It’s been a couple of years since I posted about Halloween Costumes I Have Been. So I thought I’d do it again. Except this time it’s Halloween Costumes People Other Than Me Have Been. I won’t reveal who the someones are, except to say they are related to me. I also won’t reveal the decade, because then I might be killed. I will reveal that the person standing beside the Caveman is Aphrodite. In the flesh. Just in case you didn’t believe she really existed.

If you’d like instructions for Halloween costumes for Pond Scum, the Chewing Gum Family, Robot Boy, or The Three Witches of Macbeth, check here and here. And don’t give me any grief about the Pond Scum costume. It made sense at the time!

Here we go…

Caveman!

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Marry Aphrodite.
2. Go hunting. Don’t give me any grief about the hunting! It wasn’t me who did the hunting, and the hunter had hunted all his life, beginning with hunting deer for food as a 13-year-old in the decade following the Great Depression. People lived on farms and hunted for food and then later hunted for sport. And then realized maybe they should stop hunting for sport. And so they did.
3. While hunting for another animal entirely, get stalked by a wolverine (this is tricky, but I assure you it can be done.)
4. Shoot the wolverine before it pounces on you.
5. Have your brother-in-law by marriage, who happens to be a taxidermist, create a wolverine skin.
6. Have this same brother-in-law give you a beaver pelt, because what home is complete without one?
7. Wait a few years.
8. Get invited to a Halloween party. Decide to be a caveman.
9. Strap beaver pelt to your chest and secure with a wide leather belt at the waist.
10. Take no notice that the beaver pelt is no longer than a mini-skirt. Trust that your friends expect this sort of behavior from you and will accept you, with or without mocking.
11. Hang wolverine skin down your back so that the head hangs over your butt. Prepare to stand around all night so you don’t sit on the wolverine’s head. Or, prepare to lift the wolverine’s head to sit, revealing what you may or may not be wearing beneath the pelt.
12. Considering the length of the beaver pelt, you’d better be wearing something beneath it!
13. Coax Aphrodite into stitching the wolverine paws over your shoulders and onto the beaver pelt. Because it looks super cool.
14. Strap a diving knife onto your belt…because it makes total sense that a caveman would go diving. In case he encounters a shark, he needs a knife. And he can pretend the knife is really a hunting knife. Because it’s a knife. Who will argue with him?
15. Wear a fancy watch to detract from the length of the beaver pelt.
16. Clasp on ONE earring. Make sure to choose the correct ear. Choosing the wrong ear might lead people to think you’re really Hagar the Horrible.
17. Hey, maybe you ARE Hagar the Horrible. This is an adaptable costume!
18. Ask a teenage person who lives in your house to take a photograph to commemorate the costume for all time.
19. Thirty years later, consider choking the teenager.
20. But, for now, hie thee to thy Halloween party and have a blast!

APHRODITE INSTRUCTIONS:

1.  Wrap sheet or other cloth around body toga-style.
2. Secure with Grecian rope at your waist and a broach on your shoulder.
3. Spray paint leafy crown thing with gold leaf.
4. Look amazingly hot.
5. Remember how much you love the teenager who took this picture.

Have you designed any creative Halloween costumes for this year? Too many people buy store bought costumes these days. Why, when it’s so easy to make your own?

I’m back from the RWA National Conference in New York and have settled into my kinda/sorta regular routine. So I thought I’d share some of my conference highlights. Those began with attending four Broadway musicals. I hadn’t seen a Broadway performance since before RWA National 2003, which was also in New York. Then, My Liege went with me to New York for five days preceding the conference, and we tootled all over the place, taking in three musicals and one drama (we caught Bernadette Peters in Gypsy, Antonio Banderas in Nine, the guy who played Mr. Cunningham on Happy Days in Cabaret, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy in, I believe, a Tennessee Williams play that pretty much put us to sleep except for Mr. Hoffman’s amazing performance. He stole the show.)

