Nice Day; Kinda Chilly

Illustration Attribution:    www.scenicreflections.com

100,278

I knew my blog would roll over in the past 24 hours. And it did. If even ten percent actually read it, I would be thrilled, but it is not a blog many people comment on.  I think that I use it to make statements, and should try harder to engage readers.

I would like to go back and see where it changed, but I probably won't. Anyway, thanks to all of you for stopping by and y'all drop by and say hi again.

Dichotomy

I love this.  I don't know if I would say it is beautiful, but it touches me.

I also love this.  I think this is beautiful.  I would love this to be my parlor, but the crow picture would not fit in.  Yet the crow picture is totally all about my blog.  And my head.  I think this explains a lot.  But I am the only one who benefits from the explanation. 

The person who lives in this parlor would like this:

This is by Rene' Lalique and I think it is perfectly exquisite, but I would be very uncomfortable wearing it. 

Well, I am just rambling today and trying to settle some of my thoughts. 

Image Attribution:  all from my Pinterest board "Beauty" where you can find further documentation of these images and see a bunch of neat stuff. 

Let's Be Reasonable

To me, this is like mourning the passing of the Measles epidemic cuz then you get fewer days off school.

I cannot see ANY connection between the popularity of electronic publishing and the death of libraries, Mr. Patterson.  Please explain that to me.

And let me explain to you that an epub is not a book. It is an electronic file.

There are no more engraved tablets because: books!!  Oh, wait a sec. Cemeteries, corner stones, memorial plaques, etc.

But I did see that story about the monks picketing Gutenberg because they would lose their jobs illuminating manuscripts.

There are no more wagon trains cuz of Amtrak. Well, they aren't doing so well.  Maybe trucks and airplanes would fit better.  And cargo crates and Wal-mart.

And, seriously, did you finish Blood Meridian?  I kinda can't see it.  But I did read Along Came a Spider if  you want to talk about literature.

"Witty."  "Exquisite."  "Crazy good read." "Read it straight through."  "Didn't want anyone to get hurt."  "Someone should have been shot."  "Some of the sex was a little strong."  "Fast, fun read."  "Has the makings of a great novel."  Oh, wait.  That's my work.

The Taking of Andersen1-2-3

Demure Granny

I promised someone I would tell this story, and I am willing to be as realistic as I can recall while avoiding harming anyone.

Just as an integral part of my personality disorder, I very much want this story told. I recently parted ways with a long time friend because I decided she was being friends with who she knew or thought she knew and that person was not me. She didn't even know me. Well, maybe she did and I didn't like the me she knew, but in reality, I believe she had no clue as to who I was or why. I have never had a problem being me and never wanted to be anyone else. That sometimes leads to TMI. You can check the box at the end.

I was cute in high school. Middle level clique. Friends with the "hoody" kids, and some of the uppity ups. Dated. Not much til jr. year, but a lot sr. year. Mostly "boyfriends" and making out in the alley or the forest preserve or someone's basement. I was terribly, 'skip grades' smart, but I was not very "nice". I took a guy away from someone just to see if I could and then dumped him cuz I didn't like him. Both parties sicced their sisters on me for that.

At my ten year reunion a guy said, "I wish I knew you were going to turn out like this". Ultimate left-handed compliment. I was pretty much coming into full flower.  Just before I turned 30 something terrible happened to my marriage. His sin. The usual. Begged me to stay married, and I did. But I had a score to settle.  I had a job and met this high school foot ball hero rich guy blonde who never noticed me in high school. We had a two year fling with all the worst complications you could imagine. My husband even said at a social gathering, "That guy's in love with you." I'd be at my mom's house in Michigan and he would call me. My mom never asked, but said, "Tell him not to call here." His wife would call me.  I got sick of him, heard him lying to his wife. Business problems, lied to his superiors. Asked me to lie. I called the person back and told real story. We both left that job.

I said, "Your wife needs you to take care of her. I have someone already. Good bye." My spouse was a bank VP and we were flush.  High school jock ended in the news for giving municipal contracts for kick backs. He walked into my office one day and I told him to find a new girlfriend. "It will be very exciting."

