Reflections of the Australian Hotel

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Technically speaking, this photos has some issues, but I like it anyway.

I took this in Sydney, Australia, during our family vacation in 2007. We were wandering around The Rocks section of the city, which is a really old area of town at the base of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, when we came across this pub called the Australian Hotel. While my husband sampled the huge varieties of beer, I had some fun with my camera. This photo is looking over the bar. In the mirror, you can see me taking the photo, along with the rest of my family.

This photo was used with permission in the fourth edition of our Schmap Sydney Guide. You can see the online version here, and the iPhone version here.

Make a wish...

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My nephew blows out his birthday candles during his party last year. I really liked this series of photos, so I pasted them into a triptych.

Happy Birthday, Lewis!

Weekend Photo Fun: Flickr Sudoku

To see this photo in a larger size, click here.

Something fun to try with photos today: Play Flickr Sudoku.

If you want to play with cute hamster photos, then you're in luck. That seems to the be default setting for this website. If you want to change the subject of the photos in the puzzle, change the tag and make a new puzzle.

Have your own Flickr account? Enter your Flickr username and get a puzzle made with photos from your photostream. Add a tag, and it'll further refine the selections.

If you have no idea how to play Sudoku, check out this site or Google "how to play sudoku".

Have fun! I did.

Doodle Pride

Today is the last day of the September edition of Doodle Week, with the theme Pride, which is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. I went with a rather straight-up interpretation of pride being vanity.

(Aside: Does anyone else think that my Vanity Girl might have a little hair-loss going on? Kind of looks that way to me. Seems a little thin around the top of the head.)

And now that the week is over, I can share my big combined doodle, featuring all of my doodles from the past week.



Stay tuned for Doodle Week in October, which I would expect will happen near the end of the month and feature a lot of Halloween-related themes. I'm just guessing. Could be wrong.

(You do know that everyone is invited to play along, right? You don't have to follow the themes or participate every day. And, obviously, you don't even have to be talented at drawing! Check out the Doodle Week website for more information.)

Doodle Envy

Today's Doodle Week theme is Envy, one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

When I drew this I wasn't feeling envious of published authors, I was feeling envious of writers who know how to sit their butts in their chairs and consistently produce publishable books. Really successful genre writers do it on a pace of at least one a year. That's what I'm envious of.

Wrath Doodle

Today's Doodle Week theme is wrath. Mother Nature has been throwing around a little bit of wrath lately, so I thought I'd feature her in my doodle today.

King of Autumn

To see this photo in a larger size, click here.

Flickr says this is my second most interesting photo of all the photos I've posted. Only Flickr knows for sure how they measure "interestingness", but I know that it's based on some secret algorithm involving number of views, comments and favorites.

I took this photo of my dog Thor last autumn before I cleaned up the leaves in our front yard. It's a very dignified photo of my goofy boy, and it's also the best of the bunch in this set. There is a photo of Loki in the set that I really love, except that it's slightly fuzzy because I was fighting with the auto-focus on my old camera.

I'm hoping to get a second chance at a photo shoot with the dogs in the leaves this year. Probably sometime in November when our big maple trees fall. You'll be among the first to know if I capture anything worthwhile. :)

Not so Wordless Wednesday: A conversation with Loki

We purchased a new video camera using one of those rewards points programs, and the camera just arrived this week. The first video we made was a conversation with Miss Loki.



Loki will initiate these conversations when she's feeling particularly needy for attention, which is a few times a day.

Every time we play this video, Thor will come running into the room, looking for Loki. Sometimes he'll run over and give her kisses to make sure she's OK. Loki, on the other hand, doesn't raise an eyebrow when the video is played.

Now that I've figured out how to upload a video to YouTube, I need to learn how to edit and splice video. Someday. Maybe soon.

Doodle Sloth

Happy Doodle Week everyone. We're midway through this week with its theme of the Seven Deadly Sins.

To represent today's theme of sloth, I doodled my desk, which is covered in books, papers and half-finished drinks waiting to be emptied so I can dispose of them. Even the recycle bin needs emptying. Slothful indeed.

For more about Doodle Week and to find other Doodle Week participates, visit the Doodle Week website.

