A-to-Z Blog Challenge: S is for...special mention

And the award goes to Francois! Ha, I thought to make this post a dedication to my husband, Francois.
He is a terrific photographer in several genres. Here is a picture of him holding the award for portrait photographer of the year for 2018. The award was made last week.
Well done!

Francois holding his award and certificate

A-toZ Blog Challenge: R is for... - a guest post by Mari Reiza

Welcome to my guest
 - Mari Reiza

… Reflection - Rejection - Remorse - Revolution. Reiza's Ritual.

It’s upon Reflection that you become a writer. Your life is boring. You yearn for prime shakers replacing the herd around you. Characters who drive, the car, the boat even, a Super Tritone, and know where they're headed in the weekend, Capri. That’s amore! Take stunningest, cleverest Ivanka, in Opera, a no-nonsense prima donna who abhors losers and always gets her way. You love her instantly. You’ll never again wonder aimless, unshaven and unshowered up-and-down the corridors of a second-rated mall in a sorry town on Sunday, as she takes control of your life.

After a bit though there’s Remorse, the realisation you should have dug deeper. Why? You have aimed for paradise, likeable perfection. Guilty as charged. It’s not real. Perhaps men and women with only enough good in them so you can live in their company for the duration of the story are best. When you start observing their evil you like it. Take cute Marie, in the Retreat, with a sexy gap, a secret passage between her upper incisors; like Ivanka she's headed somewhere, hellish, and it's magnetising to watch, an accident you can't look away from. We should embrace flawed humans, especially women. Who on earth wants Barbie! It’s my personal objective to put such ladies forward, not for tête-à-tête martinis but it’s entertaining to see them wreck the world from afar.

Alas. Regardless of your hard work comes Rejection, claims your hero is as boring as chewed cardboard. And your narrator over-judges him/her when inner life should be hush-hush rather than clumsily revealed. Or readers don’t even get who’s the protag, like it’s not clear to them, not out of the gate not mid-novel not ever. ‘Who’s this novel about?’ Take Physical; you think it’s about Kiki, anarchic with curly hair and thick-rimmed glasses, and snap, it's about Fátima, straightforward, rational and practical. Sacré bleu! Readers advise against it but beware most advice is overrated: remain as deaf as to random tips on how to make lust last.

Okay so I'll rewrite my character as per my critics. Nonsense I will not. I resort to Revolution. Let the bloody things do as they please, anything, act upon their world. Soon Ivanka miscalculates. Marie as anticipated goes into butcher frenzy. Fátima who was totally stuck burns her kitchen. Ass kicking moment. You like her now? And Kiki becomes a lesbian after falling on a cow dung as she's being dumped with child; the shit she's landed in changes her fate. Whilst the comatose wife in Room 11 wakes up. I bet you didn’t expect that cause neither did I. But the rule is if the hero does not change the world, the world changes them. See the wife's nurse who lacks courage, she stays poor and alone, doomed for years to foreign cornflakes for breakfast. Good. Prod your hero! Have them crash, cause if you've done it right you’ll finally get to your reader. The fun can start!

R for the ritual. R for Regards to the Reader.

Cheerio. Mari.

Read more about Mari  👈👈👈

A-to-Z Blog Challenge: Q is for...quignogs

Welcome to the first playful post for the month. Q is such a problematic letter sometimes so when I came across this Q-word, I couldn't resist.

😄😄 Quignogs is an old Cornish word for pipedreams, or ridiculous thoughts or ideas.

Do you like searching for or finding words that you didn't know?

  

💁Linzé

Book feature: PEACH COBBLER POISON by Diana DuMont

Today is a book feature in one of my favourite genres 💜

P is for Peach Cobbler Poison Check it out on
Amazon

See you tomorrow for the letter Q!

💜 Linzé

A-to-Z Blog Challenge: O is for...obfuscate

Today's word is well-known to the NaNoWriMo community. When uploading a novel the website to verify the word count, obfuscation of the text may be used to prevent anyone else seeing what you wrote (even though the text is not saved on the website). And if you're not familiar with this technique, I will demonstrate with a simple sentence.

Sample sentence: I love my sketchbook and pencil.

Obfuscated text: o oooo oo oooooooooo ooo oooooo.

The text is then hidden away by replacing every letter with the letter O (or any other letter of the alphabet). The word counting software will then count the words because with NaNoWriMo it is not about the contents, but about the number of words.

  

Keep writing!

😁Linzé