He drove by me a few years later in traffic. He kind of was following me. When I turned off the highway I waved. I had my four year old in the car. I know he wonders about that.

High school reunion web site, he has a pasty smushy face and same wife. I left marks.

The Death of Pride

Anyone who has seen the photos of those thugs in Benghazi getting ready to castrate our Ambassador while he was still alive, and taking pictures with their cell phones must know we are all playing ostrich. You have to know that. Valerie Jarret disarming Marine guards. Hired spin doctors. Hillary saying, "What difference does it make?"

Here is the difference:   Americans used to be able to hold up their heads and be proud of our Nation.

I weep.

Image Attribution:


bellatrix25.blogspot.com

www.dailymail.co.uk

Five Feet of Heaven in a Pony Tail

I think it is because of the time I grew up in. My grandma used to take me to the Novena at Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica. I think we would go on the bus. I would have to research how far it was from our home, but I won't. She knew I was obnoxious and fidgety, but she didn't want to go alone, and I was available.

There was Care, Devotion, a Crush, falling in Love, Crazy about someone, being in Love, Loving, being Loved, being Cherished, Adored, Worshipped, making Love,  Nuts about someone, Obsessed, being the Love of someone's life, at least for a few weeks. All words tossed about, referring to your  brother's friend, the guy down the block, someone on a movie screen or a television, a teacher, your boyfriend, your husband, your child, a pet, a painting, a singer, a city. How are you supposed to know what love is? We read a book, I think in college, I think in Philosophy, The Art of Love. It certainly didn't have anything to do with sex, and, frankly, I have no recollection of a single word of it. But the cover was red.

The only thing I know about love is that, for sure, when we were talking about someone wanting to take someone dear from me, and that dear someone climbed on my lap and I gently circled that tiny, dear, cool, little arm with my hand, the thing I felt in my whole being was Love.

MY BLOG

I do not remember when I first heard about blogs and blogging.  I never did much organized writing before that if I could possible avoid it.  But if I had to do a paper on something I cared about, or was writing someone a letter, I would go on and on.  There were even times in my life when I "submitted".  Of course not successfully, as we well know, or I would probably have several Pulitzers under my belt and a few really good movies playing on your local screen. But I received actual professional encouragement.  Have you?   Anyway,  it became what it is.  A place for me.  A place that people visit.

I have only the vaguest idea of what an algorithm is, and I know there is one on Amazon that is good to me.  But I would really like to know the algorithm that brings visitors to my blog cuz there is definitely no rhyme or reason to it.  I know how to pull a few strings if I start to fall below the horizon, but I get these huge numbers when I have done nothing or think I have nothing.  Well, I am not going to analyze it cuz it is all just kind of fun for me.

Sometimes I really need to let loose with a bunch of stuff that bothers me, but usually I just blather.  As you well know.

There is one thing I am going to pay attention to, though.  I actually worked on my work in progress tonight.  I have been having huge problems with it.  I wrote a bunch of junk just to put words down, which is supposed to be rule number one:  Just Write.  So, tonight, looking at it, some of it was salvageable and some actually useful.  Not "good".  I have written some stuff that I felt was "good" and I get specific reactions to that, so I can kind of judge myself.  But I wrote.  I edited.  I corrected.  I deleted.  And there are two more things I have to put in it.  I know what they are and I am not worried about that part.  What I always have trouble with is having the person "here" where I wanted them to be and where I put them and getting them to "there" where I want them to be and where they have to be.  So I am making progress there and am starting to think I may actually be able to launch this one last book before I head to the happy hunting grounds.

And this time, I am going to notice if this blog has any influence on what happens after I publish. My blog is now a different entity.

So we shall see.

Not too much keeps the old bird up and running these days.  Now that Delaney uses polysyllabic words and wears big girl pants, I feel it is pretty much all over for me. And I am getting sick of Barney's incessant wonderfulness.  I do have an idea about a different tangent, and a fun thing I might do to put Amazon through its paces.  So maybe there is life in the old girl yet.


Image Attribution:  smugnom.com

All About Me

Crisis of Conscience

Well, I am NOT in the mood to be subtle, so I guess I just better hope this is not read by any detectives.