This time I went sans the DH and roomed with Susan Lyons (who also writes as Susan Fox). We both arrived late Saturday night, June 25th. It was a 3-hour time change for both of us, and I wanted to catch some Broadway and catch up on my sleep before my first official conference event, The Golden Network Retreat, which occurred on Tuesday, June 27th.

The entire conference began a day early this year, to accommodate the July 4th holiday weekend in the States. Canada Day (July 1st) also occurred during conference. Alas, I confess, I completely forgot about it until I strolled into the Samhain Publishing book signing later in the week  (Samhain is publishing Penny’s first single title in November) and spied Canadian author Vivian Arend giving away mini-Aero bars. I quickly nabbed up two, which was fairly greedy of me, considering I can buy Aero bars whenever I want (as long as I’m in Canada) and Americans can’t. Well, tough. It was Canada Day, and I wanted my Canadian chocolate! (If you’re not jealous, you should be—those chocolate bubbles are melt-in-your-mouth delicious!)

I’m getting ahead of myself.

On Sunday Susan and I slept in, then over-indulged in Broadway. First, here’s a photo from our hotel window (it was overcast that day).

We’d purchased tickets to The Addams Family matinee and the evening performance of Chicago. So we had a great lunch, then saw The Addams Family. I thoroughly enjoyed it. So far, The Addams Family was the #1 musical of the four I wound up seeing during my week in New York. Not hard to accomplish when it’s the first I saw.

But it was truly excellent. The set reminded me of being stuck in The Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland for two hours. Bebe Neuwirth played Morticia (if you don’t know who she is, remember Frasier Crane’s wife from Cheers? That’s her) and Roger Rees played Gomez (he played one of Kirstie Alley’s boyfriends on Cheers—small world!).

When the performance ended, we learned that it was Ms. Neuwirth’s last performance in the role, which had been written for her. A few men in suits came out and sung her praises. Roger Rees sung her praises, and then she sung everyone else’s praises. Except she more like spoke them. The actual singing occurred during the play.

I’ve never attended an actor’s final Broadway performance in a particular show before, so that was fun.

Following the performance, Susan and I scarfed down a quick dinner, then went to Chicago, where we sat in the first row of the mezzanine (The Addams Family, we were in the left orchestra, aisle seats).

I loved Chicago and was more familiar with it than The Addams Family, because I didn’t watch TAF TV show growing up and the music was all new to me. Whereas I’ve seen the movie version of Chicago a couple of times.

As of the Chicago viewing, my score was (1) The Addams Family (2) Chicago (the set was much simpler and the orchestra was on stage, which necessitated the actors singing and dancing in front of the orchestra, which necessitated a bit of leaning forward in our first row mezzanine seats).

On Monday I pretty much ran around trying to figure out why my cell phone didn’t work in the States (turns out it was because I use pre-paid minutes instead of a monthly plan). After three phone calls, I learned I could buy a post-paid cell phone with a different number, but it would have cost $90 for only a few days. Worse, every time someone called me the call would have been routed through Estonia. Estonia? I wasn’t putting any of my writer friends through that. Ridunkulous.

Monday night I decided to go see Mamma Mia. Susan remained behind because she’s seen it before. Now, first, you must understand that I lack all sense of direction. To me, “north” is wherever my feet are pointing. So Susan had to shepherd me through wherever we visited in New York until I made my way out of the hotel on my own for the first time to see Mamma Mia. I had the address and a badly drawn map from a guy at the ground floor desk. I just walked “with purpose,” pretending I knew where I was going. Eventually, I realized I was heading the right direction, and soon I was at Winter Gardens.

I had a mid-row seat in the right orchestra, with two French-speaking families on either side of me. Now, I totally love the movie version of Mamma Mia. It really tugs at my heart strings, and the Broadway version did, too. The song where Donna is singing about her little girl going off to school always makes me cry. It made me cry during the movie because, at the time, my then 20-year-old son was moving away to university for the first time. Last Monday night, sitting in the theater, I had to blink back tears again because in a few weeks that same son is moving to the Middle East to teach school for a year. Later, someone without kids mentioned, “But you don’t have daughters. Why would that song make you cry?” It’s not the sex of the child, it’s the fact they’re leaving. And when mine is leaving for the Middle East and I know I won’t see him for 11 months unless I travel over there (an option that is not off the menu at this point!), how could that song about “slipping through my fingers” not make me want to cry?

