Archive | March 2014

Mission: Fog

Mar2

That was my mission. Take pictures of the fog. I love fog. It reminds me of vampires. And ghosts. And the mystery beyond.

So when I see a fun, foggy day, I take pictures. Only this time I thought I’d try to capture the fog and then do a black and white version of it. Some of the photographers’ sites I visit have the most gorgeous black and white photos. Total novice here, but I thought it was interesting, nonetheless.

fog orchard bw crisp 400

It’s a bit cluttered with telephone pole, wires, a fence post, hose roped around it, a picture of the bare field in between my property framed by trimmed hedges and then my neighbors of his trimmed peach orchard, and beyond, trees in the distance. It’s also interesting to see the fog layers and how deep it is the further out you get. It shows a country life where wildflowers can grow with abandon.

And this was taken on my other neighbor’s side where the fog was even more pronounced. Actually, it was getting thicker by the time I moved to the backyard.

fog other neighbors yard 400

But I was thwarted on my mission to take pictures of the fog.

Because of him.

Here I was happily looking for fun fog shots and he was in the backyard, looking at me when I must have taken the 2nd fog picture. I turned to take one of my back acreage, and there he was. The farmer was actually getting ready to sow his crops so was making a racket right next to my yard, yet Wiley, the Road Runner, just watched me and let me take several pictures of him surrounded by henbit, the wild purple flowers around him.

And then I worked on bears for one bear order, 3 Matheson Clan bears. They have their tams/bonnets on, but are bear chested, needing their sashes still, and waiting on the fabric to come from Scotland.
And then I have to finish up the Campbell and MacPherson Clan bears for another order.
So that’s my mission today.
And our nice warm weather dropped in temperature, because it’s March! Prediction of ice on Tuesday.
Do your plans ever go asunder?
Terry
“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male!”
www.terryspear.com

Cougar’s Mate and the Near Catastrophe

Mar1

1840f-cougarsmate3d11292013copy

Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Kobo
Google Play
ARe Books
Smashwords

Doesn’t that sound like the title of a book?

If I just told you that I wrote the story and then it was ready to go and then it was ready to read, that wouldn’t be any fun at all, would it? Stories need conflict.

So I put ten hours into proofing it one more time, and then… get an error message when I saved it. Now, I’ve gotten them before, no problem. Not this time. I saved it under a couple of different files I would need and then went to send a copy to myself, just as a precaution, and guess what? Instead of 526K of story, I had 0K. Nothing. Zero. Nada.

I don’t have panic attacks except over losing a book I just wrote!!! I can lose half a page I’ve written and be upset. Fire in the kitchen? I can deal with it. First snake in the house, no problem. Second snake in the house…it was biting at me, so, okay, that was giving me a slight amount of angst.

But lose a book I’ve just written? That’s the reason to have a panic attack. And I had lost an entire book, years ago when I had nothing else to save on but a CD disk, and I still wish I had a way to get it back!

After a couple of hours of searching on the internet for a solution, not wanting to shut down Word or the computer,  I had planned on uploading the finished manuscript to bookselling sites right after saving it, I hadn’t figured out the problem.

I called my daughter, but I’d already tried everything she suggested. And my mss was sitting there, right before my eyes. And yet? I couldn’t save it. I have to say that I did have earlier copies of it, but not the one I just spent 10 hours working on.

Well, she suggested I save the mss on a thumb drive and then try it on my laptop. I did. And it opened fine. Then I emailed myself a copy.

And then with a whole lot of trepidation, I was going to turn off my computer and restart it. So I began shutting everything down, including Word and it said there was some kind of glitch. Did I want to restart it?

So I was like, yes!!!

And once Word restarted, all my work was there. Plus, like 10 copies of the mss in various forms of distress. I had copy and pasted some into notepad which makes them lose all their formatting.

The happily ever after is that, the mss was fine, uploaded to the sites last night, and I have it saved everywhere! If you ever have trouble with something you’ve written and you save it and it shows you have 0K, maybe you can do what I did to recover it. At least for me and for this time, it worked.

But I just thought you should know that sometimes what seems like a smooth process can be anything but, and that’s perfect for a story, don’t you think?

daffodil fun 500

I had to take another picture of the daffodils as they’re doing a beautiful job of blooming, and though I didn’t think it would ever happen here, they are multiplying! So I’m excited about that!

I’m taking the weekend off from writing to catch up on working on bear orders and such. 3 Matheson Clan bears, 1 Campbell Clan bear, and 1 MacPherson Clan bear. See? Even Highland bears are hot! 🙂

Are you having a fun weekend?

Terry
“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male!”
www.terryspear.com