What will come of iRON-ic Suicides, your 2009 novel? (It's pronounced Ironic Suicides for those of you stuttering with the name like my mother did; which, by the way, she became a character in it because she helped sponsor me through her charitable donation to the Office of Letters and Light.) It goes on the back burner for now. I've plotted and stayed fairly true to the plot, so it won't be so hard to pick back up and finish the first draft.

Did you finish the novel? No. A decent sized novel is roughly 250-300 pages (paperback). A trade paperback has an average of 300 words a page, therefore 75-90,000 words. I'm about 2/3rds done - with the first draft.

When will you finish iRON-ic Suicides? I'll go back to it after I take care of some other irons in the fire. Right now, I have another manuscript, MSD (sorry, that's all I'll reveal about the title right now for a number of reasons) which came from my first NaNo novel, then titled And Then There Was Sam . . .. Once I have that one done and sent out, I'll probably pick up last year's NaNo novel, The Haunting of Mira Beck, pound the putty out of it and ship that out.

MSD/First NaNo // Dani Summers (2007) // Haunting of Mira Beck (2008)

What about your other NaNo novels? In 2007 I wrote one that started out as a mainstream mystery but then came back, tweaked it and wrote it as a young adult novel. Yet will need a lot of work to get the voice right in it. Or possibly rework the main character and torque the plot a bit to turn it into a mainstream mystery. I'm not sure yet, but as it stands right now, that one doesn't seem to be working as I'd hoped. iRON-ic Suicides will probably be finished up long before the one about Dani Summers. Or was it Sommers? See? I don't even remember!

Did you give in and tell your husband you were participating in this year's NaNoWriMo? No. The good news is, this year I managed to fulfill my goal of NaNoing without telling my husband I was participating. Mom likes to think I'm keeping secrets. No. I'm surviving, Mother. It was merely a test. Had it been a real emergency, I would have thrown him a life preserver and told him to have it on stand-by, demanded he take off the entire month of November and sequestered myself in the back storage shed along with my handy espresso machine and bars of Trader Joe's dark chocolate. The kidlets knew and I had them promise me they wouldn't spill the beans. However, when my mother pointed out that if I got them to keep secrets from my husband, I couldn't complain in a vice versa situation. So the very next day I qualified that and said that they weren't to volunteer the news but if they were asked, they could certainly tell him.

Does your husband know, now? Yes. And that's all I'll say.

Why do you do the NaNoWriMo if it takes away from getting a manuscript out and published? I ask myself this all the time. Usually the time NaNo comes up, I'm already getting frustrated with the current manuscript and look forward to taking the month off to create an entirely different story. But this might change soon. I might participate in NaNoEditMo (February or March, I believe) and forego WriMo. I'm still undecided. February is a very busy month for me, odd as it seems.

Got a question about my participation in NaNoWriMo? Ask away!

Today, Tuesday, November 24, 2009 there is a special 24-hour fundraising event. If you have a buck or ten you can toss into the coffer to help raise money for these wonderful programs, I'd be especially grateful. And if you do it within the 24-hour period via my sponsorship page (https://www.gifttool.com/athon/SponsorAParticipant?ID=1891&AID=777&PID=109076) I'll write you in as a character in my current novel, iRON-ic Suicides, which is a dark comedy (and yes, I'll be nice and not transform you into a writing pin-cushion). To watch my progress and learn more about this year's novel, check out my NaNo page at: http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/21182.

Next up: A site and blog revamp! Look for it soon (but not before the end of NaNoWriMo, foo'!)

Spear on my back, arrow in my right hand, and bow in my left. Lay ahead of me, the buffalo that roamed and feasted on the grassy meadow, the mighty kill. I kneeled down, then fell on my stomach, then went into a full out crawl. I pulled the bow up, aligned the arrow, and pulled back the string until my muscles couldn’t take any more.

The horn blew, the buffalo stepped forward, and then came the noise that echoed through the valley that my people often heard before the buffalo fell. I didn’t think it was possible, or true, until the buffalo fell. What followed was the laughter, heard far away, from the terrible machine that always passed and made weird noises like an extraordinary animal.

