I was talking to a librarian the other day and she laughed when I said I thought librarians were like drug dealers. But they really are! They even target the little kids! Get them hooked on the picture books, next thing you know the kids are applying for library cards and mainlining Harry Potter, Divergent and TheTesting. Give it a few years and YA just won’t give the same buzz and the kids have to move on to bigger and bigger fiction. And that’s when the librarians start pushing the hardcore stuff – Faulkner, Atwood, Joyce. If you’re not careful your kid could end up reading the entire Lord of the Rings even though there’s a perfectly good director’s extended cut blue ray back home.
And just like pushers, librarians are extremely open-minded. They don’t care where you’ve come from. Rich, poor, or in between – all library cards are the same to them. (Unless it’s an out of state card, in which case you will have to pay the buck and get a local card.) They don’t even judge when all you want to read is Romance novels; they just point you toward the romance section and recommend new authors who also write in the kilt and dragon milieu. It’s a slippery slope, my friends. You go into the library for the videos and the free internet access and the next thing you know you’re reading and using words like “milieu.”
So, if that kind of blatant pushing of mind-expanding education is acceptable to you, then you should probably hug the next librarian you see. Just remember that the VIG on those late library books is due next week…
https://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.png00Bethany Maineshttps://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.pngBethany Maines2014-12-10 02:00:562014-12-09 18:51:11The Dealer in Your Neighborhood
The Navy SEALs must pass through something called Hell Week in order to become an actual SEAL. If they can’t take Hell Week they can always ring the bell that signals that they are opting out and then they get coffee and donuts. For five and a half days the SEAL candidates are expected to operate on four hours of sleep while being cold, wet, and presumably yelled at (since no one seems to do anything in the military without being yelled at). To this I say… What pansies.
OK, the cold and wet does sound miserable. But try operating for three months on four hours of sleep while being constantly yelled at and then having someone puke in your pants. And in your hair. And on just about everything else. Then we’ll talk. OK, OK, so you can snap a man’s neck with your bare hands. I can shoot milk out my boob. What else you got?
All kidding aside, one of the unfortunate side effects of becoming a mother (or probably a Navy SEAL) is that sleep is immediately curtailed. Which makes lots of things, for instance, writing novels and running a business, more difficult.
Side effects of prolonged sleep deprivation include:
Weight Gain
Loss of Sex Drive
Impaired Alertness, Concentration, and Problem Solving
Depression
Aging Skin
Memory Loss
Greater chances of death due to accidents
Greater chances of other health problems
It’s not that being a mom is so difficult; it’s that being anything else, while being a mom just increased in difficulty due to our adorable little time sucking children and the constant sleep deprivation. Which makes every word I type a minor triumph. I will not be ringing the bell today.
PS Please forgive any typos I may make. I blame them on my daughter.
https://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.png00Bethany Maineshttps://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.pngBethany Maines2014-11-05 01:00:282016-02-23 18:08:02Hell What Now?
Recently my daughter learned to crawl. She’s six months old, so basically any time she learns something it’s “recently”. But as she learns new tricks she forces my husband and I to adapt (and hopefully overcome). Sadly, in our sleep deprived state we find ourselves relying on the training we did with our previous “child.”
As she learns new things my mind reaches out for words that will get the result I want. Ack! She’s chewing on a power cord! Drop it! It works on the dog, so my brain now auto selects for those oh, so useful training phrases. Sadly, the phrases mean less than nothing to my daughter. The only one she obeys is “stay” and that’s only if she’s strapped in the car seat. As a result my dog, Kato, thinks I got the runty, stupid puppy of the litter. I can practically see the thought bubble over his head. “Look human puppy, I am demonstrating what to do. Figure it out!” The tiny daughter’s thought bubble says, “Look at those shiny eyeballs; if I could pluck them out, it might be fantastic. Why is the fuzzy one leaving?” Which is a terrible way to treat a dog who is trying his best to be supportive.
Kato performs many important baby related jobs. There is the “I alert you to the fact that the baby is crying.” (Believe me Kato, we know.) There is the extremely useful butt check. Kato, would you like to smell this butt? Oh, you would? Must be time for a diaper change. And the adorable guard dog duty. He is not quite sure why the human puppy hasn’t been weaned to dog food, but if I’m going to insist on breastfeeding her, then he will do his best to guard us while we’re vulnerable.
