Forbes is now using computer-generated stories created by Narrative Science software. Writers apparently are no longer needed for a long list of stories that can be written by algorithm, from sports stories to financial reports. 

Personally, I have known some nice sportswriters and am sad to see them being sent to the junk pile. I always admired the depth of their verb vocabulary.

Who will be next? Bloggers, short story writers, novelists? Please no. I know humans are messy and can’t spell and like to be paid. What if I took fewer bathroom breaks and limited the use of “was” in chapter one? Would that save my job?

I can be creative. I know hundreds of words. Of course, you know thousands and can remember them. But I think people want to read more than stats with a few verbs sprinkled in, something a little more eloquent than a computer manual (no offense). I think they want to be swept away by the turn of a phrase or the essence of a character. They want to imagine themselves . . .

What? Yes, that could be melted chocolate on my keyboard.

I know. That would never happen to you.

Everyone knows my feelings about Halloween. (See “Why I Spend Halloween in the Basement.”) Valentine’s Day ranks right up there with it; I was tempted to name this post “Why I Spend Valentine’s Day Under the Bed.” 

I didn’t always think Valentine’s was a total waste of pink, doilies, and red construction paper. I’m not a complete ogre. I still have those homemade love notes from my kids, and they still make me cry. And then I remember those same kids, years later, sobbing in my arms because some elementary school doofus gave everyone a Valentine but her or because she did’t receive a rose that day from a single high school moron.

This holiday is rife with expectation, hope, and sentimentality. It makes me gag. It makes my heart hurt for all those sitting at home waiting and for those coerced into going out on a miserable date not because you want to but because that’s what you’re supposed to do on February 14.

Romantic love is not dashing into Cub Foods at 5 p.m. and snagging the last bouquet or giving, heaven forbid, a love coupon worth one heck of a time at a future date. It is not having a jet waiting to fly you to Paris (althought that could earn massive points).

Romantic love is giving and receiving a smile EVERY day. It is keeping your mouth shut when you are jumping-around-inside-of-you dying to say something.

You want true love? I’ll give it to you.

One day my husband (whom I shall call Rubbertoes) and I were arguing in the backyard. I forget what it was about, but it started to get heated. Finally, my normally peaceful Rubbertoes flung his gardening trowel into a bed of impatiens and shouted: “And that’s your heart!” For a moment, the world stopped; the birds ceased singing; the children gasped.

And then I burst out laughing. I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my lawn chair.

No one sends a spade spinning into the aorta of a garden unless they truly care. When we drive each other to the edge and still hang on, that is love. It does’t have anything to do with chocolates or jewelry or tattoos.

My curmudgeonly advice: Don’t do anything special this holiday. Instead, make all the other days of the year special. That’s my plan—do nothing. At least until the grandkids come along.

_______________

Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day? How? Are you a curmudgeon or a mushy, chocolate-loving, diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend sort?

Folk artist Maud Lewis of Nova Scotia was a wee woman with such a great artistic spirit that her entire house has been preserved in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. The diminuitive dwelling doesn’t take up much space; it was only a 10 x 12 foot fisherman’s shack to begin with. Yet it was bursting with life when Maud lived there.

“Once this house was covered in tattoos.” That was the first line I wrote for my novel Maud’s House, after reading about Maud Lewis and seeing her artwork. Although my novel has nothing to do with Maud Lewis or her life, I hope it is imbued with her unquenchable desire to create. I couldn’t help but name my character Maud because she came to be as driven as the real Maud.

Pictures of Maud Lewis nearly always show her smiling and hiding her hands, which had begun to curl and become misshapen when she was 15. Her art is always joyful: brightly colored flowers, oxen with large curling eyelashes, glorious butterflies and birds. These were the things Maud saw from her window every day.

When I get stuck and consider complaining about how lousy the writing is going, I think of Maud and kick myself. She was a sickly orphan passed around from one poor relative to another until one day, in her thirties, she walked down the road from Digby to the isolated cabin of shy fish peddler Everett Lewis. Everett was impressed that his dog didn’t bark at their uninvited visitor. Apparently, Maud had passed some kind of test. Within weeks, they were married and living in their closet of a home.