Also, the actress did a damn fine job. Mamma Mia didn’t have any big names that I recognized, but it quickly became my favorite of the three musicals I’d caught so far, because of the emotion the movie (and the play) always elicits in me. First, Donna had to sing the song about the little girl slipping through her fingers and then she and one of the male leads had to sing a song about their lost love. Between the two, I was a blithering sob-fest. How’s that for a musical that’s supposed to leave ‘em dancing in the aisles?

Still, it was now (1) Mamma Mia (2) The Addams Family and (3) Chicago.

Conference began, and soon there was no time for Broadway. Except…except…Susan had heard that How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, starring Harry Potter Guy (aka Daniel Radcliffe) and John Laroquette (remember Night Court?), was really, really good. It was Thursday night, and I was supposed to meet friends in the bar (sorry). But—but—Broadway was beckoning! And I’m a lousy drinker. One drink, and I’m floating away on clouds of glory. So I try not to indulge too often.

I regret not seeing the buddy I planned to meet (but I did see her during a Spotlight the next day). However, How to Succeed was spectacular. I can’t recall the decade in which it’s supposed to be set, but the flavor of the stage was like something from Mad Men. The set was changed a lot, and Harry Potter Guy worked so hard in his role. So did John Laroquette, who, I might note, has about the longest arms I’ve seen in person (he appeared in Boston Legal, too. Loved that show). Between the two of them singing and dancing, the talented male and female dancers, the female lead, the story line (which revolved around a self-help book that spirited our hero to the top of the corporate ladder), and the intricate sets and mood of the story, I was totally hooked. Hands down, it was my favorite musical of the four. The list then ran at (1) How to Succeed (2) Mamma Mia (3) The Addams Family and (4) Chicago. But all four were magnificent in their own ways. I would completely recommend any of them.

You’ve seen tag clouds (those clusters of words in some blog sidebars that show the most commonly used tags or categories). I’m not a fan of tag clouds. The bigger words always look like they’re bragging. But I am a fan of having fun. I stumbled across the Wordle website and inputted the first three chapters of the book I’m currently submitting to agents. This was the result:

I like that the Wordle is shaped like a shoe with the hero’s and heroine’s names jutting out. #1, the book is a romantic comedy/mystery and the hero, Gabe, is a newbie P.I., so the shoe form = “gumshoe.” And, #2, the jutting out of the names looks fun.

I inputted my text block into the Wordle form, then opened a new window, took a screen shot, then expanded the screen shot as wide as my monitor would allow. I then pasted the screen shot into Photoshop and created this JPG (You can choose to post your creation to a public Wordle gallery instead of going to all this trouble. But you know me. I like trouble).

Like a tag cloud, a “wordle” highlights the most commonly used words in your uploaded text. Gabe is the hero and Ursula is the heroine, so their names should show up the largest. I’m pleased that they do.

Mackie is Gabe’s uncle. He has several point-of-view scenes in the novel and plays a major role in the plot.

The Wordle website has several font and color and shape variations. Play with your own Wordle then let me know about it in the comments section. When I have a moment, I’ll pop over to your blog and check it out.

I write like Stephen King? That’s hilarious. I’m married to Steven King! (Different spelling, different man, but it still tickles my funny bone).

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I cut and pasted the first several paragraphs of my WIP into the program on the Analyze Your Writing link (see badge).

I can’t even read Stephen King. I’ve tried. He scares me.

Take the test. What famous writer do you (supposedly) write like?

I saw on Twitter that Margaret Atwood, my favorite Canadian author (my favorite author, period) supposedly writes like James Joyce. I’ve read Joyce. I’ve read Atwood. I prefer Atwood. I think she writes like herself.

