok?). er, thanks, fuzz.... #
• 01:26 husband says it's an act of love. cats show they love you with wet cardboard. #
• 01:50 In IC's fantasy, I give him my cheese. #

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norilana:

This is going to be a long, semi-coherent post.

I am tired, and am recovering from a nasty flu that hit mom, then me, right after Thanksgiving.

Ok...

Remember same time last year, when I was going through financial and medical family hell due to threat of foreclosure and other long-standing issues?

Remember how so many of you generously and kindly came through for me and my family in the helpvera community donation drive? How you raised thousands of dollars, and as a result bailed me out, and I was able to pay off the three months backlog of my mortgage and the rest went to replace the flooding sewer in my back yard?

Remember how great everything was?

Well, since then, Countrywide, which became Bank of America, took my (your) money, and then DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to modify my loan and my RIDICULOUS outrageous monthly payment that I had been begging them to modify for the second year running.

I was getting naturally behind again, and was in absolute limbo. Paying BofA partially, as much as I could, every month, never knowing what the HELL was going on with my loan.

They only kept on leading me on, promising me, telling me to wait, after hundreds of phone calls and escalations from rep to rep, to VP, back down to loan negotiator, to another negotiator, to rep, ad infinitum.

In the meantime, the economy crashed, swung down, slightly up, months dragged into more months, etc.

I faxed the bank my "financials" (regular statements and income paperwork) four (4) separate times and FED-EXed it once in the stretch of 12 months, only to be told they are processing it and to WAIT, because I had, according to them qualified for the Obama program.

I waited and waited. In the mid-summer I got a significant business loan from a kind private party to hold me out for the rest of the year and a half at least while regular income was solid but growing very slowly and not enough to cover the extra business expenses such as urgent advertising, marketing, and promo that I needed to do desperately for some of the special niche titles my small press was publishing. I was once again fine, and would have been fine now and all of next year if not for...

wait for it....

Out of the blue, for no specific reason, an immediate threat of foreclosure.

Yes, suddenly, in the end of the summer, I received a BofA foreclosure threat unless I come up with my delinquent portion of the once-more-behind chunk of the mortgage over the last 6 or so months.

I panicked.

And, to stave off foreclosure, I used the WHOLE of my remaining borrowed money, the financial cushion that was supposed to last me and my business for over a year of overhead expenses to pay off MOST (just most, not even the whole, that's how huge the amount I was behind was) of what I owed Bank of America, on a small 3 bedroom, 1.3 bathroom tract house in an average Los Angeles suburb -- a house that was now OVER $100,000 underwater in terms of equity.

The foreclosure status went back into the less dire status of LIMBO.

Except, now I was again stripped of all safety and beyond.

I was back to nothing, again poised between the pit and level ground.

They took my financial cushion of 1.5+ years worth of safety.

The bastards robbed me, JUST AS I WAS DOING FINE AGAIN.

So... desperate from struggling for so long, so many unrelenting years of work and hell (mom's cancer, father's death, starting the business, my own health, etc), with no respite, not knowing what else to do (I cannot work outside of the home because I am a fulltime caretaker of my cancer patient mom who is dependent on me and homebound) I decided to take a wild risk of a different kind...

At the end of July, I took 3.5 months of my life, of already non-existent time, dropped all other regular work to write a book.

I wrote Mansfield Park and Mummies.

You have all heard of the best selling Jane Austen monster mash-up phenomenon Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its followup Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, right?

Go click right now on their links to see their incredible Amazon rankings.

Who the ^&@!#$%^!! is buying all those copies?

Well, I took Jane Austen's Mansfield Park original text and expanded it with particular subtlety, keeping the true Austen voice and flavor, and added my own portions that closely paralleled the Austen stylistic mannerisms, wit, cleverness, and a great comic horror-fantasy storyline that (unlike the other mash-ups that are more of a "Frankenstein patchwork around the joints" kind of job) fit very smoothly and seamlessly into the Austen story. In addition, I "massaged" the original Austen prose, not leaving a paragraph unturned, sentence to sentence, clause to clause, to invisibly update and subtly make it more palatable to the modern reader.

