July 24, 2007 | Family & Life

I will be the first to admit I’m an overprotective mother. Now I’m not so bad I won’t let him cross the street by himself, he’ll be seventeen in August. He’s about to take the test for his driver’s license and I’m not too nervous. Right.

J Man is the opposite of J Girl. She was the ying, he the yang. She was the social butterfly, he’s the video game tennis player. We were never sure when J Girl went out on weekends what story or adventure she’d have before returning home. J Man, well he is at home, unless he has a tennis tournament or begging to go to Best Buy. J Man is a young man of few words. I’ve been told this numerous times by many. I agree because unless they’re hiding in a closet when he and I are at home, they don’t know the truth. That boy can TALK!! Again, the opposite of J Girl. Of course since she couldn’t keep her stories straight, it was in her best interest not to talk. The truth always had a way of sneaking out.

Now I’ve always suspected J Man was growing up, maturing, but he’s sneaky. He allows me to mother him to a point, but as I discovered last weekend the boy is savier than I give him credit. Sorry honey. J Girl was always strutting her independence (of course it was all in her mind). J Man is sutle. He’s independent and initutive, when it serves his purpose.

J Man is a high school senior this fall and we’re doing the college tour this summer. We spent last Saturday visiting a college in Indiana and afterwards we went to dinner downtown. Now in Indy, most of the places are closed until four in the afternoon. We wanted to be home by five. Hubby chose Weber Grill (I don’t want to cook anymore after eating there, but that’s another story), mainly a steak place, but the fish was excellent. We drove past and hubby asked J Man to get out and make sure it was open. So he did, and it was. Hubby was parking in the garage across the street and I was going to get out and go with my son. Hubby said no, I stayed in the car until it was parked. Now here is where the overprotective part comes in. When we reached the street, no J Man. Some one had stolen my baby!! Hubby asked me to go inside and look for him. I did, he wasn’t and I freaked. “I told you I should have gotten out of the car!!” I shouted at hubby, who is very use to my hysterics. I walked down the street freaking out, while hubby stood quietly and patiently at the sidewalk. When I returned he asked me to go back and see if he was there. “At the bar?” I retorted. But I went in, and this time went upstairs, and asked the hostess if they’d seen a young, tall black teenager. She said calmly, “Table for three? I seated him.” Then I felt his familiar big hand on my shoulder. J Man had gotten a booth, the bread and butter had already been served, and he was drinking a Coke. Needless to say, my two men had a major laugh at my expense for thirty minutes. I ordered a cosmopolitan. Okay, so I was afraid someone had kidnapped my six foot three inch, almost seventeen year old son.

Now, the most interesting part of this story, if you can stop laughing at me for a moment, is that an upscale restaurant would actually seat a young black male with adults nowhere in sight. Kudos to Weber Grill for respecting my son and kudos to J Man for taking charge of the situation. Of course it didn’t hurt he was extremely hungry.

April 30, 2007 | Uncategorized

1. Don’t tease me, if you can’t please me.
2. I don’t make mistakes, I date them.
3. Skinny Bitch.
4. I Don’t Give A Blog!
5. And Your Point Is …
6. Mental Breakdown in Five, Four, Three, Two ….

T-shirts have been taken to a whole different level. The first three I listed are owned by JGirl. I’m guilty of buying her a few but not the third one. When I was her age, my t-shirts had, Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!, not I’m Gay and You’re Not! stitched on it. Tshirts are a way of expressing opinions, beliefs, a place to eat, or good old fashion humor. JMan receives t-shirts every time he plays a tournament. They make great cleaning rags, because he won’t wear them. He doesn’t wear shirts with sayings, shirts with dragons maybe.

