It's my turn!

I know that I'm supposed to have something to say... preferably something witty. But gosh darn it, I've got nothing. I mean, my life is all about going to school, going home, taking care of the puppy, going back to school, going home, taking care of the puppy, doing homework, taking care of the puppy. And there you have it. My life: not exactly conducive to wittiness. Unless of course I deteriorate into potty humor jokes about my dog. And I'm not quite that far gone.

So in an effort to find humor in my life, I'm submitting to our readership a list of funny/dumb laws that are really on the books:

Alabama

* It is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while operating a vehicle.
* Dominoes may not be played on Sunday.
* It is illegal to wear a fake mustache that causes laughter in church.

California

* Sunshine is guaranteed to the masses.
* Animals are banned from mating publicly within 1,500 feet of a tavern, school, or place of worship.
* Bathhouses are against the law. [Get the full text of this law.]
* It is a misdemeanor to shoot at any kind of game from a moving vehicle, unless the target is a whale.
* Women may not drive in a house coat.

Florida

* Women may be fined for falling asleep under a hair dryer, as can the salon owner.
* A special law prohibits unmarried women from parachuting on Sunday or she shall risk arrest, fine, and/or jailing.
* If an elephant is left tied to a parking meter, the parking fee has to be paid just as it would for a vehicle.
* It is illegal to sing in a public place while attired in a swimsuit.
* Men may not be seen publicly in any kind of strapless gown.
* Having sexual relations with a porcupine is illegal.
* It is illegal to skateboard without a license.
* When having sex, only the missionary position is legal.

Kansas

* Prohibits shooting rabbits from a motorboat.

Louisiana

* It is illegal to rob a bank and then shoot at the bank teller with a water pistol.

Indiana

* It is illegal for a liquor store to sell cold soft drinks.
* Liquor stores may not sell milk.

Michigan

* You may not swear in front of women and children in the state of Michigan.

Nebraska

* It is illegal for bar owners to sell beer unless they are simultaneously brewing a kettle of soup.

New York

* A fine of $25 can be levied for flirting. This old law specifically prohibits men from turning around on any city street and looking "at a woman in that way." A second conviction for a crime of this magnitude calls for the violating male to be forced to wear a "pair of horse-blinders" wherever and whenever he goes outside for a stroll.
* It is against the law to throw a ball at someone's head for fun.
* A license must be purchased before hanging clothes on a clothesline.
* The penalty for jumping off a building is death.

North Dakota

* Beer and pretzels can't be served at the same time in any bar or restaurant.
* It is illegal to lie down and fall asleep with your shoes on.

Ohio

* It is illegal to fish for whales on Sunday.
* It is illegal to get a fish drunk.

Pennsylvania

* A person is not eligible to become Governor if he/she has participated in a duel.

Texas

* It is illegal to take more than three sips of beer at a time while standing.
* It is illegal to drive without windshield wipers. You don't need a windshield, but you must have the wipers.
* It is illegal for one to shoot a buffalo from the second story of a hotel.
* It is illegal to milk another person's cow.
* A recently passed anticrime law requires criminals to give their victims 24 hours notice, either orally or in writing, and to explain the nature of the crime to be committed.
* The entire Encyclopedia Britannica is banned in Texas because it contains a formula for making beer at home.

Wisconsin

* You must manually flush all urinals in a building.
* Butter substitutes are not allowed to be served in state prisons.

Don't you all wish that you were in law school now?

On Chaos and Platitudes

I owe you some winnahs!

From Skye's post about rejection, the winner is Cherie J! Cherie, we love you, please have a book to ease the pain of getting fired on your birthday! How totally harsh! Email me at sonja@sonjafoust.com with your address and the book of your choice from my inventory at BookMooch and I'll send it to you.

From my post about my blue hair (which is still blue and getting bluer, by the way), the winner is Amy S.! Amy, email me at sonja@sonjafoust.com with your address and I will get The Shoe Queen by Anna Davis in the mail for you. Hopefully it will erase all bad memories of the Wal-Mart highlights.

My writing world has been suffering of late, mostly because the rest of my life is (or rather was) in a bit of an upheaval too. But this weekend I managed to clean my house which just makes life seem so much better. I also hopped on the bandwagon and joined FlyLady. I always kind of thought I didn't need platitudes to keep my house clean, but it turns out I sort of do. So, um, thanks FlyLady, even though I'm kind of embarrassed about signing up. But not as embarrassed as I was about my CHAOS: Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. And now I'm FLYing: Finally Loving Yourself... uh... Myself... or something. (Do you see now what I mean about the platitudes? FlyLady is chock full of them, lucky for me.)

So anyway, now that my house is no longer a disaster, I can get down to the business (fun business) of writing! So here are my upcoming goals:

Numba One
Edit Lying Eyes
Submit
Deadline: August 15


Numba Two
Finish Courting the Preacher's Daughter
Figure out where to submit
Submit

Numba Three
Write a Regency (Skye even promised to critique it, even though she doesn't read Regencies.)