Everett encouraged Maud’s love of painting and scrounged paints for his wife. Soon she was riding along on his fish route in the Model T selling hand-painted postcards—five for a quarter.  In the 1940s, Maud put out a roadside sign, “Paintings for sale,” and began selling small paintings to tourists for $2.50. By the time she died in 1970, at the age of 67, her paintings were being shipped to collectors all over the world.  

These are the things you should remember about Maud Lewis:

• She never took a drawing lesson, read a textbook, or saw a work of art.
• She contracted polio as a child and later was afflicted by arthritis. She lived in constant pain. By the end of her life, Everett had to lift her out of the bed in the morning, dress her, and set her by her easel and paints. And still she painted: everything in her house (even the windowpane), driftwood, cookie sheets.
• In her final years, in the hospital with a broken hip and no longer able to control a paintbrush, she made Christmas cards for the nurses with felt pens.

When she was creating her art, Maud Lewis escaped pain, poverty, and the Nova Scotia cold.

She proved that the creative spirit makes everything seem bigger—life, love, even a painted doll house with no insulation or running water.

____________________

Visit the Painted House of Maud Lewis. 

Calling all Sherlocks, Stephanie Plums, Richard Castles, and all you readers/geocachers/scavenger hunters.

It is time for the Get Loaded Blog Tour de Force—the most fun you’ll have on a scavenger hunt all year.

We call it get loaded because we’re going to load up your ereaders with FREE eBooks. And some of you are going to score loads of prizes as well—special gift baskets by the five participating authors and a new Kindle.

Eager to get on the trail?

Get out your GPS (Great Powers of Scavenging) and put in these coordinates:

• Day One (January 23): A Hustler’s Promise by Jackie Chanel http://www.jackie-chanel.com
• Day Two (January 24): Neiko’s Five Land Adventure by AK Taylor http://www.backwoodsauthor.wordpress.com
• Day Three (January 25): Anew by Chelsea Fine http://www.chelseafinebooks.com
• Day Four (January 26): Book of Mercy by Sherry Roberts http://www.sherry-roberts.com
• Day Five (January 27): Secrets (Guardian Trilogy: Book 1) by Liz Schulte http://www.lizschulte.com

Why am I doing this tour? Because I want you to meet: Antigone Brown, a women who can’t read and is pregnant with her first child; Irene Crump, president of the Mercy Study Club and determined to rid the town of Mercy of “undesirable” books; and Ryder, a runaway who steals right into Antigone’s heart (and yours, too, I bet).

Basically, it all boils down to a literary smackdown between Antigone and Irene. Who will win? Will censorship prevail in Mercy or will Antigone be able to save the books she can’t read? There’s a secret library involved, a brawl (with pies), hubcap art, boxing deer, and more.

How do you get this must-read? Leave a comment on my blog, during this tour, and I’ll send you a FREE eBook of Book of Mercy. Be sure to leave your email address and what type of eBook you’d like (PDF, Kindle, ePUB format).

Rules of the game:

• Leave comments on every site of the tour. Use your GPS to hop around the tour. Try to hit every author site. Leave a comment at every site. Each comment earns you a free eBook from that site’s owner AND an entry into the site’s giveaway AND an entry into (drum roll please) the Big Golden Cache at the end: a FREE KINDLE!
• Find your clues. After you comment, hop over to the Indie Book Collective and get clues for hidden info. While you’re there, sign up for the IBC newsletter and earn 5 MORE ENTRIES for that Kindle.
• Grab your GPS and start hunting down info.
• Collect all the info and e-mail your answers at the end of the tour to IBC to earn EXTRA entries for the Kindle drawing.
• Cheating is allowed. Keep this on the down low, but I will be giving a few hints on Twitter. Follow me at @sherryroberts7 and get some insider info on this super-scavenger hunt.

