Black Friday tidings (contest alert!).

Image credit: alisafoytik / 123RF Stock Photo

I hate Valentine's Day.

This is not a recent development. When I was in the second grade, my teacher's name was Mrs. Dunkelberger. She wore her iron-gray hair in a bun and ran our classroom with an iron fist. In the run-up to Valentine's Day, she was insistent that everyone not only bring enough valentines for every kid in the class, but that we had to sign the backs of all the cards we were handing out. On the appointed day, after valentines were passed out, another student complained about receiving an unsigned card. Mrs. Dunkelberger's solution was to call a halt to the whole thing. The details are fuzzy -- we may have been required to reclaim all the valentines we'd brought -- but in any case, we had to go back to our regular work instead of having a party.

Granted, it was a long time ago. But that sort of injustice sticks with a person.

Since then, I've come to view Valentine's Day as not just an excuse for florists to triple their prices, but as a sly way to make unattached people feel inadequate. You can always tell the unattached. We're the ones in line at the drugstore on February 15th, buying ourselves the heart-shaped box of chocolates we didn't receive the day before. On the upside, they're half price. On the downside...yeah.

This feeling may or may not have influenced me when I wrote the ending of Fissured. As you may know, that's the book in which Joseph goes walkabout on Valentine's Day without a word of explanation to Naomi. (Seriously, Joseph? If you forgot to get her flowers, there are better ways to handle it.)

Interestingly (according to Wikipedia), St. Valentine didn't start out being the patron saint of lovers. He was originally considered to be the first saint of spring. Slovenians believed that on his day, birds chose their mates and flowers began to grow. In 1382, Chaucer took the charming folk tradition about the birds and worked it into a poem honoring the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia. So we have him to blame for starting all this lace-edged nonsense.

Anyway, for this Black Friday, I decided to lighten my own mood by giving some books away. Three signed copies of Crosswind are up for grabs at Goodreads. Feel free to enter (US and Canada only, sorry) by clicking either this link or the one in the box on the left. The contest runs through the 22nd.

And in addition, especially for readers of my blog, the most pathetic Valentine's Day story posted here in the comments gets a Land, Sea, Sky mini-bookmark signed by Yours Truly. Go on -- spill it. It'll make me feel better.

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On top of all that, the trailer for Crosswind is featured today at Indies Unlimited. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, stop by.

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These moments of bloggy love (ahem) have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Imbolc and the power of older women.

The Wheel of the Year keeps turning, and so here we are at Imbolc again. I talked about some of the folklore about Imbolc last year, and some fun facts about Brighid the year before. This year, I'd like to talk a little bit more about Brighid and what She may mean to us women writers of a certain age.

Wicca loves its Triple Goddesses -- typically Maiden, Mother, and Crone -- and it tends to cast as many goddesses as it can into that mold. Brighid got the treatment early on. She's considered to be the goddess of poets, childbirth, and metalsmiths, so hey, there's your three-in-one, right? That makes Her a triple goddess, right?

Lots of people think so, but I don't necessarily agree. Mortal women are multi-talented, after all. Why can't a goddess be the patron (matron?) of multiple disciplines without somebody suggesting She should be split into multiple beings? Especially when gods don't get the same treatment. Lugh's good at everything -- He, too, is a patron of poets, among other things -- but I've never heard anybody suggest He should be called a Bazillion-fold God.

Anyway. The point is Brighid wears multiple hats and is backed by a wealth of experience. That's what makes Her so easy to relate to, in my opinion; She's so much like us mere mortal women in that way, particularly as we get older and have more, and more varied, experiences under our belts. It makes perfect sense to me that a single goddess could raise a child while at the same time writing interesting prose and hammering out practical, tangible objects -- because here on Earth, women do it every day.

Yet often, we don't get credit for all we do -- particularly once we hit middle age. Too many times, still, only young, attractive women get any attention. Fay Weldon wrote a piece for the New York Times this week in which she talks about how writers are still advised not to write stories featuring women in their 50s. Sure, the bulk of the book-buying public is made up of those women, but the conventional wisdom is that they -- we -- don't want to read about ourselves as we are.

[T]hey like to identify with themselves when young and beautiful, when sexual power and adventures were for the taking and life was fun — not as they are now, with bulging hips and crepey necks. Why wouldn’t they?

