Sean has poor reading skills at 6am

I've been burning my candle at both ends this week and not for any really good reason. Okay, maybe it is a good reason. My husband has been working long hours all week (leaving at 6:30am and not getting home until 9 or 10 at night) and if we want to talk to each other at all, we both have to stay up really late. Neither of us has had more than four or five hours of sleep per night all week. Normally, I can deal with sleep deprivation but, man, have I been dragging all week long. I've also had a terrible, pounding headache, too. I was beginning to think I might be coming down with something.

This morning, I staggered into the kitchen at a quarter of six to make coffee. I dumped the water in the coffee maker, put the coffee in the filter then just sort of stood there for a minute, staring at the bag of coffee I started using on Monday. It was then I noticed an unfamiliar word on the bag: D-E-C-A-F.

Sort of explains it all, doesn't it?




Trying. So hard. To. Stay awake.

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Fly

It was August 28th, 1992. My first semester of college. I and some of my newly found best friends headed out from the dorms at Wichita State University for some college hijinks. There were six of us in the car (a 1978 Cadillac Deville), listening to the city’s classic rock station at an obscene volume and singing along at an equally obscene volume. The song “Blinded by the Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band came on. We belted out the lyrics.

Then it happened.

We came to the line “Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.” I loudly sang what I thought was the line. Everyone stopped singing. The driver turned down the radio.

“What did you just say?”



I repeated the line. The car erupted in laughter. And that was the day I learned the song doesn’t go “Wrapped up like a douche, another roller in the fight.”

Go ahead. Laugh. It is kinda funny. I always wondered what they meant by that line anyway.

On a related note, I was once sitting in a radio station with another DJ. We’d been talking but lapsed into silence while the No Doubt song “Spiderwebs” was playing. At the end of the song is the line “Leave a message and I’ll call you back.” As soon as it played, the other DJ commented in an offhand manner “Why do you think she wants to leave a message for Carl Eubanks?”

Any embarrassingly misheard lyrics in your past?

Geology, Geograhy and Me

I have something embarrassing to admit. It requires a bit of background so bear with me.

I was 6 years old in 1980 when Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington (the state. This distinction will be important later). It was all over the news and I was way into because … I was 6 and volcanoes are waaay cool to six-year-olds. Especially when they live in the middle of the country, far, far, away from the eruption. For some reason still unclear to me, my great-aunt in Washington D.C. (yet another important distinction) sent my grandmother a bit of ash from the eruption. So, if you’ll follow my six-year-old logic. Mt. St. Helens + Washington + Aunt Gladys + Washington = Mount St. Helens is in Washington D.C.

See? That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

Fast forward to my sophomore year of college and my Geology 101 (aka Geology for Liberal Arts majors) class. My professor was talking about the eruption when, like a lightning bolt from the sky, it struck me: MOUNT ST. HELENS IS IN WASHINGTON STATE!!!

Truly, I felt as though I’d been living a lie. And I also felt like a complete dumbass because I’d never corrected my faulty, six-year-old reasoning. This was the most complete and absolute “blonde” moment of my life. And I made the mistake of telling my husband about it. Being an engineer, he NEVER lets me forget it.

The point of my story: We were watching a program about what would happen if the seething caldera that is Yellowstone National Park were to ever explode. My seven-year-old son asked where Mount St. Helens was located and my husband replied “Washington.” My son thought about that for a moment.

Then he asked: “Washington state or Washington D.C.?”

A Death in the Fictional Family

I was reading another writer's (who shall remain nameless) blog the other day in which this person was despondent over the death of a character. It made me curious as to how others handle eliminating characters. Sure, I've shed a few tears over the deaths of characters written by others, (I STILL bawl like a baby when the little girl dies in Bridge to Terabithia.) but never over my own characters. In fact, I take a fiendish pleasure in devising good ways to remove characters (I have a particularly good death ready for one of my Seals characters. Bwahahaha.). I was discussing this with my stepdaughter Shekey last night and she told me, "It's a good thing you aren't a criminal, because you'd probably be a serial killer." Shekey has a wry sense of humor.




Writers: How do you feel about killing off your characters?

Everyone: Any particular fictional death scenes that really make you turn on the waterworks?