An Author’s Thanksgiving

By Karen McCullough

I think there’s some kind of unwritten rule that November blog posts in the U.S. have to be about being thankful--and, really, that’s a good thing! Cultivating gratitude as a top-of-the-mind trait is something we should all do and it’s great we have a special time of year to remind us to do so. I’m more disappointed than I can tell you that retailers are turning a beautiful holiday into a gateway to the profligate spending money for Christmas season, the antithesis of what Thanksgiving should mean.

But anyway, back to gratitude. I firmly believe that gratitude isn’t something you do. It’s one of the most important underpinnings of how you live your life. It’s an attitude that everything you are and everything you have is a gift. It means taking nothing for granted.

With that in mind, I want to take a slightly different slant and talk about some things I’m thankful for, strictly in my capacity as an author. Some of these may be controversial, so feel free to disagree in the comments. Here are some of them:

Computers and word processing software – I’m old enough that back when I was in college all my term papers and theses were produced on a typewriter. I developed into a fairly speedy typist, but not a very accurate one. The typewriter I used was old enough that when you messed up, you had to either use that messy white-out stuff or just retype the whole page. I shudder to think how many times I would’ve had to retype each of my book manuscripts to get a reasonably clean copy.

The freedom to write what I want – I’m grateful to live in a country where I have the freedom to write pretty much whatever I choose. But let me be clear, freedom to write whatever I want doesn’t absolve me of responsibility for my words. I can write what I want, but the rest of the world has the right to object to my words, to refuse to buy my books, and to write scathing reviews. They can sue me if those words are stolen from someone else (something I’d never do, by the way), or hold me responsible if someone uses my words as inspiration to commit a crime. (I like to think my books are inspirational but not that way!)

The ability to travel for research and inspiration – I love travel and it inspires me with ideas for stories, settings, and characters.  And several of us here on this blog have talked about the importance of getting details right in your settings. There are some substitutes for actually visiting a place, but none will give you the richness of detail of the actual experience.

Libraries – As a kid, I hung out in libraries as much as I could. I loved to read, and I loved to research odd facts, pursuing all sorts of information. I don’t go as much as I used to, but it still gives me joy to be in a library. Usually when my grandkids are visiting, we’ll take them to the library and let them check out a few books to read during their time here. I love that they regard that as a huge treat. In the early days of my writing each book would require several trips to the library for research purposes. The staff at the research desk knew me and sometimes I could just call to verify a few facts.

Google and Wikipedia -  Google created the first search engine that delivered really accurate results, speedily, and Wikipedia created the first crowd-sourced, comprehensive encyclopedia. I do a lot of my research using them. I don’t take everything I read on the Internet as gospel, but at the very least, the articles I find suggest leads to more authoritative sources. I try to verify everything I learn with another source.

Amazon – I know not everyone will agree with the gratitude here, but Amazon did create the first online bookstore and, let’s face it, that has changed the world. Before Amazon I bought books at the local bookstore, but frequently would find an author I liked and had to go searching through used   Not to mention the time I’ve saved because I can do most of my shopping online and have everything delivered right to my door! That’s more writing time for me!

bookstores to find the rest of the author’s works. Since my taste runs a bit off mainstream, I often had to special order books I wanted and then wait, and wait, and wait some more for them to arrive. And Amazon popularized the ereader. It’s hard to describe what a boon that has been for people like me, with poor eyesight. Now every book can be a large print book! And for the author, the advent of epublishing has meant I can make my backlist available as I get the rights back to my older published books, and also have a chance of putting out those other books that mainstream publishers didn’t want – usually because I crossed too many genre boundaries!

Pencils

On a recent trip to the Lake District in England, we used a rainy day as an excuse to visit one of the few indoor attractions in Keswick, the Derwent Pencil Museum.

Before I talk about the museum, though, a bit of quick history – Writing instruments of all sorts have been in use for thousands of years, but a sort of proto pencil was a lead-based stylus used since the time of the Romans (which is why we still call them “lead pencils” even though lead hasn’t been used in pencils in hundreds of years).

The modern version of the pencil dates back to the 16th century with the discovery of a large deposit of graphite near Keswick in the Borrowdale Valley. The story says that it was found by accident by a group of shepherds who, on finding that it wouldn’t burn like coal, used the mineral to mark their sheep. But they soon discovered it left marks on their hands and other things that were hard to remove.

People soon discovered that the mineral was too soft to use by itself, but stuffed into a wooden tube, it made an easy-to-use writing instrument.

The World's Largest Pencil

By the early 18th century a cottage industry creating pencils had grown up in Keswick and the surrounding area. In 1916 the Derwent Cumberland Pencil Company or sometimes just called The Cumberland Pencil Company was formed to manufacture pencils. The first Derwent color pencil was produced in 1938. The Derwent brand is still recognized for produced some of the finest artist’s pencils in the world.

The factory has since moved, but the museum remains in Keswick. It’s a fascinating place. In addition to displays showing the history of the pencil, there are numerous historical items, a look at the manufacturing process, the varieties of pencil and art supplies now available, and a couple of fascinating, related stories. It also features the world's biggest pencil, as certified by the Guiness Book of World Records.

During World War II, Brittain’s secret service operatives worked with the company to develop ways to incorporate various bits of miniaturized technology into the pencils. They were also used as a method for passing secret messages. None of this has ever been officially confirmed, of course!
The museum gave us each a plain Derwent pencil with our entrance ticket. I was glad to get one.

Personally I use pencils quite a bit. Although all my books are written on the computer, I do a lot of preliminary work and planning using a pencil and paper. I like a pencil that writes fairly dark and has a nice sharp point. There’s something about the physical act of holding a pencil over a blank piece of paper that gives opens the spigot and gives the ideas a channel to emerge and begin to grow.

The Lake District in England

by Karen McCullough

For years I’ve wanted to visit the Lake Country in England. The historical association with the romantic poets and the cultural connection to Beatrix Potter influenced that but the real decider for me is all the stories I’ve heard about the remarkable beauty of the area.


The region has been a go-to vacation spot for many English families for years, including my son’s in-laws, who are avid mountain-climbers.


I recently got the chance to visit when we arranged to spend a week in Keswick, one of the largest towns in the District. We shared a vacation cottage with our son, daughter-in-law, and their two children. The journey to the place was a fairly easy but rather long car ride from their home in Hythe, Kent.


For us, getting there meant taking planes from our home in Greensboro to Atlanta, from Atlanta to JFK in New York, and from New York to Glasgow. After a couple of days stop-over in Glasgow, we took a train to Penrith and then a bus from Penrith to Keswick.


Was it worth all the travel? From the purely personal perspective, a chance to visit my grandchildren is worth any amount of effort. But the countryside offered a lot of rewards as well.


The Lake District is actually an area of mountains, valleys, and rivers as well as many lakes. The scenery ranges from gorgeous to breathtaking. Mild weather and frequent rain ensure that the place is very green. It’s a playground for lovers of nature and the outdoors.