Really? Maybe I'm an outlier in this, as I am in much of the rest of popular culture. But personally, I'm pretty tired of reading about teen and twentysomething protagonists who are just figuring out their way in the world. That's why Naomi was in her mid-30s in the Pipe Woman Chronicles, and why Tess and Sue in Land, Sea, Sky are close to 30. I think women who have seen something of life are much more interesting to read about -- and to write about, too.

Huh. It just occurred to me that when I get around to telling Sage's story, Naomi will be in her mid-50s and Joseph will be pushing 60. I knew they'd be an old married couple, but...huh.

Anyway, Weldon goes on to offer hope to middle-aged women writers: once you push through to 80, she says, the publishing establishment will be interested in you again: "so old as to seem ageless, sexless as a sage." Sounds appealing, doesn't it? In the meantime, she advises us women of a certain age to consider going indie:

Meanwhile the female writer still going through the doldrums of middle age should look at the advent of the e-book as a blessing. It is such an anonymous medium. The writer can be from anywhere and as old or young as she likes. The quality of the text emerges without frills, without the photo on the back of the book. And, should you e-publish yourself, with any luck a “proper” publisher, impressed by your skill and panache, will turn it into a book as we once knew it, indifferent to your age.

I think her last sentence is a little out of touch; "proper" publishers today are flailing, and "a book as we once knew it" doesn't really happen any more. But as for indie publishing being a blessing for women of a certain age? With that, I heartily agree.

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Undertow is back from my editor -- huzzah! We're on track for publication in mid-March or so. I'll send a newsletter update pretty soon.

Also, the Indies Unlimited 2013 Flash Fiction Anthology is available now, and I've got a piece in it again this year. And there's been some discussion amongst my BookGoodies pals about doing another anthology -- this one geared toward summer. Stay tuned for more info on that.

Winter's on the downhill run. Happy Imbolc, everybody!

You don't want me to make a playlist. No, really, you don't.

wpclipart.com

Back in November, when Kriss Morton and I first started talking about the Crosswind tour, she suggested -- among other things -- that I could put together a playlist for one guest post. I demurred. But the subject came up again later, and I finally had to confess that I didn't want to do a playlist because I haven't bought any new music, other than Irish trad, since 1983.

That might be a slight exaggeration. I mean, there's the odd new Christmas CD (Chicago, Hall & Oates, and Jethro Tull, as well as some rockin' Renaissance tunes). I picked up Raul Malo's "Today" because a friend was really, really into him (hi, Kim!) and I liked that I could almost understand the songs that are in Spanish, and could sing along with the help of the liner notes. A couple of guys from Czech class gave me a copy of a Vlasta Horvath CD, which I liked so much that I searched the intarwebz to find the lyrics to the songs in Czech so I could sing along. (I even made an attempt to translate them; the less said about the result of that exercise, the better.) Another friend once gave me a tape of gamelan music. And I bought "Sevilla" by Young & Rollins, which, it turns out, is classified as nuevo flamenco. That, together with CDs by Irish trad bands -- mainly the Chieftains, Lunasa, and Flook -- constitutes the sum total of my "new" music purchases for the past (oh gods!) thirty years. Virtually verything else I've bought has been a replacement for an album I once owned on vinyl.

I didn't set out to step so far away from popular music, honest. It just kind of happened.

The breakaway began in 1982, when I moved from WKEE-FM in Huntington, WV, to WGNT-AM crosstown. KEE was a top-40 station; 'GNT played country. This was when country was in its "Urban Cowboy" phase, and I just couldn't get into it. (Sorry, country music fans -- I like bluegrass, but not country.) We had a sister station that played album rock, but I can't listen to heavy metal for long without getting depressed.

From there, I moved to WTAR-AM in Norfolk, VA, which played oldies from the '50s and '60s; our sister station, WLTY-FM, played lite rock, but I'd long since gone off chirpy love songs due to too many bad relationships. Next stop was DC, where I eventually ended up at all-news WTOP; 'TOP's sister station, WASH-FM, also plays lite rock (see "chirpy love songs" above). So the bottom line is that from '82 on, I didn't like any of the music I was hearing at work.

And by then I had little kids, so we were listening to a lot of "Wee Sing" and Disney soundtracks at home. In their teens, one of my kids got into Eminem and the other got into Disturbed, neither of which were my thing. At the same time, they were both listening to soundtracks from Broadway shows -- "Rent" and "Wicked" in particular.

Our taste is nothing if not eclectic. But you can't make a playlist out of it.

