Have you ever said exactly the right thing at the right time?  I rarely do.  It's always an accident when it happens.

This morning, one of my sophomores came in early (as she often does).  She's a big-boned, square-jawed girl who loves Mary Queen of Scots and knitting.  She also is doing some local theater, so she was grousing to another student about the part they gave her in Alice in Wonderland.  She's cast as a flower.

She said, "I don't mind being a flower, really, but a flower is small and delicate.  Look at me."  She waved her hand at herself.

I said, "Maybe they chose you for your grace."

She lit up.

I wish I could script moments like that.

I watch way too many complete seasons of television shows.  It's an addiction.  Name the usual suspects, and I've seen them.  All of Buffy.  All of Angel.  Firefly, twice.  Torchwood.  Smallville.  Dark Angle.  Moonlight.  True Blood. . .  Well, the list goes on and on.  Almost all of the shows have a romantic subplot.  In many of the cases, the romance is what holds the show together.  Was there any real reason to watch Roswell other than to see if Liz and Max would get together?  Even the marginal fantasy show, Veronica Mars, was just as much about Veronica and Logan as it was about the mysteries she solved.

So, I realized there's an entire category of discussion about genre television that I've never heard discussed:  in all of the television series in science fiction/fantasy/horror, who was the best couple?  Which two characters generated the most heat?  Who did you care about the most that their relationship would work?  Who was the most believable at the emotional level?

I know my vote tonight, after watching the first five episodes of the second season.  Without a doubt, the couple I think is the most convincing and whose story I care the most about is Chuck Bartowski and Agent Sarah Walker from the show, Chuck.

Long live the king and queen!

Besides, I have to love a show that keeps Adam Balwin in front of the camera.

You're welcome to promote your own nominations.

It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.

Stuff you liked

• Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
• We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more sifting through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
• Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
• Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
• After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
• Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.

You got your fix

• We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
• In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. Please note that this still needs more tweaking, and we are working on the one-minute cut-off issue. For more info on voice posting, read here.
• At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.

Paid features you enjoyed

• In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
• This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
• When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
• How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.

Mixed reviews

• The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
• This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
• We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
• We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.

Missing Inaction

• We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.

Stumbling points

• Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
• A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
• That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.

Full steam ahead!

As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!

Eat Well Every Day has a pair of bookended posts about ethical meat eating for health reasons, and vegetarianism as an option. Plus with a sexy daal recipe. OMG. (In the vegetarian post.) I have a great fondness for lentils in any form. Well, almost any form.



We used to get to have lentils when Dad was traveling on business. Mum would whip up lentil burgers, which Dad wasn't fond of, and he'd get to eat expense account steak smugly while we got to enjoy a veggie meal. Although I seem to remember the recipe was pretty fiddly, so I'd probably stick with the daal now! Anyway, go take a look and let her know what you think...

Yesterday I talked about my teaching schedule, a set of classes that my college prof pals tremble when they read, and I realized that where my planning periods and lunch fall make the day much easier.  We have an eight-period day.  Teachers teach six periods, have two planning periods and a lunch. 

Here's the schedule with the breaks:
 

• 7:25-8:10       Honors 10th Lit/Comp
• 8:15-9:00       Planning
• 9:07-10:42    Science Fiction (this is a "blocked" class that meets for 95 minutes for nine weeks--It will switch to a block period Journalism class at the end of the quarter)
• 10:42-11:33  Lunch
• 11:33-12:18  Comp/Lit 10
• 12:23-1:08    Planning
• 1:15-2:00      A.P. English
• 2:05-2:50      Creative Writing

Since I get to school before 6:00 every day, I have 90 minutes of planning (and blogging/e-mail/grading) before class.  Then I teach my first prep, get 45 more minutes of planning before my second prep, eat lunch and plan, teach my third prep, plan for 45 more minutes, and finish with my last two preps. 

This is almost an ideal schedule.  The only change I would make to it if I could would be to swap the two 10th grade classes.  A regular-level 10th grade class is more likely to have discipline problems, and putting them first period has a tendency to mellow them out (they're not fully awake yet).

Our school district moved the schedule so we end the first semester before Christmas rather than taking a two-week break and then coming back for another week or two of instruction before the semester ends, which is more traditional.  That means we started school on August 19 and will finish May 27.

Today is a workday to wrap up grades for the last semester and prep for the new semester.  I'm looking at tomorrow and I suddenly realize why a teacher friend of mine said, "I don't see how I can lift the mountain again."  I have five different classes to prepare material for:  Honors 10 Comp/Lit, regular 10 Comp/Lit, Creative Writing, Science Fiction (for 95 minutes a day), and Advanced Placement Literature.  That's a lot of plates to keep spinning!  Since the first day is mostly intros, expectations and background, I'll be presenting about four and a half hours of material to 123 kids.

