Delay in responding to comments and messages

I apologize for my responses being a little behind.  My daughter had surgery with some unexpected complications.  I hope to be back to making regular posts and responses in a day or two!

Literary Quote of the Day

INVITATION


If you are a dreamer, come in, 
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!


~ Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

Literary Quote of the Day

    "The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you.  To think for you.  To hang on your cross.  The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best.  T hey might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.
    Was there a more difficult lesson for a human being to learn, a paradox harder to accept?  Even though the great emotions, the great truths, were universal; even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-on-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine.  It might be complicated, it might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely - but it was the bottom line.
    It was as different for everybody as it was the same, so everybody had to take control of their own life, define their own death, and construct their own salvation.  And when you finished, you didn't call the Messiah.  He'd call you."


~ Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

Literary Quote of the Day

"...just as there are people who are prone to catching colds, there are those who are prone to becoming vampires and, vampire bite of not, that's how they'll turn out.  Sometimes it's just tough luck - or an unfortunate accident.  According to legends (and you can believe them, or not), someone likely to become a vampire is someone who:
- Was born with teeth.
- Is the seventh son or daughter.
- Ate the flesh of a sheep killed by a werewolf.
- Is a dead werewolf.
- Is the child of a vampire and a werewolf.
- Has red hair.
- Is a corpse that a dog, a cat, or a child jumped over.
- Is a child cursed by its own parents.
- Drowned.
- Was murdered, and the murderer remains unpunished.
- Was struck by lightening.
- Is different or unpopular.
- Is a liar.
- Is a wicked person.
Wow!  It's a wonder there's anyone left who isn't a vampire!  Wait a minute.  Maybe there isn't."


~ Dona Smith, Vampires

Literary Quote of the Day

"Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is considered one of the most moving and brilliantly written speeches of all time.  And the most fascinating aspect of the speech is that Lincoln wrote it on the back of an envelope while traveling by train through Pennsylvania.  Wrong!  It would be wonderful to believe this masterpiece was so divinely inspired that Lincoln dashed it off in a matter of minutes.  But the truth is, Lincoln began working on the Gettysburg Address eleven days before he gave the speech on November 19, 1863.  In fact, there are five drafts of the speech still in existence - some even written on White House stationery.  Maybe because the speech is fewer than 300 words, people have assumed he just pulled it out of his hat."


~ Leland Gregory, Stupid History

Literary Quote of the Day

"I despise you! I ought to destroy you-finish what I started when I made you. Turn you into ashes and sift them through my hands. You know that I could do it! Like that! Like the snap of mortal fingers, I could do it. Burn you as I burnt your little house. And nothing could save you, nothing at all."


~ Anne Rice, Tale of the Body Thief

Literary Quote of the Day

"He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."


~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Literary Quote of the Day

"Listen to the swaying grass
and listen to the trees.
To me the sweetest music
is those branches in the breeze.
So imagine that the lovely moon
is playing just for you -
everything makes music
if you really want it to."


~ Giles Andrede, Giraffes Can't Dance

Check out my new cover for Hearts On the Run!

Literary Quote of the Day

"I did not go away as soon as I intended.  I stayed for the night, while the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a ding-dong 'hundred and fifty up.'  Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.


Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything out of it. 


That was the bitterest thought of all!"


~ Rudyard Kipling, My Own True Ghost Story

Literary Quote of the Day

"France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.  Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.  It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history.  It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution.  But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous."


~ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Literary Quote of the Day

"Walking out in the middle of a funeral would be, of course, bad form.  So attempting to walk out on one's own was beyond the pale."


~ Steve Hockensmith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Dawn of the Dreadfuls

Literary Quote of the Day

Rockabye


Rockabye baby, in the treetop.
Don't you know a treetop
Is no safe place to rock?
And who put you up there,
And your cradle too?
Baby, I think someone down here's 
Got it in for you.


~ Shel Silvertein, A Light In the Attic

Literary Quote of the Day

"So this is heaven, he thought, and he had to smile at himself.  It was hardly respectful to analyze heaven in the very moment that one flies up to enter it...

'Where is everybody, Sullivan?' he asked silently, quite at home now with the easy telepathy that these gulls used instead of screes and gracks.  'Why aren't there  more of us here?  Why, where i came from there were...'

'...thousands and thousands of gulls.  I know.' Sullivan shook his head.  'the only answer I can see, Jonathan, is that you are pretty well a one-in-a-million bird.  Most of us came along ever so slowly.  We went from one world into another that was almost exactly like it, forgetting right away where we had come from, not caring where we were headed, living for the moment.  Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock?  A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!  And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth.  The same rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we learn in this one.  Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the limitations and lead weights to overcome.'"

~ Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Literary Quote of the Day

The Lovers' Litany


Eyes of grey - a sodden quay,
Driving rain and falling tears,
As the steamer wears to sea
In a parting storm of cheers.
    Sing, for Faith and Hope are high -
    None so true as you and I -

    Sing the Lovers' Litany:

    "Love like ours can never die!"


Eyes of black - a throbbing keel,
Milky foam to left and right; 
Whispered converse near the wheel
In the brilliant tropic night.
    Cross that rules the Southern Sky!
    Stars that sweep and wheel and fly,
    Hear the Lovers' Litany:
    "Love like ours can never die!"


Eyes of brown - a dusty plain
Split and parched with heat of June,
Flying hoof and tightened rein,
Hearts that beat the old, old tune.
    Side by side the horses fly,
    Frame we now the old reply
    Of the Lovers' Litany:
    "Love like ours can never die!"


Eyes of blue - the Simla Hills
Silvered with the moonlight hoar;
Pleading of the waltz that thrills,
Dies and echoes round Benmore.
    "Mabel," "Officers," "Good-bye,"
    Glamour, wine, and witchery - 
    On my soul's sincerity,
    "Love like ours can never die!"


Maidens of your charity, 
Pity my most luckless state.
Four times Cupid's debtor I - 
Bankrupt in quadruplicate.
    Yet, despite this evil case,
    And a maiden showed me grace,
    Four-and-forty times would I
    Sing the Lover's Litany:
    "Love like ours can never die!"


~ Rudyard Kipling, The Works of Rudyard Kipling

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Literary Quote of the Day

"'I've been coming to this universe for a long time now, and in all this time, I've seen some very stupid behavior.  But then I remind myself that you're just bags of meat doing the best you can with what you've got.  And from that perspective I guess you're doing all right, even if mostly driven by the same selfish instincts that compel all blobs of marginally sentient protoplasm.  It's just what you are, and I try not to judge you for it.'"

~ A. Lee Martinez, Monster

Literary Quote of the Day

"In 1716, the Oxford University Press printed 500 copies of a book titled Translation of the New Testament from Coptic into Latin, by David Wilkins.  Not exactly a John Grisham novel, it too 191 years to sell all 500 copies."


~ Leland Gregory, Stupid History

Literary Quote of the Day

"When Charlie arrived home from his mother's funeral, he was met at the door by two very large very enthusiastic canines, who , undistracted by keeping watch over Sophie's love hostage, were now able to visit the full measure of their affection and joy upon their returning master. It is generally agreed, and in fact stated in the bylaws of the American Kennel Club, that you have not been truly dog-humped until you have been double-dog-humped by a pair of four-hundred-pound hounds from hell (Section 5, paragraph 7: Standards of Humping and Ass-dragging)."


~ Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

Literary Quote of the Day

"'I'll end up with three healthy specimens,' Joe continued to rant.  'I don't have enough ice but I suppose I could tether a couple of you to the back of the boat.  Put life jackets on.'


'Specimens.'  the woman spit it out like she was disgusted and certainly not afraid.  'You're gonna nickel-and-dime my body parts?  Is that what you have in mind, young man?'  She was holding her ankle but it didn't stop her.  'I'll have you know that my husband was murdered for millions of dollars.  Millions.'"


~ Alex Kava, Damaged

Literary Quote of the Day

"There, however, wrapped around the base of the hill, was a monstrous white Worm, bloated and blind.  At their approach it turned a foul face upon them, and uttered the following words:


'Pay me the proof of your pain.'


Sir Luckless drew his sword and attempted to kill the beast, but his blade snapped.  Then Altheda cast rocks at the Worm, while Asha and Amata essayed every spell that might subdue or entrance it, but the power of their wands was no more effective than their friend's stones or the knight's steel: The Worm would not let them pass.


The sun rose higher and higher in the sky, and Asha, despairing, began to weep.


Then the great Worm placed its face upon hers and drank the tears from her cheeks.  Its thirst assuaged, the Worm slithered aside, and vanished into a hole in the ground."


~ J.K. Rowling, The Tales of Beedle the Bard

Literary Quote of the Day

BLAME


I wrote such a beautiful book for you
'Bout rainbows and sunshine
And dreams that come true.
But the goat went and ate it
(You knew that he would),
So I wrote you another one 
Fast as I could.
Of course it could never be
Nearly as great
As that beautiful book
That the silly goat ate.
So if you don't like
This new book I just wrote - 
Blame the goat.