T-shirts are popular because they’re easy to wash, reasonably priced, and come in a multitude of colors and sizes. It’s so easy to get up, put on a shirt that says Monday, even if it’s really Thursday, and get going. The shirt can express exactly how you feel, without you opening your mouth, stare a person down, or frown. Unless of course the shirt says, I Feel Pretty. You can cite your college affliation, a picture of your grandchildren, your pet dog, or your latest book cover. I had a shirt from a Las Vegas hotel that said, Gamble, Gamble, Gamble, Shop, Eat, Gamble, Gamble …. across the front. Yep, it expressed just how I felt about Sin City and the fun I had every time I went. Not so much the gamble part, but the eat and shop is right up my alley. T-shirts contain memories, family reunions, a tribute to a great basketball run (that would be The Chicago Bulls, of course). They throw them into the crowd at sporting events. You can make ones with glitter and spice up your wardrobe. Wet t-shirt contests are very popular I hear. Calendars have been dedicated to women wearing nothing but t-shirts. It is socially acceptable to go on a field trip, children and seniors, and see fifty people wearing identical shirts. It makes it easy to find your group if you wander off, children or seniors. And it identifies for everyone else what group you came with. This is the main reason I don’t wear t-shirts. I can’t stand seeing someone wearing what I am. It goes back to my Catholic school navy blue uniform nightmare. Last year, I purchased purple tshirts for my tennis team with their names on the back. I still haven’t worn mine. Sorry ladies, but they were cute.

I don’t approve of all the sayings on the shirts, some are rather outrageous and obscene and the wearer is trying to promote a particular political opinion or belief to provoke a comment and/or draw attention to themselves. I haven’t seen any yellow happy faces on t-shirts, unless I’m at Wal Mart. However there are many shirts with silk screened pictures of Tupac, P Diddy, various bands, movie stars, etc. Think it and you’ll find it. Autographed tshirts are a big thing. But my question is: once you have the shirt covered with signatures, can you wash it? What do you do with it?

There is a distinct difference in t-shirts worn by girls and guys. Girls wear shirts two sizes too small, with large bright letters, and are meant to intentionally draw the males attention with some risque remark. JGirl wore her Skinny Bitch shirt to breakfast when she was in town. I didn’t say anything and the fact I kept the menu glued to my face had nothing to do with my not wanting to be identified as her mother. Our waitress was definitely impressed, she wanted to know where she got it.

When I sell my first book, my family and friends, will be ‘encouraged’ to wear a t-shirt with a Phoenix on the back and my book cover on the front.

Guys wear t-shirts eight sizes too big, with small lettering, so you have to get up close and personal, squint to read it, so you can be amused, insulted, or confused. And the sayings on their shirts aren’t as snappy as the females. Note: if a guy is wearing a shirt with the second saying from the above list – run away!

February 14, 2007 | Writing

I live in the Midwest, Chicago area, and we’ve been hit with snow. For a lot of you, you say ‘So What? Join the shovel committee’. Well, I’m originally from Virginia and even after twenty-six years of living here I’m still adapting. As a writer, I know well the story about how Nora Roberts got started. It was winter, cold, and she was snowbound with her kids. It’s a great story and we unpublished writers use it for inspiration. I was thinking about Nora as the snow keeps falling, and falling, and falling around here. We’re not exactly housebound, but it is an opportunity to work on my novel. Edit some more, polish it and get it the frack out of this house. I figure that’s what Nora would do. However, I don’t know, and I’ll have to ask her at the next Romance Writers of America Conference, if she had access to cable while she was snowed in. I mean, if the power died and the cable went out I’d have to first find other living arrangements and then without anything else to do, I could write. However, that’s not the case, the cable is working, and Law and Order, NCIS, Law and Order Criminal Intent, and Law and Order SVU still come on. So, what I have to rely on my staying put at my desk and working is pure sheer will and a Nora saying. “I can fix a crappy page but I can’t fix a blank one.” Which brings me to the second part of my blog.

I can’t bake. I’m not talking about a box of prepared cake mix. Oh that I can do with the best of them. I’m talking about baking from scratch, like my mother use to do. At Christmas she would bake German Chocolate cakes, using real coconuts she’d crack open, use the milk and grind the meat. She’d melt chocolate. It took me until I was almost thirty to eat her cake, mainly because I didn’t like coconut. Trust me, I still don’t particularly care for coconut, but I had no problem eating it in her cakes. She also make pineapple cakes from scratch. Those I’d eat heartily, which could explain my fat cells now exploding at my advanced age. No instant, canned fruit. Yeast rolls were also made with real yeast, hot water and the smell of bread rising was yummy.

