FREEBIE

ANYMORE is free on May first and second.

I may have mentioned the wrong book in a few  places and I apologize, but this is the deal.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007O47VIE

You will find it somewhat different and smaller than my previous work.  I hope you will participate and enjoy.

Excerpt from Sacred Sin

Of course, it was only a matter of days until Barney knew she was back in town.  One morning, Sarah brought the mail in, including this week’s “US” magazine.  On the cover were two side by side photos, one of Daniel getting off the plane in England and one of Jenny and the kids, getting off the plane at O’Hare.  The caption read, “Trouble in Paradise?” and, within, a long article with photos of Daniel with his split lip and Jenny crying.  Barney was on his way out the door to go to work and took a minute to glance at it.  “I’ll drive by and see if she’s okay.”  And he dashed out the door.

The kids were on the lawn and Jenny was sitting in the side yard writing on her computer.  When the huge red truck pulled up and the huge guy got out, she hit ‘save’ and started across the lawn.  As he ran toward her he thought, “If the house was on fire, she would remember to hit ‘save.’”

The kids were terrified, especially little Maisie who began to cry and run to her mommy just as Jenny literally jumped into Barney’s arms.  “Oh my God.  You look so wonderful.  The glasses.  You’ve put on weight.  You look wonderful.  Oh my God.  I’m so glad to see you!”

“Jenny.  What did you do to your hair?  Are you alright?  You weigh nothing.  What’s going on with you?”

“Just a sec,” she said, as she stepped away to pick up sobbing little Maisie.  She turned away from Barney and put her cheek against the baby’s and whispered to her, Maisie’s tears wetting Jenny’s face and their copper curls comingling.  The baby’s crying ceased the moment she felt the safety of her mother’s embrace.  The sight of them--each end of the spectrum of all that was true in his life,  Maisie, the perfect replica of the nemesis of the kindergarten Barney, and Jenny, the only image he carried in his soul--stabbed into him, love spiraling into itself, redoubling and ripping a hole in his chest where his heart had been.

He felt full of some ancient knowledge, but as though his life was renewed.  “Not my kid.  Not my kid. . .” his brain kept trying to remind him.  But he knew that this icon before him was his only truth.  He knew he was seeing Jenny’s reality, if only for a second, her truest person, and he knew he would never be anything more to her than her soldier, her bastion, her anchor.  But he realized that was all he was meant to be and she needed that.  And her need for him, born when she took her first steps and reached for his hand, drawing her to him in the troubled nights of her adolescence, and now her child reflecting the intensity of her love, brought him a sense of purpose he had never known.  He knew that he was the part of her that finally let her be unafraid to give her love.  And he knew he would be rooted to this spot in time, in his life, in his soul, forever.  He chuckled slightly, “And was this one cloned in a Petri dish?”

(This is one of my favorite parts.  It ties all my books together. Sacred Sin will be free to download on May first and May second, 2012.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005H3EW3Q

Seriously

I keep saying Barnes and Noble bring me the most sales, but I promise not to let it go to my head.

Argument

Every now and then I will jump into a comment thread on a blog that has gone on so long and gotten so far off track it is ridiculous.  I have prided myself on being able to bring some of these long-winded discussions to a crashing halt.  Now, it's like why bother.  The truth is the people just want to see the ink.  I have admitted that I have been guilty of it.  I call it being a blog whore--posting just cuz you know that site will bring you hits.  I do it when I notice a dip in my stats.  It always seems to reverse the trend, but I cannot definitively say it is a cause and effect relationship.  I have blog spikes that are inexplicable and often leave me wondering what someone must have said about me somewhere that I know nothing about.

I have also commented on the fact  that people will read something in my blog and then go and blog about it like I am not going to notice where they got  the idea.  This, I know, at least on more than just a few occasions, is a fact--or ESP.  I don't even care about that.  It's kind of flattering.  But it would be nice if they just kind of in a generalized way mentioned that someone gave them this thought and they ran with it, even if they don't get specific.

The latest is the prevalence of certain terms.  Mises just finished a month long multi pager in which the main figures in the argument went off track with defining and accusing each other of the ad hominem attack.  Now I just got through another windy one where, not only did they have to pause in their tracks to make a snarky remark about my "one-liners", (A market is a market, asshole.  I don't care what you peddle.) they go completely down the side road about the fucking ad hominem attacks.  It is like the word of the week .  It is usually accompanied somewhere in the discourse with several mentions of cognitive dissonance.  The last time I saw 'cognitive dissonance' in a blog, I went in and said, "I call bullshit.  This is cognitive dissonance, not what you are referring to."  Boom.  End of thread.

