About Me

Cat on My Head

~ Shara ~ 9 Comments

My cat has a few pretty regular habits.

He almost always gets on my lap when I’m reading at lunch.

He almost always gets on my lap when I’m reading before bed.

He almost always lies on my head while I’m asleep.

The latter is one of those things that truly tests whether or not you’re a cat person. As long as he does this while I’m asleep (in other words, he doesn’t make a beeline for my pillow while I’m trying to fall asleep), I’m good with it. The problem I have is when he wakes up and decides to start biting my hair, or sticking his wet nose in my ear or on my face.

The bigger problem is that he’s a BIG cat. 17-18 lbs worth of cat. And if I wake up in the middle of the night and want to readjust my position, getting my head out from under those 17-18 lbs is difficult. And sometimes, I lose my pillow in the process.

Last night was one such night: woke up at 3:30 am with a migraine (yay, sinuses!), and I knew I needed to take something. So I did. And when I came back to bed, the cat was completely sprawled all over my pillow, with a leg hanging off the edge of it. It was rather cute, and I proved my cat person-ness: instead of forcing him to move (and therefore meow in protest, and therefore waking up my husband), I simply hauled myself to the living room, grabbed an extra blanket and a space heater, and tried to sleep off the migraine on the loveseat. I halfway succeeded.

I love my cat. 🙂 But here’s hoping that he spends tonight beside us on the bed, rather than on my pillow (and therefore my head). 🙂

Beautiful Lie

~ Shara ~ 4 Comments

When I finally finished the very first draft of Telepathic Soulmates in 2007, I was in trouble and lots of it. The sucker needed WORK, and in order to graduate, it required an extensive rewrite. The good thing is, sometimes you don’t really understand how to write a book until you’re already finished with it, so I knew what I needed to do.

One of my biggest weaknesses was (and still is, generally speaking) setting. I had a vague, generic setting for the first draft, and I needed something to fix that. Honestly, I don’t remember if I was leaning towards what I settled on before I saw the below video, but I do know that once I saw this video, I knew my setting couldn’t be anything different.

Continue reading →

Movie Ramblings, with a Side of Headaches

~ Shara ~ 4 Comments

Currently, my husband and my cat are getting more sleep than I am. Admittedly, this is my fault, because it’s hard to say no to a good margarita, and then you really, really wish you’d said no after you wake up in the wee hours of the morning to worship the great porcelain goddess.

That, and stealth headaches. These are headaches I’ve dubbed stealth because I wake up, and there’s pain, so I get up to take something, realize the headache isn’t bad at all, really, but when I lay down again? PAIN! Stealth headaches: you don’t know they’re there unless you’re horizontal, which puts you in the unfortunate position of trying to figure out how to sleep vertically, because those headaches always how up in the middle of the night.

ANYWAY. It’s been a productive weekend so far: Friday, the hubby and I watched Argo, which I really liked, but I find myself disappointed now that I’ve learned that Ben Affleck’s character, Tony Mendez, was actually latino. It’s especially painful since, in the credits, the film makes a big deal to compare the real life counterparts to the actors, and honestly, the resemblance was uncanny for most of them. Except they didn’t do it for Mendez/Affleck. The Book Smugglers, in their post devoted to the Oscars, have the comparison picture here.

The more I think about it, the more it frustrates me. I didn’t have a problem with Affleck in this role or his acting before I learned this. I left the movie feeling great, warm, fuzzy feelings for the man he was portraying, and now that I know the man he was portraying was latino, I’m pissed, because so many people who watch the movie are going to think a white guy saved the day. And even though I’m a white woman, it pisses me off: race relations can be so tense in the US that we need to see heroes of all shapes and sizes and colors. Having a latino hero in a movie that’s based on a real latino hero who did a great service to the US? Who was one of the most important operatives in CIA history? That would’ve been beyond awesome.

Anyway. Argo was still really good, a really tense movie, but that just bugs me to no end.

We also watched Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. I’m pro-Steve Carrell, but not a huge fan of Keira Knightly lately. She’s a good actress, and I’ve liked her work in the past, it’s just that I can’t look at her now without wishing she looked healthier. She’s so thin it’s frightening, so I tend to avoid her films. Shallow of me, I know, and it’s not like I have a vendetta against skinny people (when I was growing up, my mother had a whacked-out metabolism that kept her super-skinny, the kind of super-skinny that made you realize being super-skinny wasn’t awesome. To get jeans, she had to get them from the boy’s department — not men’s, boy’s — and then hem them in using a sewing machine). Anyway, I still really wanted to see this movie, so that was Saturday’s entertainment. And it was good. It was really, really good. I was surprised by the end, and I loved seeing an alternate take on the apocalypse. We always assume sheer anarchy and mutiny, but seeing other ways of coping was a fascinating study of human character.

