Taser MP3 Player

I also want that killer song list. But one question–how long before the RIAA demands a piece of the action so they can remotely shock you for ripping mp3s from your CDs?

Edited to add: The only drawback is if you load “Electric Slide”… IT shocks YOU!

see more crazy cat pics

Springtime Greetings to you and yours. May your chocolate bunnies not come to life and attempt to eat you before you bite their little heads off. May your peeps become appropriately and deliciously stale with a modest passage of time

Wow. Just wow. It’s a long watch, but oh-so-worth it.

Yes, I know. The site suffered through several schizophrenic episodes over the past week while I putzed around with my new layout. There are several reasons, one of which has to do with me simultaneously cursing and loving on widgets with the hate/love of a thousand burning suns. Or at least a 60-watt bedside table lamp as I burned the midnight photons trying to hack graphics and reverse-engineer a stylesheet written originally in Portuguese.

Normally, the last thing I want to do is give up on my lovely website graphic design (devised for me by a dear friend with an incredible eye for design and an awesome sense of humor), but I’m working on a WIP right now and I have determined that I need some immersive therapy for getting into the universe I’m developing. Contrary to the appearance and first impression of my new layout, it’s not an historical. I’d call it feudal punk space opera.

I adore using WordPress as my CMS, and I adore the flexibility in both design and functionality. But much of it makes my damn head hurt, and as a result of me not being a full time web designer/developer, I spent a good week and a half on this when I only wanted to spend about three days.

But I’m having a hell of a time with this latest WIP. I seem to be obsessed with writing the boring parts, and as Elmore Leonard says, don’t write the boring parts. I feel as if my entire writing life consists of the boring parts right now.

Figuring out where a story is going wrong is one of the hardest parts of a writer’s life. You’re too close to the story to really have a good idea where it’s going pear-shaped, but you’re also the one who knows it best, and oftentimes the only one who knows how far to back out of it and which new direction to push.

I think it comes back to my beginnings. I have to have a good beginning, or if not a completely good beginning, a decent starting point. If I don’t have that, I’m just farting around with characters. Right now, that’s exactly what I’m doing.  My heroine hasn’t yet found a point where she’s willing to give the hero a chance (or consider him to be more than something to be scraped off the bottom of a shoe), and my hero hasn’t yet given me the real reason he isn’t trying to get as far away from her as possible, as fast as possible.  I know it will come, somehow.  The Girls In The Basement will send up the material I need to figure it out.  It’s just a question of when and in what form it will be.

So here’s to hoping that this blog post will be the expunging of a particularly full-bodied whine and its associated cheese, thus clearing the way for some quality writing time in the near future.

…for not updating her blog on Monday like I was supposed to. In my defense, I have a good reason. Family in from out of town and a kiddie birthday can really cut into a girl’s blog h0rin’.

Alien Communion is consistently getting great reviews - thanks to everyone who’s mentioned that they enjoyed the book! I write to be read, and if I’ve swept somebody away for a few hours, it’s the greatest of compliments.

Doing a short entry today, because I’m drafting a longer one on an actual subject - my own personal definition of erotic romance.  I’m sure every ero-rom writer has either blogged or posted about this at one time or another, and I’m probably not revealing anything earth-shattering–so call it peer pressure.

This time, there’s one from Cassidy at Joyfully Reviewed.

“Alien Communion caught my imagination and fantasies tight in its alien fist from the first page on. Not only was the sex hotter than could be contained on ordinary paper, the characters drew me in and made me feel as if they were standing right next to me.”

I’m not supposed to be posting today, since it’s not Monday, and I promised myself I wouldn’t blog h0r any day but Mondays…but I was so very excited about getting my second review, I couldn’t wait to post.  Plus, it’s raining outside, and I can’t take the laptop out while the rugrats play.

I’m also being a bad girl and messing around with blog layout and tinkering under the hood of this baby…just a few tweaks.  I can quit any time.  Really.  Swear.

I’d like to thank Annie and Eveline from Euro-Reviews for popping in to say, “Hi!” in the comments of my last post.  Annie–I’m just incredibly glad you liked the book!  I love writing about the future, where anything’s possible–and if that possibility includes hunky men, all the better!  Eveline, I envy you your chocolate.  I once had the chance to work on a consulting project in Belgium, but had to turn it down because right when the project was due, I’d be due, myself, and flight attendants get nervous when they see very pregnant women boarding airplanes for transatlantic flights.

For those of you who’ve made comments and wondered why your comments don’t show up immediately, it’s because I have comments set to moderated approval.  I’m fairly new to the back-end of blogging, and I don’t have all the filters set up yet that would allow me to open up comments and not worry about spam from online casinos, online pharmacies, online diploma mills, and or online whackos in general.  So while I learn, I moderate.

In case you dropped by sometime yesterday or today and noticed the place was a little snarly, I had to tinker with some stuff under the hood. Not to bore you with uber-g33k stuff, but I upgraded the WordPress engine that runs my little G-spot here (yes, that was a pun–flog me with a wet noodle, ’cause I’m all about flogging the blog), and put up a static splash page, so the site has room to grow.

Anyway, things should be shaking down just fine again from now on. The upgrade went smoothly and I learned that my HTML skillz, while not so mad anymore, are still adequate enough for simple stuff. This from a former hard-code head who believed that using anything other than notepad to code the page diluted the purity of the code, man.

Of course, I make no promises about the blog skin. I’m still playing around with blog couture. If I’d had a WordPress blog when I was nine, Barbie wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much of my parents’ money as she did. I’d much rather play dress-up with my blog than with my Barbies any day.  And your pervy little brother can’t put your blog in compromising positions with GI Joes.  There’s always a downside.

I had so much fun SEx Blogging Saturday over at Silver Expressions!  It was actually a pretty remarkable thing, since my laptop (aka, my outside-brain) was on the fritz and well, being Frankensteined by Mr. Xandra at the time.  But since I did sorta plan ahead, I had drafts of posts prepared, and used the BFGaming Computer to post my posts and read/respond to comments.  If you actually come to this blog to read, thank you for reading!  And if you commented over at SEx, thank you, too!

But I’m now proud to say that I’m back on Ol’ Sparky, live and Open Source.  I’ve discovered a freedom to Linux that I don’t think I had with Windows since the days of 3.11.  Customization, lean and fast operation, FREE.  Secure.  I’m so diggin’ this.