Well, what should I expect?  I'm the one that keeps saying there are only 26 letters.  I always think of the millionth monkey in that room with the pianos, pounding out Beethoven. Or is it typewriters and Shakespeare?

It's been said.

Today's CTA:  What hasn't been said?

Polite Conversation

Someone actually came up to me at a family gathering recently, a cousin of a cousin that I hadn't seen in years.  She is almost exactly the same age as I am and she has a child younger than some of my grandchildren.  (Which is hard for me to imagine for many, many reasons.)  When we were all younger and used to have family parties for this or that reason, we sort of hung out cuz of our similarities in age and interests, plus I kind of liked  her older brother.  She actually asked me what happened to me, that I used to be kind of always up for a good time.


 Today's CTA:  Should I have told her?

Stop It

So now Google is farting around with my blog and facebook has that new timeline thing and it absolutely confounds me how some organization can send you an email to come and buy stuff on their website and you have to sign into the website and then they tell you that email is already taken, yeah, goofnuts, it's mine, and then they will send you an email so you can get a new password and screen name.  How the fuck did they send you the  fucking email in the first f-ing place.  For f's sake.  I'm just about through I guess.  I cannot even open the lid on the shampoo bottle anymore and I am going to need a wheel barrow if I am assigned any more pills.  I would love to sit and mess with the 26 letters, but if the chair is turned the wrong way, I can't sit down and I have to walk around the chair and turn it the other way, and by then who feels like writing some cheerful little ditty.  Not me.

Scratch That

Previous post = over medicated? Can't stop. Won't. Needed a bit of an ass-kicking, but I am fine.

Mixed feelings

This is the plan. I am going to rotate the four books through Select and rewrite each one, heavily editing the sex out of the first, at several people's suggestions, and doing new covers at least for the third. I feel like I am done being a writer. I wanted to do the four and they are done. And they pretty much are tanking. I average a sale a day. I realize that is sixty times better than no sales for months at a time, but the word of mouth thing is not working for me. I blame my personality and lifestyle for that.

But I'd like to say a few things about the "business" end of this business. I get lots of email and even phone calls that they want to tell me about this publishing deal and that. Okay. Leave me alone. I'm published. Unless you have some promo ideas, I have nothing to say to you and I don't want to listen to you. Word of mouth is the ONLY thing missing from my equation and you cannot sell me a program for that. Don't ask me to send you copies of my work. It is all out there in many different forms or places. If you can't do anything else, you can name search for me. As far as I know there is one other Virginia Llorca and she is a 23 year old girl in North Carolina.

Thanks to everyone who read my stories and double triple thanks to those who said nice things about them, and think about the Karma, especially you family members who pretend it doesn't exist or it's a whim. Read any Lora Leigh and then get back to me about MY work.

The only thing that is bothering me now is that I am toying with ideas. It is just because I am bored and am so very unused to dealing with a sense of relief. I'm trying to talk myself out of it.

Today's CTA: Do you get angry with yourself when you break promises to yourself or do you just shake it off? What do you learn from the experience? Share.

High Times

Just read an article in the Chicago Tribune that some of the drug manufacturers are getting worried because anti depressant sales are tanking. This is of great interest to me.

I am old. Not that old, but pretty fucking old. I have a copy of the ORIGINAL Whole Earth Catalog. There were many subsequent ones like the New Whole Earth Catalog, but I own one of the real ones. Most of it contains different ways of exploring how to get high. And I tried most of them. I am proud to say I have NEVER taken a hallucinogen. Really. Why would I have to? You have no idea how fucking bizarre my life has been. And, no, I am not one of those people who THINK their life has been bizarre. It has been and continues to be--at a much slower rate. My reproductive history alone, which most of you do not want to hear about, is far more bizarre and unbelievable than that of Nadya Suleiman. Trust me on this.

