Well, here’s the latest photo from the brat family.

This is the Amazing Brat Boy and his Brat Dog and the new Brat Bike!

He’s growing up too fast, you know…. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 18%

The title of this blog post, I realized the other day, is very true. Actually, I was sitting on the toilet. Plenty of conflict there, no? Anyway, I started thinking about this conflict issue. Every good fiction story has to have a conflict. It’s the conflict and the resolution thereof that is the story.

It’s nice to read someone’s blog when they’re a friend of ours and hear about their day, and something they did to have fun, or that they took their kids to the doctor. Great. Cool. I like hearing how someone I know is doing. But what blogs are going to get the most comments? Those that have conflict. For example, “Jenny jumped off the table at the doctor’s office and ran away, down the hallway, and a team of three nurses and two residents had to chase her. They coaxed her out with a lollipop. We thought we had convinced her to get the shot, but then when we got to the exam room, we had to sit on top of her to get it done.”

That’s a good story. Much better than, “We went to the doctor to get my kids shots.” Read the rest of this entry »

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It would seem that I’m able to sneak in here and there and drop a post and no one notices I’m gone. I haven’t been blogging regularly, and I know that’s not a good thing. I’ve not kept up with the majority of the things going on with the board. I’ve done a bunch of stuff on Mahalo, but that’s mostly been in between napping.

I think I mentioned I went to the doctor on Thursday? Or was it Friday? I don’t remember now.

So sitting in front of me is a little collection of pill bottles. Some big, some fat, some skinny, and a couple of those foil things that the pills are in bubbles and you push them out. Let’s see, I have: Read the rest of this entry »

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Accentuate Services, Accentuate Writers and Twin Trinity Media are proud to announce the winners of the Accentuate Writers Short Story Contest for the ‘Life” theme.

It was one of the more difficult contests to judge, but with 44 entries we received on the “Death” theme, we’re certain it’s not going to have been the hardest one!

I read an agent who posted on Twitter the other day that she hated having to say no to good stories, and that’s something I can now totally relate to. When judging these contests, we use blind judging, so no one knows in advance who wrote what stories. I read the judge’s comments, then I read the stories, and using the scoring system we set up, the judge’s determine the winners–I only break ties or make sure I truly agree with the judges. So far, though it’s been awfully close, I’ve agreed with their decisions on the winners, but I haven’t always agreed what order they were to be put in. I think that’s the subjective part of judging contests. It’s super easy to tell a bad story and not count it, but what do you do when you get fantastic stories that are within fractions of being equally as good?

It’s harder than you think! Read the rest of this entry »

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