Now what does baking have to do with writing, Yasmine? Well I’ll tell you. You have to have the basic ingredients for baking. Same with writing. If you’re going to bake a cake, from scratch, you know you’re going to have to work at it. You can’t rush, you have to study what you need and purchase the items because you can’t stop in the middle of mixing and run out to get it. Some ingredients require research, it may not be available at your local grocery store. So you have to figure out where to get it. Same with a story setting. It may be local, or exotic, or another world you’ve created but you’ve got to set the scene. When you decide what type of cake you’re going to bake, you should set all your ingredients out on the counter. Your story has to have a heroine and a hero and they are your main ingredients. They’re the base of your story. Plot is the other ingredients, sugar, salt, flavorings. If you’re using a receipe, it’s been tested before you bake your version, so you can follow the written directions. We read books on how to write a romance, and when we first start out, we do it by the book. The more we write, the more we discover our voice and vary the receipe to suit our strenghts.

Say you’re baking a butter pound cake, of course you may prefer to use a bundt pan, and you may want the cake to have a tart lemon taste. Are you going to use real lemons? Take the time to slice and squeeze them or are you going to take the fast route and use lemon juice and extract? What if your family wants a chocolate pound cake? Are you going to use real chocolate, melt it and add it to your cake? What’s your objective with writing your story or baking your pound cake? To please your family, tempt an agent or publisher, or for your own enjoyment? The more you experiment with your writing and your baking you may find you have a talent for making cakes that are decadent, rich, and ‘can’t enough of it’, i.e. erotica. Or you may have a talent for baking cakes that are delicious, memorable, and made from a receipe that will be handed down from generation to generation, so your name will always be associated with it. Jane Austen, Terry McMillian, Octavia Butler, Josh Whedon.

So my conclusion is, I may be snowbound, like Nora was, and I will continue to use her as an example to keep writing. I may not be able to bake a cake from scratch, although after reading that last paragraph, I make have to try it, but I will keep creating, editing, polishing my work, and meanwhile bake cupcakes and watch Law and Order.

January 23, 2007 | Writing

The last time I blogged, me, myself, and I were discussing how to be on the same page instead of running around in different directions. It’s taken some time, apparently one of us forgot to blog, but we’ve worked out a very good relationship. I decided we would blog once a week, the topic must be writing related and sometimes personal, depending what’s going on. Me wanted to add links of all the great shopping sites she and myself were hanging out, while we were supposed to be writing. I think the Fedex guy loves me.

Someone had to take control, bring our focus back and make our deadlines. I voted to give that responsibility to Molly Herwood, but me and myself, dismissed that bright idea. So, we’ve reworked our writing schedule, making it primary, every fracking day for four hours. We have set hours but we discovered our weight was increasing faster than our page count, since we took a sabbatical from tennis for a couple of months. So, we agreed to return to tennis in February and still make sure to get our four hours of writing in. Myself has a list of agents and publishers we’re submitting our query to in February. Of course, I was the last to know. No one wrote it down on our desk calendar. But apparently we will make that deadline.

We also collaborated on submitting a story to Amber Quill. We joined forces made the deadline and will know by March first how we did. Sloane, Beth, and Virginia liked the part I brought to our critique meeting. Trust me, I don’t think they’ll ever look at cucumbers the same.

Sometimes my unedited pages resemble the writing of a deranged housewife. Oh wait a minute, that’s me, or all of us. Never mind. But there are words on those pages, words that are good, terrible, and just plain stupid, but they’re something I can work with. Now that I’ve outed myself to my friends and family as a writer, my ego won’t let me back down. Damned, another personality to deal with, the ego. Let’s try to keep the id out of this, okay.

Okay, so once a week blogging will occur. I’ll be back next Tuesday. Also, this year I’m going to do something new with my favorites page. Last year I interviewed authors, so stay tuned and I’ll let you know when it premiers.

Keep Writing