Call for Book Reviews

My website, Women Writers is doing a special issue and needs your help. We're short on book reviews.

If anyone out there has read a book (fiction, poetry, nonfiction) that they loved or hated that had some aspect of Voodoo/Hoodoo/Conjure/Rootwork/ in it and would like to publish a short to medium length book review of that text on our special issue of Voodoo & Women of Womenwriters.net, please send it my way within the next week. For samples of previous book reviews, check here: http://www.womenwriters.net/archivesbookreviews.htm

Even if you've never written a book review before, you can do this!

If you know someone who might be interested, tell them to submit something.

Authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Nalo Hopkinson, Emma Bull, Gloria Naylor, Maryse Conde, Maya Deren, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Emma Bull, *etc, etc,* would qualify. Tell us about books we don't know about! Reviews of the New Orleans Voodoo Tarot would be cool, too. Reviews (personal essay style) of your visit to Marie Leveau's house of voodoo in New Orleans would be awesome....

But really, anything goes. As long as the author of the book you're reviewing is a woman, and you keep it under 1000 words, we'll be super happy. :) The review can be previously published if the place it was published in before does not object to dual publication. Even website reviews are open to negotiation.... any website dealing with voodoo & women can possibly be reviewed.

If you want to broaden your definition and review anything with women's MAGIC or witchcraft of any sort, you can, but please ask me for approval first. :)

We're looking for things that can be ready to go NEXT WEEK. (Short notice, I know. That's why I'm posting here... come on, someone has to have something....)

It's gonna be a super cool issue... send your stuff via an email attachment (ms word or word perfect preferably) to me. Ask for my email address via comments if you're interested.

Does anybody know

Where the he77 I put my da#mne% car keys?!!! Seriously. I always, always put them in my purse. But this morning I cannot find them anywhere. Darn twin babies. I'm sure the keys are tucked carefully somewhere that a 3-year old finds amusing.

Succumbing to the Masses

So, today, I popped in to Wally world and came out with the Tinkerbell shoes my daughter has been bugging me to buy her for the last two weeks. She would ask for them with the self-assurance that they were out there (in spite of me not finding them anywhere I had looked) as though she knew I just wasn't APPLYING myself, dammit. :) So ridiculously happy about that purchase, I also fell into a trap zone that I usually do not let myself fall into. What everybody is doing. Yes, here is my guilty lemming following: I bought one of the Stephanie Meyer teen vampire books--Twilight. I've been reading it; it's not too bad. I guess they're doing a movie on this, and I can see why girls (especially) are digging on it. I would have loved it when I was seventeen. A lot.

It's funny, too, (to me) that it takes place in an area that I lived for about four years (the Seattle area).

Anyways. I got stuff to do. But I wanted to blog that I am fine, babies are well again, I am mostly cured (still a little ick but not bad at all). The speech went fine last weekend (I know I haven't really blogged much about it. I don't really have much to say other than it went well.) I'm supposed to be sorting through the dozens of huge containers of baby toys and getting rid of stuff they don't play with. I don't wanna, though. I wish I could afford to pay someone to clean my house for me all the time. Dammit, why am I not a Hilton sister? :)

This book, the teen vamp thing, it qualifies as work. Really. Cause I might have to work it into my dissertation turned into first book. I need a new chapter, and something really current and really really popular would work very well. Anyways.

Maybe a nap. I love summer, but it is going too fast.

Damn Stomach Flu

Please pray for me, or do whatever it is you do to help out charitable cases. I have had sick babies for at least a week now (I think it's actually been longer but who's counting?). I was planning to take them to school this morning, but Maia got sick in the car on the way there. Poor little things. I myself still feel a bit icky, so that makes it twice as hard to deal with the sickies.

Ah well. This is one of those bugs that just holds on and on and on. My only consolation is that the boy (who was the first one to be sick) does seem better today, so perhaps that means we're all about a day away from being better.

2013

Crap. I sometimes HATE computers.

I just wrote a fun post and then the damned thing got eaten. Now I'm very annoyed.

No fun posts today.

perfume

this room
smells like spring
greengold flowers freshly blooming
not yet
the legginess and heat of summer,
heads too heavy
blooms bowed down before the sun's
merciless
face.

promise still
lurks
in the corners
like desire-- dusty and unused.

but it is a promise that
will never go claimed.