Stepping out for a taste of wine

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Today is my 14th wedding anniversary. My husband sometimes gets a little squeamish about me using photos of him in my blogs, so instead I'm featuring one of my favorite photos of his backside. :P

This photo was taken during our vacation to Australia last year. Dave and my Auntie Edie are walking up the path to Domaine Chandon in the Yarra Valley outside of Melbourne.

I like the way the path curves off and out of the picture. Even through the vineyard is dormant, I like the winter greenery around it. I like the contrast of sun and shadow over the vineyard and into the mountains. I like the fact that even through Edie is using a cane, she still looks like she has a spring in her step -- it seems like a jaunty accessory and not a tool.

Mostly, I like that my husband is in it. :) Happy Anniversary.

Tea* Cup meme

Laura at That Grrl posed this question: What's your favourite cup for coffee or tea? Post a photo if you can. Let's make it a meme. Post your cup photo and pass it on to someone else.

*Laura called this the Coffee Cup meme, but I've renamed it the Tea Cup meme, since you'll never find coffee in a cup I'm drinking out of. :P




This is my current favorite tea cup at home. Jules purchased it while on a trip to Germany at Sanssouci, the former estate of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia.

She liked it not just because of the pretty estate pictured on it, but also because it shows the "Sans Souci" name, which means "without worry", and "suum cique", which means "to each his own". Plus, it fits her grandmother's definition of a proper tea cup: thinner porcelain with a fluted drinking edge.

The teacup I use at work was a holiday gift from a coworker, which explains its Christmas design. While the porcelain is thicker, it does have a fluted drinking edge that Jules' grandmother would approve of.

Speaking of fluted drinking edges, the teacup below has one too. While I wouldn't call it my favorite, it does amuse me and sometimes I choose it just because I'm feeling a little cheeky. Wilko and Lesley bought it for me after I dared to request some royal memorabilia from the most recent royal wedding. Come on, take a closer look at it and glory in its tackiness -- the grainy photos, the poor aesthetics, the typos. It just makes me warm and tingly sometimes.



Want to participate in this meme? Consider yourself tagged and jump right in. Leave me a comment to let me know you decided to play, or go leave Laura a comment, or leave one for each of us. :P

The Lake Ellyn Boathouse

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I took this photo of the Glen Ellyn Park District's Boathouse this weekend while taking a walk around Lake Ellyn. I'm hoping to go back and get more photos at this lake some day soon. It's surrounded by gorgous old houses and Glenbard West High School, which is known as the Castle on the Hill because of its castle-like architecture. Unfortunately, when I was at the park on Sunday, the lighting was really difficult to work with so I didn't take many photos.

Doodle Greed

The Seven Deadly Sins of Doodle Week continues today with the theme Greed. This has to be one of my lamer doodles for this series. What can I say? I'm limited by my drawing abilities. :P

Doodle Lust & Doodle Gluttony

It's that time again -- Doodle Week. This time we're doodling the Seven Deadly Sins.

Sunday's theme was Lust, so here's my lust doodle. I choose lips because they were easy to draw and, well, full red lips are very lusty to me.



Monday's theme is Gluttony, so here's my gluttony doodle. I choose this pink birthday cake because I remember my Mom making me a cake with pink frosting as a kid, and I also remember getting into trouble for eating all the pink frosting off the cake before it could be served for my birthday.



For more about Doodle Week and to see other Doodle Week participants, visit the Doodle Week website.

York Minster Chapter House ceiling

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This is another one of my all-time favorite photos that I've taken. This is looking straight up at the ceiling of the Chapter House in York Minster, which is a cathedral in York, England. We visited in 2003.

This photo was used with permission in the fourth edition of the Schmap York Guide. You can see the online version here, and the iPhone version here.

The Alamo in 1836

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Last year I went on my first ever business trip. We had three days in San Antonio, and I was determined not to spend the entire time working or hanging around our hotel. One night we were able to get down to the Riverwalk and see the Alamo.

Since it was closed for the night, we weren't able to get in, but we did enjoy walking around the exterior. This is one of my favorite photos I took that night. The grounds are lit so prettily, and the modern hotel in the background really creates a nice juxtaposition of old and new.

Is it style or is it voice?

Have you ever read something, and without having seen a byline, feel certain that you know who wrote the piece?