You all have my full permission to beat me with a wet noodle on August 15 if I cannot provide you with a touching tale of how I've edited at least the first three chapters of Lying Eyes and sent it off for Cerridwen to hold onto for like 90 days or something ridiculous like that.

So what about you? What are your upcoming goals, writing or otherwise? Are you going to finish that home improvement project? Read War and Peace? Join FlyLady with me? Spill.

Technicalities

So, as Sonja is already well aware, I may be a techno geek, but I'm totally anti-social-networking, which both she and my boyfriend despair of, since I spend quite a bit of time making fun of their MySpace pages. Anyways, I don't actually READ blogs online, per se. Not even the ones I write on, including this one. They are emailed to me, but they don't get here until a day later. Which means that by the time I get this blog in my email, I only have a day left to post. So, all this time, I've gone of the (probably wrong) assumption that I will post 2 days after I read it. Therefore, I usually wind up posting 3 days after Sonja.

Which is what I'm trying to clarify. Is this bad and wrong? Should I be adhering firmly to the 2 day limit we set out way back when? Or am I okay with letting it slide? Thoughts, comments, suggestions?

Anyways, in other news, I'm back in North Carolina, which means I get to see my bestest buddy, at some point. Hopefully. Sonja? Are you out there? It only took me and JB a mere 30 hours to make it across the country. We practically could have driven faster. And we spent a wonderful night at the Dallas airport. So I'm one up on Sonja- to prepare for the RWA National Conference, I stuck it out in Dallas, just to see what the weather was going to be like. Which, i'm not pleased to report, is sucky. But maybe it'll be better by the time we get there.

For other preparations, however, I'm also lacking. Since my eyeball was out of comission, I was unable to stick to my writing schedule and finish my WIP before the conference. Which means I'll be pitching an unfinished book again. Oh well.

I'm also trying to find the motivation to get to working on the book again. I've had 4 or 5 weeks off of it now and I'm struggling to get back. Need inspiration... Any help for those of you out there in readerland?

And one final note to Sonja... Quit yer bitching about being compared to your sister. You're IDENTICAL TWINS!!! And while you and I may not think the two of you actually look that much alike, most of the rest of the universe only sees the similarities. Also, on her wedding day, she probably looked fabulous. So being compared to her is a compliment. Suck it up.

Sonja is so right...

I admit it. My plan is in fact to be published with my monster of a book and gloat about it endlessly. Failing that, I'll just cry myself to sleep every night. But such is life.

Actually, to be honest, Sonja's fabulous success has inspired me to begin working on my book again... so i've dredged up the many edits that Sonja gave me for Misdirection that i totally ignored and am currently wasting work paper to print out my novel and begin editing (again). No, really this time. :)

At any rate, this is Skye, popping in to say howdy, before I leave again. I'm back from one trip, but am leaving for another. Ah, the life of an unemployed writer is just so tough. But on this trip I will be taking along my edits and will theoretically be working on them. Just you wait, I'll be published yet. But while I will gloat about being published, I will still give all credit to Sonja for being published first. And even though she's too good to talk to me nowadays that she's published, I still love her. :)

To sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there's the rub

I realize I have yet again fallen behind in posting. And will probably continue to do some in the next few weeks, since I'm going walkabout on Sunday to go visit law schools. And friends. :)

At any rate, I have nothing to offer Sonja in the way of advice for getting up earlier... I love sleep. Not even cattle prods would convince me to wake up earlier if I didn't think i was ready to get up. My mom (and brynmuffin will corroborate this) used to be SO cheerful that she would sing obnoxiously cheery songs in the morning to wake us up. I once chucked a pillow at her and told her i was practicing for the weekend. This, however, did not work. Alas, as a result, now that I'm no longer forced to wake up for, say, work, I don't. Simple as that :) JB does occasionally drag me out of bed with him (the crazy man only needs a little bit of sleep! how weird is that?)

Anyways, to connect sleep and inspiration, I have 2 stories. One involves an old book and one involves a new one.

The first: While i was writing my first book as my senior thesis in college, I was having troubles coming up with a title for it. I strained my brain trying to think of something and couldn't come up with a title that suited it. So one night I went to sleep after a hard day's work of typing. Ah ha! Suddenly, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most insightful title i could never have thought up awake. I was so excited! It was perfect. The book would sell on the title alone. This was it. Of course, I thought that i should write it down, but couldn't find any paper near my bed and thought to myself "Well, it's so perfect, I'll never forget" Yep, bet you can guess the ending to this story... I woke up the next morning with the memory of having thought of the perfect title.... AND NO MEMORY OF THE TITLE ITSELF. Ugh. It took me several months to come up with another one that I'm quite sure isn't as good as the first: Misdirection. Of course, I'm left to wonder if i ever really came up with the perfect title or i just dreamed that I did. You know how when you dream and you think you've solved something perfectly and you wake up and are like "well, obviously my brain is on crack because that wouldn't work in a million years?" well, it's possible that's what happened. But i prefer to believe in my genius. And then my lameness in forgetting. :)

Oh, and I should add as a p.s. to that story that when I actually thought up Misdirection as a title, I was flying somewhere and had another ah ha moment. And then remembering my mistake of last time, asked the man sitting next to me if i could borrow his pen for a minute to write it down. :) Lesson learned.