B-52 Crash

Before anyone asks, for those of you who might know to ask, No, my husband was not on the airplane that crashed in Guam. But people from our hometown were, and my husband will know them. It's very sad, and I hope they find survivors.

Monday

The speech went fine. I'll post it soonish on my Women Writers website. I got a couple of nibbles on future speeches... so that's really nifty. We'll see if any of them pan out. I like doing that sort of thing, and practice always is good. I met a bunch of nice authors, and after lunch, when everyone loosened up a bit, it was kind of fun. The kiddos met Curious George, with Sean "stalking" him around the place for a good ten minutes before working up the courage to give him a hug around the knees. I have some cute pictures; I'll post them soon, too.

But today, it's back to the old grind. AND you know what they never tell you about parenting? How many bugs you catch from your little darlings. I have some kind of tummy bug right now that is really kicking me down. The babies are just fine; either they passed it through with no impact or it hit them more lightly or they were pretty sick last week and didn't appear to be. You never know with kids. But all I want to do is lie on the couch and complain. It reminds me of a quote from the Devil Wears Prada, though. The skinny assistant says "I'm just one stomach flu away from my ideal weight".... I'm not close to an ideal, but it has squeezed a few pinches off of my mom-inspired belly. So that's a silver lining, if I wouldn't gain it all back as soon as I feel like eating again.

Now to go moan on the couch about the injustice of it all. :)

Keynote, Shmeenote.

So I volunteered, in my usual overly pushy way, to fill in any gaps that happened at the Author Author festival.

Well, as I may have mentioned, Jennifer Baumgardner & Amy Richards, who were basically headliners, had to cancel their trip to greater LA. So the organizers said "Um, since you kind of do some of the same sorts of things (at least theory-wise) maybe you could fill in for them?"

So tomorrow, at 11, I'll be giving a speech on Women, Third Wave Feminism, and the Internet. The speech ranges from discussing Larry Flynt to Virginia Woolf. So. I'll put up a link after it's posted to Women Writers in a week or so. This is my second invited speech, you know. Next thing you know, I'll be a regular speechi-fyer.

I kind of rock, you know. :)

Another Cute Picture

I've been working really hard to try to get caught up to the present on my pictures for scrapbooking. I'm up to mid summer last year, actually, which isn't bad. This one below is one I did yesterday which features Sean. Most of the cute spreads I have thus far have been Maia and I didn't want you all to think I've been favoring her. :)

As you can see, he's going to be a nail biter, like hsi mommy. But this is from last summer when we were staying at the family's lake house. Isn't he adorable? He had gone for a long time with dad on the kayak, and finally made it back, he escaped as fast as he could and would not be talked into getting back into the kayak.

Independent Lil Old Me

This weekend, I'll be attending the first annual Shreveport Author Author book festival. They were excited to get someone who does web publishing-- most of what they have are the "old fashioned" sort of bookish type. :) I'll be on the main floor, though, with a killer slide presentation of my Women Writers website (since they don't have Internet access, this is the best way to show it off). My URL will also be on the little book bags they hand out to people, which is cool. I'm also planning to print up a small, bound version of a selection of poetry, fiction, and scholarship the website has had over the years.

Why, you ask, is this cool? Well, Jewell Parker Rhodes, who wrote the bestseller Voodoo Dreams will be there. Also, some third wave feminist authors are supposed to be there, and we're supposed to meet for coffee beforehand, but I just heard that they are cancelling. (Which is a bummer, but not the end of the world).

And the whole point of this is twofold. To get to know people who are into literary stuff here in Shreveport, and to possibly get myself and my work noticed by people who can help me with my goal of trying to get Women Writers published as an anthology/collection of works in a real, bound book. I know the web is cool and all, but it would be neat. A lot of the academic types would find that more impressive, and it could be good for my career. (I'm not saying WILL be good because it's weird the way these things work.)

So anyway. I don't think there are any readers of my blog in the area, but if you are coming to town this weekend, come see me! I'm trying to get a babysitter so we can attend the ball on Saturday, but my fairy godmother babysitters are all busy so far.

Short & Sweet

Some days, you can be genuinely happy. So far, this is one of them. :)

How Cute Is This?

Okay. So one of the pages I've done. Maia, about a year ago, helping dad make pizza. Please to enjoy.

Have You Seen Junior's Grades?

In which your plucky heroine turns 13 and a grandmother....