I remember in high school the first time I was asked to do a five-minute presentation in front of a class.  While most of my friends were grousing about the assignment, I was excited.  I like being in front of the room.  My friends had the more common attitude.  According to speech-topics-help.com, public speaking is the the #1 fear for most people, even more than dying, although I'll bet if someone was on his deathbed and was given a chance to take the podium to save his life, he'd do it. 

Here's speech-topics-help.com's top ten fears in order:

 1. Fear of public speaking (Glossophobia)
 2. Fear of death (Necrophobia)
 3. Fear of spiders (Arachnophobia)
 4. Fear of darkness (Achluophobia, Scotophobia or Myctophobia)
 5. Fear of heights (Acrophobia)
 6. Fear of people or social situations (Sociophobia)
 7. Fear of flying (Aerophobia)
 8. Fear of open spaces(Agoraphobia)
 9. Fear of thunder and lightning(Brontophobia)
10. Fear of confined spaces(Claustrophobia)

I don't have Glossophobia, but I'm big on 2, 3 and 5 (I'm also afraid of stinging insects--I almost jumped from a car at highway speed when I realized a wasp was riding along with me).

Tomorrow will be fun, but I'll be exhausted at the end.  For me, teaching is all about energy and how much I can generate.  I've never felt that I have a "cruise speed" in the classroom that I could sustain indefinitely. 

If I'm cruising, I'm losing.

Long time no post. Been busy, life is good. Not making any resolutions 'cause the self-improvements I'm focused on are already underway. Happy New Year everyone!

http://moninavelarde.com/newyears/

(Four gleaming points of light enter the scene, zipping this way and that in an apparent effort to disturb as much of the furniture in Lisa's house as possible. Upon closer inspection, they can be seen upon miniature stick horses, herding dust bunnies.)

Moth: Giddup! Yaw!

Mustardseed: You've let one escape under the sofa.

Moth: I'm not going under there. I might disappear, never to return, eaten by bits of dried up PlayDoh and Barbie clothes.

Cobweb: Ain't that the truth. Why the heck can't those women keep their clothes on?

Peaseblossom: (paused by Lisa's desk) Oh my!

Moth: What is it?

Peaseblossom: SOMEONE got an ARC and didn't share!

Cobweb: (galloping his stick pony over to the desk) Lemme see. Last time, Jason painted me from the back, and I know my bum isn't that big.

Mustardseed: At least you were ON the cover last time. I don't know who decided to only put three fairies on it, but that person should be ashamed of themselves!

Peaseblossom: It was for the sake of the composition...

Mustardseed: (smacking himself on the backside) Composition THIS, why dontcha??

Moth: Hold on a minute... I'll bet you a chocolate ganache cupcake with espresso filling that this artwork is Top Seekrit. I vote we leak it!

Peaseblossom: (appalled) That's terrible! That's evil! That's--

Mustardseed and Cobweb: A scathingly brilliant idea!!!

Lisa: (sneaking up on them) HEY! What are you guys up to?!

Fairies: AAAAAAAAH! (They scatter, leaving glitter and the cover art for the PERCHANCE TO DREAM ARC in their wake.)

I was in The Tattered Cover in Denver this week, a gift card in hand, looking over the huge selection of books to choose from. It was awful (too many books, too little time). Twice, though, I picked books from the stacks that I already owned. I knew they were good books, and I don't want to waste time on bad ones. Fortunately, I had the good sense to put them back, but that made me think of the books I have bought more than one copy of. Here's the list:

• The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.  This is the first book I bought twice.  I discovered it in 4th grade, and then reread it so often that the edges had grown soft and fuzzy, but the coup de gras was a TMI moment.  I had the flu once, and was lying in bed, sick to my stomach.  On the floor was a bucket, just in case, and my beloved copy of The Martian Chronicles.  Of course, when I got sick, I missed the bucket.  A few days later I had a new copy.
• Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock.  I've written about this extraordinary book several times.  When Tom Doherty put out a beautiful trade paperback edition through Orb books in 2003, I couldn't help myself.  I bought it again.
• The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.  The first paperback editions wore out, and I replaced them, and then I saw the larger format edition of The Hobbit from Houghton Mifflin, and a lovely boxed edition of The Lord of the Rings, also from HM, and I bought them. 
• The 10% Solution, by Ken Rand.  I have to keep buying this one because I give it away to writers who strike me as serious about improving their writing.  I buy the book in sets of five or ten from Fairwood Press so I always have a few.
• Poetry in the Making, by Ted Hughes.  This book, along with Lew Welch's, How I Work as a Poet, and Ralph Fletcher's What a Writer Needs has been incredibly influential to me as a writer.  The Hughes' book is such a small volume, though, that I've lost it several times, so I have to keep rebuying it.
• War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, edited by Kevin Anderson.  I love this collection of short stories inspired by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, and I was using it as a text to teach science fiction, and then the darned thing went out of print.  I picked up an extra copy from a used book store when I saw it just so I would have two (in case).
• I'd lost track of my marvelous two-volume set of the hardbound A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher (1959), but after much searching, found them in a box in my closet with a ton of other books.  What kicked me on my search was I saw the pair at a used bookstore and thought about picking them up--this is the collection that has a paper book jacket with the back half of a space ship on the spine of the first book and the nose of the space ship on the spine of the second.  Yummy old science fiction of the most classic sort.

