Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Via Publishers Marketplace, here’s a Election Day countdown treat with a writerly twist: a “Match the porn with the politician who wrote it” quiz.

:-)

UPDATE: Okay, I linked first, read later, and really, the quiz title should be “Match the most gawdawful prose ever written with the politician who wrote it.”

I now need a shower and it’s NOT because of the sex!

Technorati Tags: novels, politics

Here I come.

I’m doing the National Novel Writing Month thing.

Here’s my situation. I have an idea for a novel. I have some quirky stuff that I love for the premise. I have some characters. I have, at a high level, the arc of the conflict.

But I haven’t been able to see what happens to these people. They are sitting there, static, staring at me like they expect me to, I dunno, serve them scallops wrapped in bacon or something.

I haven’t been too worried about this. I started querying for my last novel in June and I still have some agents reading full manuscripts; in the meantime, I’ve taken my fiction-writing hiatus as an opportunity to recharge.

But it’s time, now. Plus I get the cool icon for my sidebar.

Anyone else doing it? China, are you?

Technorati Tags: National Novel Writing Month

Why did I walk away from my clubs and ball, you ask?

Because it was so windy today that the flags on all the greens were blown over.

Once I got close enough to (theoretically) get onto the green on my next shot, I had to walk to the green and replace the flag. So that I would know where to (theoretically) aim.

Technorati Tags: golf

The camera didn’t expose the image until several seconds after I hit the shutter button. But it did a better job of capturing the weather today (overcast, wind gusts strong enough to occasionly knock me slightly off balance) than any of my intended shots did.

(Hey, I finally figured out how to wrap text around my images!)

(Now lets see if there’s a margin around the image — there isn’t in my preview window . . .)

Technorati Tags: Autumn

It’s a thrill when the dog training book I co-wrote gets a mention in the press, of course, but I also love when someone says something like this, which I just found in a dog training forum (Terry Ryan is the trainer I teamed up with to write Outwitting Dogs):

I second Sandra on the Terry Ryan book, i just bought it and im hooked.

It’s hard to assign a value to writing quality, and it happens that Terry (her website is here) is a gifted and experienced dog trainer; there’s no question that the enthusiasm shown by people who read it are in large part due to the quality of the content. The lady knows what she’s doing when it comes to dogs!

But I like to think that my contribution — in terms of the organization, clarity of the writing, and tone of the book — are playing a part in the book’s success as well ;-)

/end shameless self-promotion

Technorati Tags: dog training, Outwitting Dogs

One of my cats loves to watch moving water. I’m really really glad he hasn’t figure out how to do this!

Via Miss Snark.

Technorati Tags: Friday catblogging

It’s been such a peculiar fall. Cool, yet no bite, and so much rain that the turning of the leaves has been listless and tentative.

Then last night our first serious frost.

And this morning, even without a breath of wind to nudge them leaves were falling everwhere, as if the trees were themselves now raining. The leaves rustling as they hit the ground like hundreds of rustling footsteps.

I took the photo beneath a ginkgo finally gone to sleep.

Technorati Tags: autumn, Rochester, New York

Newly awakened, I recognized
the day — it was yesterday,
it was yesterday with another name,
it was friend I knew to be lost
who came back to surprise me.

Thursday, I said to it, wait for me,
I am going to dress. We’ll go out together
until you disappear into night.
You shall die, I shall go on
awake and accustomed
to the satisfactions of dark.

Things came about quite differently
as I shall tell in intimate detail.

I don’t really care for Neruda — much of his poetry strikes me as forced — but this one’s pretty nice, and after a day spent hunched at my computer, looking up only long enough, once in awhile, to chafe at my responsibilities, at the dullness of being responsible when it’s naughtiness I need — I can relate to the Thursday of the poem that turns finally into a tomb.

The translation is by Alistair Reid, from a 1972 bilingual edition, in paperback, Pablo Neruda Selected Poems.

Technorati Tags: poetry, Pablo Neruda

As if I needed any more — I just found out that this fellow (bloke??? lol) Michael Wright mentioned Outwitting Dogs in a February piece in the Telegraph — and what a delightful piece — I got a wonderful belly laugh from it, which was all I needed, I’ve just ordered his book, C’est la folie, more of that please, sir!

Technorati Tags: books, dogs, dog training

Via one of Michael Blowhard’s always-worthwhile round-up posts, here’s a Christian Science Monitor piece that makes a point I’ve noticed myself: the cost of eating out is on par with, if not lower than, the cost of buying and preparing your own food.

This assumes you shop at the higher end of the supermarket food chain — and also assumes the time you spend preparing meals has a dollar value. If your definition of home cooking is to prise open a #10 can of franks-n-beans and dump some in a saucepan, the argument falls apart ;-)

Otherwise, as says one Mark Bergen, “pricing specialist,” Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota: “Simply put, restaurants are more efficient than you are.”

Some nice data about the resturant biz in the article too, though. Their profit margins are under 5 percent. And “most turn over more than their entire staff each year, a rate that has contributed to a decline in service over the past 10 years, experts say.” Yeah, that does explain a lot.

And of course, some requisite hand-wringing about portion size and how that’s making us fat. As if the doggy bag had never been invented. After golfing with my parents last weekend, we stopped at the Doug’s Fish Fry in Cortland. They were offering a fried oyster special. I ate half of mine and had the other half for lunch yesterday. Mmmmmm. (Heat them up under the broiler, a minute or so a side, just until the breading starts to sizzle, crisps them back up without overcooking the oyster.) (A trick I’ve perfected by reheating the ubuiquitous “chicken fingers” that my daughter often orders when we eat out.)

I’m not advocating a steady diet of deep-fried breaded whatever, of course, but in moderation? And they were oysters!

Technorati Tags: restaurants, dining out