Take today, for instance. I received an anonymous comment on a post, but just by reading the comment, I knew it had to come from Cousin Bob. It simply sounded like him -- the words he used, his way of addressing me, and what he felt important to relay to me.

"Nice blog Hughes, you are a talented FORMER Rush fan !!! ;)"

That's Cousin Bob's voice coming through loud and clear.

If he'd changed his style of writing by punctuating the sentence differently, capitalizing it differently, making it two sentences instead of one, it still would have sounded like Cousin Bob to me.

That may be a simplistic example, but to me it nicely illustrates a concept that a lot of writers (me included) have a hard time wrapping our heads around: the concept of style of writing vs. voice in writing.

This very concept was the subject of a talk by author Jennifer Greene at my writers group meeting last week. It was a talk that left many of us pondering: What are the elements of our writing that we can control (style) and what are the elements of our writing that are innate (voice)? And how can we work these to our advantage as writers?

Further defining style

"Style is craft. It's nothing you're born with. It's something you learn and apply," Greene said at our writers meeting.

Style is the delivery system. It is the writing technique that we change, depending on what we are writing, she said. It's the adjectives and adverbs we use, the length of the sentences, the choice of words.

The concept of style contains all the elements of writing, such as pacing. "Pacing is about the impression of speed and is delivered through style and choice of words," Greene said.

Further defining voice

Voice is harder to explain. It is what the writer brings to everything he or she writes, Greene said. It reflects the writer's vision of the world. No one else has the same voice and no one else can duplicate it.

Like good writers, at our meeting we tried using analogy to define voice. Here are a few that were bandied about. (Sorry, I can't remember who offered which analogy.)

Voice is food, and style is the flavor.
Voice is the heart, and style is the head.
Voice is the fabric, and style is the pattern that you apply to the fabric to create a shirt, a dress, draperies or whatever.

And the thing about voice is that when someone rejects your writing because they don't like your voice, that rejection can cut a lot more than when someone rejects your writing because of style issues. It's a more personal kind of rejection.

"Voice is an intimately personal exchange between a writer and a reader," Greene said.

It can be that one hard-to-define element that causes some people to love an author's work, and other people to loathe that same author's work.

(Me, personally, in contests I tend to get a lot of feedback about my voice. It probably also explains why my scores varied so widely the last time I entered the Golden Heart contest, with some people giving me 9s and 8s on a 1-9 scale and some giving me 2s.)

How do voice and style affect a writer's success?

That's anyone's guess. If there were hard-and-fast rules on how to be successful as a writer, there'd be a lot more successful writers out there.

But there was one hypothesis that was bandied about at my writers group meeting: A strong voice can be more of a liability when times are good in the book-selling business, and it can be more of an asset when times are tough in the book-selling business.

In good book-selling times, publishers think they know what readers are looking for in a book. They tend to stick with the tried-and-true and tend to favor books that are strong in style. Talking from a romance perspective, when secret babies, vampires and Scottish medievals are selling well, a lot of people are writing and submitting these books. Publishers have a lot to choose from in these categories, so they don't have to take risks on strong or different-sounding voices. These strong voices might have to tone themselves down to get a publishing slot.

In tough book-selling climates, the publishers are looking for something new and different that will grab a reader's attention. Since the tried-and-true isn't working as well, the publishers are more willing to gamble on books that don't fit marketing slots as well. They might take a chance on the strong or odd-sounding voice, even though the writing may have style issues.

Remember, this is just a hypothesis and is open to debate. Feel free to shred this hypothesis. No hard feelings.

Anyone else have other ideas about how an author can work these elements to his or her advantage?

Anyone want to throw out some examples of authors with strong voices? Jayne Anne Krentz comes to mind.

A side note for Cousin Bob: Thanks for the compliment. And just because I haven't bought Rush's latest album and often mess up the name of it, I am still a Rush fan. There is no FORMER about it.

Amber waves of ... grass

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This is some of the decorative grass we have growing in our garden. I took this in the late afternoon, so the color is especially amber. I'm not sure if I like this picture more or this picture, and I'm not sure that either of these photos is the best possible capture. But the nice thing is, it's my garden, so I can keep trying until I get it perfect.

