The Easter bunny came! With a big white bag from Parkside Candy! And (e:zobar) and I have both just stuffed ourselves with chocolate! And washed it down with coffee! And I just chased him slowly around the house trying to tickle him. I thought it'd be a great idea to see which of us could make the other barf first.

I have to go to work in a little bit. I am going to stuff myself with chocolate and show up so fucking high on sugar, and see if that gets me through the day.

Man! Z is fun when he's fucked-up.

And this is legal. Is this a great country or what?

I have media to blog with, later, when I am not so lazy (photos, of Z's family doing traditional Latvian egg-dyeing, with onion skins and pocket knives and pantyhose). Meanwhile, I link to this instead:
Eddy from Z's work goes to the Broadway Market, eats the horseradish, manages to get in not one but three phallic jokes, all to a polka soundtrack.

Yikes, I just absentmindedly tabbed to the next field and wound up not in this one, but in one of the search fields. I still don't know this place very well!

I was going to talk more about gardens. Not much has happened, in that I haven't done much-- every day I water the seedlings in the front window and under the gro-light. I rotate them too so they grow straight. Nothing exciting, though.
None of the seeds I planted outdoors have come up. Depressing. This is the worst part of gardening, when you think, "Great, i screwed it all up."

I did count up my seedlings. I have fifteen tomato seedlings, eight sweet peppers, eight ancho peppers, five anaheim peppers, and then there are ten peppers I forgot to label. I planted cucumbers and zinneas under the grow-lights, and so I have ten zinnea seedlings and six cucumber seedlings. The peppers are ready to be set outside, though, which is a problem because it's not time yet.

Of the bulbs I planted last fall, I've got a bunch of hyacinths blooming now, which is really nice because they smell good. Daffodils are blooming too. Crocuses are just about done, which is sad-- I love them.

Just went for a walk around the neighborhood, which was nice. (e:zobar) and I both really like to look into people's yards just to see their stuff and how they've got it laid out and how they use their space, which is, I suppose, kinda creepy-- I love looking in windows, too, but I have a policy of not peering overtly, and I won't leave the sidewalk or even deviate from my place in the sidewalk, because that's wrong. But if you can see in, I mean, why not glance in as you go by? People have neat stuff.

But then, I'm a nutjob, so...

Mailed my mom a bunch of easter eggs from the Broadway Market, so she's happy, but I didn't get myself any. Oh well: People who work every Sunday don't get to celebrate Easter, see, so what's the point of getting excited? There is none.

I don't ever have anything really clever to post here. I assure you, I am not this boring. Maybe it's something about the orange and green color scheme... I can't possibly compete with its colorfulness... This is why my livejournal is plain white.

Bad day. One shouldn't have such a bad day when it is so nice outside.
I have two computers. Both are malfunctioning.
I have a novel that is 136,631 words long. (I just hit the wordcount button in Word, and it's a palindrome! hey neat. [for the curious, that's 236 pages, single-spaced. Printed in paperback-novel form it would approach 500 pages.]) I am nearly done with the first draft. I am tired and want it to be finished. But it is not finished. (I am in the middle of writing a sex scene for the novel, and could not be less in the mood. Which is too bad, as the point-of-view character could not be more in the mood, and I feel I'm letting him down, but I'm sorry, I really just can't make it any hotter. Poor fellow. He thinks I'm about to kill him, too, and the only reason I'm not is because I am also not in the mood for the irony and tragedy that would entail. Not that I don't love him, because I do, but from a writer's standpoint that makes his survival even more tenuous.)

I wish I had some dark chocolate in the house. I was so mad at my computers that I mopped the floors, and then I went for a jog while the floors dried, and now I want to sit and stuff my mouth with something really dark, a little bitter, a little decadent, but all I've got in the house are semi-sweet chocolate chips and some Cadbury Eggs. Neither of which is suiting my mood.

My monitor is flickering. I do not dare go out and do some gardening in the yard because my next-door neighbor is Completely Batty and if she comes over to yell at me about one more thing I'm-a deck her.

Z is taking offense to everything I say lately and I am wondering whether it is the stress of his job, or if I am somehow transforming into a bad person. I feel like I have not done anything fun in a long time and perhaps I am stagnating. I know I have been reduced to less than a half-dozen topics of conversation lately and I"m just not very interesting.

So there you have it: it is a winter of discontent, and yet, it is spring. Surely I should feel better about all of these things?

My first daffodil is blooming, in the front yard. I don't feel better.

I'm figuring out how to upload things but oops, I think I missed the guideline about file sizes.

Anyway. Pansies, from last year.

I posted a review of this book already on my livejournal and it was mostly squeeing and babbling. As I am soon to be embarking upon a new bit of career as a columnist (I'll spill the beans once there's beans to be spilled), I thought I should try my hand at a serious review.

