by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on March.11.2010
- Figure out how you’d spend all those millions if you won the lottery.
- Practice falling asleep with your eyes open.
- Try taking notes using pictures and symbols instead of words.
- Study everyone in the meeting individually, and try to image what they would look and sound like while having an orgasm.
- Ask a question you already know the answer to, just to sound engaged.
- Come up with a way to trick your spouse when you get home.
- Come up with a way to seduce your spouse to make up for tricking them.
- Tap your foot to the rhythm of the song that you can’t get out of your head.
- Keep your head propped up by your hand or fist so your head doesn’t roll when you nod off.
- Make your bathroom trips as long and slow as possible.
- Send silly text messages to another person in the room.
- Keep checking to make sure you’re not copying the gesture of the person sitting next to you. If you are, sit in the chair a different way and time how long it takes before someone copies you.
- Actually listen and pay attention. No really, that is an option.
by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on March.4.2010
- If you want one of those cookies, you better move fast! Act now before they’re gone!
- Farts are often followed by laughter.
- Naked dangling body parts don’t even phase you anymore.
- You’re constantly picking up dirty socks and underwear that aren’t yours.
- Light-saber battles and arguments over G.I. Joe action figures are frequent occurrences.
- You have to hide your box of tampons lest you find them used to build miniature log cabins.
- If there isn’t at least one electronic gaming system for everyone in the house – there’ll be trouble.
- You’re always the first one awake.
- Nothing says “I Love You” like a headlock and a playful blow to the gut.
- Everybody comes to you when they can’t find something.
- A dry toilet seat brings tears of joy to your eyes.
- You have a hard time falling asleep without the sound of snoring.
- You’re the Queen of the castle. And you like it that way!
by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on March.4.2010
Netflix’s movie recommendation equations are genius. I just recently rented and watched a movie that I’d never heard of before. And I adored it. It’s called It’s a Boy Girl Thing and it’s hot!
It takes the Freaky Friday plotline that’s been done numerous times before – where a mother and daughter switch bodies, or a father and son, even a young woman and an old man as in Prelude to a Kiss – and puts a new twist on it. Here, two teenagers who are classmates and next door neighbors that don’t get along end up cursed by the mysterious and magical body-swapping phenomenon.
This movie was very cute, a little naughty at times, funny and surprisingly romantic. I can’t think of the last time a romantic comedy did so well of a job making me both laugh and sigh. And I don’t know – maybe there is something very sentimental about a young man and woman literally taking a walk in each other’s shoes in order to fully understand and appreciate the other.
If only we could do that in real life, right?
The roles weren’t easy to pull off, but the actors did a great job and made the movie easy to watch over and over.
If anybody else has seen this It’s a Boy Girl Thing, let’s discuss. If you haven’t – check it out because it’s HOT!
by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on February.25.2010
You want to be a member of Starfleet when you grow up.- The announcement of new technology or gadgets make your heart beat faster.
- You actually try to use The Force to pick up your cell phone.
- Ero Anime is way more enticing to you than porn.
- The idea of Live Action Avatar Roleplaying doesn’t sound too horrible.
- The only way you’d consider watching Desperate Housewives is if one of them was married to a werewolf.
- You haven’t been outside your home for 6 days – and you’re okay with that.
- Lists and Spreadsheets are your best friends.
- When people need computer help, they call you first.
- I really like you.
- You have a driving need to do everything yourself because that’s the only way to get it done right.
- Staying at home reading a good book or playing a video game sounds more enticing that going out to a party.
- You know it’s better to be a geek than not to be one.
by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on February.18.2010
He brags about you to his family and friends.- Even when you’re wearing sweat pants and a baggy t-shirt and your hair is a mess, he still checks you out when you walk by.
- When he talks about the future, you’re included.
- He’ll watch Grey’s Anatomy or go shoe shopping with you – something you like to do but he doesn’t – just to spend time with you.
- He remembers something you said last week.
- He calls or texts you just to say hi.
- He spends more time with you than he does with his friends.
- He calls to make sure you got there okay, because he’s concerned about your safety.
- He’ll prepare a meal for you. Even if he isn’t a good cook, he’ll learn to make a dish just for you.
- He puts forth effort to see to it that you too are satisfied. Every time.
- He’s not too ashamed to run to the store and buy feminine hygiene products for you.
- You can see it in his eyes. Feel it in his hands. Hear it in his voice.
- He tells you he loves you. And then he shows you … with everything that he does.
by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on February.11.2010
Love is a wonderful thing. And I’m not just saying that because Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. I truly love love. I love reading about it, writing about it, watching movies about it, talking about it, being in it.