In short, I wrote my own more "classy" monster mash-up, and I gave it MY ALL.

I worked my ass off. I HAVE NEVER LAUGHED SO DAMN HARD AND LONG as I had writing this book. There is humor and romantic tension and wacky monsters of all sorts, and true love. There is the Brighton Duck...

I even illustrated it, and basically did everything short of chewing up the pulp to make the paper it was printed on.

My book is out right now, and is available everywhere online. And if you ask the brick and mortar bookstores and libraries, they will order it for you.

And here is where you come in.

I am not asking anyone for a donation -- I am not even asking for you to buy the book -- you all already helped tremendously last year, and I have no right to expect anything more of any single one of you in this wonderful, kind, generous community.

What I need DESPERATELY is to get the word out on this book.

I need word of mouth. And I cannot get it on my own.

After YEARS of STRUGGLING in so many ways...

I am tired.

I am ill.

I have no financial resources to send out review copies beyond a handful.

I have no posse to act in great numbers on my behalf.

I have no energy to write intriguing posts to raise my blogger status and to gain admirers... and because I have no life to speak of right now (for most of the last 4 years), I have nothing to say worth blogging (or things too personal or private, not suitable to be spoken). I don't even have the energy to make "cute trivial pleasantries" posts, such as describing what's in my beverage glass (watered down tea) or what I had for lunch (in most cases you don't want to know -- see, again, too sad or embarrassing to share).

I have no time.

What I have is desperation. And I am begging you all to tell everyone you know about this book -- on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, websites, forums, listserves, emails, and of course in real life -- at work, office, school, watercooler, library, house of worship, synagogue, church, temple, post office, concert hall, meeting, party, supermarket...

If only a tiny portion of that audience that is buying the Zombies and the Sea Monsters books finds out about this book of mine, I will have a regular minimal addition cushion of income that will solve my problems pretty much indefinitely. I will be able to start repaying debts and paying forward -- paying all of you.

I need the book to get noticed by THAT SAME AUDIENCE that's putting the Zombies book into double digits on Amazon.

Please, friends.

I am asking you to speak for me.

• Open your mouth, tweet, type.
  
  
• Mention it to a stranger on the train reading a book across from you (it might be Joe Biden).
  
  
• Write the title on a piece of paper and leave it behind on the seat of a cab or at the airport seating area.
  
  
• Leave the library public computer with its screen on the Amazon link to my book.
  
  
• Go to a bookstore and ask the clerk about the book by title. If they ask if you want to order it, just say, no, but you were curious to see it, to browse it, since it's exactly the same kind of book as the Zombies and Sea Monsters one and you were wondering if they had it.
  

I am so tired right now (have been working on this post for the last three days) that I am probably forgetting all kinds of things.

So please, help me out. If you are a prominent blogger or online personality reading this, please re-post it to your own audience, or link to this.

And if your blog only has a couple of readers, please, friend, do the same, and I will be equally thankful.

Here is the official Mummies website with all kinds of information including Amazon and Barnes & Noble order links, and book covers, ISBN, descriptive text, and other goodies.

This book truly makes the PERFECT holiday gift -- for that finicky person who has everything, and for an ordinary person who likes and appreciates books, laughter, Jane Austen, parodies, oddities, good writing, and plain old fun.

THANK YOU, friends, from the bottom of my heart. Thank you to all of you who have ALREADY HELPED SO MUCH, and to all of you who are helping anew.

This is not just a book release.

This is the last straw to keep me going.

cassiphone:

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

I spent yesterday taking author photos dahling around Salamanca Square and the Parliament House Gardens. This one is my favourite. One of the revelations of the day: oh my, I really have very little colour left in my hair, do I?

Photographer: Frank Strk