Prizes:

• Books, books, books. All of the eBook variety. Collect a FREE eBook at every author’s site. That means you’re hunting for five days, but it’s worth it. A comment on this site earns you an eBook copy of Book of Mercy.
• Giveaways. Leave a comment at each author’s site and get entered into that author’s special giveaway. What’s in my gift basket? A signed paperback copy of Book of Mercy for your personal library. A dozen of the best cookies on the planet courtesy of Two Smart Cookies (because you won’t be able to put down Book of Mercy and will need nourishment) and a Bananagrams game (in honor of my dyslexic heroine, Antigone, who sees letters mixed up all the time and has to make sense of them). I have to limit this giveaway winner to the U.S. #sorry.
• Free Kindle. For each comment you leave on my site, you will get one entry into the drawing for the Big Golden Cache at the end: a FREE KINDLE! For every piece of information that you scavenge from the five authors’ sites and take back to the IBC site, you get a Kindle giveaway entry. Sign up for the IBC newsletter and get 5 more entries.

So stuff that ballot box, baby. Scavenge like crazy. Don’t miss a day or a site.

Give a Big Cyber Hug to My Sponsors

Go visit my wonderful sponsors’ sites and leave a comment. These folks do a tremendous service for the reading community. Plus they have interesting stuff to say about books. Bookmark these sites; subscribe to them. Please.

SmartLit

Journey of a Bookseller

Defrosting Cold Cases

Purple Jelly Bean Chair Reviews

Reading Is My Cheap Addiction

A Word about My Tour Mates: Amazing Paranormal Reads

Go back to Day Three: Chelsea Fine’s YA paranormal romance, Anew, presents a conundrum I can honestly say I have never encountered in my long reading life. This is a fresh take on the love triangle, and you’ll find yourself wishing there was a way for everyone—brothers Tristan and Gabriel and lovely Scarlet—to live happily ever after. But first they have to break not one, but three curses. A promising start to the Archers of Avalon series. Bring us more, Chelsea. What are you doing on this tour? You need to be writing.

Get ready for Day Five: Liz Schulte is a talented writer who has woven an intricate plot with an amazingly seductive bad boy (don’t the vulnerable ones get us every time). In Secrets, she alternates first-person chapters between photographer Olivia and mysterious Holden. The world has plans for Olivia. Can she keep from falling into the abyss? Side note: The dream sequences in this book are amazing.

That’s it. So get going. Comment. Scavenge. Cheat all you want. Get those prizes. Get loaded.

Remember: Leave a comment on my blog, during this tour, and I’ll send you a FREE copy of Book of Mercy. Be sure to leave your email address and what type of eBook you’d like (PDF, Kindle, ePUB format). Here’s the question I’d like you to answer: What’s your favorite banned book and why?

I am participating in the Get Loaded Blog Tour de Force sponsored by the Indie Book Collective this week, and I hope to get more mileage while putting on fewer miles. This is the new paradigm in publishing.

You see, in my last book tour (back in the ’90s when few people were talking about virtual anything much less a virtual book tour), I traveled for ten days from Los Angeles to Vermont to promote my book, Maud’s House. I talked to packed houses and empty ones; one horrendous thunderstorm washed away all my potential readers in Chicago.

Maud’s House is the story of a Vermont artist who loses and regains her creativity. As a child prodigy, Maud drew on the walls of her house, every square inch. As an adult, she is has lost her muse, drinks too much Rolling Rock, and seems to only be able to draw postcards featuring cows.

The neat thing about any book tour, virtual or physical, is meeting readers and learning about their lives. On the Maud’s House tour, I met readers who cracked me up and who touched me with their stories.

One woman admitted that she had begun writing again after reading my book: “I was raised in a strict home where we weren’t allowed to dance or paint or write. I’m in my fifties and starting my first journal.”

