When someone really needs help...

I make about half my living editing other people's prose. I enjoy editing and feel a sense of accomplishment when a project's done. Most of my clients are referrals but I pick up clients through Craig's List as well. (One of the books I edited, Debt, by Rachel Carey was recently published and that made me feel terrific. The book is funny and smart and I urge everyone to read it. )
Sometimes, though, you see an ad and you know, you just know that no matter how strong your edit-fu is, you are not going to be able to help the person who's looking for help.  You know that when you see an ad that includes a phrase like this:

MUST BE FLUID WITH THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

I'm not posting this to mock the ad writer but I am bemused that  the ad went on to demand that whoever applied have at least a Master's degree and 10 years of experience. I've worked for clients like that--asking for qualifications way way over the need of the project. I would like to think that they were  compensating for their own shortcomings by looking for the very best in assistance. I'd like to think that but sometimes they were just jerks.

Starcaster--the cpver

Cover by Elsa Kroese

This is the cover for my novel Starcaster, written for the Drifting Isle Chronicles, four novels with the same backdrop. (The other authors are MeiLin Miranda, Charlotte E. English and Joseph Robert Lewis.) The cover is by Elsa Kroese, an illustrator, concept artist and animator who has created many of Charlotte E. English's covers. The entire series of books will be out next month. Making the transition from short story writer to novelist was ... challenging. My natural story-telling length is 1500 to 2500 words so you can imagine. I'm very pleased with the way it turned out.

R.I.P. Mindy McReady

Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" and Mindy McReady's "Guys Do It All the Time" are two of my favorite "sisters are doing it for themselves" anthems, songs that made it past my "no country music" filter along with Garth Brooks' "Thunder Rolls" and Alan Jackson's "Midnight in Montgomery" and the Dolly Parton/Brad Paisley duet "When I Get Where I'm Going," which always makes me cry. When I heard about Mindy McReady's death last night, I wanted to cry too. How much pain do you have to be in to leave your little boys without a parent? How much pain do you have to be in to take your own life? Too much.

Food Porn Alert--Decadent Chocolate Desserts

A picture is worth a thousand words and at least that many calories. Check out the drool-worthy picture gallery at Yahoo news. Console yourself with a box of Thin Mints now that Girl Scout Cookie season is in session.

Really, how hard could it be to change the Constitution?

Enjoy Historical Romance? This Contest is for You!

Over at their website The Jewels of Historical Romance, twelve best-selling romance authors are launching the first of many contests for their readers. The prize for this one is an iPad mini. Deadline to enter is March 31.

Haiku for Lovers--the review

Dance of Love” image by Kjunstorm

We are born loving poetry. As children we delight in rhymes and rhythms and repetitions that older people dismiss as "sing-song" or of they're word snoots, "doggerel." But how old were you when you read Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham? I can still quote it

I would not like them
here or there.
I would not like them
anywhere.
I do not like
green eggs and ham.
I do not like them,
Sam-I-am

I can still quote it and I bet you can too. That's the power of poetry. Once you hear it, it sinks into your synapses and stays there. We are born loving poetry and yet most of us stop reading it when we leave school. And yet poetry is all around us, just waiting to be rediscovered. (In L.A., the metro buses used to carry poetry placards and one weary commute I discovered Pablo Neruda's "Sonnet XVII" with its startling and sexy imagery:

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
 
Now that is a love poem.  Which brings me to Haiku for Lovers. One of the most elegant forms of poetry, haiku's strictly structured, 17-sylllable shape is infinitely flexible, endlessly versatile and has become the perfect poetic construct for the 21st century.

This Valentine's Day Buttontapper Press published a collection of poems called Haiku for Lovers: An Anthology of Love and Lust that is a beautiful assemblage of words and images that in another era would have made a gorgeous coffee table book. Every poem is paired with a photo, a painting or an illustration. All of the artwork is nicely done and most beautifully complement their poems. One exception for me was the color photograph "The Modern Femme Fatale" b Nicki Varkevissar that accompanied Sue Mayfield Geiger's three-act haiku "Film Noir." 

The model was lovely and the photograph was nicely done but for me, "Film Noir" forever means black and white, not technicolor. I was also disappointed by the photo of the young woman kicking up her flip-flops in the bed of a truck that accompanied Janet McCann's lovely "Because We Are Old." I wanted this romantic poem about love in the autumn of life to feature a mature couple and not a woman in the lush summer of her life. But those are minor quibbles; as a whole, this is a wonderful collection of bite-sized reveries about love and lust and sex and romance and sometimes everything at once. There's sci fi writer Don Webb's frankly phallic rocketship erection; and Richard Scarsbrook's "Intoxication," an elongated erotic reverie. There are phrases that stick in your heart, like h.l. nelson's "Painstaking lacing of emotional corsets." 

The various stages of love are chronicled here from Fiona Johnson's "New Love" to Dave Wright's emotional "The First Five Months." There's romance here (Kenneth Pobo's sensual "Pink Calla Lily'")  but also doses of practical reality as in Bridget Brewer's "Life Has Taught Me This" and Vuong Pham's "SEX Billboard" in which he talks about what REALLY gets his juices flowing. Then there's Katya anchentseva's "Slept Bad After Sex," which weighs and balances the good and the bad of the night and the morning after.

Editor Laura Roberts'  "outro" (as opposed to an "intro") presents a couple of bonus naughtyhaiku that are offered almost apologetically even though they're both smart and provocative. On sale for less than three dollars at ebook-sellers everywhere, Haiku for Lovers is a perfect non-caloric treat for yourself or a belated VD present for your sweetie. Because everyone needs a little poetry in their lives.