Yesterday at the Doctor's office for Sean's ear checkup, an old guy asked me if my babies were my grandkids. Wow. I'm 39, so it is POSSible that I could have grandkids. If I started young and my kids therefore started young too. But it's a stretch. And that's one of those questions that you JUST DON'T ASK A WOMAN ever. Like how much she weighs and also if she's pregnant when it's not obvious. I don't look THAT old, people. But it was a moment of ick.

And then, during the visit, I also turned 13, figuratively speaking. I got the urge to Text Message a friend of mine. And we've been sending silly juvenile Texts back and forth all day since then. Silly, but hey. I gotta join the younger generation, don't I?

Anyway. I've been avoiding the computer cause on Monday I pulled my neck muscle again and it just hurt to sit here. So that's why no real comments here. I mostly just lay on the couch and read. Which was, in itself, kind of awesome.

13 and a grandmother. You know, it happens.

Digital Scrapbooking

For my mom's birthday, I printed up pages from the digital scrapbook I made of the babies' first year. During that crazy, crazy 12 months, I managed to create a 150ish page book of images of the babies on a program from Hallmark. It was both hard & easy. I printed it up, and then sort of left it. Babies got into it when we moved here to Shreveport and got the pictures all out of order but I just stuck it in a box and then didn't mess with it. I've been taking lots of pictures, but I haven't been scrapbooking.

When I printed out the images for my mom, I looked at them and thought of how precious this time was, this book that I made which highlights special moments of that first year. How things can be forgotten and the details fade over time. Yes I have multiple versions of the photos on various places, but you distill an image in a scrapbook page. You type out dates, special details that could be forgotten over time.


So. What you're probably guessing is true-- I've decided to get back to doing the scrapbooking thing. I bought a new program which is specifically designed for digital scrapbooks, and you would be amazed at the amount of websites out there with special graphics and designers for this kind of thing. They are gorgeous, and could run into lots of cash if one were so inclined. Luckily, a lot of them also give out freebies, often as much as once a week. So I spent a bit of time this weekend downloading some of those things, and gathering up the stuff I had from last time I did this.


Last night I made a couple of new pages. The next book is going to be something like "Toddler Years" since I will need to cover everything since the last one. So it'll be images from years after the 1st birthday to 3ish. I am both excited and apprehensive because I know how much time these kinds of things can eat up. But if I'm just working on them while I sit and watch TV, it's not like I'm taking time away from other, more important activities. Maybe do a page or so a day. But it is fun to go back through those pictures that I hadn't seen in a while.


This is a screenshot of one page I did yesterday. Cool, huh? :) I swear the pictures were not posed-- she was really being that adorable. All the graphics, the "paper" in the background, etc, are freebies I got from an awesome digital scrapbook site. It's made with the new program, and I think it's pretty spiffy.

Anyway, this page is just a beginning. When I was taking those pictures of the girl, I could just "feel" the page that they would make. And Maia loved it. It's a start.

Vacay Over Sort Of

Well, this morning I was able to sleep in with the girl baby. Maia is a hard sleeper; Sean was up at 7 ish and dragged Daddy out with him. Then we all got in the pool for a while. In fact, Sean is still there now. So in a way, our vacation is still on for today. This is why, in spite of having been home since Thursday, I haven't blogged. I just don't feel like I'm really "home" at this point. I do have lots of lovely pictures, though. I'll load them to that feed thingy in a sec. But two for feature, one of Maia & one of Sean on the beach. They LOVED the beach, as I knew they would.

We didn't get to see as much of friends and family as we would have liked. Things are always harder once you're there-- Sean would not have ANY of staying at my mom's house and he was less than agreeable about a few of the other places we went, too. He is such a quiet boy that when he does choose to yelp, it's all the more unsettling and difficult to deal with. But we did have a wonderful time, for the most part. I'll try to provide a specific narrative later. But now, for some cute pictures.

I just love the moment of stillness on Maia's face in the first one. That little scar above her eye just adds character, I think. (It was a bathtub injury and is taking forever to disappear.... I hope it does).

And then there's Sean in action. You can see on his face that he is simply In Love. I myself love the beach in Florida. It's warm water, and green blue color, and the sand so white.... it's not as pretty in the same way as it was before the last few rough hurricanes, but it will be again one day after some time. For example-- I don't remember there ever being vines of morning glories all over the dunes back in the day but there were. Pretty white morning glories til about 1. Then they drooped in the heat. I meant to get a picture but we were always in transit when I saw them.

But now, the family calls again. More to come.....