Another woman said she had a brother who, like Maud, drew on the walls. He was always getting in trouble with their mother. In the end, he became a successful artist. One day, the mother discovered one of her son’s early drawings secreted way on a wall inside a closet. She seriously considered cutting that part of the wall out and having it framed.

I hope to meet more great readers on this tour. Come back to this blog on Thursday, January 26, my featured day of the tour, and let’s talk. I am promoting my new novel, Book of Mercy, this time. It’s a funny novel about a serious issue (censorship), so we’ll have lots to discuss.

See you Thursday. I’ll be in my PJs, so don’t dress up on my account.

________________________________

What’s on your mind? I’m listening. Maud’s House is about pursuing your creativity no matter where it takes you: to the painting studio, the kitchen, the garden, the antique car in your garage. What do you take to the level of an art? Leave a comment below.

I am concerned about memory preservation because of my father and his sister, a former beautician who was found wandering in her pajamas with wild hair. This is looking more and more like a family thing, which I think about every time a word slips away just as I am about to nail 4-Down in the crossword. Daily crosswords and sudokus are my line of defense.

I write memories everywhere, and my scrapbooking has taken on a whole new intensity. But recently, I have read that water has memory. This gives me hope. After all, 60 percent of the human body is water.

Independent scientists in Japan and Germany have conducted water experiments to figure out: Is water capable of storing information and retrieving it? Researchers at the Aerospace Institute of the University of Stuttgart maintain that each drop of water has a face of its own, like a snowflake, but can be changed by the memory of what it comes in contact with—such as a person’s finger or a flower.

In Japan, Dr. Masuru Emote has taped words, such as “peace,” “love,” and “I want to kill you,” on separate beakers of distilled water and left them over night. In the morning, Dr. Emote took samples from the beakers and compared them to the pure, distilled water crystals taken from each beaker prior to the experiment. They were different. In fact, the loving word samples created beautiful crystals, while the hateful word samples made ugly and fractured crystals. He has performed similar experiments with music and meditation. Each time the water was changed.

With this new information comes responsibility. I live in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. So I have been thinking that all this water around me is retaining memories of me as I swim or fall out of my canoe. When our family vacationed in Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota, we frolicked in the headwaters of the Mississippi River, where you can walk across the Big Muddy in but a few steps. We filled the river with happiness until I stubbed my toe, lost my balance, and dropped my shoe in the effing water.

The German researchers hypothesize that a river is picking up information from its source to its mouth. That means people in New Orleans are drinking memories of me hopping  on one foot and cursing in Minnesota, not to mention the kid who decided to take a whiz while fishing in Missouri, and the street musician playing a tune on the Memphis waterfront.

Whether water has memory or not, I have decided to be more cautious of H2O in the future. I don’t want to be responsible for planting some horrible, murderous memory in the nearby lake. Note to self: do not rant while swimming.

Maybe these theories about water could lead to practical applications. Memories could become the eco-weapon of tomorrow. Imagine throwing a bunch of happy people in that scummy pond down the street. Clean-ups of ecological disasters could become a snap, if we could find enough people in a good mood.

But before I save the world, I should look closer to home. Maybe if I get my dad to drink more water, he will fill up with other people’s memories and not miss his own so much.

I am used to such misadventures; they do not faze me. My husband says these things would not happen if: 1) I read more in the kitchen (as in Julia Child or Betty Crocker), or 2) I didn’t read as much (as in Hemingway or Steinbeck).

But why should I read cookbooks when I am such a marvelous cook to begin with?

I can boil down sentences until there is only the essence left, the true flavor of the words. They cling delicately to the bone of meaning and taste full and round in the mouth. They form such vivid images you can almost bite into them and feel their juices running down your chin.

A good story takes some preparation. Call it marinating. True, there are a few storytellers, such as Garrison Keillor, who pop out stories like microwave ovens. But I, and probably most other writers, take a while to collect information and ideas. After I gather the ingredients, I throw them into a pan, cover them with sauce from the subconscious, and wait.

Sometimes, I wait for years. Good cooking cannot be rushed.

