From Here to There Romance

Quirky gifts

I received these slippers/flip flops from my cousin. She just decided to get them for me. Not sure why. Don’t you love receiving gifts for no purpose other than to give you a gift? And quirky gifts like slippers/flip flops are even better! I remember visiting my great-grandfather in a nursing home when I was very young. He would buy quirky things from the gift shop there. I noticed a little sculpture of a hand. I thought it was so unique. He said I could have it. I wish I still had that quirky hand. As I came to find out later, it was an ash tray. No one in my family smoked, but it was the coolest hand ash tray ever. What is the most interesting gift you’ve ever received?

Summertime in Alaska

In my bio when I say I have a love-hate relationship with Alaska–I really mean it. I do love it here in the summertime so very much. So, in recognition of the “love” side of my relationship of Alaska, I’m going to post various reasons, and some pictures of why I love it here throughout the summer. The wild roses are a particular favorite love of mine. Generally speaking, the roses you purchase at a flower shop no longer have the beautiful fragrance they used to have. Florists have bred the smell right out of them it seems and frankly, the smell is the reason I love roses. Alaska’s wild roses smell wonderful and grow naturally in thickets and rocky slopes all over Alaska. Many parts of the plant are edible during different parts of the season. The petals are made for jelly and for tea. In late summer, the rose hips can be eaten right off the bush for a quick snack. But more than anything, they are beautiful to look at and I look forward to seeing them every year.

Misplaced modifiers, oh my!

I’m an author and I’m going to tell you my dirty little secret—I don’t know what a misplaced modified is.

Yes, I took an English 101 in college where I was supposed to learn all the correct rules of grammar, but I hated that class. I think I got a B, but I’ve long since forgotten everything I shoveled into my short term memory banks concerning participles, modifiers, and the like. I think part of the reason I delayed becoming a writer for so long was because I had this idea in my head of what a writer should be. And he/she was definitely someone who knew all about grammar and punctuation and, well, the rules of writing.

It took me a couple years of thinking about writing before I actually did the writing, but one conversation stood out in my mind that pointed me in the right direction. I was discussing breast cancer with my cousin, Diana Megli (family members call her Sis) who was undergoing her third relapse with the disgusting disease. The conversation was something like this. She said, “Most people say, why me? I say, why not me?”

I had never thought of cancer or anything else quite like that before. I harbored my secret desire, wondering if I could ever write a young adult or adult romance novel. I kept chanting those same words to myself, “Why not me?”

Why shouldn’t anyone pursue their dreams? I let my ideas of not knowing every rule of grammar hold me back, but Sis made me realize there was no reason to hold back, except my own insecurities. Who was it who said, “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Oh, that would be Alfred Lord Tennyson.

I decided to adopt my cousin’s attitude, of why not me and Lord Tennyson’s watered down version of love and said to myself, “Better to have tried and failed, then never to have tried at all.” Or who knows, maybe somebody famous already said that.

So now you know my dirty little secret and how I overcame it. And here’s another secret: get a grammar queen critique partner. Believe me, they are out there. Regardless, don’t let anything hold you back from your goals, whether it be misplaced modifiers or simply not believing in yourself.

Don’t say, why me? Say, why not me?

Beautiful!

A New Year

christinejhglover:

Do you make goals? I do. But I don’t make resolutions. Too easy to break them.

Mean people, Survivor, and High School

A recent twitter exchange has inspired this blog post. Social media at our fingertips and reality TV has come together for me in an interesting way.

I’m a huge Survivor fan. I watch it every week religiously. I tweeted to who I hoped wouldn’t win mostly because he stole food from others and I thought that was incredibly mean and selfish. Maybe that wasn’t such a smart thing to do. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t, but regardless he posted a snarky sarcastic comment back to me. And that’s fine, he has every right to do that, but the number of people on Twitter who favored that snarky sarcastic mean comment is mind boggling to me. It reminded me of high school. I seriously felt like I’d been transported back in time. You know when the popular bully makes a comment about the bookworm nerd and everyone joins in nodding their heads in agreement and/or hurling insults at the nerd hoping for approval from the bully.

But anyway, back to Survivor. It is a game of out-witting other people, so it’s not as if a nice guy is always going to win. In fact, I think the opposite is true. Winning may require some maneuvering that might be considered mean. I understand that its part of the game, even hiding the idol is actually smart, but stealing food from folks who are just as hungry as you is where I draw the line.

Last season when John Cochran won, I couldn’t have been happier. Nice guys don’t always finish last, in fact, sometimes they win.

I am a romance writer. I always root for the underdog and I love happy endings. From now on I’ll stick to what I know and avoid tweeting to contestants on reality TV shows. Never know when I might be transported back to high school.