You know that story about the wisdom of King Solomon? The two women were fighting over who had the rights to the baby, so King Solomon said, "How 'bout we just slice the baby in half ?" So the person that really loves the baby says, "Don't cut the baby in half.  She can have it."  And King Solomon says, "Well, you love the baby more so you can have it."

So this is like a moral dilemma. Suppose a group of people are banding together to slice up your heart and your soul.  Would you play dirty pool just cuz they choose to?  Should you drag out the big guns?  If you knew the name of the grade school teacher that writes erotica on the side, would you reveal that?  Would you threaten to?  Would that be blackmail?  Even if you felt it was totally justified to survive their onslaught, to save yourself?  To save all that was important to you?  Stuff that is meaningless to them.  They are just doing it for spite.  Would you threaten to tell the guy that hides his marijuana stash in your garage to keep his wife from knowing that she will learn about it if he doesn't back down, if he doesn't take a different tack?  Would you talk it up in all the right social circles about the engaged couple that are seeing a urologist to get the husband-to-be wired up with a penis pump?  If you heard all these things with no warnings or stipulations, is it fair game?  If they go ahead and continue to attack you, when you know and they know you are undeserving of it, should you just reveal all?  Should you warn them of what may be in store?  Should you sit like a little mouse with your Christian conscience and let them ride rough shod over you?  My Christian conscience tells me to be a swell guy and keep all the dirty little secrets and hope Karma sorts it out.  (Yeah.  I know the Karma thing doesn't meld with the Christian conscience, but it is my mind, so get over that.)  But the subject of my quandary is far too precious to gamble with.

These are real issues that the midwestern grandmother faces daily.  Someone made a remark about one of my novels.  "Enjoyable read, but I don't know if it would play out in real life."  Wanna bet?  Does each and every Mr. or Mrs. Tom, Dick and Harry America have this shit raining down on them all the time?  Or is it just me?  Maybe it is my own misperception.  But I do have court documents bearing out this tale of woe and disconsternation.

Weigh in.  I am actually thinking of taking steps to erase the problem completely.  I discussed with someone just today what would be the outcome of my court ordered mental eval.  Would I live out the few short days left to me in a prison or in a mental ward?  Would it matter?  Actually, not at all to me if it served to preserve some of the things  that I find the most precious meaning in after all other considerations.

Strange how looking down the barrel of a gun can distract you from all the other weapons aimed at you.


Image Attribution:   asitoughttobe.com

What’s wrong with buying your way onto the bestseller list?

What’s wrong with buying your way onto the bestseller list?

Let's Talk About Covers

This is a copy of a post I put up in January. I just wanted to add another example of a professional cover used by a best-selling, traditionally published author to illustrate the importance of paying a large sum of money to have a beautiful, relevant cover. And, yeah, I am bitter. I spent hours on my new cover yesterday  and have apparently forgotten everything I knew about my photo manipulation program. I couldn't even make a text box which is the easiest part of it.

One of the things some people insist on is that, if you are self-published, you must at least spend some money on a good cover.  I won't.  I bought a Getty Image early on and it pixelated.  I spend a lot of time talking to customer service about it and discussing it with various other humans.  Everyone had a reason, but then I see that very picture I used in some blog or Pin or something I wrote and there it is HUGE.  Huge and unpixelated.  So now, I do screen shots, copy image, mess around with that photo manipulation program that I bought (which is not PhotoShop but has a smudging tool, which is really all you need), incorporate, and yeah, steal.  I DO, honestly, make every attempt possible to attribute.  That is just the way I am.  And the one picture I out and outright snitched is not in use by me any more.  So you can unknot your skivvies.  There are two covers on Barnes and Noble for my work that SUCK.  This is because of size requirements and impatience.  I shall, when I am in the right mood, put beautiful corrected covers up, but it apparently doesn't make much difference since I sell more on Barnes and Noble than anywhere else.  (Which really doesn't say much.)

So, first of all, the size requirement thing is so much baloney since I have seen with my own eyes that anything can be manipulated into any other thing.  How many times have you looked at a pin on Pinterest that was all blurry, and you wait a few seconds for it to resolve, and it doesn't?  Me -- more than once.  And another time there will be a long list of tiny photos that someone pinned, like the cats at war, and you enlarge one of those tiny thumbnail photos and you can read the number on the cat's rabies tag.

