Musical Cherry

This week I experienced an important rite of passage. My first concert. You’ve never been to a concert? I hear you say. Yes, it’s true...well sort of. I have worked at one before but it’s not quite the same. There are various reasons for this, no time, no money but mostly just friends with different tastes in music. Last year I swore I would do it, but who would be my first? It was an important decision, one not to be taken lightly. So I watched the newsletters from event holders and ticket sales websites and in October, there it was.

Bon Jovi.

Now I don’t really care if it makes me uncool but I have loved that group for years. Catchy rock music for blasting out loud and singing along to and a charismatic lead singer – who I swear has a deal with the devil to still look so good. It’s also one of the things my mum and I share so of course she would have to go with me. Whenever we would go on road trips out would come the Bon Jovi cd and we would sing along together. They are part of some really good memories. So I woke up early on the morning they went on sale and I bought the best tickets I could get my hands on without going bankrupt. Back then, June seemed a very long way away.

The nearer the date got the more excited I got. I kept expecting something to go wrong, the concert to be cancelled but the 22^nd arrived and off we went. The one and only concert I’ve experienced I was working with the Red Cross and was actually next to the stage and feet away from Billy Joel and Elton John. You wouldn’t think anything would beat that but not so. That day I was working and wasn’t concentrating on the experience. Being behind the barriers means that you are very separate from the crowd, the atmosphere isn’t the same.

The rain poured down but even that didn’t spoil our anticipation. Our seats were amazing. I chose to be in the seated section which did put us about a hundred yards from the stage but we are both short and if we had stood we wouldn’t have been able to see past the crowd. Slowly the stadium began to fill up until 60,000 people joined us. The atmosphere was electric. I have never been in such a large crowd before and it was amazing to look around and see a sea of faces and the strobe of thousands of camera flashes. Suffice to say that Bon Jovi exceeded all of my expectations. They played for two and a half hours without a break and it was one of the best experiences of my life. There is nothing like being one of thousands of voices singing out anthems that clearly mean as much to them as they do to you. I am proud to say that Bon Jovi took my concert virginity; there will never be another first.

I can now say I am hooked and even if I have to go alone, there will be more concerts in my future. The question now is who will I see next?

Question for our readers

As you undoubtedly know, several of the Scribes have made recent forays into the blossoming self-publishing market. Tara Nina's Playing Cowboy (a wonderfully HOT read!), Tielle St. Clare's A Change of Pace (M/M erotica like you've never read before!) and Diana Hunter's Tales from the Ramayana (romantic short stories) are currently available. But like so many others, we're having an internal debate about pricing. Right now we're just shooting in the dark.

And so we turn to our faithful readers for help. Please take the survey below (it's through Survey Monkey and will not download any unwanted material to your machines!). We made it nice and simple with only 4 questions. Help us price the books you want to buy!

Click here for survey

This will be open until noon on Sunday, June 26th. One of us will post the results later that night.

- the Sizzlin' Scribes :)

An I Love Lucy Moment

We've all had those moments when we've done something totally stupid, something like Lucy Ricardo would've done on the old I Love Lucy show. If you're too young to remember that show, you've missed out on some great comedy.

I'll start this story with a fact about me that you may not know—I'm very full busted. That plays a big part in my tale.

My late husband, Harry, and I moved from Sacramento, California to Olympia, Washington in 1996. His son, Little Harry (whose name never made sense to me since he's 6'1"), owned a house in Forks (yes, the town of Twilight fame) that was currently empty, so told us we could store all our household belongings in it until we got settled in a place to live. It was a cute little house with a second story that contained two small bedrooms and a bath. Little Harry was currently remodeling the house, so it was pretty much a mess upstairs.

A couple of weeks after we arrived in Washington, we drove up to the house in Forks to get some of our stuff. It was pouring rain. Forks is on the edge of a rain forest and gets a lot of rain per year. We walked in the back door of the house and heard water running. Let me rephrase that. We heard water gushing and it had nothing to do with the rain outside.

A pipe had burst in the upstairs bathroom beneath the sink and water was literally dripping down the walls and through the ceiling. So we whipped out our cell phone and prayed we could reach Little Harry in Olympia to tell him what happened and find out how to turn off the water. Remember, this was 1996, so cell phones barely had a strong enough signal to call the neighbor, let alone 100 miles away. Luckily, we were able to reach him and he told us where the lever was located to turn off the water. It was under the house, which meant going out in the pouring rain.

I was elected for the job. Harry had had a stroke in 1994 that affected his legs, so him crawling beneath a house wasn't even an option. With the help of a flashlight, we found the little white lever. Hooray! All I had to do was pull it forward a couple of inches and the water would turn off. So I get on the ground in the mud and scooch backward on my back in the narrow space between the ground and the bottom of the house to get to the lever. I'm within an inch (literally) of reaching it when (yep, you guessed it) my boobs came up against the house. I can't go any farther. I'm stretching and squirming to reach that lever just off my fingertips, but my boobs won't let me move.

Of course, Harry is leaning down watching me and laughing like crazy. I put up with his snickering for a few moments, then informed him it was up to him to figure out what to do. After laughing a little longer, he went in the house and came back with a wire clothes hanger. I hooked it around the lever and pulled forward. Viola! Water off, job complete.

Do you have one of those I Love Lucy moments? Tell me about it. I love a good laugh.

Lynn

Vegas, Baby!

So I'm taking a few days in Vegas, first for business, now for pleasure...so this will be short but I had a bit of a revelation about time away from the keyboard.

I'm a pretty consistent writer. When I'm home, I don't take "days off." I work a full-time job and when I get time off from that, I work at my "other job," writing. The writing is a mental break from my day job and I know that at this point in my life, I have to maintain the two work environments.

When I'm on vacation, or even just away from home, my routine is completely thrown off. I haven't written a word in five days. I haven't even spent time with my characters (you know, those moments when I let myself daydream and drift into the worlds inhabited by werewolves or dragons. Please note: I often do this while I'm driving which probably makes me fairly dangerous on the road...be glad you don't live in my city.)

This morning while I was waiting for my massage, I dropped in to visit a werewolf character of mine. It was like visiting a friend that I haven't seen in weeks. I realized my characters and I were getting a little tired of each other. We needed a little bit of space. And now, after a few days away, I have new insights, new stories, a couple of funny scenes...and discovered a great place to hide a body (the pool side of the hotel...cool, huh?).

Have fun! I'm off to find my favorite slot machine!

Tielle.

P.S. (Don't forget...I have two books out in the past month—A Change of Pace, available at Amazon, and Collective Memory from Ellora's Cave!)