The waste of meat, bones, and the hide that was used to make my tepees. My family needed it, needed it all. The tepee needed patching due to the water wear, we needed more eating utensils, and I needed more weapons now that my father had risen up to be one with the bear in the sky.

The gold stake was driven nineteen moons ago. Since then the black smoke maker rumbled in the night. The buffalo had been disappearing since, and if the buffalo were disappearing, my people were to go along with them.

Three weeks before the driving of the golden spike:

I sit down on the log along with Kohla, my sister. The fire burns and rises up to point to the stars above. The sticks crack in a rhythm tonight, and the sparks rise and dance in the cold wind. I grab a rock of obsidian, along with another rock, and start rubbing them and sharpening them for better and newer arrowheads so I can hunt with ones that are sharper than my father’s old, worn arrowheads.

The shouting starts from the tepee behind me, I drop the obsidian and run to the entrance. There, in the middle Koluku, a friend of mine and tribe mate, stands with a wooden club. The light shimmers through the tepee, shining gold on the walls. I follow it to the red hair on the white man’s head.

The man was murmuring to himself with his hands on his shins and blood seeping through his fingers. I grimace. Koluku raises the club, and strikes as hard as possible. The man screams in agony, his hand crunched where the club struck.

I walk forward, raising my hand in front of Koluku’s chest. Crouching I stick my hand out to grasp the white man’s chin. I turn his head so he is staring into my eyes. Fear, hunger, pain, and shock is etched in his eyes, it sunk down into his brain. I let go and shoo Koluku.

I run out of the tepee and to the warm fire, and lean to the buffalo meat in the center. A handful is as much as I can take. I run back and grab the crippled hand of the white man and place the meat in it, then nod. His hand shakes and quivers as he pulls it to his mouth. The meat falls on the red dirt he sits on.

Tears form under his eyes then fall to the meat. He shivers tremendously, and then cries out in agony.

Present

I walk towards the dead buffalo, my hands shaking as I put them on the animal’s back. The tears formed the same way they always do, the Irishman's and yours. The tears fall on the mammal’s fur that shimmers in the sun, and ruffles in the wind. My legs aren’t broken, my hands are not crippled, but the pain is the same as the Irishman’s. The pain of knowing your death.

--------------------------------------------------------------

This was written by my son, Z-dude, for his history class project. When I first read it, I was moved to the point of tears. What an incredible story, don't you agree?

It's out with the old, in with the new. Maybe I'll get lucky enough to have it all ready for release on New Years Day. Wouldn't that be the bomb?

Periodically I might post here. Thoughts get caught up in my brain and need a way to come out. This has always been the perfect medium. It's just of late, well, there's enough going on that those thoughts can't be voiced in this type of forum. Please don't ask. It's personal. Very personal, and not something I'm willing to share, not even via email or any other route. I don't want to seem rude, but even pressed, it's not going to happen.

What will become of the posts up and till then? Probably archived and removed from the site. I haven't decided yet. Of course, if there's something you'd like to see transitioned onto the new site, leave me a comment. Having a link to the particular post or page would be even better. I won't make any promises, this is, after all, my site. But I do try to be accommodating.

The other blogs and pages? Yeah, revisions, remodeling, maybe even removed altogether. It's the website mid-life crisis!

So there you have it.

In case you were wondering.

See you on the flip side!

If you're responsible for hiring at somewhere like Office Depot or Staples, you'd be wise not to process my application, I'd go out of my head being surrounded by all these yummy things day in and day out! 

So when the kids are getting ready to go back to school, as much as I try to get them to give me very specific lists in an earnest attempt to curb my overwhelming need to take all those homeless items back with me, the kids don't quite get the importance of being specific. And whose to blame them? The lists they come home with from their teachers seem to grow to a ridiculous size whenever the budgets go wonky.You can probably imagine just how crazy the lists are now, given how strapped the school's resources are with the massive budget cuts.