~ Shel Silverstein, A Light In The Attic

Literary Quote of the Day

"He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.  He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.  He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision."


~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

True of Blood made #80 on Amazon list!

True of Blood is on one of Amazon's bestselling lists!


Amazon Bestsellers Rank:#80 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Mythology


Check it out now at http://www.amazon.com/True-Blood-Witch-Fairy-ebook/dp/B004X287VK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1307205338&sr=8-1

Literary Quote of the Day

"Miss Barett, You said we could put in your letter box Extra Credit reports on books we read outside of school and due to Midterms and horsing around I need that E. Credit!  I demand you give it to me!  Ha-ha joke!  But every little bit counts!


Three Important Myth
by Lou Martin


1. There was once a boy and girl but their familys were always arguing so naturally these two children or people would meet each other on the sly.  One day a bleeding lion came along.  Horrorfied she ran away leaving her scarf!  The lion played with it for a while and then went away.  The boy came back and seeing the bleeding scarf taught that she was killed.  Remosely he took his knife and his life!  The girl saw her boy-friend was dead and she decided to kill her self!  The 2 familys seeing their dear children dead realised how silly they were & became friends after learning a horrorful lesson.  The same conflict appears in Shakespeer.


2. Pygmalian was a myth who was a sculpture.  He was the type of man who didn't like women particulally but this story changes this.  One day he made a statue of his wife-to-be and put in everything he wanted just so and when it was finished he wanted to marry her but since she wasn't alive he couldn't very well do so.  What to do?  Pray, of course, which he did to the G----ss of love who made her alive!  From this we get My Fair Lady and others.


3. Adonis was a handsome youth from Asia Miner and Venus was the G----ss of love.  She use to spend all her time going hunting with him and fishing and other sports.  All the manly outlets of life!  One day while Adonis went hunting a wild bore killed him and all the Gods pitied Venus so much they then allowed him to rise from the dead to dwell as her husband part time.  During the months in which he visits we call Springtime."


~Bel Kaufman, Up The Down Staircase

Literary Quote of the Day

The Tower

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, I said.  And she did.  I started climbing.  Watch out for my hair, she said, I don't want split ends.  Take your boots off, I just washed it, she said.  Watch out for my barrette, it's my favorite! she said.  Why are you slowing down?  Aren't you strong enough to rescue me?  Why did you stop?  What kind of prince are you, anyway?  I climbed back down.  I've heard about this other princess who's asleep - a real beauty.


~ John Grandits, Technically, It's Not My Fault

Literary Quote of the Day

"On Tuesday, March 9, [John] Belushi's body was buried in Abel's Hill Cemetery on Martha's Vineyard just about a mile from the old McNamara place that John and Judy had bought several years before.  [Dan] Aykroyd, dressed in a black leather jacket and black jeans, led the funeral procession to the cemetery on his motorcycle.  James Taylor sang 'That Lonesome Road' at the gravesite as snow began falling.


In Los Angeles, Dr. Kornblum finished the autopsy and ruled that in his opinion, 'John Belushi, a 33-year-old white male died of acute toxicity from cocaine and heroin.'


Two days later, about 1,000 family members and friends attended a memorial service in New York at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.  Aykroyd took a small tape recorder from his blue knapsack, held it up to a microphone and, as he'd promised John six months earlier, played a tape of the Ventures' 'The 2,000-Pound Bee.'  At first everyone seemed stunned, but soon they were laughing."


[The Ventures' 'The 2,000-Pound Bee: http://www.theventures.com/index.php?pg=music&id=13]


~ Bob Woodward, Wired The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi

Literary Quote of the Day

"It had been three months since I'd washed my hair, two months since my underwear got stolen off the laundry line, and six days since I last changed my outfit, so I felt sufficiently ready to attend my first Rainbow Gathering/Full Moon Party.  It was to take place on the shores of Lago Atitlan in Guatemala.  We were looking for Bob's tepee somewhere between San Pedro and Santiago.  A favorite gringo hideout, it didn't take long to secure a boat at an astronomical price.  As we approached the spot a giant tepee with leaping figures dancing around were visible in the setting sun.  Our friendly boatman's face quickly changed to disapproval...


It was nothing like I'd seen before, and I'd been in Central America a long time.  About sixty people were dancing around to the beat of twenty people drumming, singing chants they all seemed to know.  Some people were making out, others were spinning around, and the rest were running around naked.  Restless, I looked around for someone to make out with since naked running and spinning were out of the question."


~ Cara Tabachnick, Not So Funny When It Happened