But she is learning. She now knows her name and his name, and she knows where the dog food is and how delightful it is to spill it all over the floor. So while the dog thinks she’s dumb, I can see the day coming when he will realize that her little monkey fingers are useful to help him get the delicious human food he desires. Hopefully, by then she will also know what “sit,” “stay” and “drop it” mean.
https://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.png00Bethany Maineshttps://bethanymaines.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Aug2016-Logo-op3-300x69.pngBethany Maines2014-09-24 15:02:592023-03-10 17:51:01Puppy Training
This is my first blog on the Girlfriends Book Club! I’m excited to be on the same “team” with so many fun authors, and hopefully they’ll think I’m a good addition to the blog.
I’ll start with a little bit about me. I write what I call women’s action-adventure. It’s a good amount of mystery, a little bit of romance, a lot feminist, and of course, totally incomplete without action and adventure. Did you ever see an action movie and think, “Why does the girl scream a lot and then fall down?” Well, if I made movies, they’d be a lot shorter. Scary man in a mask, calling from inside the house? Bam. Yes, officer, I appear to have shot a deranged psycho hiding in my attic, please send a coroner. The End. None of this waiting for the hunky hero to come save the girl; my heroines save themselves, and possibly the hunky hero too.
My first two books Bulletproof Mascara and Compact with the Devil form the basis for my Carrie Mae Mystery series. (Coming in 2015 – High Caliber Concealer!) They feature Nikki Lanier a twenty-something red-head who, in desperation, decides to sell make-up to make some cash, only to discover that the at home make-up sales giant Carrie Mae is also running a clandestine militant wing staffed by all women with the lofty goal of helping women everywhere.
If you just laughed while reading that, then you’ll know exactly what my friends did when I told them the idea. (They also promptly made up the Carrie Mae salute – chest thump into a mascara flip.) But I knew that I could write that book and that I could make it work. I knew that it would be funny, feminine, and feminist, and I could choreograph some awesome fight scenes.
I’ve written other things, and there have been books that I intended to write because they sounded like a good idea, but when I find the book that I have to write… have you ever heard the sound a metal pan makes when you take it off the burner and it starts to cool down? That little tiny ting? That’s what I hear when my brain produces a freshly baked perfect novel premise. And that’s what I heard the day I realized that at home make-up sales were an incredibly cut-throat business.
So hopefully you’ll join me as I search for the next tiny little auditory hallucination that tells me it’s time to sit down at a computer and make some stuff up.
The Dealer in Your Neighborhood
/in General Writing, LifeI was talking to a librarian the other day and she laughed when I said I thought librarians were like drug dealers. But they really are! They even target the little kids! Get them hooked on the picture books, next thing you know the kids are applying for library cards and mainlining Harry Potter, Divergent and TheTesting. Give it a few years and YA just won’t give the same buzz and the kids have to move on to bigger and bigger fiction. And that’s when the librarians start pushing the hardcore stuff – Faulkner, Atwood, Joyce. If you’re not careful your kid could end up reading the entire Lord of the Rings even though there’s a perfectly good director’s extended cut blue ray back home.
And just like pushers, librarians are extremely open-minded. They don’t care where you’ve come from. Rich, poor, or in between – all library cards are the same to them. (Unless it’s an out of state card, in which case you will have to pay the buck and get a local card.) They don’t even judge when all you want to read is Romance novels; they just point you toward the romance section and recommend new authors who also write in the kilt and dragon milieu. It’s a slippery slope, my friends. You go into the library for the videos and the free internet access and the next thing you know you’re reading and using words like “milieu.”
So, if that kind of blatant pushing of mind-expanding education is acceptable to you, then you should probably hug the next librarian you see. Just remember that the VIG on those late library books is due next week…
Hell What Now?
/in General Writing, LifeThe Navy SEALs must pass through something called Hell Week in order to become an actual SEAL. If they can’t take Hell Week they can always ring the bell that signals that they are opting out and then they get coffee and donuts. For five and a half days the SEAL candidates are expected to operate on four hours of sleep while being cold, wet, and presumably yelled at (since no one seems to do anything in the military without being yelled at). To this I say… What pansies.
All kidding aside, one of the unfortunate side effects of becoming a mother (or probably a Navy SEAL) is that sleep is immediately curtailed. Which makes lots of things, for instance, writing novels and running a business, more difficult.