This year my husband stepped in to save the day, offering to grab up what they needed provided they came up with a list. Did I happen to mention how they're not very good at that? Yeah, I think a bit of my adoration for the stuff has rubbed off on them, too. You'd have thought they were writing out their wish list for a birthday or Christmas by the time they were done!

I thought it was way too much and began comparing what was on their list to the list their teachers had handed out and what I knew we had on hand. It went something like this:

They came back with notebooks, mechanical pencils complete with extra 'lead' and erasers, and I believe I saw two bright yellow highlighters. It was just the silly string that kept me from permanently assigning the hubby to the task next time.

But I might reconsider. I got these:

from their trip to the store.

Happy back-to-school supply shopping, y'all! 

You might rationalize that the cost of service alone is well worth the policy. You may even look at the reduced coverage on large appliances and other big-money items is worth the annual fees even when the premiums are increased. But if you look closely and carefully, you'll start to notice that the restrictions have doubled, then tripled and even quadrupled. Got a leak on the exterior faucet? Too bad. Not covered. Air conditioning conked out? Tough luck, you didn't perform the recommended prevention maintenance as we recommend. Got a repair service provider out that is a lazy bum and claims the two dollar soldering job done on your thermostat will solve the problem and a week later, your furnace dies? Not their problem, they'll tell you. "We're just going off of what the service repair person reported, who is the authority in this matter."

I really wish I could tell you that I got these examples from places like Consumer Affairs, but no, these are actual examples after talking with family, friends and our own experiences when using their "service" since 1995. In the years, we've even see the contractors that have been sent out, change. Spend any time waiting for an AHS representative to answer your call while listening to their recorded message loop around, and you'll understand they've become, more or less, a monopoly. They use Cleanmasters, Servicemasters, and have an umbrella of other services that include Terminex (and that in and of itself is scary if you spend any time looking into them for pest control services, gives me the eebie jeebies just thinking about it) among others. I don't know about your neck of the woods, but these aren't the people I want anywhere near my home, let alone tromping around to fix and service this or that.

A few years ago, when our policy came up for renewal, we decided to let it expire. Shortly after I received a call from an AHS representative. I explained that the lump sum they required was no longer affordable and we weren't so sure we needed the since watered down services they still offered. He was a damned good salesman. By the end of the call, we renegotiated the terms and he had my credit card information along with an arrangement to bill me monthly for a more affordable amount, no added fees tacked on and, as he explained, able to be terminated any given month.

As you probably know, when things roll over to a credit card, you tend to forget about the charges. Until the card is about to expire, they send you a "friendly email" and then you're back to reconsidering - do we really need this service? When's the last time we even used it? Is this an expense we can cut when things are as tight as they are? Can we make a claim against our homeowners policy if something big happened and exceeded our hefty deductible? That was us and we came to the conclusion, let it ride.

A couple of months passed and -wham- in comes a letter from a collections agency. It says that on behalf of AHS, their client, they're reminding us we still owe AHS several hundred dollars. They were even nice enough to include their client's billing address and phone number. Of course, it wasn't toll free.

As a homeowner, you're probably well aware of the importance of protecting your credit history. It's almost as precious as a baby. I phoned the number provided, waited a painful seventy-seven minutes to their messages that repeated so much I heard them in my sleep for days after, and finally was connected to a representative. I politely explained the situation, got the typical run-around that went along the lines of still owing money up until the policy was set to expire, which according to their records wasn't until November. I knew my rights, I knew their own limitations, and I made it clear that once we rolled over into the monthly billed amount, that these supposed "life of the policy" rules were no longer effective. That's when the representative said I had to call to another department and they would make a final decision. I stood firm. No, I fulfilled my end of the bargain, I chose not to renew my credit card information, they had no legal grounds to come after me, they were to immediately cease and desist with their attempts to collect and that if they continued, if there were any bad reports made against my credit history, I would sue them to the full extent of the law.