I take a prescription antidepressant among other things. It runs in my family. My mom and dad both took them. First Gin and then Vodka. I tried that, but I was a migraine person so it didn't work out for me so I ended up in doctor's offices instead of liquor stores. And, like there is a difference between Grey Goose and well vodka, there are differences in doctors and Rx's. One thing, did you not ever wonder why any prescription that has any kind of psycho active effect, whether it be a low dose paxil or a Lunesta or whatever, strongly advises you not to take St. John's Wort? How big a deal was it when GNC started to sell it? They would run out. Like chew on the bark of two willows and call me in the morning? So, it doesn't have to be a prescription, you know that, right?

One of the things mentioned was that magic mushrooms (Psilocybin or 'shrooms) was being investigated for the purpose of being used as an antidepressant. Like Carlos Castenada didn't already know that? Oh, man. I can't wait. I hope I live long enough to see psilocybin mushrooms on the shelf in the GNC store. Guess who will be waiting when the store opens?

Today's CTA: what makes you feel high?

blog endorsement

This is an unsolicited endorsement. There is a blog I discovered, I do not know how, called Fighting Monkey Press and I really like it for some reason. It is just the right mix of serious and profane I think.

Last Call

ANYMORE is free until midnight tonight
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007O47VIE


Here is the new cover I will put up tomorrow.

Despite all the confusion and misspelling in the links I have about 600 downloads so far and reached 42 in freebie "best seller" in Contemporary Fiction

Beating a dead horse.

Actually, I am still trying to ride the dead horse around the town. Someone read me the riot act for something I said, and I was right and they were wrong, so terribly wrong on so many levels, and I have to bring it up yet again. I don't know why just being right isn't satisfaction enough, since I sometimes, actually frequently, am right about some things. Although my statistics do grow less impressive as I age. I seem to age about a year for every day lately. Anyway:

Someone was saying how poor the earning scale was if you worked for a non-profit. This person was a bit older than ten, so I was kind of shocked. Although it is kind of sweet to learn there are still people in the world who have an innocent sort of belief in what people tell them. Illusions I think they call them. I had them once. I find it sad they are gone. I found it painful to give them up.

This is making the email rounds:

Think about these before you donate.
As you open your pockets to do a good thing and make yourself feel good, please keep these facts in mind:

The American Red Cross
President and CEO Marsha J. Evans salary for the year was $651,957 plus expenses

MARCH OF DIMES
It is called the March of Dimes because only a dime for every 1 dollar is given to the needy.


The United Way
President Brian Gallagher receives a $375,000 base salary along with numerous expense benefits.

UNICEF CEO Caryl M. Stern receives $1,200,000 per year (100k per
month) plus all expenses including a ROLLS ROYCE . Less than 5 cents of your
donated dollar goes to the cause.

GOODWILL CEO and owner Mark Curran profits $2.3million a year.
Goodwill is a very catchy name for his business.
You donate to his business and then he sells the items for PROFIT.
He pays nothing for his products and pays his workers minimum wage! Nice Guy.
$0.00 goes to help anyone!!! Stop giving to this man.

Instead give it to SALVATION ARMY.

GO "GREEN" AND PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE IT WILL DO SOME GOOD:·

The Salvation Army

Commissioner Todd Bassett receives a small salary of only $13,000 per
year (plus housing) for managing this $2 billion dollar organization. 96 percent of donated dollars go to the cause.

The American Legion
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!


The Veterans of Foreign Wars
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and
their families and youth!


The Disabled American Veterans
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!


The Military Order of Purple Hearts
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!


TheVietnam Veterans Association
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!


Please share this with everyone you can.

Calling the Girl in the Hat

Disable your comments? Can't I share my tears with you? That was amazing. Straight to the core of this heart. Someday I'll tell you the bicycle story. Or maybe I did. I think I told the Minnetonka story on Betsy's.

debut

First day freebie promo...good news. You just have to take my word for that.

paranoia or guilt

Am I being moderated out again? I wish I could enjoy my sins more.

Did I put this up already? It went up five points so lets consider it an update. And if you think this is boring, wait til anymore hits the lists. Zot.

Saturday, March 25, 2012

This is not a chart of my mood swings. If it were there would be more peaks and valleys. It is a graph of my blog hits for the week. It is nuts.

I posted about my two freebies and had the dates wrong for ANYMORE and the link wrong for THE MAZE. I post in a German forum, an Italian forum, a French forum, and I think I hit up the Spanish forum this time, so I made the mistakes international in scope.

