I Want My Hour Back

I hate the first day of Daylight Savings.  I'm never quite sure what time it is.  Let's see, I woke up at 8, but it was really 9.  Or the clock says it's 6 and it's time for supper, but my body thinks it's 5 and isn't hungry.  I seem to be playing catch-up all day.  Thank God it's always a Sunday, at 2 AM, or I don't know what I'd do.

That 2 AM thing has always bothered me.  Last fall, when we switched back to Standard Time, I was awake, looking at my iPhone to see what happened at 2.  What happened was, there was no 2.  As the seconds counted down at 1:59 AM, the hour changed to 1 AM.  This is the only time when 1 comes before 1.  2 AM came an hour later, which by the previous way of telling time should have been 3, but wasn't.  Confused?  The iPhone was; this time, it didn't know whether to spring ahead or fall back, and it made the wrong choice.  At 2 AM, when it should have been 3 AM, it said it was 1 AM.  So, here's my question.  How can you change your clocks at 2 AM, when there is no 2 AM?  And who picked that particular hour for the change?  It's all very perplexing.

Telling time is weird, anyway.  Without researching it, I'm pretty sure that the Romans invented the 24 hour clock.  Why 24 hours?  Why not?  I can live with that, as well as with 60 minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute (and even with the hundredth of a second, which is apparently a long time in Olympic sports).  What bugs me, and always has, is that the day begins at 12 AM.  Midnight, as in the middle of the night.  By definition night is not day, so how can that be the start of the day?  I can see why that particular hour might hold some importance.  The numbering of hours probably started with noon, which is when the sun reaches its apex.  Fine.  That's an actual, measurable cosmic event.  So, 12 hours after that is midnight.  But why call noon12 PM?  Why not call it 6, if you're going to stick with the 24 hour day?  After all, it's midday, though with the clocks being changed, the astronomical noon probably doesn't happen at 12.  (and the true equinox doesn't happen on the day of the equinox - but that's another story).  If noon is considered to be six, it follows that what we now call 6 AM should be 12 AM.  That way, the day begins when it really should:  around daybreak.  Sunrise to sunrise makes a day.  Right?  I'm just saying.

So, fine.  Because of the Romans we're stuck with a weird start to the day, and because of Ben Franklin we have to adjust our clocks twice a year.  Yes, good old Ben came up with the idea of Daylight Savings, and it was enacted during World War II.  In recent years, it starts earlier than it used to, and ends later.  It has to do with conserving energy usage.  But did you know that not all states in the country follow it?  Hawaii doesn't have Daylight Savings.  Neither does one county in one of the midwest states.  Can you imagine that?  Every county in that state is at one time, except for this one.  So if you live in County A, but you work in County B, you'd better keep an eye on the clock and make sure you're where you're supposed to be at the right time, or it might be 2 when it's supposed to be 3. 

So here I am at 10 PM, reluctantly deciding that I should probably start getting things ready for tomorrow, and another week of work.  But it's really 9!  Last night at this time it wasn't last night at this time.  I had another hour to go.  Today I don't.

I miss that hour.  Think of what I could have done with it.  I could have slept later, written more, done a craft, even cleaned (well, no).  It doesn't matter, really.  That's my time that got stolen, and I feel cheated.  I want my hour back!

The 150 Book Challenge

Several years ago, someone in an Internet group challenged herself to read 50 books.  That idea caught on with other people in her group.  Soon, the 50 Book Challenge became known far beyond this little Internet community, into the wider world of ordinary readers, including me.

I read a lot, and I read fast.  50 books in a year is nothing for me.  For the last 3 years I've challenged myself to read 150, which I have yet to do.  Still, I keep going.  This year I'll make it.

In addition to my own challenge, I'm also taking part in the New Bedford library's 50 Book Challenge, which was my idea.  It got amazing publicity, showing up in newspapers and TV stations all across the country, and on websites from as far away as China.  Well over 300 people have signed up for it.  In spite of TV and DVD's, in spite of computers, reading is holding its own.

