Lisa Writing Wild

Last week my husband came home from work and told me to not spend any money between now and July. Yeah, right. I needed a little more information than that. He said he made vacation plans for our tenth anniversary and it was a surprise. He told me no matter how much I bugged him, he wasn't going to tell me. We haven't been on a vacation alone since our honeymoon. This was BIG! I started in on him: "You have to tell me where we're going." "Nope. You'll see when we get there." "How will I know how to pack? How will I know how to dress? What if I wear the wrong shoes? I could wear sneakers and it could be fancy, or I could wear sandals and my feet would hurt from..." "Fine, fine, I'll tell you!" I knew my nagging would come in handy some day. He's taking me to New York City to see Paul McCartney at the new Yankee Stadium! I saw Paul twice before (once in '89 and again in '91) in Toronto. I never thought

I have this problem, especially with female characters, where I think I make them all sound alike. I know you should be able to cover up the character's names and just read the dialogue and figure out who is saying what. I don't think I could do that with mine. At least not yet, but I'm working on it. I've learned two things recently. One, if I go more than a day without writing or working on my story, I start to forget what the characters sound like. And, two, having pictures of what I think my character looks like really helps. Sometimes I use New Faces Model web site to find pictures of people, or I'll use famous people. Either way, it helps to put a face with the person I've created. What do you do to help your characters sound unique?

  Homeschool Mother's Journal In my life this week…  We found out that our five year old has cough variant asthma. I was happy that he was finally diagnosed after being at the doctors six times in less than a year for coughing. He now has an inhaler he'll use every day, and his own nebulizer when he has an attack. The doctor gave us steriods and a nebulizer to try for the week, and the results were amazing with how quick he got better. Now the baby is sick with a cold:( In our homeschool this week… I haven't been doing as much homeschooling this week, but I did get my schoolroom totally organized. Now all of my son's toys are in the walk-in closet (off the bathroom which is off the schoolroom). And the schoolroom is filled with educational things. I have bookshelves with games, school-related books, his workbox, my own shelf with teacher-related materials and lots of other things. Now I'm just trying to get rid of our piano so I can have even more room!

Foster care is something I never blog about. To be honest, besides the kids, I don't have many positive things to say about it. But right now I'm feeling burned out. Really burned out. When people hear we're foster parents, they usually say what a wonderful thing it is we do and we are amazing (or fill in adjective here) people. The truth is, we're not. Sure we're on our tenth baby, we've adopted one, we go to court when there's court, we're super friendly to the meanest of bio parents and we love the kids unconditionally. But we don't do all of that out of the kindess of our hearts. We do it because we want to adopt. Obviously we love our five year old. We've had him since he was three months old and he is the love of our lives. But we went through three and a half years of hell before it was decided last minute that we could adopt him. Three and a half years of waiting, wondering, crying and praying. I know there are many other foster par

So I finally weighed myself last week. I found a scale in the girl's locker room at the Y. I've always weighed around 107-110, but a few months ago I creeped up to 127.5. That was the last time I weighed myself. I was positive I've been in the 130 range lately, and would enter that amount on any machine that asked for it at the YMCA. Turns out I'm only 122. Since I've already been exercising for a few weeks, I'm not sure if I lost weight from working out, or if I lost it from being a full-time mom and chasing a five year old and taking care of a four month old all day. Either way, I was a very happy girl. Plus I got to go out and buy a bunch of work out clothes from Old Navy. That's enough to keep any girl going. Friday my five year old came down with a sudden cough, and my girlfriend (who was over) asked if he had asthma. I said no (I'd never heard him wheeze) and said it was just a cold. At her urging I called the doctor and they wanted to see him