Today was my daughter's thirtieth birthday and everyone had such a good time. It was so nice. Her little girl took some of her first steps and I got to see it. We blew bubbles in the driveway and even my dad said it was a great party. No small praise from such as he.

And now I am #92 on the Amazon best seller list of 100 for my genre. This is even with the mistakes I made. It is basically meaningless in the long run, kind of equates in my mind to having someone tell me my hair looks nice but what a great day. And while we were gone, Henry did not pee the carpet.

Louie said that Lisa called this morning and asked if the women from the courts had called to tell us we have been awarded custody of Billy. There is a terrible misunderstanding here somewhere, but still I feared coming home and finding him standing on the porch with a bag of clothes. This is a huge tragedy, but I might as well try to win the election as figure this one out. What that girl has done to people's lives is beyond horrible and when I think of the darling baby she was and how happy I was to hold her and take her for walks and watch her take a step, it is fucking heart breaking. And the one thing about getting this old is I know I cannot do a thing about it and I won't even try and I won't bother feeling guilt about it. I do feel anger toward the people that have made such a muck up of his life and thwarted all the good I did for him. But I look at Jupiter and Saturn and say "What's up with that?" and think this was a beautiful day.

Lull

I love how when these little storms die down, I am left out in the cold feeling abandoned.

I published ANYMORE, my swan song, but it is not approved yet. Probably tomorrow and then it will be free for three days. Someone told me how to preserve my indents so it looks real nice. It is very tame and I am pushing it as YA. Let's see if that makes a dif. This is totally due to a change in my meds. I think I will spend the rest of my days rotating my four works of art through Kindle Select , editing, putting on new covers, etc. I cannot imagine another story. Although near the end of this book I wanted to kill off the love interest and start a big mystery deal so you never know. I also have about five thousand words of Jenny Agnoli's first marriage which, she told her second husband, was very "dark."

Then, last night, I was thinking, I could always do a bunch of that 99cent erotica on smashwords and just not tell my family. I have a prob with the words kind of pouring out lately, so maybe I will utilize that. Fun.

Rejection letters

Feel bad when you query an agent about your most illustrious work? Sad they don't appreciate genius when they see it? Feel the whole world is being done a disservice because your wisdom and wit will not be available to them? Depressed and confused because you are beginning to realize your mission to change the history of civilization will never be fulfilled since some ignorant, misguided gate keeper doesn't fall in love with your masterpiece?

This is Hunter S. Thompson's idea for a rejection letter. He didn't actually send it. He gave it to Rolling Stone along with the piles of stuff people had send to him unsolicited. They admitted they used it a few times.


You worthless, acid-sucking piece of illiterate shit! Don’t ever send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again. If I had the time, I’d come out there and drive a fucking wooden stake into your forehead. Why don’t you get a job, germ? Maybe delivering advertising handouts door to door, or taking tickets for a wax museum. You drab South Bend cocksuckers are all the same; like those dope-addled dingbats at the Rolling Stone office. I’d like to kill those bastards for sending me your piece … and I’d just as soon kill you, too. Jam this morbid drivel up your ass where your readership will better appreciate it.

Courtesy of Futility Closet via Wikimedia

From the Playhouse

I've already been read the White Paper on why it is not nice to "shit" in the Playhouse. So I have left the Playhouse for the moment to say words that I know are not "shit" in my own house, on my own soapbox (If you don't want to read them, you can leave.) , but judgmental people also seem to be kind of quick on the draw. At least in my experience.

The organ harvesting entity in our state is corporate. Here is part of their statement regarding employment.

" Our employees enjoy competitive salaries, a team environment and business-casual workplace attire. Qualified full-time staff receive full medical, dental, vision and life insurance benefits, as well as pension and tuition reimbursement benefits and a generous time-off plan.

All of our employees work in support of our critical mission: to save and enhance the lives of as many people as possible through organ and tissue donation.

All candidates must demonstrate excellent verbal, written and interpersonal communication skills; be detail-oriented; possess the ability to handle multiple projects; and possess the ability to work independently. Basic computer skills are a must. Travel by personal auto and the ability to work outside normal business hours may be required."

A teenager gets $15.00 plus to sell t-shirts in a record store in this neighborhood. Also, a corporation may stipulate they are not for profit in order to get certain ear marked funds, but they manage to build executive type salaries into that structure. A fund raiser for Community Chest cannot live in North Oak Park on thirty grand a year.