And secondly, there is a thing about originality.  Despite the fact that some big selling authors leave all the cover design and stuff like that to the publisher, probably thinking  the publisher should do that since he gets $7.00 for every book sold and the author gets $1.17, still, you will find an amusing and well-written piece on that delightful site Smart Bitches, showing that several different, very big selling romance novels have exactly the same cover illustration only it is reversed on one or the dress is a different color on another, or a desert is placed in the background where another has an ocean, or a forest, or a frozen expanse of tundra.  This goes on ALL the time.  And nobody does anything about it, and the huge selling author says, "Sigh."

This got me going tonight because I noticed the cover on Steven King's Joyland and I was pretty sure it is a copy of a vintage pulp fiction work with a title concerning something about red heads being sinners.  I thought I had it posted on my beautiful, extensive, entertaining Redheads board on Pinterest, but I could not find it, so I am not able to provide evidence that the picture was cribbed.  Besides, if Mr. King wanted to use someone else's photo, he sure would pony up whatever it cost cuz that is just the way he is.  And he was going for that Noir effect and he captured it perfectly.  So, that was just a blip on my horizon, a horizon filled with blips I must explore in order to keep my self from actually typing out the last two chapters of my sensational new novel that is bouncing around, fully developed inside my head.

Thirdly, but not finally there is this:

And this:

The final point I was going to make was about people who paint their own covers or have Auntie Elsie paint an appropriate one for them, but I want them to keep on doing that cuz I am very familiar with self-delusion and am not about to call anyone else out on it.

So when you want to talk about covers, I don't listen.  If you don't like my cover and don't pick up my book to read, well, that's okay.  They were fun to write.  

Thanks for stopping by.  Yeah.  I am still here. 

The Big Hack

First, I offer you my sincerest apologies.   If whatever hijacked my accounts affected you, I am very sorry.  I see today that many people, including my bank, received a big red warning sign when they got the affected email.  Mine was from my cousin and did not bear a warning so I had no way of knowing it was infected.

I have changed all my passwords and stuff, but today I see that it has even affected some of my twitter contacts.  If you still have trouble, I can only suggest changing your passwords.  My bank suggested opening new email accounts, but that would be a disaster for me.  Not that this hasn't been so far. 

Please forgive me.  I was naive and careless.  I hope those are forgivable offenses.  

Image attribution:

robot6.comicbookresources.com

POV: Educate me, please!

"The dragon snarled. Jenny was terrified but Tommy felt unusually brave and protective."

What is the point of view of the above quote?  I have been led to believe it is third person omniscient. It seems to me the point of view is that of the person observing the scene.  It tells about three different characters, even what they are thinking.  I could go on and add conversation (dialogue) between Jenny and Tommy.  I could put Tommy said, Jenny said, but in many cases that is unnecessary.  

"The dragon snarled at us.  Jenny was terrified but I felt unusually brave and protective."  First person POV, right?  We are hearing the story from Tommy's view point.  I am very uncomfortable with this.  I know it is appropriate for many stories and that it is the dominant POV in YA.    I can read it, but if I stop to analyze, how does Tommy know Jenny is terrified?  Maybe she is thrilled out of her mind because she is crazy about dragons and wants to befriend this one.  Or maybe the dragon is snarling only at Tommy because he is already great pals with Jenny. 

I do not have an enormous supply of reviews to draw from, but in general this is the only criticism I get consistently about my writing -- that I change POV, sometimes within the same sentence.

Is this an age issue?  I grew up with The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland.  They are stories that are "told".  It just wouldn't affect me the same way if I read, "Suddenly I found myself falling down a hole under the tree.  I guess it was made by that rabbit I just saw."  But this is the way most YA stories are written, so maybe that is what this generation is used to. And, in the case of Jenny, Tommy and the dragon, there are infinite possibilities to add more words to your story while you explore Jenny explaining to Tommy that no, she isn't terrified.  Take my word for it.  She is terrified because I wrote her as terrified.