Side effects of prolonged sleep deprivation include:
It’s not that being a mom is so difficult; it’s that being anything else, while being a mom just increased in difficulty due to our adorable little time sucking children and the constant sleep deprivation. Which makes every word I type a minor triumph. I will not be ringing the bell today.
PS Please forgive any typos I may make. I blame them on my daughter.
Fictional Character, Real Personality
/in Carrie Mae, General Writing, Girlfriends Book ClubPuppy Training
/in LifeRecently my daughter learned to crawl. She’s six months old, so basically any time she learns something it’s “recently”. But as she learns new tricks she forces my husband and I to adapt (and hopefully overcome). Sadly, in our sleep deprived state we find ourselves relying on the training we did with our previous “child.”
As she learns new things my mind reaches out for words that will get the result I want. Ack! She’s chewing on a power cord! Drop it! It works on the dog, so my brain now auto selects for those oh, so useful training phrases. Sadly, the phrases mean less than nothing to my daughter. The only one she obeys is “stay” and that’s only if she’s strapped in the car seat. As a result my dog, Kato, thinks I got the runty, stupid puppy of the litter. I can practically see the thought bubble over his head. “Look human puppy, I am demonstrating what to do. Figure it out!” The tiny daughter’s thought bubble says, “Look at those shiny eyeballs; if I could pluck them out, it might be fantastic. Why is the fuzzy one leaving?” Which is a terrible way to treat a dog who is trying his best to be supportive.
Kato performs many important baby related jobs. There is the “I alert you to the fact that the baby is crying.” (Believe me Kato, we know.) There is the extremely useful butt check. Kato, would you like to smell this butt? Oh, you would? Must be time for a diaper change. And the adorable guard dog duty. He is not quite sure why the human puppy hasn’t been weaned to dog food, but if I’m going to insist on breastfeeding her, then he will do his best to guard us while we’re vulnerable.
But she is learning. She now knows her name and his name, and she knows where the dog food is and how delightful it is to spill it all over the floor. So while the dog thinks she’s dumb, I can see the day coming when he will realize that her little monkey fingers are useful to help him get the delicious human food he desires. Hopefully, by then she will also know what “sit,” “stay” and “drop it” mean.
Helllooo Girlfriends!
/in Carrie Mae, Girlfriends Book ClubOriginally Published at www.girlfriendsbookclub.org
Hellloooo Girlfriends!
This is my first blog on the Girlfriends Book Club! I’m excited to be on the same “team” with so many fun authors, and hopefully they’ll think I’m a good addition to the blog.
I’ll start with a little bit about me. I write what I call women’s action-adventure. It’s a good amount of mystery, a little bit of romance, a lot feminist, and of course, totally incomplete without action and adventure. Did you ever see an action movie and think, “Why does the girl scream a lot and then fall down?” Well, if I made movies, they’d be a lot shorter. Scary man in a mask, calling from inside the house? Bam. Yes, officer, I appear to have shot a deranged psycho hiding in my attic, please send a coroner. The End. None of this waiting for the hunky hero to come save the girl; my heroines save themselves, and possibly the hunky hero too.
My first two books Bulletproof Mascara and Compact with the Devil form the basis for my Carrie Mae Mystery series. (Coming in 2015 – High Caliber Concealer!) They feature Nikki Lanier a twenty-something red-head who, in desperation, decides to sell make-up to make some cash, only to discover that the at home make-up sales giant Carrie Mae is also running a clandestine militant wing staffed by all women with the lofty goal of helping women everywhere.
If you just laughed while reading that, then you’ll know exactly what my friends did when I told them the idea. (They also promptly made up the Carrie Mae salute – chest thump into a mascara flip.) But I knew that I could write that book and that I could make it work. I knew that it would be funny, feminine, and feminist, and I could choreograph some awesome fight scenes.
I’ve written other things, and there have been books that I intended to write because they sounded like a good idea, but when I find the book that I have to write… have you ever heard the sound a metal pan makes when you take it off the burner and it starts to cool down? That little tiny ting? That’s what I hear when my brain produces a freshly baked perfect novel premise. And that’s what I heard the day I realized that at home make-up sales were an incredibly cut-throat business.
So hopefully you’ll join me as I search for the next tiny little auditory hallucination that tells me it’s time to sit down at a computer and make some stuff up.