Recently, I had to provide pronunciation guides to the audiobook publisher for HEAD OVER HEELS and BORROWING ALEX. I sped-read (speed-readed?) both books to find words that might trip up the narrators. A mental forehead slap happened nearly right away. I’d forgotten that some readers have a tough time pronouncing the name of my heroine in HEAD OVER HEELS. Her name is Magee Sinclair. Magee is pronounced like the Irish surname, with a hard G, like Mr. Magoo but with E’s instead of O’s. I did everything I could in the writing of the book to ensure the name wasn’t pronounced like Maggie, but can’t be assured of my success. Even an old friend said she wanted to say the name like Maggie. When I asked her how she would pronouce Magee if she saw it on a business (like Magee’s Garage), she could pronounce it easily enough. Go figure.

I’ve tried to give my characters easier-to-pronounce names ever since. Frankly, I knew the name Magee would give some readers conniptions before Amber Quill Press published the book. But I’d had the name on my character names list since I was pregnant with my first child. I loved the name, and it suits my heroine to a T, because she’s a bit of klutz (a Ms. Magoo, shall we say).

Now, my legal name is Cindy. It isn’t Cynthia and it isn’t Lucinda. My birth surname, Procter, is spelled with an E—NOT like Proctor. When my mom registered me for grade 1 (I didn’t go to Kindergarten; it wasn’t available in the community where I lived at the time, way back in the Dark Ages), I distinctly remember the principal coming along and speaking to my mom by the registration table. You see, the principal of my elementary school had once taught my father and uncles in a one-room schoolhouse. You’d think she would have known how to spell Procter, she had enough of the little rascals in her school. Yet somehow my name got registered as Proctor—argh! And no matter what my mother said, whoever actually recorded my name was not convinced that Cindy was a bona fide name in and of itself. Until I was in grade 3 and my wonderful teacher, Mrs. Brady, asked me why I kept mangling my library card, on which my name was written as Cynthia Proctor, the problem persisted.

At least people know how to say Cindy, though. It’s not as if I’ve had to suffer through people calling me Sign-Dee or Sin-Die. No one has ever called me Kindee. I have been called Sydney before, though, usually by people young enough that they don’t recognize “Cindy” as a name. What’s that I heard? She must have said Sydney. I know Sydney is a popular girl’s name these days, but it makes me think of Woody Allen. I am not at all appreciative when someone calls me Sydney.

How about you? Do you have a name that’s difficult to pronounce? Or, it looks easy enough to you but people mangle it regardless? Share your horror stories here.

I love this picture. I took it in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico in January. I actually took a series of pictures—you know, with the shutter automatically snapping so you don’t miss the perfect shot? This pelican was on a fishing expedition, and I caught him just before he plunged into the water. I was so proud of myself.

So I set up the picture with others from that trip as revolving wallpaper on my computer. My Liege walks by and says, “Who just shot that bird?” Groan. To him, the picture looks like a dead pelican about to flop into the water. Or…he said it did. He might have been pulling my leg. If I asked him now, I’d probably get a different answer, because he lives to torment me. Honest. He’s admitted this. But I’m up to the challenge. I torment him more!

Anyway, your turn. Caption this photo for me. Does it say “Bombs Away!” to you? Or “Agghhhhhh-Gurk!” Or something else altogether? Show me your creativity.

The winner gets the satisfaction of knowing they’re more clever than anyone else.

I’m blogging at Nobody Writes It Better today…about cats and Christmas trees. I even wrote a Christmas cat poem! Hop on over to read it.

Today’s the last day of the Super Secret Santa Give-Away over at Nobody Writes It Better as well. Click here to learn how to enter. Barbara Wallace is drawing the winner’s name later today, and Gail Fuller will announce the winner on the NWIB blog tomorrow.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Caught this on agent Kristin Nelson’s blog. I have a number of big, difficult-to-wrap Christmas presents to give out this year, so this video brought a smile to my face. Enjoy!