The representative said she would share this with the other department and that they'd have to call me to confirm the cancellation, so on and so forth. Good luck, I told her. I won't be around to take the call, I was heading out of town in the morning and could make it just as difficult for them as they'd made it for me. Regardless, the demand still stood, they were, I repeated firmly and made her repeat back to me, to cease and desist. She said she understood and would "relay the information."

Dated a week after my phone call that took an entire ninety-two minutes of my time (billable at $100/hour for a 3-hour minimum), another letter was sent from the same collection agency. I was informed that the clock started ticking when I received the first correspondence and had a mere thirty days to respond to their communication. It seemed vague about anything further than that, but the intent was loud and clear. That's when I began digging into AHS online and found hundreds of complaints filed against the company for a wide variety of things including this type of tactical (or maybe, tactless) maneuver in attempting to collect on debts that they really don't have a right to do.

I followed the advice on many of those complaint boards, went straight to the Better Business Bureau (bbb.org) and filed a complaint according to their form driven website. Earlier today I received an email from the office that handles complaints about AHS and was told I would be hearing back from them soon.

A word to the wise, avoid American Home Shield. I can't suggest another warranty service that might be a better choice because I'm still dealing with this and haven't researched any, but given the headaches and the frustrations of dealing with this particular company, American Home Shield, which I've heard complaints have also come from many of the legitimate service companies AHS used to send out to service the policy, you're better off putting that money in a money market account and using that to make your repairs.

I'm pretty sure they'll report back that, indeed, something was slipped into the water somewhere after eight p.m. and midnight.  A sleep agent of some sort. And then the reports will come back that someone who works for the school district, listed as a bus driver, was the culprit.

That would, after all, explain why I was still dead to the world at 6:15 a.m., didn't budge when a kidlet came in to wake me twenty minutes later (or so he claims, I still think he and the bus driver might have a conspiracy going here), and didn't wake until almost 8:00 a.m., right?

Tomorrow is finally the first day of school. If you're taking pictures, be sure to check out Popular Photography's September 2009 issue, page 48, about how to get that perfect shot. 

In the meantime, it's a complete schedule adjustment for everyone here. The kids are needing to start being more diligent about time management especially since this is their big eighth grade project that takes the entire school year to put together. Hubby is having to map out his own schedule now that the captain's test at the fire department has been announced. And me? I'll be going through the thousands of pictures we've taken over the summer, sorting through them, archiving and deleting several while posting and sending out many more.

And then there's the whole site revamp that will be mapped out. But the priority on my plate is finishing up one of the novels and getting a few short stories cleaned up and sent to press.

Thankfully Mother Nature has been able to stave off the fire season this year with periodic rains. Whether that turns out to be a true blessing or just pushing us back a bit further for a more frantic, furious season has yet to be seen. It has made the wild grasses grow longer which means as the temperature rises such as it has within the last few days, those long grasses dry out and become horrific wicks.  I doubt I'll be able to update my blog with details of any fires my husband is working on or pose a threat to our community, but I abide by the rule of never saying never, so we'll see how that pans out. In the chance I don't, here are some fairly good sources of fire information:

• Cal-Fire Incident Web (formerly California Department of Forestry - Fire) at http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/
• Inci-web: National Fire Incidents at http://inciweb.org/
• Inci-web: California Fire Incidents at http://inciweb.org/state/5/
• and California Fire News blog  at http://calfire.blogspot.com/ (sporadically updated)

You can also subscribe to their feeds. If you're unable to find the feed information, leave me a comment and I'll provide you with the information.

Finally before I go back to transcribing my manuscript (which I spent upwards of an hour this morning at my weekly write-in having to restructure after I found a major flaw in the timeline-- rewarding to get it done, but frustrating to have to endure), a reminder. As you might recall, our friend and a fellow firefighter's young adult son, Sean, was critically injured in an accident at the end of May. He's been getting better and was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital down in the northern San Francisco Bay Area. However this has caused a lot of strain on their small and close family as his dad, Vince, has returned to duty. They're in the process of transferring him back home. I continue to post updates at Terri, Sean's mother, posts them. They can be found at the Angels Near and Far blog which is located at http://www.kathieleung.com/blog/ Please visit often and keep Sean and his family in your thoughts and prayers.