So where am I today, Feb. 21?  I'm at 28 for the 50 Book Challenge, which started in December, and 25 in my own challenge.  I've had a few books I didn't finish, but there have also been a lot I really liked.  I'll probably have the 50 read during April, and I'm well on track to meet the 150 total.  Did I mention that I'm having fun?

It's not too late for people to read 50 books this year.  I'll bet a lot of you read more than that, anyway.  If you want to do it in an organized manner, and you live in SouthCoast Massachusetts, why not join the New Bedford library's challenge?  Check it out at the library's website, at http://www.newbedford-ma.gov/Library/   Once you read 50 books you get a prize, and we're planning various get-togethers and author appearances.

So, what are you doing reading this blog?  Go pick up a book!  I'm going to.

The Bad Old Days

I liked my old computer.  I really did.  I liked Windows XP, the full-sized keyboard, and floppy disks.  I didn't like it when it got that virus that almost crashed the hard drive.  Fortunately my computer repairman managed to fix it, and even find some extra space on the drive.  By then I'd decided, though, to buy a new machine, a cute little laptop.  The desktop was almost 4 years old, ancient in computer years, and the drive was almost full.  It was time.

I didn't really like the laptop at first.  I didn't like Windows 7.  It's vastly different from the various Windows systems I've used in the past.  I've been computer literate for 30 years.  I've worked on IBM and Univac mainframes, and my first PC had to be booted up every day with a 5 1/4 inch floppy.  I'm used to change in the computer world.  But I was also used to things being done a certain way, and working with files in a certain way.  The keyboard feels different.  The screen looks different.  And I sure as hell don't like the touch pad.  Frankly, I missed my old machine.  Only the facts that my office is in a renovated front porch, which isn't too well insulated, and that it's been freaking cold, kept me from using it much.  About all I did was get my data out to switch to the laptop.

A little over a month has passed, and I love the laptop.  It's the best purchase I've made lately, even better than the iPhone.  I've gotten used to Windows 7, and the purchase of a mouse makes life infinitely easier.  Plus it's portable.  I can sit in my room, nice and warm, and do my work.  I've converted my files from Wordstar, a word processing program that was cutting edge in the 80's, and I've been having fun getting them ready for epublication.  The only problem is that it's not hooked up to a printer yet, and I need hard copies of my manuscripts.  That meant returning to the old machine.

It took forever to boot up.  The monitor screen is gorgeous, but it was cluttered with all these icons.  Copying files from old floppies to the machine meant opening screens and minimizing them, again and again.  So did copying from the machine to the thumb drive.  Plus, it was just so cold in the office.  OK, I told myself.  This is a lot better than typing a manuscript on an electric typewriter and then bringing the pages to a copy shop, as I once did. A click here, a click there, and the files were copied in no time.  Still, compared to the file handling in Windows 7, it was clunky.

Then there was the printing.  I remember now why I always allowed a full day for printing a manuscript for submission.  It takes time to print a 300 plus page book.  Plus something was always going wrong.  The paper would get jammed, or, more than once, I'd run out of ink.  Today I shut the printer off for a moment, and now it won't turn back on.  Aargh!  What a pain.  It was wonderful when I was able to send the books in by email.

Last week I sent a manuscript electronically to an electronic publisher, and voila!  Instant book.  I searched for images on stock photo sites, and, what do you know?  I had a book cover.  I'm playing with 3D software to create "people" for future book covers.  OK, I could probably have done this with the old machine, but somehow this new little computer, with its amazing capabilites, has me trying new things, and loving it.  I've come a long way, baby.

30 years ago I learned computer processing on a "mini computer", mini in the sense that it filled a small classroom, not a huge computer room.  I don't know what it had for memory, or how large its disk drive was.  I do know that it used a text editor, not word processing, and that it had no graphics.  The screen was green, with white printing.  Today I have a machine that's not even 2 inches thick, and is many times more powerful.  Someday I'll probably be enthusing over a different computer, and wondering how I ever survived with my old one.  Not yet, though.  These are the good old days, folks, and I'm enjoying every minute.