Spring blossoms

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I took this photo on Mother's Day at Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, IL. It was a rainy, dreary day, and this was one of the last spring blossoms we saw before heading home that day.

13 Things: Brain Dump

1. This is going to be long. I apologize. But that's what happens when I let things collect for a few weeks. I'll try to present it in the most skimmable format I can. I've included lots of pictures, too. :P

2. We had some torrential rains here in the Chicago area over the weekend. Something like 6.6 inches on Saturday alone, which is a new record for the area. There was a lot of flooding. You'd think I might have gone out with my camera to take photos, but I didn't. The best I got was this shot with my cameraphone of geese swimming in a flooded parking lot. Fortunately, we didn't get any water in our house, although we did have a small lake form in our back yard.


3. I've been writing and brainstorming a book proposal with friends. It's an updated version of The Hunting Lodge project I've mentioned in the past. Oh, and The Viking's Tale project is on track. I'm going to work on that more as soon as I finish this post.


4. I received the best non-job offer ever. I applied for a lateral technical writing position in my company. Instead of writing documents for internal consumption, it would have been writing for users of our software. The only problem was that it was a new position and they needed someone really strong in FrameMaker and RoboHelp and with a lot more experience writing users manuals and training manuals than I have, and those factors outweighed my strong product knowledge. But they said they loved me as a candidate and that people in the office lobbied really hard for me to get the position. Basically, it sounds like if I brush up on some skills, they'd like to groom me for a second position whenever it opens up.

5. I'm thinking about applying to enter a masters degree program in New Media Studies at DePaul University. I looks like something I would enjoy, plus if I take a technical writing course there, it would count as an elective. Not looking forward to having to take the GRE's though.

6. I'm signing up for a 3-day course in FrameMaker. My boss just gave me the go-ahead to register.


7. My husband has officially been through a tornado. The village newsletter that we received last week proves it. The tornado happened back on Aug. 4 and was part of a series of tornadoes that were recorded in the Chicago area that night. In the photo below of the newsletter, the red lines mark the path of damage and the route the tornado took.The X marks the spot where my husband was at the gym.  The little twister icon represents a touch-down point. Lucklily, it was a small tornado as tornadoes go (an EF1) and it only did major damage to five houses and one warehouse in town.



My husband said that when the tornado went through, everyone was sent to shelter in the locker rooms. There were about 100 guys crammed into the room. A couple of the big, burly guys said this is crazy and walked out, only to hurry back into the locker room when they saw how badly the plate glass windows were bowing in the wind.

8. We now officially have no phone books in our house. That's OK, since we don't use them anyway thanks to Internet search engines. My husband did his Bionic Woman impression on Saturday night and tore a phone book in two. If you've watched Mythbusters lately, you know exactly where this is coming from. If you haven't, check out this clip. We also tried interleaving the pages of two phone books, and verified that you can't pull them apart, but we no longer have the books as we sent them home with our school-teacher friend to bring to class.

9. Cousin Bob sent my husband this link for Geddy Lee of Rush giving Celebrity Winter Advice. Funny in an odd sort of way.



10. These are my favorite chocolates -- Joseph Schmidt truffles. Thank heaven I don't live in San Francisco anymore and can't get these on a regular basis.


11. Eric sent me a link to this Chicago Tribune story to share with all of you -- Cubicle toys to keep the workday fun (for when the Internet is down). My husband has the slingshot monkey in his office. It shares a bunk with Bubblegum Godzilla and Anguirus.

12. I bought this really cool wrist-band at a flea market in San Francisco last month. It's made out of latex paint. Check it out at The Land of Fa.com.

13. None of the products mentioned in this post have paid for placement. I mention them simply because I think they're cool, or interesting, or they were sitting in front of me on my desktop at the time of writing.

Sparkling wine

This is one of my favorite photos. I took it in July 2007 while on vacation with my family in Australia. My brother-in-law is tasting sparkling wine at Domaine Chandon in the Yarra Valley outside Melbourne.

This photo was used with permission by Uplanit in their Australia guide.

Extending some link love

It's close to the 15th of the month, and it's time to extend some big thank yous to the people who make blogging fun.

Thank you to my top droppers this month on Entrecard. I really appreciate your dedication to this site.