I'm sure there are other books I've bought twice, but this is a preliminary list.  Do any of you have a list like this?

Thanks to the new DVR that came with the cable, a first for us, I was able to watch the highlights of the Twilight Zone marathon.

(No, I wasn't just sitting on my butt watching contrived ironic endings. I was also working.)

A few thoughts:

• How come the teens in the button-down, conformist, McCarthyite 50s got The Twilight Zone when I, from the open-minded, free-and-easy, explorational 70s got The Love Boat?


• Rod Serling really had a woodrow for beautiful, disheveled, silent women. Viz Nova in Planet of the Apes and Elizabeth Montgomery in Two.


• Given his half-hour time frame, he had to do an awful lot of telling rather than showing. There are certainly worse places to learn when and how to use telling.


• CBS must have sold off all their Twilight Zone music cues. Kingdom of the Spiders got most of its music from the Zone.


• Good thing Shatner did Star Trek or he might have gone the Anthony Perkins route and been typecast as the go-to guy for borderline mental illness.


• It's too bad Serling smoked roughly three thousand cigarettes a day. I would have liked to see what he came up with in his (dare I say) twilight years, had he not died at 50.


• I really have a woodrow for beautiful, disheveled, silent women. Viz Nova in Planet of the Apes and Elizabeth Montgomery in Two.

After the first couple of tattoos, you just want more. I am considering (and will probably consider for quite some time before I do anything about it) getting a tattoo on my scarred and busted ankle. I made a friend damn near choke with laughter when I told her I wanted this.

Because I told everyone that I broke the bones in my ankle during a fight with a timber wolf. And a surprisingly large number of people said, "Really!?"

But that's a bit much to fit on one ankle, so I think I might go for "Pain Don't Hurt" in Latin.

December was basically a whirlwind from which I am only now recovering, so to start the New Year off correctly, I've hammered out some new words on the WIP and booted all my excuses (I'm tiiiiiired, I have a houseful of cooooompany, where's the cooooooffee?) out the front door with the Christmas tree.

The Christmas tree, I will add, was going to stay up for a few more weeks (as is our tradition) until the Husky suddenly noticed it. A tree! In the living room! OMG! And thus it was peed upon.  *headdesk/facepalm*  This is continuing the never-ending cycle of Holiday Pee that started with the in-laws' dogs arriving and concluding yesterday when my mother's new puppy also noticed a pee smell around the tree and added her tinkle to the mess.  That was it for me, out went the tree. It means my house is blissfully empty of Christmas clutter, although I do have a few cards/gifts yet to stick in the mail.

As I told jennawaterford , a CAT would have never done this. Although I have read that a CAT might have scaled the tree instead. Which, honestly, would also not thrill me.

The BUNNEH would neither pee upon nor scale the tree and thusly is Perfect In Every Way.

(My birthday, btw, was awesomely laid back with a trip to Seattle, jadite gifties from Mom and Sister, a visit to Five Guys for hamburgers and fries, hopping from the bookstore to the toy store to the shoe store... Yup. My kid got books and toys and shoes on my birthday, reminiscent of last year, when we took her to eat at Ariel's Grotto at California Adventure on my birthday. *L*)

Someone posted a rant entitled "Can't people read??" and I'm copying my thoughts here (edited to protect people who don't use the same screen name everywhere they go).

( Cut to spare my parents' innocent virgin eyes )

Fingers crossed...






Wonder if there's a chance in hell it'll get on the big screen over here.

A long break like the Christmas one gives me a chance to catch up on movies and do some reading. My movie list was long this year: Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, Up in the Air and It's Complicated.  The movies were a good batch.  Avatar is worth seeing twice; Up in the Air was funny, somber, meaningful, well-acted and well-written; It's Complicated was supposed to be a comedy, but I enjoyed it better thinking of it as a drama with some funny moments.  Sherlock Holmes, while enjoyable, left me a little meh.