The second story involves a dream from just the other night. It's all getting vaguer in my head as time passes, but it spawned an idea for a book that I still remember, so I'm counting that as progress. The dream involved a lot of lawyers, basically, and as the dream progressed in odd ways (which I'm not sharing because it'll take too long) I figured out that all of the lawyers for this law firm i was dreaming about were VAMPIRES. Yeah, basically, i can't figure out if I'm 1) reading too many vampire stories, 2) watching too many back episodes of Boston Legal or 3) am really nervous about becoming a lawyer and having everyone hate me. What do you all think?

My story idea, of course, is way cooler. :) But yes, it includes vampires and lawyers all the same. Lucky me!

Inspiration and Puppy-love

First of all, I am so proud of Skye for actually posting about writing that I might just wet myself. I am even more jazzed about the fact that she has newfound inspiration. It always sucks when your bestest bud is in the doldrums, whether they be writing-related or otherwise. So yay. Happy joy.

I myself have been struggling madly to get out of the doldrums lately too. Inspiration strikes very rarely in the Land of Sonja, and in its absence, I soldier on without it. I know that's what you're supposed to do and everything, but it's not as much fun. Butt In Chair time is great, but it's never as good as oh-my-god-if-I-don't-write-this-down-this-second-I-will-pop inspiration.

But allow me to share my theory on inspiration: Inspiration is a little bit like having a big huge crush on someone. It feels great, makes you all fluttery and gushy, and will carry you for a little while. But, like puppy-love, it fades. And when it fades, something has got to be there to take its place. In the case of a crush, it's either true lurve or a break-up. In the case of inspiration, I guess it's just commitment to the project. Butt In Chair time. So in the end, even though Butt In Chair time isn't as exciting as inspiration, it's the thing that gets the book done.

Tonight, I'm going to attempt to take my own advice, and put my butt in my chair for a while, even though I'm not really feeling my novel right now. And maybe, as with true love, just being with my project for a little while will inspire those old feelings of inspiration and we'll all live happily ever after.

Hang on! I'm actually posting about writing!

Yeah, like the title says, this post is actually going to be about writing. Sonja's dying of shock somewhere, but hey, I like to shake things up every once in a while. Okay, always. :)

I had a story idea. Now, that's not anything unusual, given I consider myself a writer and almost any writer will tell you that they often have ideas and if they're really lucky, they remember them and then can eventually spin them into a story later which they sell for lots of money and, lucky them, Fabio appears on the cover. So it hasn't worked exactly that way in my case, I do have a lot of story ideas. I keep a file for each, usually and add to it when i think of something that relates.

At any rate, I need to preface my post a little bit with how this idea came about. I was lucky enough to get an xbox 360 for my birthday this year. Along with it came a bunch of arcade games. I've been wandering through the arcade games, seeing what there is to see. Tonight, I was playing Bejeweled 2, which is a totally brainless game involving gem swapping to get rows of 3. Or something like that. So I was sitting there playing it, not really focusing, and I started daydreaming. And in to my mind popped a story idea about a girl who plays video games. (Now you'll never ask an author where they get their story ideas from ever again, right?)

And the longer I played, the more fully formed the idea became. I started expanding on the main character... and who her hero was going to be. I started pondering how much research it would take (because, let's be honest, no one's going to read a book about Bejeweled 2, and that's pretty much the only game I know anything about), and other facets that i will eventually need to bring this book to life.

Obviously, the moral of this story is that I need to turn my brain off and let it do it's thing. For the first time in a long time, I was actually inspired to write. Which is a bummer, given I'm in the middle of packing up a 2 bedroom apartment to fit into a 10 x 10 storage space and also, theoretically, working on my work in progress (forever after referred to as my WIP) which is entitled A Girl's Guide to the Afterlife, and is, to my egotistical way of thinking, a really great concept. I mean, who wouldn't want to read about Valkyries? I know I do! Besides, there's so much potential for Fabio to be a manly Viking on the cover.

So, my writing goals (which Sonja has been wanting me to post since the beginning of the year) are now thus:

1) Finish the damn book. A Girl's Guide to the Afterlife really needs to be finished. And I need to make the hero less lame.
2) Send massive amounts of paper to Sonja so that she can take 2 years to edit my book, much like the last one :)
3) Work on new book, an as yet untitled project about competative video gamers

and finally,

4) Play Bejeweled 2 a lot more in the hopes of sparking more writing brainstorms