Even after I have made the story, I must wait, let it simmer, let it age. For a story made today has a different taste tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that. Good writing, work studied and hailed and read over and over again, never loses its taste, never goes sour.

Of course, errors do happen. I forget to add a thought. Or I beat an idea instead of folding it in with gentleness and patience. Or I sprinkle in too many adjectives, and the story becomes not only runny but run on.

The best cooks never follow the book as if it were a drill sergeant. They improvise, feeling their way by taste and touch and sound. With practice, you get to know what will work; you have a sense of what the story needs, when it is missing a pinch of this or a dash of that.

And, of course, I have burned things. Everyone does. Cooks on scaffolds building skyscrapers, cooks in operating rooms navigating jungles of tiny veins. Cooks speaking before juries, exploring the ocean deep, patrolling lonely city streets. They make mistakes, but they don’t give up. They go right back and beat that steel beam again, cut out that diseased organ, flambé their opponents’ arguments.

Nothing is more disheartening than to hear someone cry: “I can’t cook.” Nonsense, everyone can cook. We all have our specialties, and none is greater or less than others. We all have some dish inside us with our name on it. Sometimes, we just forget to look for it. We let people sidetrack us. Categorize us. We don’t listen to our hearts.

I say get out your pots and pans and descend into the Grand Canyon. I hear the view is stunning.

What type of writing do you do?

As Wren Andre, I like character-driven stories that reveal something extraordinary about an ordinary person. I am also working on a two-part memoir that has been an alternately excruciating and fulfilling experience. Under another pen name, I explore paranormal and erotic romance themes.

How long have you been writing and what is your writing habit—when you write, where you write, what gets you going?

I began writing around the age of 12, and I took myself very seriously! Then I became sidetracked by rock ’n’ roll for about 20 years. I was a singer/songwriter for many years and then was co-owner of the independent record label Cave Poodle Records. I’ve been back to writing for about a decade now and have finally gotten into a workable routine. My writing habits revolve around my day gig. I also have a family, and my time with them is very important, too. So it can be a challenge! I write almost every day, typically a few hours after dinner, and I will also take an entire day of one of my days off to write. Then I save the other day for family. It’s all about balance.

Who are you favorite writers?

I enjoy and gain inspiration from writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, Augusten Burroughs, Phillip K. Dick, and Margaret Atwood. But I’m also an old school Stephen King fan, and I love memoirs or a good paranormal romance to shake things up. (Wren, shared a peek at her personal library.)

What writing resources do you find useful?

I follow the Writer’s Digest newsletter and subscribe to the magazine, but honestly, I get so much out of other writer’s blogs (such as yours!). There’s something magical about the writing community; I have such a sense of camaraderie that I never had when I was in the music business. I love hearing other writers’ “in the trenches” stories.

Wren is a self-proclaimed spider whisperer. What does someone in that line of work do actually?

Spider whisperers protect poor innocent spiders from those who would heartlessly smash them. My husband and everyone I work with know to come to me when a spider is in need of rescue—as in “come get this spider before I squish it with my shoe.” The next time a fly lands on your hamburger, remember that the spider is our friend.

Wren lives in Oregon. I love to hike and bike. In fact, I spent a great week in Oregon visiting Crater Lake and parks up and down the Oregon coast. Tell me what you like about the outdoors.

You should come back! I could show you some great areas to hike. The outdoors for me is a direct connection to the life spirit. Back when I lived in L.A. (shudders), I would escape to the mountains on the weekend and regain a sense of peace. Inevitably, I would become inspired to write a new song, or have one forming in my head on the way home. I would say nature is my ultimate muse. Hey, maybe that’s why I’m such a writing fool since I moved here! I think you’re on to something there, Sherry.

I’m a big X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. What do you, a paranormal junkie, read and watch?

I love Charlaine Harris and, of course, the True Blood series. I’m also a hardcore X-filer and really got hooked on Lost (however, the ending . . . hmmmm). I also think Karen Marie Moning is a fantastic writer, and I first got converted to paranormal romance through Christine Feehan. Oh, and did I mention Stephen King? He will always be my first love.