One person actually said, in a review, that she couldn't finish my book (although she felt it started out with possibilities, she did admit) because sometimes it seemed as though the narrator was telling the story.  And, as you know I have said many times, telling the story as opposed to what?  Waiting in the car? Did she never read Johnny Gruelle or L. Frank Baum? I like to tell stories.  I write revisionist history basically, with lots of fictitious elaboration.  It comes so easy to me.  I better not give YA a whirl.  And here I thought all along that the genre was so named because of the ages of the characters in the story or the age of the target audience. Yeah. . . Some day I will have to tell the story of the sixth grader who asked the librarian where the DuMaurier's were stacked. 

Am I losing readership because of my POV?  If I am, then I guess I will just bring the curtain down. I like the god-like position of telling the story.  Actually, I even had God weigh in on one of them, and I was able to put words into his mouth.  What power!!

Well, whatever floats your boat, eh?  Or whatever turns you on, or rings your bell.  My work has rung a few bells, but maybe that came from old fogies like me that could pretend they were listening to a story as they read. And, when Kevin Spacey turns to the audience and weighs in with his first person remarks, a lot of people find that artificial and are uncomfortable with it. That appears to be sort of a dichotomy.  First person on paper, third person on screen?  I think he carries it off very well, but I am a huge fan of artifice.

Could you let me know what you think of POV?  Not just by definition, but why you prefer to read or write a specific perspective.  Or, perhaps elaborate by showing me (rather than "telling', but don't get me started with that one) where a certain POV is more appropriate than another.  When I write non-fiction, does POV even apply?  God. I am panicking here.  I used footnotes once.  I'm gonna end up in court.  See how confused I am?

Image attribution: www.leadformix.com 

This Day

Oh, come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.

Peace, love, and joy to all of you.

That Red Rascal!!

Illustration courtesy of Chicago Tribune.  Original Copyrights apply. 

BOOKS

The local library probably has more actual "books" inside their doors than the last "bookstore" you were in.   Still, most of them are now lending e-books and actual e-reading devices,  and I am sure they are not lying awake all night worrying if they are doing the right thing.  Which thing? Take your pick.  This is going to be kind of like those books you buy in the gas station when you are on a long road trip and they fill in the blanks in the story and then you are supposed to laugh or marvel.

Anyway, it is moot.  Libraries run on tax dollars, right?  Not counting the tote bags they sell and the money that they get from over due fines, and from the used book sale and that box in the corner of the hall full of unclassifiables that are twenty five cents a piece.  Oh, no.  Wait.  Now those are free.  They have the unclassifiables shelved and priced now.

(Aside)  I used to take a book I owned and had finished reading and put it on that shelf.  Hardcovers 50 cents, paperback, 25 cents.  One day I got "caught".  You have to put it in a special slot so it can be catalogued.  A person does this, a library employee, paid with your tax money.  Not a volunteer.  I asked her why they decided to do it that money wasting way and were they afraid someone would not put down the quarter or the two quarters that they were charging for books people left off for free? I guess our town is so safe and secure that they do not have a training program at the library for new hires on how to deal with the local anarchist.  I just set my book on the shelf while making a noise that I hope sounded like a wry chuckle and not a threat and left.  She can stick it in the slot herself.

Anyway, I just read another article about how Penguin is determined to crush the world of publishing and reading under their heel, or maybe that is the wrong metaphor.  Maybe Penguin is actually trying to bring the world of publishing to its knees.  Heels, knees, what ever. Now they will not give the author of the book a copy of his own book pre-release, unless he pays  $300. Why did he NOT upload his MS to Adobe Books before he sent it to them? Well, someone said then he is not seeing any of the final edits. Lora Leigh sells like hotcakes, and you would go through two red pencils sitting and editing any of her books just for fun. The same rule applies to the cover art, or the facsimile of the actual cover, or something.  And everyone is ringing in, which is I guess what I am doing here, and wringing their hands about rights and DRM and piracy.