Although there are other entertainments, including a theater by the lake in Keswick, the place attracts mostly hikers, mountain climbers, bikers, boaters, and other water sports enthusiasts. The entire area is a warren of narrow roads, trails, and walking paths.


We had a beautiful view of a nearby mountain from the large window of our house and the deck overlooked a river. On our first full day we took what was billed as an easy hike to the Castlerigg Stone Circle, an ancient stone circle that lacks the size and grandeur of Stonehenge, but is more accessible and intriguing. The day was unusually sunny and hot, making the mostly uphill hike there more strenuous than expected. Still we managed it and an even longer downhill hike back to town.


Day two featured a boat trip around Derwentwater, one of the many lakes in the area, followed by some time in town, followed by lunch in a pub and poking around the town of Keswick. Day three also featured beautiful weather. While my daughter-in-law and oldest granddaughter climbed Catbells (a “beginner” mountain I wasn’t ready to tackle) the rest of us walked a mostly level trail along a lovely, winding river.


It’s worth noting that the landscape is also dotted with numerous small pubs and cafes. Most walks included breaks for refreshment at a café and ended with a meal in a pub.

Unfortunately during the last couple of days of our stay the weather deteriorated sharply. Rain isn’t unusual in the area. Our first few days, which featured sunny warm weather, were more of an anomaly. But the solid deluge and heavy wind of our final days were not the norm. On one of those final rainy days we all visited one of the most interesting non-outdoor activities in the area, the Derwent Pencil Museum. The pencil as we know it had its origin in the area and Derwent still makes some of the best quality pencils around.


The last day we stayed inside and played with the grandchildren. And that was good too. All things considered the trip was well worth all the travel involved.

It’s the Little Things

by Karen McCullough

Detail can make all the difference.

One of the reasons I like to visit the places I use as  background for my stories is the need to get the details right. It’s not always necessary, and I confess that I’ve set parts of stories in places I haven’t been to, but not often. Sometimes, if the place isn’t the main setting, I can get what I need from Google Maps, Wikipedeia, travel and tourism websites, and Google Earth.

But settings are an integral part of most stories and I really try to get it right as much as possible. The setting for my current mystery series is a market center in Washington, D.C. that is the site of various exhibitions and trade shows. Because I’ve had family living in the D.C. metro area for a long time and have visited often, I’m comfortable writing about the geographic area. During my ten years working for various trade publications, I attended numerous trade shows and got to see a lot of what goes on. I’ve also spent time talking to some of the people who work behind the scenes to get a feel for what they do.

When I come to writing something I don’t know about, I try to do as much research as I can to get things right. What I often find is that almost everything is more complicated than one suspects and there may not be any cut-and-dried right answers. Different people, different places, and different organizations do things in different ways. But there are usually some definitely wrong answers, and I try to avoid those as much as possible.

But like most people I don’t always know what I don’t know, which is why I need editors and beta readers. I first wrote Hunter’s Quest a few years ago, but published it only last year. One of the editors who read the book pointed out that I had my hero and heroine toodling around in a car with a front bench seat, although no American cars have been built with bench seats for years. Why didn’t I know that? I haven’t owned a car with anything but bucket seats in front for many years.

A couple of books I’ve read lately also reminded me of how easy it is to slip up on things you don’t know. I was beta-reading a Regency Romance not too long ago, where the American author didn’t understand how the English nobility worked. She had a character in her book, Sir Somebody, being a knight who talked about passing his title onto his son. I pointed out to her that a knighthood was not a title that could be passed on, and she probably wanted to make him a baronet (also addressed as Sir Somebody but that title can be inherited).

A different author, for whom I was doing a beta read of an otherwise very good story jolted me out of it when she described her English hero’s house as having a wrap-around porch. Because my son lives in England and I’ve spent time there, I know that a porch  means something slightly different in England than it does here. (It’s a small, usually covered, and sometimes fully enclosed entryway to the house, not a broad, elevated platform in front of the house.) I’ve never seen an English house with anything similar to an American wrap-around porch. They just don’t build houses that way. Outdoor sitting areas are pretty much always in the back of the house. And by the way, don’t call it the back yard. It’s the garden.

The first picture below is my son and his daughter heading out for a walk in the neighborhood where they live in Kent. The house directly behind has just a small porch entryway. The one in the upper left-hand corner has a small enclosed porch in front of the door. It's very common.

An English country manor with an entrance porch.

I know those things from experience. But there are tons of things I don’t know, and I don’t always know what those things are. I try to check out anything I’m not sure about, but can easily miss things I think I know. Which is why I let other people read my book before I publish it, and why I’m always happy to hear from readers who point out where I made a mistake.  I’ll always investigate and update the book when and if I can!

The (Literal and Figurative) Weight of History

I’ve just returned from a vacation in Greece. This was the trip of a lifetime, something I didn’t expect to ever happen, but I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity. I experienced so many wonderful things and had great times. I love Greek food, the beautiful country, the colorful souvenirs, and the lively culture.

The Parthenon

Undoubtedly the highlight of the trip, though, was the tour of the Acropolis, followed closely by the visit to Delphi. I’m not a historian, a classicist, or an archaeologist, but all of those fields interest me. My reaction to those places mirrors the way I felt on first viewing Stonehenge and the Colosseum in Rome. Those sites have little in common other than being old and huge building feats for people without access to the power equipment available today.

I’ve heard people say about sites like Stonehenge and Delphi that they’re nothing but a bunch of old stones, sitting in place and doing nothing. Or a group of nice columns from a ruined building. I simply don’t understand that point of view.

What remains of the temple of Apollo at Delphi

I can’t help but see more than stones and mortar when I look at structures like the Parthenon. I see enormous amounts of work from peoples of a past time. I see remarkable ingenuity to manipulate huge objects with unpowered tools. I see amazing feats of mathematics and engineering that’s just as impressive today as it was then. I see an appreciation for symmetry, grace, and beauty that’s built into the human spirit. I swear I sometimes hear echoes of the groans of workers, the yells of the overseers, the crash of blocks as they’re moved into place, discussions of the designers.

I try to feel the depth of the impact these structures must have had on the people who built them. Huge undertakings like monumental buildings require a culture’s commitment and investment so they must have been of incalculable importance to them. We may not always understand why these days, but we can still gape at what has been achieved and marvel at what it took to create them.

Perhaps it’s part of being a writer that when I look at buildings like the Parthenon, my imagination tries to bring them to life, to picture in my head the building process, the culture that spawned the expressed need, and the meaning they brought into the lives of the people of the time.

I prefer to think it’s being human, being much the same as those who actually created these structures. I wonder if any of them could have guessed we’d still be marveling at them thousands of years later?

PS: If anyone is interested in reading a more extensive write-up of my travels, I've been posting a day by day recap (with pictures) on my blog at http://kmccullough.com/kblog/

What I Want for Mother’s Day

By Karen McCullough

Mother’s Day is in a couple of days, and I’ll actually be getting exactly what I want from my kids and grandkids to celebrate the day.

