MUSES & MORE!

Well, busy day, busy weekend! Lots to share, in no particular order:

An impromptu date with hubby;
a day with Swishy!;
a new muse;
a LOTTERY contest winner;
my first YouTube video attempt;
an ear-piercing incident;
and more!

First and foremost! A winner has been drawn for Pat's Contest!

And it was completely legit as you can see by the photos:
List of Entrants--

Swish was here, and it’s so random that we get home from our day’s activities (summed up later below) and I need to call Pat to discuss the contest, cuz you know me, we’re all about the biznez.

Special DA BEARS hat used for drawing winner's name:


When Pat answers the phone, she has no idea that Swish is here; and up to this point, I have no idea if Pat has had the pleasure of learning about Swish at all. But, Pat answers, and she tells me she is practically crying because she was reading Swish’s car rental incident, so I start cracking up and say, “Swish is RIGHT HERE in the room with me!” How random is that? So, we have a teleconference on speaker and I decide that, “Hey! Swish should draw the name of the winner to be completely, utterly fair in this contest!”

Entries then placed in the hat--


So, she does, and… drumroll please….

Are you ready?

And the winner is…

Oops, I’m so bad at trying to pull a teaser on you, but this is the deal, you will have to check over at Pat's Blog Monday morning to see who the lucky winner is. Don’t worry, Monday is not that far off!

Anyway, if you didn’t win, you can still BE A WINNER and go out and purchase Lottery on August 2 when it makes its debut in a bookstore near you! You. Will. Not. Be. Disappointed. At. All. Promise! Perry L. Crandall with think, "That is so cool!"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Next Up: As promised, Swishy's ear-piercing experience!

Still Life Swish's New Ears:


That's all cute and great, but does that tell the story? Nah! What's even better is that I combined Swishy's ear piercing with my first foray into YouTube, unbeknownst to her, because I opted for the video option on my camera...so without further adieu…we bring you…

SWISHY GETS HER EARS PIERCED,YOUTUBE STYLE:

NOTE: Unless you are REALLY, REALLY weird, you have just tilted your head to the left, right?

Ta-Da! What do you think of THAT?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

(For those of you tired of reading, because I realize this is an extremely long post that may have been better fit to be THREE SEPARATE POSTS, feel free to quit reading and come back tomorrow to read about the muses! But if you choose to continue reading, you may want to take a potty break, go grab a latte, or a hunk of chocolate, and come back when you feel like it!)

So, Swish and I then go to B&N, our most favorite place in the world, and we peruse the New Fiction section, browse through the acknowledgment pages of books we are interested in and of authors we know or want to know, and we promise one another that we will acknowledge each other when our books come out. We also promise each other that we will have a good draft of our second novels DONE by October 31, 2007. Yes, maybe it sounds far away, but it’s really only 3½ months away and even just one page a day isn’t going to cut this deadline, and CRIPES! Get this! There’s already Halloween and Thanksgiving crap out at TJ Maxx and More Homegoods store… NO LIE!

And we know this because after our visit to B&N, we both got a little bit depressed because we want OUR books on the shelves and we decide we need more motivation! More inspiration! More butt-kicking!

We decide we need a muse! We need a duo muse! We need something to inspire us to be the writers we dream of, and we need something to have on hand, all the time so we can look at it, and feel the muse, and write, write, write!

So, at the first store, I find this really funky wooden artifact thingy that really, from far away looks like it could double as a rounded pile of wooden poop. (Damn, I should have taken a photo of it at the store.) But upon closer inspection, I realized it was a wooden carving of some dude in a yoga pose that was part child’s pose, part “I’m-a-dog-and-can-lick-myself” pose. I liked it. It was unique, it was funny, it would fit nicely on the desk, and it was cheap.

But, there was only one of these, and Swish and I agreed we needed two of an identical item, exact, in order to get our muses in sync so we can revel in the wonderment of a book seeing the light of day in the not-so-distant future.

So, this muse was not to be.

Then, we found some obscure Fourth of July paperweights, that while also cheap and “matchy-matchy,” just didn’t hold the musey-vibe we were searching for. We knew we had to discover something together, and it had to be a muse item that would jump out at the two of us, and we had to KNOW it was the perfect muse for us.

After searching through some antiquey-looking magnifying glasses (which we liked but they didn’t match), some froggy statues and boxes, more paperweights, an Uncle Sam thingamagig, we left and went to a different store, sure our muse would show itself to us, just like a muse should do so.

And, it appeared.

After scouring through the shelves of obscurity that is the Home Goods section of TJ Maxx, she showed herself to us.

Allow me to introduce to you, “The-muse-that-will-help-us-finish-our-second-novels-to-get-us-to-publication”…

Muses Musing:


Swish and Me with our Muses, INSPIRED!

Got any ideas for names for our muses? Would love to hear them!


“Peace UP! Cuz Peace DOWN is just lame.”

PS… How many of you caught on that I did not discuss my impromptu morning ‘date’ with hubby? Let’s just say I owned up to a Father’s Day gift he’d been patiently waiting for, and call it at that.