As some of you may know, in addition to loving love I also love video games. Especially adventurous, action-packed or RPG (Dungeons & Dragons) type games where I get to be a hero or heroine and beat some bad guys until they beg me to stop. Very few of these games include any romantic elements, which I try not to complain about since I can get my romance fix elsewhere. But still, I’ve always wondered why so many game developers seem to forget that love can be a great adventure too, and often a perilous one! So when I encounter a game which also incorporates love – and I mean actually makes the romance part of the gameplay and not just back-story or an implied relationship – then I’m completely thrilled. THRILLED I tell ya!
Square’s RPG series Final Fantasy has always put a love story in nearly every game. My favorites so far are Final Fantasy VIII with the relationship between Squall and Rinoa, as well as Cloud/Aeris and Cloud/Tiffa in FFVII, and Tidus and Yuna in FFX and FFX-2.
Even the romance in these games were entertaining and important parts of the story, they were linear and not really part of the gameplay, however. You couldn’t choose someone else to fall in love with it, or whether or not to fall in love at all.
So today I’d like to give a shout out to a few of the games I’ve played recently that were kick-ass and yet didn’t give love the backseat.
Dragon Age
What rocks about the romance in this game is that you have options. You’ll have 3 different possible love interests depending upon your character’s gender and the sexual orientations of the game characters. Other characters reacted to my chosen relationship (either with jealousy, disgust or warnings) and there were actual love scenes.
Surprisingly, the romance was intense enough to make me gush with joy but yet somehow the game remained gritty enough for my husband to enjoy without his manhood being threatened. And when I say “intense enough” I mean enough to actually invoke real emotion in the player. Heh, at least for me anyways. I think I have a serious crush on Alistair. At least as serious as it can get with a digital dude. But let’s just say that I think this game is so nice, I”m playing it twice!
Fable II
Unlike Dragon Age, Fable II doesn’t have a written-out romance with a main character. Instead, the “romance” in this game is more like a mini-game, where you can flirt with random citizens of the towns you visit and possibly make them fall in love with you. What I thought was an interesting touch though was that you could choose a house to buy, get married and move your spouse into it. You can even buy furniture and decorations for your home, make love and have children. After a long, hard day’s work of beating and slicing bad guys to a bloody pulp you could return home to find your spouse and children waiting to greet you and offer you gifts.
I haven’t encountered another game yet that let’s you be a hero while also getting to play house. Nice!
Mass Effect
Mass Effect has a special place in my heart because it came out before Fable II and before Dragon Age. It is one of the first games I played that actually involved you in the romance instead of just having you watch it or hear about it, and gave you at least a couple of choice. Mass Effect 2 just came out. I bought it but haven’t opened it yet, and probably won’t get to it for a while. But I believe it will continue with the same kind of romantic awesomeness as the first installment, and therefore I will be playing it.
*sighs* Bestill my heart, o-wonderous-game-makers who aren’t afraid of a little romance! Keep them coming and I’ll keep playing them! (And with any luck, one day I’ll join their ranks with some romantic game creations of my own …)
by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on February.9.2010
And here it is – my newly redesigned website/blog! *beams proudly*
What I especially love about this theme, besides how gorgeous it is and how much attention to detail my husband paid on the artwork, is that this was very much an enjoyable collaborated effort between the both of us. He created the design and the artwork, I built the menus, the code and the pages based on the theme he laid out.
Man, do we make a great team or what? And we had a blast doing it.
So much so, that we’re making it a side-venture to help other writers who want an attractive, custom website with the easy maintenance of a Wordpress blog, but may not have the time or know-how to build a professional-looking one. We’ve already created one for my friend, author S.K. Yule.
Caldwell Interactive would love to help set up your customized Wordpress website for you to manage yourself if you wish. And because we work together we can do it fast, and thus at a very affordable cost.
Feel free to contact me or go to our Caldwell interactive website for more information.
by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on February.4.2010
Okay, so I’m a little late in posting my goals for the new year, but that’s because I’ve been busy working to achieve them!
Here are this year’s goals:
- Write at least 1500 words every day. This would take me about 2 hours a day to accomplish, more or less. Very doable. If I’m in editing mode, then I plan to polish 5 pages a day.
- Finish 6 novellas. I just finished one up last month and I have another drafted, so I am already 1.5 down with 4.5 more to go. And it’s only February!
- Write 1 novel. I have 2 very different ideas for new full-length books that are fighting for priority right now, but time will likely only permit one to win this year.
- Redesign this website. *laughs* Yes, within a week or so I’m going to change the look of this site again. I like the look of this current theme, but my husband is creating a custom design made specifically to reflect my personality, and it looks so awesome I’d be crazy not to use it. You’ll see!