They already know there are few things I need and not many that I want. I’m in the fortunate position of being able to buy the things I most want and have learned that nearly all possessions bring only a brief jolt of joy, if even that much, so I desire very few.

My family knows that I really don’t want anything that will sit on a shelf and need to be dusted or washed. I have plenty of those already and I’m trying to get rid of many of them. There are exceptions. Pictures, particularly of them and their children, are always welcome. Since I go through coffee mugs all too quickly, I’m usually happy to get a new one, especially if it relates to a special time or place.

I love getting cards, especially those that are personalized or show that some thought and effort went into them. And flowers always bring me joy.

But what I want most from my children and grandchildren is time with them. Time spent playing games, talking, walking, shopping, eating ice cream, visiting museums, even reading stories with them.

This coming Sunday I’ll be heading to the beach for a week with my husband, sister-in-law, two daughters, and my younger daughter’s husband and four children. The children are all boys – ages 7, 5 (he turned six yesterday but we’ll be celebrating his birthday at the beach), 4, and 2.

If all goes as usual there will be plenty of fun, laughter, talk, games, good food, drink, sun, and surf. We’ll spend time reading and playing in the sand and ocean water. We’ll talk endlessly, scatter for walks and shopping trips, and then share experiences later on.

I can’t think of anything I could want more than that for Mother’s Day.

Research Ain’t What it Used to Be

I wrote my first complete novel sometime around 1982 or 1983 and saw my first one published by Avalon Books (since swallowed up by Amazon) in 1990. A lot has changed in the publishing industry since then, some things for the better, some not so much.

One thing that has changed a lot and mostly for the better is doing research.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s when I had to check out information for a book, I started by consulting my own carefully accumulated research library, which included encyclopedias, dictionaries, histories, and a wide variety of other reference materials. Sometimes visitors to my home would look at my books, especially the books about poisons and crime, the firearms manuals, the abnormal psychology tomes, and I’d see them give me a sideways look and back slowly away.

I used those books, but they didn’t always give me all the answers I needed. Usually that meant a trip to the library to look up things I didn’t know. The reference librarians at the time knew me well and were good at finding answers for me. Sometimes, I had to pick up the phone and try to find an expert in a certain area to help me out.  It was often fun, but it also took up a lot of time.

Earlier this year I signed a contract for a new romance novel that is part of a series set in New York City, specifically Manhattan. I start with some advantage in this because I grew up in a suburb of New York City and made enough trips into Manhattan to be familiar with the streets, the people, and the atmosphere. My disadvantage is that, although I've visited occasionally, I haven’t actually lived there in more than 40 years.

I considered making a quick scouting trip to the city, but time, budget, and circumstances precluded it. I’ve done this in the past, visiting cities that would form the settings for my books. I want the big picture layout, but I also always try to find the telling details, the small bits of scenery, characters, objects, landmarks, etc. that convey the atmosphere or feel of a place.

I had some of that for New York after growing up there, but a lot changes in even ten years, and I hadn’t lived there for much longer than that. I turned to the Internet for help and it’s amazing what you can get.

I knew, more or less, where I want both my heroine and hero to live, and I didn’t want to be very specific about it, but I needed to be sure the general locations were feasible, so I turned to Google. I started with the maps but then did the satellite thing and zoomed in to get a better look. Finally I got right down to the street level to check out buildings. I picked out addresses for my characters though I don’t give actual numbers in the story.

Then there were the places they visited in the course of the story. They took a bike trip along the Shore Park Bike trail in Brooklyn. I’ve never been on it but it was an important event in the story so I wanted to get the details right. Googling brought up maps, pictures, and even a couple of YouTube videos. One video, done by a rider with a GoPro camera through a long section of the parkway, gave me a good idea of the pavement, the surroundings, the crowds, the sounds, the obstacles and who was using the path. Similarly when my characters took a walk on the High Line, a park that didn’t even exist when I lived there, I found an abundance of pictures and videos of people walking the park.

When my characters visited the Metropolitan Museum, I went online and got a map of the museum, pictures of various exhibits, information about hours and so on.

There are tons of other details I looked up to check my memories or just to try to get something right. I rarely take any one article or video at face value and usually attempt to find at least one and hopefully many others to support.

I sometimes miss the interaction with the reference librarians who were always so helpful, but the time I’m not spending driving back and forth to the library can be time spent writing.

By the way, the book I’ve been researching is called No Time for Surprises. It’s part of the No Brides Club series from Sweet Promise Press. My books is the last in the series and due to release February 8th. The entire set is available for pre-order now.

An October to Remember

By Karen McCullough

If you follow this blog closely you might have noticed that I missed posting last month. (I don’t fool myself. You probably didn’t notice. But anyway…) I have an excuse and that’s what this post is all about.

I live in central North Carolina. Early fall is hurricane season here and this one was a doozy.

In September Florence was the headliner for weeks as its course, even while a long way out, showed it making landfall on the coast and then heading northwest to pass right over us. We got ready. We laid in candles, batteries for the lanterns and flashlights, and foods that didn’t need extensive cooking. Stuffed ice in the freezer. Laid in extra canned goods. Put away the patio furniture and planters.

The first part of the forecast for Florence was right. The eye did come ashore over the city of Wilmington on the N.C. coast. But then it stayed there for a couple of catastrophic days, pouring torrents of rain on the eastern part of the state and creating historic floods in many places before it jogged south and lost oomph quickly over South Carolina.

Here in the center of North Carolina, we had rain (lots of rain) and some light wind, but nothing drastic. Many people here welcomed family and friends from down east who had to evacuate flooded homes and towns. After a few days we put away the candles and batteries and ate the extra food.

Then Hurricane Michael zoomed up across the Gulf of Mexico in early October and crashed into Florida. Forecasters told us it would pass well to the east of us bringing us rain and light wind, but nothing to worry about. No one in this area got very concerned about it.

Our mistake. Michael wiped out parts of the Florida panhandle, then raced north and east, losing strength as it went. But it moved fast. And it veered a bit off the center of the projected path. For a day we had heavy rain and light breezes as it approached. But Michael, still a tropical storm, stayed on the west side of the cone rather than in the center, and in the early afternoon, it hit us full on.

It wasn’t as horrible as many in Florida experienced. But it was bad. Frightening For several hours we hid from fifty to sixty mile per hour winds with some higher gusts. Some of the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen accompanied it, blown sideways at times. The noise was incredible – wind howled and screeched, the trees rattled, rain smacked, smaller branches ratt-a-tatted on the roof constantly, and larger ones hit with the occasional thud. Everything not fastened down blew around and often hit other things.

Our city has a lot of huge old oak and fir trees and many of them went down during the storm. Thousands of trees.  Several hundred houses were damaged. We were lucky ourselves. Though our trees lost a few limbs, they all remained standing and we had no real damage to the house. Probably thousands of cars were smashed.