Synchronicity

Sometimes seemingly unrelated events come together in surprising ways, so that what happens next almost seems inevitable.  It's called synchronicity.  The first time I heard the word, I had just gotten the contract for my knitting mysteries.  A friend of a friend was going to go to a wool festival in Connecticut, where her friend was having a booth.  I'd never heard of such a thing, but a few weeks later I found myself in a damp, drafty barn somewhere in the country, in a heavy downpour.  From that experience came the setting for the second knitting book, Knit Fast, Die Young, as well as an idea for what would have been the third book.  Had I not met this friend of a friend at just the right time, none of those things would have happened.  Synchronicity, indeed.

When I stopped writing 3 years ago, I never intended to stay away from it forever.  I did, and still do, intend to stay away from traditional publishing.  I planned to publish ebooks someday.  Well, someday unexpectedly came last week.  A patron at the library showed me an article about people self-publishing their books.  That got me thinking.  Then a co-worker, who owns a Nook, told me a little bit more about ebooks, and, before you know it, I was researching the topic myself.  The upshot is that this past weekend I published an ebook.  It's a reissue of one of my old Regency short stories, "Gifts of the Heart."  I'm still surprised at how events came together, and how quickly they affected my life.  I'm publishing again.  Yay!

This is an interesting time in the publishing industry.  Ebooks have been around awhile.  In fact, one of my mysteries, Death on the Cliff Walk, has been available for quite a few years.  It took the development of such devices as the Kindle and the iPad to make them really popular, though.  At Amazon ebooks are outselling print books, and that trend is going to continue.  Someone's got to supply those books.  That's where the self-publishing revolution comes in.  While books by established authors are going for $12.00, self-published authors have the luxury of setting their own prices, often at $2.99 or less.  Those prices haven't been seen in the book world for many, many years.

At those prices, it wouldn't seem that authors could make much money, but a few have. due to high royalty rates - as high as 70% in some cases.  One young woman made over half a million last year with her books; another author, whose books are also in print, made about $50K in January alone.  I don't know if I'll ever hit those lofty heights, but if I sell enough books at .99, with a 30% royalty rate, I should do OK.  We'll see.  What do I have to lose?  "Gifts of the Heart" was published in an anthology almost 20 years ago.  I love having it in print again.  Best of all, I've already been paid for writing it.  Anything else is just icing on the cake.

Synchronicity.  It's led to a new adventure for me.  In the future I'm going to be reissuing the works over which I have control.  1 down, 20 to go!

Buy my book, please?  Gifts of the Heart is available for the Kindle at Amazon, under my penname of Mary Kingsley; at Smashwords.com, in all other formats, under Mary Kruger; and soon for other ereaders such as Apple's ibookshelf and Barnes and Noble's Nook.  It's only .99.  I guarantee you, it'll be the best .99 you've ever spent.

I Guess I'm a Writer, After All

3 years ago this past Thursday (Jan. 27), I was sitting in front of my computer, trying to write and failing miserably.  I had a deadline coming up in less than a week for 6 chapters, and I'd barely written 2.  I could not, for the life of me, write a coherent sentence.  Writing, the thing I'd once loved to do, the thing that had once defined me, had deserted me.

It was a miserable Sunday.  I'd planned to write all weekend, but you know what happens when you have a lot of time to do something.  You keep telling yourself you have time, you have time.  Now I didn't.  I'd gone to the mall with my daughter, and I kept thinking, "I should be writing."  And then I thought, here I am with my daughter, who won't want to be with me in a few years.  I wanted to be enjoying it.  Instead, the "should" of writing had taken over my life.

It wasn't always like that.  I used to live for writing.  But times change.  Instead of being young and free, and writing as my sole career, I was a single mother, working full-time.  Writing was no longer supreme.  I'd plotted my current book in the summer, and I'd liked the story a lot.  Somehow, though, I coulldn't write it.  Throughout the fall I'd think, "I wish I didn't have to do this."  The voice of reason always came back:  You have a contract.  Just write it.  It's going to be your last book.  You'll be going out with 20 books under your belt, and that's a nice round number.  Just do it.