What I'm listening to these days is Chicago -- their early stuff. I picked up a box set of their first two albums plus V and VI, and I've been playing them while I do my time on the elliptical machine. I had forgotten just how original and challenging their music was -- the rapid key changes, the unusual time signatures ("A Hit by Varese" is in 5/4) -- and how it requires active, almost participatory, listening. I can sink my teeth into it, the same way I can sink my teeth into singing along in Spanish or Czech.

If you've gotten this far and you're still looking for a playlist from me, here's what I suggest this week: "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon." Have a great week, everyone.

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These moments of musical blogginess are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Et al., etc.: Why English is hard.

I wanted to let you know a couple of things before we get going here. First, today is the final day to enter the giveaway from the blog tour for Crosswind. Head on over to the Finishing Faeries website right now, before you forget, and enter the contest at the bottom of the page. Go on, click the link. I'll wait.

Back now? Cool. Because the other announcement is that the trailer for Undertow is live on YouTube, as of really late last night. Enjoy.

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Now on with this week's post.

One of the things that bugs me about getting older is finding out that a whole lot of my cherished rules of English grammar are nothing but style choices.

Nic McPhee, flickr.com

Take the rule about whether punctuation goes inside quotation marks or outside of them. Way back in grade school, I was taught that if the punctuation mark was a part of the quote, it went inside the quote marks; otherwise, it went outside.

This has always made sense to me. If something is an exact quote, then whatever's inside the quote marks ought not to have anything extraneous -- and if it does, then it ought to be clearly marked. So if you leave out a few words, you insert an ellipsis; if the quote didn't start with a capital letter and you're putting it at the front of your sentence, or if did but you aren't, then you put the letter that changed in brackets.

I've always treated periods and commas this way, too. If it was part of the original quotation, then I put the comma or period inside the quote marks. But if I'm just quoting a word or two and they happen to fall at the end of my sentence, then I would put the period outside the quotes.

Turns out that's UK style. The gods alone know how UK style got into 1960s-vintage textbooks in Michigan City, Indiana, in the good old U.S. of A., but there you have it.

The worst part is that I didn't realize I was "wrong" until an American friend ranted about it on her Facebook page awhile back. Fifty-odd years of writing, a fair bit of it professional, and only now am I discovering I'm wrong. (I'm trying to break myself of the habit, honest.)

But the truth is that English is a living language, and so stuff changes all the time. I suppose I should be grateful. It's just that sometimes it's hard to keep up.

So let's turn to a language that hasn't changed in thousands of years: Latin.

Not many indie authors use the abbreviations etc. and et al. -- but I do see them at work. Et al., particularly, is used in formal writing. But just so we're on the same page, punctuation-wise, I thought I'd explain a few things about them.

First, et al. means "and others." Et is the Latin word for "and." It's not an abbreviation. Okay? So it doesn't ever get a period after it. That would be like putting a period after "and" every time you use it in a sentence.

The al. part of et al. is, however, an abbreviation -- for alii (masculine plural), aliae (feminine plural), and/or alia (neuter plural). I'm not going to try to explain masculine/feminine/neuter nouns here; suffice it to say that Latin has 'em (as does Czech, by the way). As English speakers, all we really need to be concerned with is that al. is an abbreviation and et is not. So the proper way to punctuate the phrase is like so:

et al.

Clear so far? Okay.

So now, clever thing that you are, you have recognized that the first two letters of etc. are the same as good old et that we just talked about. And you're correct. In Latin, etc. is short for et cetera, which means "and the rest" or "and other things."

"So how come," you are now going to ask me, "etc. gets slammed together into one word and et al. doesn't?"

Good question, and the answer is probably similar to how, in English, "has not" turned into hasn't and "I am" turned into I'm. It's a contraction, sort of. Typesetters, who liked to save a space anywhere they could, dropped the space in et c. at some point, and etc. eventually became common usage.

Got that? Et al. is a two-word abbreviation with no period after et; etc. is a one-word abbreviation that gets a period. Good. Okay.

Now. There's one more sticky thing about these two, and it comes up when you stick them in the middle of a sentence. They take commas on both sides. If you have a phrase like "the rain, the park, and other things make me very happy," and you want to replace and other things with etc. to save space, you need a comma both before and after etc. Like so:

The rain, the park, etc., make me very happy.

Don't be tempted to forget that second comma. Just like with a quote or some parenthetical material, you need to mark off the end of the Latin you've just inserted. Hence, the closing comma.

Okay? Cool. Here's your reward for suffering through this post. As a bonus, it's approximately the same vintage as the textbook that taught me UK style. Have a great week, everyone.

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This very happy bloggy moment was brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.