The next day I went out for a walk with my husband. We counted more than two dozen trees down in just the six-block area we covered. Many of them were across roads and some had entangled power lines in their limbs. The pictures that accompany this were tall taken on the walk and are only a few of the downed trees we saw.

Our power was out for five days. It took almost a week and a half to get cable and internet service back.

Most of the city was without power for a few days. On the second day of the power outage we went for a hot dinner to the home of friends whose power had already been restored. Of the twenty or so traffic-light-controlled intersections we had to pass through to get there, only one had working lights. Some had police officers directing traffic, but they didn’t have enough personnel to cover all the dark intersections.

Our daughter lives in an area of underground power lines and hers was on, so after three days we packed all the meats and other things we wanted to save from the freezer and took them to her, where she made room in her freezer. While there we had the first hot showers in several days and got some time on the internet.

Nonetheless we were counting our blessings even as we sat in the dark in the evenings. My husband and I were both safe. Our house was secure and suffered no real damage. The weather was mild so the loss of heat and air conditioning meant only minor discomfort. We have city water and they have backup generators to make sure the pumping stations keep running. We ate what was in the refrigerator for as long as it remained cool and we had plenty of non-perishable food as well. We have an old-fashioned crock pot that uses sterno (and we keep a supply of sterno around) for heating water for coffee and tea and soups for lunch. We even blessed our backlit Kindles that made reading much easier than trying to do it by the light of battery-run lanterns.

A couple of points I’d like to make to finish up. Even a tropical storm is a terrifying experience. If you’re in a hurricane zone and the authorities suggest you evacuate, do it! Even if the storm goes somewhere else this time, it may not the next. Don’t be complacent.

Not a great picture. It's hard to see that there are actually two

trees down across the road. The second one is about 20 feet 

behind the first.

Second, be prepared. Before each storm, we took in all the patio furniture, filled the car’s gas tank, and charged all our devices, including making sure that the backup batteries for recharging phones and Kindles were completely juiced up. We took the ice the ice maker had already made, bagged it, and stuffed it into open areas of the freezer. When it made another batch, we bagged more until the freezer was just about full. We got out flashlights and lanterns, put batteries in them, and checked all were working. We made sure they were all in a handy place where we wouldn’t have to fumble around in the dark to find them.

Supplies I like to keep on hand for emergencies include spare replaceable batteries for everything, which have to be checked and rotated periodically, and a good variety of non-perishable foods. We always keep extra cans of tuna, beans, chicken, fruit, vegetables and other tins with a long shelf life. As with the batteries, we rotate the stock periodically. We try to keep a five-day supply of sterno in storage. We have enough wood to keep the fireplace going for several days. (In truth, though, if the weather was really cold or really hot, we’d probably go somewhere else after a day or two.) We have a battery-operated radio, but we found we relied more on our smartphones for news and connection with others. They were slow at times because not all the cell towers were working, but enough were that we were usually able to connect. I have two portable battery chargers for the phones, a small one for my purse that will charge my phone twice and a bigger one that will provide up to five charges. We recharged the bigger one every chance we got and it kept our phones going throughout.

One other thing people don’t always think about is money. My sister the banker recommends keeping up to $1000 cash in small bills (nothing larger than $20) in a safe but accessible place. We found out why this time. Our local grocery store was open, running on a generator, but like everyone else in the city, they had no internet connection. They couldn’t process credit or debit cards. Transactions were cash only.

The Delights of Walking Everywhere

by Karen McCullough

(I didn’t know today was Grandparents’ Day when I wrote the post a week or so ago, but it seems appropriate!)

Roses and other flowers blooming along

their driveway

My husband and I have just returned from a visit to our son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren in England. It was a wonderful trip, filled with good times with all of the family and a bit of sight-seeing in their area. We did a lot of walking and it enhanced the trip in so many ways.

They live in Hythe, Kent, an area known as England’s Garden, and with good reason. Nearly every house has extensive gardens filled with profusions of blooming roses, dahlias, fuchsia, butterfly bush, hollyhocks, hydrangeas, and many others. The picture shows the gorgeous row of flowers beside my son’s driveway.  Given how hard it is to keep anything alive, much less blooming, through the hot summer in our central North Carolina home, it’s safe to say I have garden envy.

Of course that’s mostly the result of a climate that stays moderate and rather rainy most of the time. Daytime temperatures over eighty are considered hot and several days in a row of those highs are a heat wave. We were there in August and day-time highs hovered in the upper sixties to low seventies, which they agreed was pretty much normal. We agreed it was pretty delightful. We were fortunate that it only rained on us a couple of times.

Looking out over Hythe from the hill. The English Channel is

 in the distance.

Hythe is just southeast of Dover and Folkestone along the Channel coast and it’s a lovely old town. The High Street is lined with an assortment of shops that cover most necessities and a lot of fun things. “Charity Shops” abound. (Think small versions of the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores.) There’s even a charity bookshop, where I found several interesting tomes I’d never seen in the U.S. There are a couple of restaurants and quite a few coffee shops. Sidewalks are narrow and crowded but for part of the day the road itself is closed off and turned into a pedestrian walkway.

One of the great benefits of this part of England is that you can walk almost everywhere, a great feature for us since we couldn’t all squeeze in my son’s car at one time. And walk, we did. We spent a couple of happy mornings wandering around the old town of Hythe, but we also walked with the family from their house, situated on a hill well above the town, down to the seashore, a distance of about a mile and a half. We also traveled on foot to shops, coffee houses, and even the grounds of the Hythe festival.

When we made treks to other places, like Rochester Castle, and Dungeness, we took the train, and then walked from the station to wherever we wanted to be. Generally it wasn’t a very long journey.

Because of the small children, we didn’t eat out as often as we might have. But there was a Sainsbury’s grocery store on the route from the town center of Hythe to my son’s house, so we frequently stopped there to get ready-made meals or ingredients for putting something together and schlepped them up the hill to their home.

We walked and talked and gazed and walked and talked some more. The pedometer app on my phone said I did about 14,000 steps most days, which added up to about 5 miles of walking per day.
Long strolls gave us plenty of opportunity to interact with each other, share stories, and compare notes on a wide variety of subjects. Walking let me stop to admire gorgeous views from the hillsides, glorious flowers everywhere, interesting and different birds, and the neatly compact houses that are hallmarks of English homes. We stopped frequently to pluck the blackberries growing in abundance all over and pop them in our mouths.

The scenery is beautiful and because the area is new to us, every corner and turn seemed to present something new and interesting. I blessed the new pair of sturdy walking shoes I’d bought shortly before we left because they supported me well through the many miles I put on them.

Back at home my husband and I walk most days, long marches through our neighborhood early in the morning in summer, to avoid the heat. It’s good for us and feels good, but it isn’t as pleasant as being able to walk to so many interesting and different places in Hythe, Kent.

And I miss the company and chatter of my son, daughter-in-law, and especially their two children, Freya (4), and James (2). 