Certain people with certain lifestyles tend to take offense at certain things. I feel this is drawing a parallel, not making a judgement. That is, of course, an exercise in semantics. I have gotten on my high horse about being treated dismissively before, and I will fight it. Say it if you want, but I do have the ammo. And as I have said before I will lend you some so the battle will at least be almost even. People say things in public about their most personal relationships, like why it is just easier to give the husband a blow job then have to explain one's thoughts on love and respect to him. They can do what ever they want in their multi layered lives. My marriage and my life in general are travesties of the case model. Maybe yours is model perfect. I don't fucking care. What I do care about is you pointing a finger of judgement at me for no reason. I did not point the finger of judgement at you, so back the fuck off.

Do you honestly think Larry Hagman or Steve Jobs were on a waiting list? Do you know all the fine print on signing the organ donor thing on your driver's license? The rules about why you can't let the EMT intubate the 92 year old stroke patient, and what you MUST do to prevent that? The ramifications of putting the tube in versus taking the tube out. I don't care what kind of environment you work in, there are people doing the same job you are doing that are way dumber and less capable than you, just as there are people doing the same job you are doing that are way smarter and way more capable. There is also a very broad spectrum among these various people regarding their moral judgement and personal prejudices or beliefs.

I am not going to go look in a book to find out if I should put a certain comma in a certain place in a certain sentence. I am not going to take what someone else "feeds" me as the truth. I am going to make my own decisions based on my personal experience, my knowledge, and carefully gleaned and weighed knowledge and opinion from other more experienced people. Then I am going to do exactly what I want and make a shit load of mistakes, errrors, wrong turns, false statements, and when I find out about it, I will apologize. I will also live with the results of my choices.

When zulily, or some like entity, asks me to post for them on my Pinterest board, that is whoring. When I post a link or a remark on Mises.org, that is whoring. When you have sex with someone you don't respect cuz he makes the car payment, or lets you come first, or whatever, that is whoring. I do not care what sex either of you are, or whether or not a priest made a gesture in front of you, or you have a piece of paper with an embossed emblem on it. Everyone is a whore for something. But that is just MY opinion, my PERSONAL feelings,and another exercise in semantics.

It is strange how you get a sense of pure hatred through the ethernet. It is so palpable, and yet, it cannot be seen or measured. Can it? And if you stopped to ask yourself why you were emitting that or receiving that feeling, you would be hard pressed for an answer. You would be. Probably not me.

THE LIST

I make constant joking reference to being on NSA's "list" because of the controversial things I sometimes say on my blog or on twitter or facebook. I follow several people on twitter because of their military affiliations. I am from a military family and married into a military family. I have posted in the past on my blogspot blog about my feelings in regard to the goings on in the middle East. My husband was stationed in the Persian Gulf for a while. He was there when the Ayotallah Khomeini died and I thought it was all going to go up in flames and, strangely, nothing happened. It turned out he was there on a sort of preparatory mission. He was in a small boat unit, supporting a Seal team (three I think, but not relevant and maybe should not even be mentioned.) They were stationed on barges and there was a small story in Time a few years later with a picture of the barge he was on and how they "actually, were never really there". I was subjected to stories of target practice on bloated dead sheep floating in the gulf and various personnel conflicts which crop up in the news even to day. It is a tangled web, that military network. He won some award and I wanted to put a mention of it in our local paper because in our very small town they did that sort of thing. He advised against it, mentioning retribution. This was around the time the school teacher who was married to a military man had a bomb placed on her minivan in California.

Someone recently posted about when the general cried in Afghanistan and I commented and retweeted the link and referred to my story on my blog "FINE WHINE" about it in 2010. I followed the person and he followed back. He also posted about how a military person might feel about our leaving Iraq in the condition it is in, and whatever the mission was in the first place. (As an aside, it is curious to me that we are pulling out when they are on the verge of going nuclear) When I retweeted this, the Iraqi Government retweeted me. I asked the person who was the source of the stories if this was for real and I have been unable to sign into his Wordpress blog which is strange because here I am signed into my wordpress blog.

This is the sort of thing that ANYBODY I know would advise me to drop and go back to writing frivolous fiction. But even in my frivolous fiction I refer to black ops agents planting micro nukes in the Hindu Kush.

I think I will go put the laundry in the drier now and check and see if the dishwasher needs to be run and work on my scrapbook and photo album and springtime wreath projects.