Please visit Wren’s blog, Writing in the Real World, and say hello:  http://wrenandre.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/in-the-zone/

The interactive feeding station for cats is supposed to stimulate the cat’s natural instinct to seek and hunt, something our civilized kitties have lost over generations of coddling. Personally, I don’t know if encouraging the wild side in pets is a good thing. I had enough trouble handling the tame ones. Let’s see, there was:

• Stormy, the dog, was rescued in a thunderstorm, of course. She required an immense amount of expensive dental work, and that was BEFORE she ate the deck. 
• Luna and Eclipse, the cat sisters, alternately grew fatter and skinnier, until it was tough to tell who was eating what. After Eclipse died, Luna aged into a slow and snooty grazer. Always aloof as opposed to her cuddly sister, Luna took on some of Eclipse’s personality in her later years, seeking attention at all hours of the day, even when it meant flopping on the keyboard or the middle of the dictionary to get it. Then the Intruder came to live with us, and Luna became an entirely different cat.
• Midori (a.k.a. the Intruder) was a cat child, always bugging the older cat to play and never staying Luna-slapped for long. Midori considered ALL food to be “mine, mine, mine.” The cute Siamese would have eaten until she exploded, I am sure. So her owner (my daughter who was living with us while attending grad school) put her on strictly proportioned and timed meals. I had to lock Luna and her meal bowl away in my bedroom at night to keep Luna’s kibble safe from Midori.

Luna has passed since those days, and Midori has her own house to terrorize now. My daughter has invested in an automatic feeder. At various times during the day, it dumps food into a bowl, which contains a golf ball. Midori has to chase her food around the ball, which slows the little gnosher down and, my daughter hopes, helps with her digestion.

That is as high tech as Midori’s interactivity is going to get. Because Midori is a smart one. I shudder to think what she could do with an interactive feeding station at her beck and paw. Rule the world perhaps.

I put my silly tweet in the pot just for fun, but also because I really hated what the University of Wisconsin in Stout tried to pull on theater professor James Miller. In September, Miller posted a quote from the television show, Firefly, outside his office door: ”You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.” The sentiment is about standing for a certain set of values, of being straightforward and honest with your fellow humankind. No threat was intended.

But campus police were having none of it. On September 16, they removed the “unacceptable” poster because it referred to killing. In response to this censorship, Miller launched a second salvo poster, which read: “Warning: Fascism” and included a cartoon image of a silhouetted police officer striking a civilian. The poster warned, “Fascism can cause blunt head trauma and/or violent death. Keep fascism away from children and pets.”

Again, the university responded by removing the poster. Quickly, the incident blew up into a public relations nightmare for the university, fueled by tweets, blog posts, and articles by Firefly fans, free speech advocates, the media, celebrities such as Adam Baldwin and Nathan Fillon, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). On October 4, the university put out the publicity wildfire by reversing its decision to censor Miller.

This may sound like old news, but a similar incident will likely surface somewhere in the world tomorrow or the next day. Censorship seems to never go out of style. And so, FIRE is sponsoring the tweet contest to draw attention to a new video on censorship featuring author Neil Gaiman.

Now, I have a few disclaimers: 1) I am a Firefly addict and take umbrage at people messing with this rag-tag crew; 2) I am a free speech nut; and 3) I have written a novel about a town that censors books called Book of Mercy. Even if you are or have done none of these things, please watch the video. 

Oh, and my tweet? Here it is:

Son, if you don’t know #censorship is wrong, you just don’t get it. #Firefly in a jar w/no walls. http://bit.ly/tGzd0o

My way-too-literal friend complained, “How can a jar have no walls?”

“It’s about freedom,” I explained.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

This is why I will not win this contest. I suck at jingles.

Feel free to RT in the name of Browncoats, TV shows cancelled before their time, and the way fireflies make you feel on a summer night.