Scams, Spams, and Nasty Schemes

It’s a jungle out there…and in here, too. I’m talking about the Internet, and right now, email specifically.  You just can’t be too careful when dealing with email.

Because I’m both an author and a web designer, my main email address is pretty well-known across the Internet. Certainly the spammers and scammers know about it.  I currently get 20-30 spam emails a day. Most of them are annoying, but pretty innocuous, trying to sell me goods or services I don’t need. The weight loss tips, get rich quick schemes, special tools, prescription drug, and great rates on shipping from China offers are aggravating mostly by their sheer bulk.

But some of them are less innocuous. By now the Nigerian prince or defecting diplomat scheme is so well-known as to be the butt of numerous jokes. But people fell for it. Plenty of them. And, having seen the amount of money to be made, the schemers and scammers have moved on to more sophisticated tricks.

For a while I got five or six notices a day from various banks that I had an urgent message and needed to log into my account. Generally poor grammar and wording were a dead giveaway that those messages didn’t really come from their supposed senders, along with the fact that I didn’t actually have an account at any of those banks.

The first time I got an email purporting to be from one of my web clients saying she’d been mugged in some foreign country and needed help, I was both concerned and suspicious. I hadn’t heard of this scheme, so I actually responded with a request for more information. The reply I got was so unlike my client, I knew it was a scam and ignored all further emails related to it. I later got four more versions of that scam relating to other friends or clients.

The scammers are getting better at it, though. The emails telling me I’ve won a $50 gift certificate from Amazon look very legit. The messages saying there is a problem with my Paypal account carry the Paypal logo and are nicely worded. It’s only when you put your cursor over the link to see where it’s really going that you can tell they’re trying to get you to enter your Amazon or Paypal login credentials on a page that most definitely isn’t attached to either site.

Any attempt to get someone to click on a bad email link or open a malware-laced document is generally called a Phishing attack. But it gets worse. What are sometimes called “spear-Phishing attacks,” where the link or attached document is tailored to a specific environment, can cause an unfortunate click to produce widespread devastation.

I’ve gotten emails purporting to be business documents from a co-worker. I don’t work in a corporate environment, but if I did, an email from purchasing@suchandsuch.com claiming to have a spending report attached might trick me into opening it or clicking on a link.

Those are perilous emails because a click on a bad link or document can give hackers access to an entire corporate network. Thousands of businesses have been hit with ransomware attacks. The city of Atlanta’s computer network was shut down for weeks when held for ransom. My local church’s computer system was also disabled for several days due to ransomware. Those attacks can almost always be traced back to someone clicking on a bad link or opening a document containing malware. The infamous hacking of the Democratic party started with a Phishing attack.

A few days ago, though, I got an email that topped all the others for me personally in terms of the general nastiness of the scam. It was basically a blackmail attempt. It said that I’d visited a porn site and while I was there, the sender had installed malware on my computer, turned on my web cam, caught me in a compromising action on the camera, stolen all my contacts information and would send the video to all of them if I didn’t pay their demand of sending 3,000 Bitcoin to the sender.

I’m an author. I do research all over the web, including some of its shadier corners. I’ve probably even been to a porn site a time or two, though I tend not to linger in such places. Otherwise I knew that the rest was pretty much impossible (in my case), so I didn’t take the threat very seriously. I suppose there are people for whom some of this might be a real possibility and such a note would worry them.

What did actually give me pause was that the subject line contained my name and an old password I once used in a couple of places.  I imagine the sender got that from somewhere on the dark web, where all sorts of hacked data, including some from famously huge data breaches like the Yahoo and Equifax debacles, is available for sale. And don’t kid yourself. Your information is up there somewhere, too.

I no longer use that password, and haven’t for some time, but this was a good reminder of why you should never use the same password in different places and why it’s a good idea to change those passwords occasionally.

Apparently I wasn’t alone in receiving this email, according to this article I found, which echoes the conclusions about it I came to about it:
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-email-scam-uses-old-password-fake-porn-threats-webcam-video-bitcoin-2018-7

Stay safe, my friends!

Some email safety tips:
• Don’t open emails from unknown sources. 
• Never, ever open an attachment unless you’re very sure of what it is and who sent it to you.
• Keep automatic open of attachments turned off in your email program.
• Don’t click on links in emails unless you’re very sure of what it is.  Remember that your friends’ email accounts can be hijacked, and spammers can spoof the names and email addresses of people you know into the “From” field.
• Any time you get an email from a bank or financial institution saying you have a message, don’t click the link. Go to the institution’s site and log in. If the message is legit it will be posted to your account.
• Keep your computer’s virus protection up to date.
• Don’t log into your email account on open, public wi-fi.
• Change all of your passwords periodically and never use the same one at two different places.

Watching the Tour de France

by Karen McCullough

Years ago our son got me and my husband hooked on the Tour de France. I started watching it mostly for the gorgeous pictures of the French countryside, the chateaux, the cathedrals, and castles that were featured to accompany the race. The bicycling itself didn’t interest me. But I gradually was sucked into the intricacies of the race itself, which proved to be fascinating.

Prior to this I knew the Tour de France existed and heard about it occasionally. But it sounded ultimately boring. A lot of cyclists racing around the country. Whole lot of pedaling. Yawn.

There are long stretches that are fairly boring, too. That’s one of the reasons you get all these lovely views of the countryside and sites of historical or esthetic interest. They do need something to fill in some of the time.

(By the way, all images here are from my television screen.)

Like a lot of things that appear simple on the surface, however, cycle racing is much more complex than it appears at first sight. There are a lot of things going on and it’s been fascinating to learn about some of them.

These are just some random thoughts about the Tour de France:

Grand tour racing is a team sport. (The Tour de France is the best known of three Grand Tour races – those that are 21 days long and include a variety of types of courses.) A single rider cannot hope to win one without a huge support staff, including team-mates riding with him. Although teams may come into the race with different goals, most teams have a single intent and build their team around it.

A good part of the team advantage grows out of one simple principle of aerodynamics. Because a rider can ‘draft’ off other riders, maintaining the same speed without having to do the same amount of work as the person in the lead, a group working together can generate more power for a much longer time than a single rider on his own.

There are races within the races within the races. Of course, there is only one overall winner, but there are other prizes available. The overall winner gets a yellow jersey, but there is also a green jersey for the best sprinter, a polka dotted jersey for the best mountain climber, and a white jersey for the best young rider. Each stage has its own winner as well, and those are coveted prizes.

The race is set up to test different skills. Some stages are long and relatively flat, while some are brutally mountainous. The idea is that the overall winner has to be good at all those things. Riders who are trying to win the whole thing are called “GC” (General Classification) contenders. But some teams bring a specialist in either sprinting or mountain climbing to the race and concentrate all their efforts toward winning those competitions.