Blogging MoRe
On The Bricks
Where the Long Tail Ends
I Do Things
Cromely's World
Kool Kustoms
1 Blog and 2 Sides
Daisy the Curly Cat
Everything Has A Reason
fragileheart.com | journal

Also, a big thank you to all my top commenters. My widget in the right column keeps track of the top commenters from the last 500 comments. As of today, here are the Top 10 people listed:

fragileheart
Claire
Monique
The Hunter's Wife
Kelly
Daisy
Laura
Periapex
MamaFlo
Don M.F.H.

Wordless Wednesday: Giddy-up

Loki naps

This is one of my top-viewed photos on Flickr. I took it in July 2002. Loki, one of our two Bernese Mountain Dogs, was 8 weeks old and we'd just brought her home from the breeder's house. When Loki got tired, she crawled onto the shelf of our coffee table and fell asleep. She quickly outgrew the space and now tops out at about 100 pounds.

Full moon through snow-covered branches

It's 2004. The night before Thanksgiving. (That makes it late November, for any non-Americans reading this.)

My friend Lesley had just arrived from London and we'd fought our way home from the airport in a blinding snowstorm. Once home, the snow stopped, the clouds disappeared, and we took the dogs outside to romp in the fresh snow while we shoveled the driveway. Imagine a very Rockwellian scene.

At one point, I paused under our giant maple tree and looked straight up at the full moon. This is what I captured.

Moments Caught in Flight?

It's from a song called Available Light from a band called Rush.

You can listen to it here.

The lyrics:

The restless wind
Has seen all things
In every kind of light
Rising with the full moon
To go howling through the night

The sleepless wind
Has heard all things
Between the sea and sky
In the canyons of the city
You can hear the buildings cry

Oh the wind can carry
All the voices of the sea
Oh the wind can carry
All the echoes home to me

Run with wind and weather
To the music of the sea
All four winds together
Can't bring the world to me
Chase the wind around the world
I want to look at life --
In the available light

Play of light
A photograph
The way I used to be
Some half-forgotten stranger
Doesn't mean that much to me

Trick of light
Moving picture
Moments caught in flight
Make the shadows darker
Or the colors shine too bright

Oh the light can carry
All the visions of the sea
Oh the light can carry
All the images to me

Run to light from shadow
Sun gives me no rest
Promise offered in the east
Broken in the west
Chase the sun around the world
I want to look at life --
In the available light

All four winds together
Can't bring the world to me
Shadows hide the play of light
So much I want to see
Chase the light around the world
I want to look at life --
In the available light

I'll go with the wind
I'll stand in the light

Wordless Wednesday: We haz popcicle

Yeah, I've been reading too many loldogs and lolcats. Somehow, I got addicted to those sites.

Feel free to offer up your own captions for this photo. Or not.
 
Click here for more about Wordless Wednesday and to see other participants.

Oprah, the Olympics and Chicago

Oprah had all the American medal-winning Olympians on her show today. I haven't watched it yet -- I rarely watch her show -- but TiVo is getting it for me tonight because I love the idea of having a rally to celebrate the Olympic team's accomplishments.

I mean, when a baseball team wins the World Series, a football team wins the Super Bowl or a hockey team wins the Stanley Cup, they usually come home to a big, rousing citywide rally to celebrate their success. But it's more complicated with the Olympics. The Olympians on the U.S. team are from all over the country, and there isn't one big accomplishment to celebrate, but several individual and team accomplishments. What one location could host such an event?

In this case, since Oprah films here, Chicago got to host the rally. And Chicago is also currently making a bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, with the decision being made by the International Olympic Committee next year. What better way to showcase Chicago as an Olympic contender and demonstrate the city's enthusiasm than having an Olympic rally in Millennium Park? 

And with the enthusiastic turnout of so many athletes -- over 150 of them -- it sure demonstrates that the rally was a popular idea with the Olympians. Perhaps after every Olympics, whatever American city is making a bid for the Olympics that year should host a similar rally? I really like that idea.

I'll take off my cheerleader hat now.

But, before I sign off on this topic, I thought I'd go out on a tangent and offer up one bit of trivia that to me illustrates how Chicago's Olympic bid fits in with Chicago's self identity.

There are four stars on Chicago's flag. Any guesses what they represent?