And so I came to this day, this miserable Sunday which couldn't decide if it should rain or snow, staring at the computer and literally unable to write.  I wish I didn't have to do this, I thought, and this time a different voice came back, the voice of a different reason:  You don't.  Buy yourself out of the contract.  You don't have to do this.

It was as if a weight physically lifted itself off my chest.  Instantly I was filled with elation and relief.  I didn't have to write this book.  I didn't have to write at all.  I was free.

I waited until Tuesday to call my agent.  I wanted to make sure that I was making the right choice.  I knew I was letting a lot of people down.  I knew I was throwing away what was beginning to look like a financially promising career, and possibly the chance of ever publishing again.  But every time I thought of my decision, my spirit soared.  When I talked to Meredith there was deadly silence for a moment.  Then she told me what I already knew, about buying myself out of the contract.  I said that I knew, hung up, and started crying.  At the same time, I flung my arms out in joy.  The publishing career that had started 20 years earlier with a panic attack ended with the Snoopy dance.

I never regretted that decision.  Never.  Sometimes I looked at books and wondered how authors wrote them, how I once had known that secret, and felt wistful.  But the pressure was gone.  Writing the very large check that got me out from under legally, hurt.  But what price peace of mind?  Now I could think of the date that was supposed to be a deadline and not flinch.  The "should" was gone.

Just before Christmas of this past year, 2010, my computer died.  While my genius of a repairman was able to resucitate it, I knew it was only a matter of time before it went for good.  I bought myself a cute little laptop, and decided to put my old book files on it, before they were lost forever.  Of course they were stored on floppies, and my laptop does not have a floppy drive.  Of course the early books were written on a word processor from the 80's, so old it ran under DOS instead of Windows.  Of course, MS Word couldn't read these files.  Even Notepad couldn't read these files.  I was stymied, until I found a small, free program (note the word "free") to convert the files.  Voila!  Suddenly they were readable again.  I could get them produced as ebooks, and in large print.  I had a chance to make more money from writing, without actually having to write.

Something funny happened as I reformatted the files into Word, though.  I started liking what I was doing.  Yes, I liked the stories, but I liked the process just as much.  One manuscript was converted, and then another, and before I knew it I'd done a third and started reading others.  I was staying up until as late as 3 AM, and loving it.

I discovered a few things.  I realized that Matt, the hero in my Gilded Age mysteries, really needs to lighten up, and Brooke, the heroine, needs to grow up.  (just after I thought this, a character in the book told her the same thing.  My writing instincts always were sound).  I learned that I can bring a fictional scene to life, and though I don't remember the research I did, the results were there, and done well.  And I learned that, man!  can I create a romantic hero!  I fell in love with Nat Howland of Beyond the Sea, and in severe lust with Brendan Fitzpatrick, the pirate of In a Pirate's Arms.  What I realized finally is that Mary Kingsley, romance novelist, is a far better writer than Mary Kruger, mystery novelist.  There's a reason for that.  Mary Kruger never liked her books as much as Mary Kingsley did.

Have I come full circle?  No.  I don't have a book needing to be written, or a character begging me to tell his story.  While the process of producing a book is beginning to look attractive again, I need the passion to tell a story to keep me going, for all the time and effort and emotion it takes.  That's not back yet.  Three years ago, though, I didn't know I'd feel as much as I do now.  I thought writing was gone for good.  It turns out I needed only a rest, and freedom to make my own decisions.  I'm not letting that freedom be taken away from me again.

Nearly 30 years ago I was walking along Cambridge Street in Boston, on my way back to work at lunchtime, and thinking about the book I was writing.  I had a revelation then.  It clarified something that I'd known all my life, and defined me in a way that few other things have done.  I've had that revelation again, and it's just as important and momentous now as it was then.  I know again something vital and crucial and yet, very simple.

I'm a writer.

Women in Red Hats

You may have heard of the Red Hat Society.  It's a nationwide organization of women of a certain age, who get together occasionally for fun events, wearing purple dresses and red hats.  The inspiration for the group comes from a poem called "Warning," the first lines of which are:

"When I am an old woman I shall wear purple,
"With a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me."