The long and relatively flat sections of the race normally end with a furious, all-out sprint for the finish by riders who specialize in just that. They’re racing for the stage win, but also points are awarded to the top ten or fifteen finishing positions and the total of those points decides the green jersey competition. Some stages also have “sprint points” within the course that award points to the first few people across that line.

Probably the most brutal stages are those that include several long mountain climbs and the even more terrifying long, winding descents most riders take at speeds that wouldn’t be wise in an automobile, let alone on a bicycle.

There are also stages that are just time trials, where riders race against the clock rather than each other.

Unexpected things can always occur. On a long flat stage, a crosswind can play havoc with the peloton. The bicycles are complex, finely-tuned instruments and they sometimes break. Flat tires are common. Chains sometimes come off the gears. Teams are set up to respond quickly to these, but it can still cost a rider time, especially if it occurs near the end of the stage.

Crashes happen. At least some of the race is on narrow roads. Sharp bends and the frequent roundabouts of European roads can create havoc. The competitors tend to ride bunched tightly together so they sometimes just run out of road space. And when one goes down he usually takes several more with him.

Not all the riders who start the race can finish. Some become ill during the race, but most withdrawals are the result of injuries suffered during crashes.

Although tactics plays a huge role in how the race plays out, the amount of courage, strength, stamina, and sheer guts all the riders need to compete is almost beyond imagining.

It Just Got Real

By Karen McCullough

For a while now I’ve heard the horrific stories about the destruction wrought by drunk, drugged-up, and inattentive (read: texting or checking phones) drivers. I’ve long been a proponent of tougher drunk driving laws and those banning texting while driving. A week ago, though, it got very real to me. That was the day my brother-in-law, my husband’s younger brother was sideswiped by a reckless driver.

He owns a civil engineering firm that does surveying work, so he puts a lot of mileage on his SUV. A week ago, late on a Friday afternoon, he was heading home from work when a woman crossed the center line into his lane. He swerved to avoid her, but she still side-swiped him. His car went off the road and rolled several times.

A witness to the accident, who’d been driving behind her for some time, told the police she’d “been all over the road.”

The impaired young woman’s car also careened off the road and into a tree, but she walked away with almost no injuries. At this point I don’t know if she’s been charged or not, but I certainly hope she will be.

My brother-in-law sustained drastic and terrible injuries, including head trauma and multiple broken bones – vertebra, scapula, clavicle, and nine ribs were fractured. He’s already had several surgeries to repair various things. He’s still in the trauma ICU on a ventilator and has a gazillion tubes going into him and machines monitoring him.

It was touch and go for a couple of days, but it looks now like he will survive and mostly recover. But he has a long road ahead. He faces probably six months to a year of recovery and physical therapy. He may well be out of work for a year or more if he can ever get back to it at all. First, though, he’ll have to re-learn to walk and other motor skills.

All because a young woman got behind the wheel when she was either in no condition to drive or wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing. I don’t know what kind of penalty she’ll face, but I hope it’s a pretty steep one. My brother-in-law and hist family are paying a terrible price for her mistake.

A Few Hours Without Cable and Internet – Arggh!

by Karen McCullough

A few days ago my cable television service went out and took the Internet service down with it. 

Fortunately it was only for a few hours, but those few hours seemed like forever.

When did I get so dependent on that cable linking me to the rest of the world?

I remember a time when television was delivered via the antenna on the roof of the house. Admittedly it could be finicky. Sometimes you got nothing but static. Choices were limited to a few stations. But it usually worked to some degree.

There was a time before the Internet as well. A time when I could work, read, and generally go about the day without having to check in on email constantly or rely on that connection to get things done.

That time is no more. Having it out for just a few hours was incredibly frustrating. Admittedly, I’m a web designer so I probably rely on that connection to do my job more than most people. Or maybe not. My daughter uses her home computer to log in and get work done when bad weather prevents her from getting to office. My son works from home. Others in the family do extensive research with it.

Things I realized I couldn’t easily do with the Internet down: update a couple of websites that needed some changes, pay bills, check the location of a shipping place, answer emails from family and friends, buy a book I wanted for my Kindle, look at the upcoming weather forecast, and check in for a flight I would be taking the next day.

All of those things can be done in other, less convenient, more time-consuming ways. But I’ve gotten used to doing all of them from the convenience of my office desk via the computer.

Just as we used to watch a limited array of television offerings with sometimes grainy pictures. I’ve now grown accustomed to being able to choose from a wide variety of programming options. Throw in my Netflix subscription and it’s almost unlimited. I get to watch pretty much any sporting event I want.

I’m soft and I’m spoiled.  I’ve gone all in for convenience and choice. The result is that I can be nearly paralyzed by an internet outage. Good trade-off? I don’t know. It’s just the way things are now.

Watching the Winter Olympics

I’m a sports fan and a particular fan of the Olympics – winter and summer. And right now – it’s on!

For years I’ve watched as much TV coverage as possible of the various sports, but I’ve been thrilled that streaming online allows me to see much more of the events I watch.

The networks have traditionally only had a few hours each evening to cover many events, so you only got to see the highlights.  That’s still true of much of the prime-time coverage. While watching the highlights can be great, but you can lose comprehension of just how outstanding most of the performances are without anything to compare them to.

Most people realize that getting to the Olympics is a peak experience for almost all the athletes participating. You don’t get there without training hard and long for much of your life. Reaching the top of your sport requires more than just enthusiasm and talent—although you won’t make it without those, success demands the kind of persistence, dedication, and sacrifice most of us can’t even imagine.

Those who get to the Olympics are the best of the best from around the world. Only a very few qualify to begin with, but even so a few of that select group will rise to the top of each sport or event.

Watching can be hard sometimes. Many of the things these athletes attempt are dangerous and have small margins for error.  It can be heartbreaking to see someone who has spent practically every moment of their lives preparing for the few moments of their run, jump, race, or performance come up just short or fail spectacularly.

But then there are moments like what happened yesterday, when a 17-year-old slope-style snowboarder who’d had two miserable runs that put him in last place, put it all together on his third and last attempt, and ripped off a dazzlingly perfect run that won him a gold medal.

And because I’m an author, I have to bring that around to writing. But it’s not hard to see the parallels. In fact, they’re rather obvious. If you want to be at the top of the writing game, you’ve got to have talent, but then you’ve got work, work, work at it. That means keep writing…and writing…and writing some more.

So for me, its back to writing. And then I get to watch more Olympics.

It Wasn’t Exactly the Christmas I Wanted…

By Karen McCullough

But it was the one I got, and it was terrific in its own way. Just not the way I planned.

It’s always a better Christmas when there are children around, so I was elated when my daughter said
she, her husband, and four little boys would be able to come to our place for the holiday. That meant a lot of packing for them, and a ten-hour drive with the four boys (ages 6, 4, 2 ½, and 6 months) in car seats in a mini-van. It’s a pretty big venture for them.



The three older boys playing at the kitchen island.