And while I’m babbling about movies, I did watch Battleship last weekend. It was no where near as bad as I thought, and I thought I’d have to be drunk to enjoy it. I wasn’t drunk, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. Going in with low expectations really helped, but it’s quite entertaining for a big, dumb action movie with dubious source material. Also, I admire Battleship utilized a super-diverse cast without it seeming contrived. At any rate, it was fun to watch. It was also free to watch (via HBO, so it’s not FREE, but I didn’t pay extra just to watch that particular movie), so that helped too.

Tonight is Oscar-night, which I’ll be watching despite not having yet watched as many of the nominees as I would’ve liked. There was a time when I was in college when I’d make a point to see every film nominated for Best Picture. Of course, that was back when only five films were nominated for the category, but still: I wish I had that time now. Yesterday, it was super-tempting to go to the theater and do a marathon of The Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty. Maybe even Life of Pi. Oh well, I’ll get to them eventually.

Happy Friday! Celebrate with Bacon!

~ Shara ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been craving bacon since Monday. Specifically, my sandwich-of-choice at Subway: turkey, bacon, cheese & ranch (and some lettuce thrown in to be healthy) on wheat. I’ve been good all week, but today’s Friday, and I’m in the mood to celebrate, so bacon it is! Erm, I mean, Subway it is!

Celebrate what, you may ask? Today was my annual review for my day job, and it went well. My raise goes into affect on April 1st, so that’s a good thing. It’s also a constant thing. I’ve complained a bit about certain things being uncertain at the day job, but this wasn’t one of them. The uncertain things seem to be fading, yet they have a bad habit of popping up out of nowhere and saying, “SURPRISE! Your life is UNCERTAIN again!” We’ll see. Right now, I’m quite happy for the raise.

I’m also taking a half day today, so I shall be spending the afternoon with my cat (did you know, cats can literally make you crazy? There’s no hope for me; I’ve been living with cats since I was a baby!) and catching up on a few projects. I’ll leave you with this story: Continue reading →

Transitioning Into What?

~ Shara ~ 11 Comments

I’ve had this idea for a while now, but it really got stuck in my head last year when I was thisclose to a publishing deal. See, I haven’t decided whether or not I’ll write under my real name (which is associated with my book blog and has been for some time), or if I want to write under a pen name (you’d think naming yourself would be easy. You would be wrong). And because my book blog has a rather large following, I always knew that I’d want to promote whatever I publish professionally to those readers. I’m not going to kid myself: I know that many of those readers won’t give a fig if I publish a book, and those that do may not like my genre. That’s cool. But there will be those who WILL want to follow my career, and I wanted to find a way to promote myself as a writer to THEM while also distancing myself from the book blog (in the event I publish under a pen name).

The idea, then, was simple: to create a blog that would transition me from book blogger to full-time author (whatever name I decide to publish under). Hence, “Calico in Transition.” If you know my book blog, the title makes sense. If you don’t, a few minutes on Google will tell you everything you need to know.

So for now, I’m in transition: not just from book blogger to professional writer, but in life in general. Trying to figure out if my Day!Job is the Forever!Job. Trying to figure out if I even want to become a professional writer, because I’ve been following the field for a long time, and there’s a lot out there that scares me. I’ll talk about anything and everything, including some of the topics I’d discuss at my book blog.

But one thing I won’t talk about: the book blog by name. I also won’t name myself because as I said before, this blog is meant to be a cushion between one thing and another, and I still haven’t decided what I want to name myself yet. I ask those that know me personally (or from the book blog) to refrain from calling me anything but Calico. It may be a futile gesture (and really, there’s no such thing as anonymity on the internet), but if possible, I’d like to dissociate my real name from this blog, so that if I one day launch an author blog, I can promote it HERE my real name being attached to the pen name.

Clear as mud? Good. This in and of itself is an experiment, a way to get me writing about other things that book reviews, a chance to loosen up, have fun, or be serious and reflect. If you’re on board, I’m glad to have you. If you’re not, that’s cool too.