The poem goes on to detail other outrageous things the speaker will do when she gets old, though she now has to stay sane, raise the kids and pay the bills.  Someday, though, she will wear purple.

There are a few older women who come into the library who continually amaze and amuse me.  All are active, vibrant people who don't let much stop them.  There's Jo, who's always meticulously groomed, in casual but attractive, well-fitting clothes.  Her hair is always perfect, as is her makeup.  Jo does not suffer fools gladly.  She keeps fit by walking and by gardening, which seems to be her passion.  I want to be like Jo when I grow up, except that I don't garden.

And then there's Clara, who delights in telling me that she rose at 5 AM, got her house cleaned, and then prepared an enormous meal for two friends.  She details exactly what's in the meal, knowing full well that she's torturing me, since everything sounds so good.  Then, with the table set and ready at home, Clara will sit down to read the newspaper, and to make friends with whoever sits next to her.  I want to be like Clara when I grow up, except that I don't do housework.

Finally, there's Emily.  Emily likes watching complete seasons of TV shows on DVD's, the racier, the better.  She loves The Tudors, for example, and she considers the doctors in Nip/Tuck "yummy."  Once she was talking to another librarian about the movie The Reader, and about Kate Winslet.  Into a momentary hush in a busy afternoon, everyone heard her say, "But she [Winslet] always looks good without her clothes."  The woman I was waiting on, a young mother, looked at me, startled, while I burst out laughing.  I want to be like Emily when I grow up.  I already like yummy men.

All of these women are in their 80's.  They live independently, take care of themselves, keep up with their families and the world around them.   Of course they've had their share of troubles, but they don't seem to let much bring them down.  Instead they go on, cheerful, and maybe just a little outrageous.  They are living their lives as they see fit.

And they don't have to wear silly red hats, either.

Make-up Your Mind

Last spring I was perfectly content with my make-up routine. I didn't have one. When I did gussy up, I was happy with my Mary Kay and my Cover Girl and my no-name products. Then I looked at the MK foundation and decided the color wasn't right. Hmm. A few years ago I went to the Clinique counter, I thought. Maybe I should do that again. Well. You can guess what happened. Turns out I also needed this, that, and that. But what the heck. I'm worth it.

Then my daughter introduced me to Sephora. For those not in the know, Sephora is a veritable candy store of cosmetics, with everything you could want and a lot you don't really need. What makes it dangerous is that you can sample everything. I've walked out of there with rainbow eye shadows and ten fingernails in ten different colors. (Sephora by O.P.I. nail lacquer, but that‘s a post in itself). Of course I had to get makeup brushes, since I had only cheap ones. And the sample set of mascara, with ten different small tubes inside. And, oh, why not, the palette of 60 eyeshadows. I will not say how much I spent, but let's just say that they consider me a Very Important Beauty Insider.

So now my routine has changed drastically, when I have time to primp and preen. Currently I:

Put on foundation primer, to prepare it for the foundation and perfect the skin (isn’t that what foundation is
     supposed to do?)
Apply foundation with a brush
Pat on concealer on those dark undereye circles
Dust on loose powder, to set the foundation in place. (isn’t primer supposed to help with this?)
Check watch. Yikes! All this, and I still have to get dressed and curl my hair

Put on eyeshadow primer
Apply eyeshadow - three complementary shades, with a brush
Apply eyeliner, in a neutral shade, or, for fun, a bright color
Brush on blush
Mascara: one coat of volumizing, one coat of lenghthening. (did you know you’re supposed to use 2 types of
      mascara? Until recently, neither did I).
Pencil in the eyebrows
Check watch again. Run around the house getting everything else ready for the day.

Finally, apply lipstick. And don't forget to clean the makeup brushes

Is it worth it? Damn right it is. It makes me feel good. I smile at myself in the mirror, instead of making faces. And I’ve gotten compliments. Bless you, those who have said I look younger, or that I've lost weight.. I should make time for it every day, instead of sleeping until the last possible moment. After all, as Laura Bennett, former Project Runway contestant, advises, "Never go out looking less than fabulous. You never know when you'll meet your next husband."