But come they did. I had things mostly ready – guest rooms, toys for the kids, high chair and portable crib for the baby, plus all the Christmas decorations. Gifts were bought and wrapped. We had plans to visit several relatives in the week following Christmas and to take the boys to a few of their favorite places. The back yard was ready with toys so they could play outside, since winters are generally pretty mild in central North Carolina.

My daughter warned me on her final phone call the day before they left that she and the baby weren’t feeling well and seemed to be developing colds. I assured her that wasn’t going to be a problem.  Little did I know…  (Writers love to use that particular cliché, and it’s so appropriate here.)

They arrived a few days before Christmas, and things started going sideways almost immediately.  The weather took a turn for the bitter, making it too cold for the boys to spend much time out-of-doors. In fact, temperatures remained ridiculously low for this area throughout their visit, making any outing an adventure in endurance. I’m talking daytime highs in the 20s and lows at night in single digits. Biting wind at times.

But I had a good supply of toys, crayons, markers, scratch paper, and books to keep them entertained. They’re good about playing on their own. Until all three of the older boys got sick as well a couple of days after they arrived. Then their Dad caught it. And my husband and I came down with it the day after Christmas.

This wasn’t the normal, garden-variety cold either, of the sort that makes you sniffle for a couple of days. We don’t think it was the flu, since none of had the achy muscles and joints, bad headaches, and nausea that go along with flu, but it was a really ferocious cold that made people feel generally icky for close to a week, then left us all congested, coughing, sneezing, and running for an additional week to ten days.

We had to cancel all the planned visits to relatives, forego the church services we wanted to attend, and forget some of the other places I wanted to take the boys. The kids were frequently, and understandably, cranky, mopey, and whiney.

On top of that, the bug exacerbated a continuing throat problem in my son-in-law, which forced a trip to the emergency room – right as we were getting ready to sit down to Christmas dinner. And a day or two after that the bug set off the six-year-old’s asthma. Fortunately they’d brought along his medicine and a friend lent us a nebulizer, but his parents didn’t get much sleep that night. In fact, sleep was in short supply for them for most of the visit with four wheezy, snuffly, stuffed-up children who all had trouble sleeping.

We blew through (literally) about 20 packages of wipes (for diaper changes and cleaning up runny noses) and several boxes of Kleenex for the adults.

And yet, amid all the chaos and changes of plans, there were some wonderful moments and great blessings.

Present-opening on Christmas morning went well for the most part. We do stockings first, and each of the boys got a foam play sword stuffed in the top. The two-year-old was so excited about the play sword, he went off brandishing it, and Christmas could have ended right there for him. We had to call him back and remind him there were other things in his stocking.

And there was the moment when the six-year-old unwrapped a present and found a book he desperately wanted. He literally shook with excitement and his face lit up with the kind of joy that, if bottled, could solve many of the world’s major problems.

The assistance of my older daughter, who lives nearby and has grown children of her own who were spending the holiday with their other grandmother, was invaluable during the chaos of Christmas day, and my sister-in-law Page was also helpful and understanding when dinner didn’t go according to plan.

At the end, they had to extend their say here a few days because of ice and snow clogging the roads back home on the day they’d planned to leave. That, too, was a blessing in disguise. With the boys finally mostly healthy again, we were able to do some of the things I’d wanted to do earlier, including outings to Safari Nation, a terrific indoor playground, the library for story time, and the Greensboro Children’s Museum.

Perhaps the biggest blessing was contained in something my daughter told me shortly before they left. In thanking me for all the help (though I still don’t feel like it was that much), she said that if they’d been at home with everyone sick, Christmas would’ve been pretty dreary. Being with us meant she didn’t have to handle everything herself, could grab a few extra naps she might not have had at home, and had extra hands to help with caring for the children. That made a huge difference for her.
And I realized I was glad that she and the family were here, illness and all. Together we all had a better Christmas holiday than any of us would’ve had on our own.

I Still Buy My Parents a Christmas Present

My mother died in 2012 after a brief illness. When she went in for surgery to repair an aneurysm, we didn’t really expect complications. Although she was 87, she was still active and spry. Her mind was sharp. And she’d come through other recent surgeries with all flags flying. We didn’t expect that she would suffer a stroke during the surgery and end up with a few other complications that led to her death just a few weeks later.

My mom’s parents had both lived into their late 90s and I truly thought she would, too. I thought we had more time. That said, although there’s still a lot of sadness, I don’t have many regrets. We had a good relationship and I visited as often as I could, given that I had a family of my own to take care of and we lived 600 miles apart. I could’ve called more often, but I did make it a point to call her at least once a week. If I didn’t, she’d call me, concerned that there was a problem.

My father died some ten years before her, after a long and lingering illness. His passing wasn’t a surprise, but it still came on us too quickly, before we were ready. I suppose one is never really ready.

It took a while to get over the grief each time and there are still holes in my life that they used to occupy, but I’m reconciled to it now.

But I still buy my mom and dad a Christmas present. Every year, I buy chickens or a goat in their names for a needy family through the Food for the Poor (foodforthepoor.org) program. It’s a charity my mother had supported during her lifetime. I like to think it’s making them both happy where they are now to know that they’re still making an effort to help others in need.

And on a personal (and more commercial) note - I love writing Christmas stories of all kinds. I have a couple that are available for sale on Amazon and at most ebook outlets and one short story that's totally free.

  

 

A Vampire's Christmas Carol

Amazon Kindle   Nook   Smashwords

Blue December - Amazon Kindle

 

Can You Jump-Start a Reindeer?

Free!

http://www.kmccullough.com/ST_Reindeer.php

Staying Sane Amid the Frenzy

It’s starting… The holiday frenzy is about to engulf us. I’m not ready. I’m never ready.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the holidays! I revel in the costumes and fun gew-gaws of Halloween, relish the family get-togethers and great food of Thanksgiving, and sink with joy into Christmas decorations and greetings and gift-giving.

I don’t like the pressure of it and I don’t like the extreme commercialization. I hate the whole Black Friday thing.  You won’t find me venturing anywhere near a shopping mall or a big box store on the Friday after Thanksgiving.  And I really hate, hate HATE the incursion of the shopping frenzy into Thanksgiving day!  It cheapens the whole idea of the holiday.

In fact it seems to me to be the antithesis of what Thanksgiving is supposed to be about. Instead of being grateful for all the many blessings we’ve been given, all those retailers opening on Thursday promote greed and hunger for things we don’t have. Yes, they disguise it as buying gifts for others, but come on…

And then there’s Christmas. I have to find appropriate gifts for so many people. There are cards, decorations, food, parties, and a gazillion other details that need to be handled.  There have been years when I got to the day after Christmas and could nothing but draw a huge sigh of relief that is was over.  And that’s so, so wrong!

Rant over. I feel better now that I’ve got off that my chest. And I’ve decided to focus this year on what I can do about it.