- Blog more frequently. I get a point for this post, right?
- Lose 25 pounds. I gained quite a bit of weight during my last pregnancy ~ over 60 pounds. But that baby is now 2 frickin’ years old, and I’m still fighting with the remaining 25. It must go!
- Exercise at least 4 days a week. Preferably 5 days, for at least 40 minutes. Consistently, no weeks skipped. My biggest challenge here is keeping my routine even during the weeks I’m out of town for work. I’ve got to get better at that.
- Submit a writing project every month. Be it a query or submission for a novel, novella, short-story, proposal, web article or contest, I’d like to aim to have something to send out every month. This goal is a way to sort of push myself to be brave and just submit my work! How else will I ever achieve the next goal …
- Get Published! Nothing would make the year 2010 earn its Ten than for it to be the year I land my very first publishing contract. A girl can dream, right?
- Go to at least 1 Writing Conference. I had it in my head that since I didn’t have a book published, I didn’t have any business attending a professional writing conference. Now I know better. By attending one I can actually try and meet face-to-face with folks who can help me accomplish my goals.
It’s good to put your goals down in writing (and to give them eternal life on the internet for the entire world to see, putting terrible, terrible pressure on you to perform), so feel free to share your goals, too!
by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on December.9.2009
Okay, the months seem to be shrinking as I get older. I could swear that I was just shopping for Halloween costumes a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m shopping for Christmas which is just a couple of weeks away. I hope this isn’t a progressive trend as the years go by, because at this rate by the time I’m 40 a whole year will feel like just twelve weeks.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with me getting older. Maybe I’m just anticipating the Holidays a lot more than I used to. Not because I’m looking forward to receiving gifts – there’s not even anything that I want for Christmas. As cheesy as it may sound, it’s the giving of gifts that I’m really looking forward to. My heart warms and swells at the thought of seeing the looks on my little boys’ faces when they wake up on the 25th and cheer what Santa will left them underneath their tree this year. I look forward to the smiles from my parents when they see what I’ve gotten for them, and get phone calls from my friends about packages from me they received in the mail. Even the husband might get me in special stockings – er hm, I mean get something special in his stocking from me. Yeah, that’s what I meant.
The spirit of giving is definitely with me this year. How about you?
And speaking of giving – a pal of mine has a contest going on over at Obfuscation of Reality where a signed urban fantasy book is being given away to a winner. If you like urban fantasy as much as I do, you should go check it out!
by ** Tatiana Caldwell ** on December.2.2009
December’s here (boy did it arrive fast) and thus November has ended and so has National Novel Writing Month. Here’s how it went for me:
MY STATS
Average writing speed: 600 words per hour
Average hours spent each day: 1 hour
Goal: 50,000 words written
Actual Words Written: 39,700 words and ~14,000 words edited
Result: 1 Novella rough draft completed and editing begun
** Some challenges I faced in NaNoWriMo **
- Not revising what I write. I can see that resisting the urge to self-edit will be like kicking a nail-biting habit.
- Writing the same amount of words everyday. My time spent writing was very inconsistent. There were days that went by where I wrote 0 words towards the target story, and days where I wrote 6,000 words. I noticed though that I was a lot more productive on weekdays that I took off work and weekends where I didn’t work before than I was trying to write in the evenings after work. I already suspected it, but my job is taking a lot of my juice it seems.
- Getting in the mood. Trying to write romance while in a bad mood is like trying to paint a wall while blindfolded. You can slap something down to cover the blank slate but don’t expect it to be anywhere near your best work in creating romantic contract. In fact it may actually suck.
** Some benefits I obtained through NaNoWriMo **
- Faster Drafts. Mastered the art of drafting out a full page in 30 minutes or less! By the second half of the month, I was sometimes able to spit out a full page in 15 minutes, which had before now been non-fiction speed only for me – never for fiction writing. I feel like I’ve grown some wings!
- Finding my voice. Turning down my logic and allowing my muse to freely speak, my writing turned out more raw and natural on the first try than usual. This was a great exercise on finding and developing my writing voice.
- I Got a Prize! I now have a new manuscript ready to be edited, polished and submitted, and a head-start on another one! Okay, so that’s not really a prize but just the product of my efforts, but it feels like one.
So although I didn’t actually reach my target number of words written, I still feel like I’ve won. I also feel that I would have achieved my goal and then some had this not been SUCH a super-busy. I’m proud of what I managed to accomplish with the time and energy I had. And just because National Novel Writing Month is over doesn’t mean that I have to stop setting my writing goals high. Who knows – just maybe I’ll reach 50k words this month.
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