The reading was Stephen King's Under the Dome.  He said that he wanted to keep the "pedal to the metal" the whole way, and I think he did.  The favor he did for me came in the front piece, a bit of lyric from a song called "Talkin at the Texaco" by James McMurtry, a songwriter and performer I'd never heard before.  

Since King referenced the song so often, and I read on someone's blog that King had called him the best songwriter in America today, I looked him up on YouTube and Amazon.  James McMurtry is now on my Pandora play list.

Here's "Choctaw Bingo" to give you a taste:

Happy New Year! We are going to make vegan taquitos, eat an assortment of snacks, drink champagne/beer/cider (all at once? In a punch? Who can say?) and watch the Winter Classic.



Maybe Day 2, 2010 will involve abstemious habits, a brisk walk, and some writing/drawing. Or, possibly, a hangover.

There have been so many great goal and resolution posts on the net the last couple of days, I felt I should post something about my goals for the new year.

But I kid you not, every time I tried to put my goals into words my mind went completely blank.  I don't know if I'm just tired from the end of the year festivities or if I'm afraid to look up and see how tall that mountain of 2010 is to climb.

Ok, it's the second thing.

2009 was a great year, especially for my career.  

• My agent sold the next three books in the Allie Beckstrom series (#4-#5-#6) to my fantastic editor
• Two of my books come out in 2009: MAGIC IN THE BLOOD and MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS.
• I wrote two books during the year (Magic on the Storm and book 5, which has a title I can't share yet)
• I wrote three chapters and a synopsis for another series, and my agent sold that in a new two-book deal.
• I saw a short story published in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2

I went to Dragon*con and Orycon, and signed at Escape Fiction, Tea Party Bookshop, Bob's Books, Canyonway Bookstore, Grammy's Books, and Powell's Books.

I became a part of the fabulous Deadline Dames: nine urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and young adult writers who talk about life in the writing trenches.

I was interviewed by terrific people online, and even by my hometown newspaper.

I received many wonderful emails, tweets, and comments from readers, writers, and reviewers interested in my books and writing.  (I unfortunately, *failed* in responding to them all--guess what's on my new year's goals?)

And I ended the year finding out that MAGIC IN THE BLOOD has been nominated for Best Urban Fantasy by RT Book Reviews.

Wow.  So what's on the deck for 2010?  Good question.  Here are a few of my goals:

• Write three novels
• Turn in a project I can't announce yet
• Blog three days a week, minimum
• Tweet/update Facebook daily, minimum
• Go to Romantic Times convention (my first time ever!)
• Stick to my new writing schedule (so I can get a couple nights off every week)
• Reply to my emails/tweet, etc., weekly
• Turn in my novels on or before deadline

I have other, more personal goals (walking, yoga, eating right, sleeping right, reading more, seeing friends more, trying not to stress so much, and, of course Much More Knitting!) which, combined with the above list makes the year look pretty darned busy.

And you know what?  I'm excited.  You hear that, 2010?  I'm ready for you to be a busy, but fabulous and fulfilling year.  I'm not going to settle for anything else.  So watch out year, here I come!

Normally this would be the post for resolutions or wrap ups.  My resolutions are all the same as last year (since I didn't accomplish them: write more, lose weight, be more active, eat better, don't get behind in grading), and the wrap up in a nutshell is that it was a good year, if I wasn't heavier, less productive, and less healthy than I'd like to be.

What was on my mind today was language that bugs me.  If I could eliminate some language habits from the general populace, here is my short list:
 

• "to tell the truth," "truthfully," "honestly," "to be honest," and "trust me."  They all imply that everything else the speaker says is questionable.  I think you could make a pretty good drinking game out of Smallville if you knocked down a shot every time one of the characters said, "trust me."
• "absolutely."  I noticed this several years ago when I listened to an interview I did for Colorado Public Radio.  I said "absolutely" as the answer to a question a half dozen times.  Now I notice it when anyone else does it.
• "no problem."  I hear this most of the time from waiters or waitresses.  "Can I have a refill?" I ask, and the waiter says, "No problem."  Is doing their job some times a problem?  Should I worry that I'm inconveniencing the help?
• "like."  This is a long-time annoyance, especially in sentences such as, "We had like lunch," or "Can you lend me like a dollar?"  Without other comment: argh!
• Making statements or observations in question format.  This may bug me because my twelve-year old does it all the time.  He'll walk into the room where my wife and I are watching television and say, "You're watching television?" or I'll say, "Get your coat.  We're going out to dinner."  He'll reply, "We're going out to dinner?"  My wife says I'm too sensitive, but it drives me bonkers to face continuous rhetorical questions.

There, I feel better getting this off my chest, honestly.