Here are a few things I’m vowing to try this holiday season:

1. Cultivate gratitude. Not just on Thanksgiving day but throughout the season. I’ve been blessed in so many ways. I’m not wealthy, at least not in money or worldly possessions, but I have enough to eat, shelter from the weather, clothing to keep me warm, reasonably good health, and a wonderful family. I want to take a few minutes each day to remember that and to be grateful for all the gifts I’ve been given.

2. Keep it in perspective. The holiday season is supposed to be about what’s best in us: joy, peace, sharing, and showing our love for others. We’re not doing that if we’re stressed out because the to-do list is too long and the expenses bigger than our budgets. I’ll be taking another look at my lists and asking myself about each item – Is this necessary? Am I doing this because it gives me or someone else pleasure? Or am I doing it because everyone says you have to or my mother always did it this way?

3. Simplify. Of course, I have to buy gifts for my children and grandchildren. And my spouse. Do other acquaintances need gifts from me? Does everyone I’ve ever met need to get a Christmas card from me? Does every surface in my home need to be thoroughly decorated? Are there things I can outsource? I’m trying to consider everything and decide why I’m doing it. Does it make me happy? Does it help others? Or is it just something I feel obliged to do?

That’s my plan.

Whatever yours is, I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving (if you’re in the U.S.) and a peaceful, loving, and joyous holiday season!

Eliminating “Stuff”

My husband and I still occupy the house where we raised our children. It’s rather larger than we need these days but the location is ideal and we renovated it a few years ago to suit our needs as we grow older. The two bedrooms upstairs can be shut off and not heated or cooled when not in use, but they’re handy to have when the kids and grandkids visit.

It’s also far too handy to use those two rooms to store extra things. I hate clutter but I do have pack-rat tendencies, so I need a place to store all that extra stuff, out of sight, but handy should I find a use for the stored items.

I’m getting older and eventually I’ll have to down-size. I’m also aware of feeling burdened by maintaining everything. I hate to think that I’ll be leaving my kids a huge mess of stuff to deal with when I’m gone. It’s time to clean out pretty drastically. I have too much “stuff.” Way too much. Much more than I need, so a lot of things need to go.

I’m trying to start with books. I’ve got a library in those two upstairs room, and the truth is I’ll never read most of them again. Heck, I don’t even read paper books much at all anymore because my eyesight is poor. My Kindle lets me turn any book into a large-print edition, making it much easier to read. So why is it so darn hard to part with all those books, the fruit of some forty years of collecting them?

Then there are all those dishes, glasses, and serving pieces. Many of them belonged to my grandmother, mother, and mother-in-law. I’m hoping to pass them onto my own two daughters and daughter-in-law some day.  But will they even want them? They have a lot of things of their own already.

Clothing is another thing I struggle to cut back on. I have so many things that I’ve worn only a few times. I keep a lot of them mostly because I’m insecure about my fashion sense and I’m sure that as soon as I get rid of something it will turn out to be the perfect thing to wear to some special event.

I’ve tried several tricks to make myself get rid of things. I’ve used that system where I ask myself about how much joy an object gives me. Unfortunately I can find the joy in way too many things. I tried the clothing thing where you turn the hangers around and get rid of anything you haven’t turned around in the season. The only things I didn’t turn around were a couple of shirts I’m sure I’ll need at some time in the future.

A few things have helped. I’ve started a routine of making myself get rid of one piece of clothing for each new one I get so at least I don’t increase the problem. I’m also in the habit of getting rid of one thing a day. Obviously that’s the slow way to eliminate stuff, so I’m still working on how to beat my inner packrat and clear out bunches of stuff.

Another technique I can sometimes make work is to take a class of items – say a shelf of books or a stack of pads and notebooks – and tell myself I have to get rid of at least of half of this batch. Sometimes that works. Sometimes not so much.

I’m open to listening to any and all ideas for eliminating stuff - especially when you’re someone with packrat instincts.

Keeping Perspective

by Karen McCullough

I’ve run my own web design and development business for the past twelve years, ever since I left the corporate world. It’s been a great ride. Most of my clients have turned into friends and I’ve enjoyed working with them to try to make their sites the best possible for them. I’m now in the process of retiring, due to my age, my husband’s retirement last year, and the fact that I’m traveling more to visit my far-flung family.

But I do still work with my existing clients and have told them that I plan to continue for as long as I’m mentally and physically able.  For the most part it’s a pretty low-key job. My clients send requests and I get them done as quickly as I can.

This past week, though, I had one of those issues that stretch my patience with the job. Or not so much the job as some of the services I have to work with. In this case it was the hosting service for my client.

The client has a Wordpress site I customized for her a while back. She’s done a great job of managing the site on her own, but a couple of weeks ago, a gremlin hit (probably during an attempt to upgrade the Wordpress software) and it brought her site down.

I tend to be compulsive about keeping things running smoothly so I went to work on fixing the problem. And quickly discovered it was going to be a slog. I played whack-a-mole with the errors – fixed one and two more popped up. I finally decided the best option was to restore the site from a recent backup.

Neither I nor the clients had one. I had an old backup from when I did some renovations on the site, but using it would mean losing a lot of data. The clients didn’t have any backups, presuming the hosting service would have them. Most do.

This one didn’t. Or at least claimed they didn’t because that’s a service for which they charge extra.  I called BS on that. They finally admitted they did have backups (of course they did!) but would charge for restoring it. And they wouldn’t restore the site as it was, just dump the files into a backup directory.

It’s an a*****le move from an a******le hosting service.  I’m not listing the name but you can email me for it.  It’s a name you’d recognize.

Anyway, those backup files did provide what I needed to get the site up and running again. The whole thing cost my poor clients a LOT more than it should have to restore their site.

But what I really want to focus on is something one of the clients said to me in a phone conversation as we discussed options for restoring the site. “It’s just a website. No one dies if this website goes down. And if we have to rebuild it from scratch, we can do that.”

It was a wake-up call I needed.  I get so compulsive that I lose site of the bigger picture. Except for some critical services provided on the web, most sites are not really a big deal in the overall scheme of things.  That’s something I need to remember.

I had a similar experience on the writing front recently. I’m in a great anthology called Carolina Crimes: 21Tales of Need, Greed and Dirty Deeds . My story is called "Dead Man’s Hand."

I like the story a lot and I’m proud of it, but it went to press with an error. One that is big and obvious and stupid.  I’m not sure how it got past both me and the editor, but it did and it’s there in black and white. I was completely chagrinned when I realized it.

I was relating this story to another author at the recent Killer Nashville conference.

She asked, “Does it ruin the story?”

I had to admit it didn’t. It didn’t impact the plot at all.

She said, “Don’t worry about it then. Half the readers won’t even notice and the half that do will just shrug and wonder how that got by the editor. It won’t ruin the story for them.”

And you know what? She’s right. That error looks so huge to me, but the first few people who read the story and talked to me about it split pretty evenly between those who didn’t even notice and those who wondered about the question. They all said they still enjoyed the story.

Perspective. It’s a hard thing to keep in mind, but so necessary!