Recent Posts
The secret weapon against teenagers
Your teenager is home for the holidays and it’s time that they face that diabolical room of theirs. “I expect you to clean your room.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get around to it.”
Never mind that you have no idea what a round toit actually looks like, but you’ve been told that you need to trust your teen and let them define their own space.
“As long as it’s done today.”
“Geez, mom, just back off.”
You roll your eyes and walk away. Some things just aren’t worth the fight.
A few hours later, an excited teen comes bouncing out of their room. “I’ve cleaned my room. Come see.” (Okay, you might not recognize this particular part of the story, but this is what my daughter does.)
Now, at this point, your hopes aren’t that high. We’ve heard it all before. But you drag yourself out of your comfy spot to go and look at whatever effort they have made in their room—only to discover that a single piece of trash has been removed, but the hallway seems to have barfed their entire wardrobe, and the floor is still this mysterious item never to see the light of day again. Just stepping inside the door is taking your life into your own hands.
Of course, this particular tale normally ends with you, as the parent, staring at your child, questioning what they’ve been doing all day. A few hateful phrases are shouted, amalgamating with a spectacular display of emotions and a “It’s my room!”
Sound familiar? Well, I may have discovered the secret weapon to get those pesky teens to actually clean their rooms. It’s called the internet.
The Strangers We Let See Facebook
It’s been a while since I’ve written on my personal blog. This has been for a few reasons, the biggest of which I’ve been focusing on my fictional writing, trying to finish my crime novel.
Well, the draft of my crime novel is complete, and it currently in the hands of a developmental editor. While I wait patiently for his comments (and trust me, it has been a patient wait, as I’m not ready to delve back into edits yet), I thought I’d turn my attention back to something else that I’m just as passionate about.
Protecting ourselves on the internet.
For years, on the Editor’s Blog on Black Wolf Editorial, I’ve been writing about some of the hidden traps associated with working online. Back in February, I decided to start a series here on my personal blog that delves into the mind of the bad guys who use the internet to prey on the innocent.
In the first post, I wrote about Twitter and how it’s actually what we post that can be more of the security risk. Today, I want to look at some of the settings on Facebook, things that many of us never bothered to consider a risk.
Emotions and Talking About It
As many are aware by now, on Friday March 15, 2019, my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand came under attack. On the morning after that attack, I posted my thoughts about what had happened, trying to make some sort of sense to the insanity. While that post was well received, there were other things going on in the background that highlighted a few others things to me about myself and how people react to stress in general.
As a country as a whole, this is going to be a long road back to any sense of normalcy. This event will change our perceptions of our home forever, and in ways that none of us can predict right now. A friend said to me that this event, in a way, is our 9/11. She’s right.
But we will heal. How do I know this? Because I refuse to go into a shell and hide like a turtle. And I refuse to let others do the same.
But in New Zealand???
It is Saturday morning, and I’m now facing a shift in my sense of reality. Less than 24 hours ago, my world was safe and calm, and my worst worry was how I was going to convince my husband to buy the new lounge suite that I want, or how was the next scene in my manuscript going to play out, or where does one find the money to pay for the writers conference that I want to go to in August.
No, instead, my worst worry has now joined that of many others around world.
Will today be the day that a terrorist takes my son, my daughter or my husband away from me?
On Friday 15th March, 2019, an unknown number of madmen marched into two separate mosques on opposite sides of Christchurch, New Zealand (my home city) and opened fire. They then proceeded to locations north and south of the central city, attempting to evade arrest while causing more acts of terrorism.
For the first time in history, the entire city of Christchurch, New Zealand was on lockdown. All schools, all malls, all businesses closed and locked their doors. Residents citywide were encouraged to stay inside. For nearly 4 hours, an entire city was held to ransom. And what makes it all bizarre… It happened in little, old New Zealand, one of the safest countries in the world.
Lives have been lost in this senseless madness. Families have been ripped apart by an act driven by hatred. Nothing can make up for that. New Zealand as a whole is now suffering.
Be warned, this is a LONG post, but I had to get it out, because so much is going on in this mind of mine.
Device-Free Experiment Gone Awry!
So, over the Christmas holidays, my family and I began an experiment where we would go device-free for one day a week. In the beginning, I saw the withdrawal on my teenage children’s faces, and my husband was just as bad. A month later, we started to notice patterns within our activities on how so much of our lives actually revolved around the internet. (Stationary lists for the school were online.)
We’re now at the beginning of March 2019, and the experiment has gone completely awry!
Traditional vs Self-Publication: The argument has flipped.
There was a time when the world at large looked down their noses at anyone who self-published, like the writing was sub-par. In many ways, it was. In those early days of Amazon and Kindle, self-publishing was so easy. Getting your book out into the world was just a matter of uploading your file to the internet and clicking on a few buttons. You didn’t even need to pay a dime, if you didn’t want to. As such, everyone from the dog to the neighbor was self-publishing—and the world became flooded with books, many of which should have never been published when they were.
The market is still flooded with sub-par self-published books, but things have moved on. With the changes that have occurred within the industry as a whole, the quality of the self-published works has gone up and the ability to get traditional publication contracts have dramatically become harder. And the attitudes about self-publication have now flipped and the stigma is now attached to the traditional roads.
For someone like myself, it is exciting times, to see these transformations within the publishing industry. However, the shift in attitudes actually make my blood boil at times—but not because of where the stigma now lies, but because of the way people treat me when they discover that I’m determined to go down the traditional route with my fiction.