I am small potatoes.  I do no promo and I drop off the map in two or three months.  But I did enough business back in the day when I cared about being a writer to win a spot in someone's algorithm so if someone buys even one of my titles, my rating jumps way up.  Of course that probably doesn't mean anything to most of you since you don't know anything about purchasing one of my titles since you have no experience at that sort of thing. (Yeah. Bitchy.) During one promotion when I was able to offer Sacred Sin for free, I had over 6,000 downloads.  The day after the freebie was over I had eight cash sales (no returns) and shortly thereafter, in one day, which I remember clearly, cuz it never happened again, I had thirty two cash sales of different titles. I have had (few) cash sales in Germany, France, and Italy and I do pretty good in New Zealand for some reason. I am building up to this.  As an Indie I may have had equal or less success than most, but most of the stats I have read state that I have sold more than the average Joe E-pubber.  Well, actually it said I made more money than Joe.  And this is my point.  I am on Pirate sites. Some let you download a PDF for free.  I saw one the other day that was charging more for my Anymore than I do.  I don't see a cent of that money.  I actually find it flattering.  They go on about DRM which has been a non-issue for at least four years.  You can find how to break DRM in dozens of places on the net.  They talk about having a real publisher, a real agent, a real book.  I net more on a single copy of my book than almost anyone who goes through the traditional method.  Unless it keeps selling for years, like Harry Potter but not like Shades of Gray which is already dropping out of sight.

I cannot understand the furor they are trying to create.  It is like they are screaming from the bottom of a well and there is a hurricane roaring right over head of that well.  I know they have to try.  I know there are firm believers, but how many JKRowlings come along?  Not enough to make more than one publishing house happy. That David Foster Wallace was goopy and he is gone.  Did you read him?  Did you try?  I tried.  I think I checked out a Franzen but returned it unread.  I read this book that knocked my socks off about this guy that was having weird dreams and deja vus and then a missile crashed into his office building and I never saw a review of it and I cannot remember the title much less the author's name.

Maybe I will never publish another book.  Maybe I am a flop.  Maybe I am jealous.  But that is all about me trying to be an author.  Me being a reader, I have the creds.  And I know these people are barking up the wrong tree.  (That happened just before they fell in that well. )

Did you see that movie Happy Feet? They inserted a huge electronic tracking module into the body of this famous dancing penguin and he was happy. There is surely a metaphor in there somewhere.

Image attribution:  Life-Is-But-A-Stage.blogspot.com

UCLA Protesters Call Good Grammar Racist

UCLA Protesters Call Good Grammar Racist

The Clueless Side of Marriage

I am going to try to move the posts from what I wanted to be another separate blog over here. I kind of can't get the mileage out of it that I had hoped for.   I will post them separately and try to put them in the right order.  If I copy them all into one post it will be quite long and I know some of you prefer the twitter-like postings.  I tend to go on and on, no matter what.  So there will be four or five repeats.  But I like them and want to share them with you.  I would appreciate your comments as, so far, my remarks have made some folks very unhappy.

You Probably Won't Tell Him; Chapter One

There are so many things that women know, either from experience or education, that men will never know.  In most cases, it would not matter if we revealed these things to them because they would not understand.  This is partly genetic, and partly because of the male to female language barrier, and surely, in some instances at least, directly attributable to the male art of selective hearing.

I am going to explore this phenomenon in this blog.  Some of the revelations will be personal, some conjecture, and some reader contribution.  I will not differentiate for you.  

Also share your arguments, should you disagree with my content.  Some of that will definitely be used for blog fodder. You can also do this in the captcha free comment area.

There is a confidential blog for women in which they are guaranteed anonymity.  The Secret Society of Women. You can read the most amazing stuff there. It has its usual share of arguments about cloth versus disposable diapers, global warming, what have you read lately, why I don’t want to have kids, what a cute thing Poopsie did to the back of my couch, etc.  Its many forums cover just about anything.  It regularly lists the porno sites that they feel, or their contributing readers feel, are the most female friendly.  The site, and others like it, (Google!!)   cover a wide variety of sexual orientation and taste. For the record, this particular blog I have named has been hacked twice, at least to my knowledge, and males have tried to pass off the most outrageous contributions and remarks as female.  They have also attacked, as male, some of the content.  This is just a note to remind you that, on the Internet, you probably should never assume you are sharing something that you don’t want attributed or associated with yourself.