They represent four influential things/events in Chicago's history:
* Fort Dearborn, which was the original fort that the settlement was built around in the early 1800s;
* the Great Chicago Fire, which destroyed most of the city's downtown in 1871;
* the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, which celebrated 400 years since Christopher Columbus's voyage of discovery;
* and the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933, which celebrated 100 years since the city's founding.

Did you notice that two of the defining events in the city's history and self identity were international exhibitions?

And what's the biggest international exhibition in the world right now? The Summer Olympics.

Rolling up the newspaper and ...

*Smack*

"Bad Blogger! Very Bad Blogger!"

(That's me admonishing myself for neglecting this site.)

*Shuffles to computer
*Licks owie
*Starts typing

Here's something I started to write last Thursday. I thought it could be a Thursday 13 post. Obviously, since it's no longer Thursday, that plan had to be scrapped, but I'm staying with the 13 things theme.

13 Things I did in August

1. I neglected my blog. Yes, but you already know that because you're smart and you read the opening of this post  or you visited this site during the past month and figured that out for yourself.

2. I attended a writers conference. Went to the Romance Writers of America conference in San Francisco where I pitched to an editor and received a request to submit my erotica short story. Also went to all sorts of inspiring workshops and talked with all sorts of creative people (perhaps I'll write about that some more at a future date). I came home much recharged.

3. I worked more on that short story. A lot. There is much erotica in said short story. What's important is that I've been working on my fiction. Yay me!

4. A tornado touched down in my town. It wasn't an overly large tornado -- all we lost was a tree branch -- but it was very scary. I was driving home from work when it hit. I was listening to the radio and knew it was stupid to keep going into the path of the confirmed tornado, so I pulled over at the Oasis rest stop and waited out the storm with a bunch of other cautious (and scared) motorists.

5. I watched the Olympics. A lot of Olympics. It was constantly playing in the background whenever I was home.

6. I finally saw The Dark Knight at the theater. Excellent. I can see what all the hoopla was about. My husband still insists that Iron Man was a much better movie. Me? It's a toss-up.

7. I got to see my friend Wook when he came in for a surprise visit. It was a surprise even to him. The airline canceled his connecting flight at O'Hare, so he stayed the night with us. It took my poor dog Thor a few days to get over this visit from his own personal Satan, but the rest of us were happy to see Wook. :)

8. I enjoyed an afternoon at the racetrack. We celebrated my husband's 40th birthday by inviting a group of friends to go to Arlington Park with us. I bet the $2 minimum on just about every race, losing far more than anything I won, but I had a lot of fun. We all did. We couldn't have ordered up more beautiful weather.

9. I got to be a mock bridesmaid at a friend's mock wedding. Jules celebrated her 20th wedding anniversary by renewing her wedding vows. That's where all the "mock" business comes in. It was a gorgeous night, a very moving ceremony, and I was thrilled to be included in such an honored capacity.

10. I applied for another job within my company. It would be a lateral move to a different tech writing position, but it would be a welcome change. Let's hope I didn't just jinx myself by mentioning it here. There's a lot of interviewing still to be done.

11. I helped to run the draft for my husband's Fantasy Football league. I ran the computer, inputting the selections as players were drafted. I even remembered to wear my referee shirt from last year's Halloween costume. It was a big hit.

12. I saw Alice Cooper in concert. It was a fun show. We drove up to the Genesee Theater in Waukegan. It's an old theater with all sorts of gilded decorations inside, so it made for an interesting setting. I could imagine the society matrons from 75 years ago fainting at the sight of big, burly, inked Harley types filling the red velvet seats of this one-time posh theater. If that didn't get them, I'm sure Alice Cooper killing a babydoll and then mock hanging himself on stage would have done it for them.

I almost forgot No. 13. Seems like it should have ended on an even dozen. But yet, here I am, so...

13. Got the dogs into the vet for their annual checkups. That's actually big news for Miss Loki, who was diagnosed with a cancerous mast cell tumor during last year's checkup. She received a clean bill of health this time. Plus, both dogs were down 10 pounds. Their diets are working. (I can't say so much for mine.)

Now I'm all caught up. My blogging is back to a clean slate. Here's looking forward to a prolific September and no more swatting myself with rolled up newspapers.