So, instead of spamming my friendslist there with what amounts to a duplicate post, I thought I'd put it here. It's a bit long-- 920 words-- and I'd cut it down, but I've already spent too long on it and need to go do some Real Work.

Don't Look Down, by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer. St. Martin's Press, hardback, MSRP $24.95

Jennifer Crusie, bestselling author of original, witty, post-Chick-Lit fiction, was stuck. Stuck in the middle of an uncooperative manuscript, stuck in the middle of a successful but unmoving career, stuck in the depths of an undiagnosed bout of depression.

Bob Mayer, despite having over two million books in print, producing some of the most tightly-written and authentic military thrillers on the market, was making his living teaching other writers how to get published.

One morning in Maui, Crusie sat next to this grim, taciturn fellow conferencegoer, and he said, "We should collaborate." She thought he was kidding.

But lurking beneath the witty romantic comedies was a neglected PhD thesis on gender difference in fiction, and when Crusie's daughter pointed out that the grim, taciturn fellow might have been serious, Crusie went back to him and said, "You know, we really should."

Two years and endless bickering later, the fruits of their labor have finally seen the light of day. It's high-concept, easy-reading, entertainment-heavy post-Chick-Lit. She wrote the heroine's point of view and all the Yucky Emotional Crap, as Mayer dubbed it, while he wrote the hero's point of view and all the guns and violence. It's a Romantic Adventure, and under the glossy cartoonish Chick Lit-style dustjacket, the hardback has a camoflage cover.

Another thing the pair did right was to start a collaborative blog (www.crusiemayer.com/blog). Previously each had maintained a blog: Crusie wrote about shoes and life and and trying to diet and trying to write, while Mayer wrote one-line deadpan blurbs updating fans on the publication dates of his books. But, combined, they exploded into a dense, wordy cornucopia of serious reflections, whimsical tales, frazzled panics and wry observations all interwoven with inside jokes and heavily tinged with an unfakeable genuine depth of emotion and spirit. This blog has attracted a loyal following of readers and commenters, who have become more than fans: they are supporters. Dubbed "Cherry Bombs" after the crusiemayer logo (a cherry, Crusie's longtime logo, with a fuse instead of a stem, connected to one of those plunge-handle detonators), these supporters have taken it upon themselves to help the pair promote the book.

Ah, the book. Is the book any good?

Fascinatingly enough, the book shares the strengths of the blog: two strong characters and writing that sparkles with wit. Crusie and Mayer have very similar writing voices: apparently he hit upon the idea of the collaboration after noticing that her speech patterns were very similar to his. So there is no jarring contrast between the parts one wrote and the parts the other wrote. But the characters: the characters are strong and distinct, and in a Romance Adventure, that's pretty important.

Crusie wrote the scenes from the heroine's point of view. The heroine is a film director named Lucy Armstrong, who starts off the book on a movie set she's just agreed to take over, realizing that the situation is much more complicated than the quick, easy money she'd thought it to be. Into the mess flies a black helicopter containing the hero, one Captain J.T. Wilder, a Green Beret whose point of view is written by Mayer. Wilder takes even fewer words than Lucy to realize that this situation is far, far more complicated than the quick easy money he'd signed up for as the star's stunt double: he's got it pinned in the first three syllables.

Then the CIA gets involved, and the Russian mob, and a sniper, and a one-eyed alligator, and a five-year-old who is more of a heroine than the heroine herself. So you take a military suspense thriller about the Special Forces, lay it over a Romance plot, shake well, and see what settles out. It's a hectic ride, on a compressed timeline: the romance plot has to move at the pace dictated by the adventure plot, which means that the heroine's Yucky Emotional Crap has to move on fast-forward, and her family issues need to be revealed and resolved in the time allotted before the bullets start flying. And the romance? Well, let's just say it's not a deep and subtle, slow-moving courtship.

It worked a little unevenly for me. Wilder was excellent, consistent and believable and, most importantly, hot. He was Manly and Strong, and also Sarcastic, and yet his more vulnerable, emotional moments came through nicely without being girlified. The only problem I found with his characterization was that he came across as younger and somewhat more innocent than he was meant to.

Lucy was more difficult: she was meant to be a Strong Woman, but had so much emotion piled onto her in such a compressed timeline that it was tough to find any room to let her be stoic.

The secondary characters were skillfully drawn, including a well-written child of five who managed to be a princess without being either annoying or unbelievable. There were a few slightly gimmicky things about the plot, repetitions and hooks and themes, that I am not used to-- but having read the blog, I knew about them already, and it gave me an added sense of being In The Fandom. Any Cherry Bomb worth her Blogger ID will know instantly about the Lasso of Truth, Moot, coin checks, or "taking one for the team", and to read them in the book and finally have them in context-- well, it adds a dimension to the book that would not otherwise be there.

Likewise the sound of Velcro offscreen in the sex scene: if you've read the blog, you know what that's about. It is never explained onscreen. But it is hilarious.