It is amazing to me, even now, after many, many years of marriage, what a woman will not tell her husband.  Some of it, I am positive, is best left unsaid.  Some of it might be helpful to the general well-being of the actual marriage if it was shared.  Much of it, the guy involved, and I cannot speak for homogenous unions, although I am sure this applies in some respects,  does not care about and wishes you had never brought it  up at all. Sometimes you might hear, “Why didn’t you tell me that”, this usually at the marriage counselors, or “I wish you didn’t tell me that” this, I can only assume, while he stares in disbelief at your tear-stained face.

In each case the woman must make the decision on her own, and this is not an easy call.  Many times the woman is the share everything type of person and spouts lots of extraneous gobbledy gook that goes, for the most part,  ignored.  The husband in most cases learns when to tune out.  Maybe he will miss something important or useful, but that is the way the game is played.  Like it or leave the field. She also has to consider the husbands nature before she spews.  Maybe he is the laissez-faire kind of guy, or maybe hearing about your third boyfriend will cause him to have a performance crisis.  I am pretty sure, if your instinct is not to share, you should not share.  Don’t for a minute think, no matter how long you have known this person, that you “know” him.  I think this applies to any every day relationship.  The person you think you know may be a long way from what that person is.  And the face they present to you is what they want you to see.  As the facets of the personality are revealed, deliberately or not, you again have to make judgments about what you can tolerate or what is a game ender for you.

Let me start off by sharing a few bon mots from some of the supposedly confidential sources.

A woman wrote in that she was longing to experiment with  the more extreme version of the three-way.  Many, many forums discuss the three-way, so this part should not be news to you.  You can read about them and glean whatever you need or want to know about them in many places..  For example, I kid you not, it has been scientifically shown that observing the sexual play between two men and a woman causes more motility in sperm than the observation of the play of two women and one man.  Take that how ever you wish.  Anyway, in this particular scenario, the woman desired to experience double penetration and was asking for advice as to how she could broach this subject with the husband, and how to select the third party without endangering the dynamic of the family she was currently a part of.  The general consensus was that, if the husband went for it, preceded by the bigger if she was able to broach the subject, the third party should be a stranger that you could trust.  A pretty unbelievable and probably unavailable expediency.

My informed guess is that, in most cases, the wife would keep this desire to herself and would fear to bring up the subject at all.  And, I further conjecture without any back up info, that the guy is at work complaining how he never gets laid anymore.

In another forum, rich with personal secrets and information, Cafe Mom, initials are used to designate in a kind of shorthand who you are referring to.  DH is dear husband, DD is dear daughter, and so on.  After reading sporadically over a year or two, I was confounded  by the reference EA.  Then, by context, I determined that it stood for Extramarital Affair.  In itself, I think, and kinda hope, you would take pause at how often this reference is made.  But, more and more lately I am hearing, “That goes on all the time.  People just don’t talk about it.”  Someone told me the story of the upheaval in their family and ended the story with, “That probably goes on all the time.  It is just that no one talks about it.”  When relating the tale to another party (those stories are always very interesting),  the person to whom I  spoke said, “That probably goes on all the time.  It is just. . . etc.”

But in off-handed remarks, I have learned that there are many reasons for this occurrence — an occurrence that is publicly considered a deal-breaker, and religiously and culturally a no-no.  And one thing I know for sure, it is not related to the quality or quantity of sexual attention at home.  I have heard for years that most men have extramarital affairs most often for emotional reasons.  Yeah. (coff-coff). Here is the skinny from the grape vine.  If you have had three kids and have gone through a rigorous self improvement program and have achieved amazing results, the person from whom you will hear, “You look amazing.  I cannot believe what good shape you are in,” will be the EA. The closest I have ever heard of this type of compliment from a husband was a  bit left-handed.  A young mother who took exceptional care of her post-child birth body was asked by her husband to wear those new tight yoga pants to a work related social gathering.

And, tell me, ladies. Would it mean ANYTHING at all if you had to say to your husband, “Didn’t I do a good job of getting my figure back?” and he said, “Yeah.”