Also, please keep two of my friends, Anne and Julie, in your thoughts and prayers as both of them are enduring many trials and tribulations that have come with news they have cancer - again. It's been amazing watching all three of these situations and the people in the center of them as their strength, their graciousness and their beautiful spirits have shone through so beautifully. It's been humbling as well and has caused me, for one, to learn it's important to balance things out, to appreciate what we have right around us and has served as a thump on my head to remind me the world does not revolved around me alone. And you'd think having teenagers would have done that just fine alone!

I want to let you know just how the Butte County Supervisors' proposed cut in library funding will probably reduce the library's open hours to as few as 12-20 hours a week.

If this happens, the conference room simply will not be available for more than 75 clubs and organizations who use this room each month.

Please ... write, E-mail, or telephone any or all of the County supervisors asking them to reconsider their priorities.  Although they have difficult decisions to make, they seem to forget the great importance of libraries to everyone, especially during difficult economic times.

Enclosed (follows) is a flyer the Friends are giving out which shows each Supervisor's mail and E-Mail address and their telephone number.
It's OUR library, please help keep it open!

Will your library be here after June?

• Butte County Library funding is proposed to be cut in half beginning July 1
  • From $3.1 million in June 2008 to $1.5 million for fiscal year 2009-2010 which starts this July
  • From 39 staff to 13 staff (1 staff member per 17,000 county residents -- the worst ratio in the state!)
• Hours will be reduced 71% - from a total of 219 hours to only 60 hours
  • 12 hours per week each for Chico, Oroville, Paradise and Gridley, 6 hours each for Durham & Biggs 
  • Community meeting room availability will be limited to library hours or eliminated
• Library services will be bare bones
  • Elimination of reference desk, Literacy Coach, Bookmobile, Books by Mail and requests from other branches or library systems
  • Restrictions in children's programs, online databases and computer access
  • No budget for books, magazines or newspapers

KEEP IT OPEN!

• Call or write to your Butte County Supervisor.
  • Ask that library funding not be cut further than the current 23% and to restore funds a.s.a.p.
  • Ask them to support a ballot measure that could provide stable funding for our libraries
• Attend the May 19th, 2009 County Supervisor's Meeting (according to website, the meetings begin at 9:00 a.m. and agendas are posted prior which can be found here: http://www.buttecounty.net/Clerk%20of%20the%20Board/Board%20Meeting%20Information.aspx)  
  • Location: County Government Center, 25 County Center Drive, Oroville
  • Wear red, speak up
  • Bring every library supporter you know with you
• Purchase and install a license plate holder - KEEP IT OPEN!
• Support your local Friends of the Library group
• Your tax deductible donation can purchase books, furniture, equipment and support special programs
• BUTTE CO LIBRARY

Butte County Supervisors:
Dist. 1: Bill Connelly
538-6834
bconnelly@buttecounty.net
5280 Lower Wyandotte Road
Oroville, CA 95966

Dist. 2: Jane Dolan
891-2830
jdolan@buttecounty.net
196 Memorial Way
Chico, CA 95926

Dist. 3: Maureen Kirk
891-2800
mkirk@buttecounty.net
196 Memorial Way
Chico, CA 95926

Dist. 4: Steve Lambert
538-2514
slambert@buttecounty.net
3159 Nelson Road
Oroville, CA 95965

Dist. 5: Kim Yamaguchi
872-6304
kyamaguchi@buttecounty.net
747 Elliot Road
Paradise, CA 95969

It's always helpful to cc those you are supporting.  Also, CFoL is selling the Keep It Open/Butte Co Library license plate holders.  Further information is available at their Web site.

Chico Friends of the Library
PO Box 6952
Chico, CA 95927
www.chicolibrary.org