Your One Stop Procrastination Shop
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Merlin club is a weekly feature in which Jessica Jarman, Bronwyn Green, and myself gather at 8pm EST to watch an episode of the amazing BBC series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan and literally nobody else I care about except Colin Morgan.
Okay, I lie. A lot of other really cool people are in it, too.
Anyway, we watch the show, we tweet to the hashtag #MerlinClub, and on Fridays we share our thoughts about the episode we watched earlier in the week.
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UPDATE #2: Stephanie Dray has issued a statement apologizing for her remarks.
There are some who aren’t comfortable with that apology, and that’s fine, I’m not throwing my hat into the ring or making a judgement on anyone either way. I’m just reporting what’s happened and everybody can go there own way from there.
UPDATE: I’ve been contacted by a few authors who know Laura Kaye and Stephanie Dray. They’ve cleared up some points about the situation.
Thank you to the authors who could shed light on the confusion regarding America’s First Daughter.
A source close to Stephanie Dray has said that a statement from the author is forthcoming.
TRIGGER WARNING: WHITE PEOPLE JOKING ABOUT SLAVE RAPE
Remember how I was supposed to be taking the week off blogging? Sometimes, shit comes up that can’t wait. Like this shit. This steaming pile of shit.
Before we proceed, here’s what I’m going to ask you to do:
If you do any of these things, I will have a fucking stroke, so help me god.
From this point on, TRIGGER WARNING FOR HORRIFIC AND OPPORTUNISTIC RACISM AND MANY, MANY REFERENCES TO RAPE. REALLY EVALUATE THE DAY YOU’RE HAVING AND THE DAY YOU WISH TO HAVE BEFORE YOU CONTINUE TO READ.
So, do any of you guys watch Adventure Time? It’s an awesome show. In an early episode, the heroes, Finn and Jake, find their sleep disturbed when a horse won’t stop staring through their window at night. It can’t moved, reasoned with, or dissuaded. It just stands there, staring. Jake diagnoses the animal as having “poo brain.”
I have come to adopt this phrase in place of “Fibro fog,” the common description of the mental sluggishness that is symptomatic of a Fibromyalgia flare-up. It’s a way better term for how I feel. I don’t feel “foggy,” I straight up feel like someone took a shit in my brain, and it’s good for nothing.
Luckily, my case of poo brain didn’t last longer than a week, but that week ate up a considerable chunk of writing time. I mostly tweeted and tumblred, because that was how long my attention span lasted. I couldn’t focus on anything.
So, now I am behind. Way behind. I had a manuscript I wanted to turn in to my publisher today; I still have a scene and a chapter to go. But because I’m off schedule with that, it means I’ve having to start work on my next project at the same time. Which means extra work, which means less time here for wacky blog shenanigans.
So, this is a State of The Trout update to let you know that I am not dead, I am still alive, I’m just overwhelmed with work I fell behind on when I got poo brain. After this week, I’ll hopefully be back to a normal schedule and I can get an Apolonia recap done and work on some Buffy.
I also want to publicly apologize to Nicholas at the Portage Crossings GameStop. I told him I would take his survey within the next three days, but I forgot. Sorry, Nicholas.
Merlin club is a weekly feature in which Jessica Jarman, Bronwyn Green, and myself gather at 8pm EST to watch an episode of the amazing BBC series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan and literally nobody else I care about except Colin Morgan.
Okay, I lie. A lot of other really cool people are in it, too.
Anyway, we watch the show, we tweet to the hashtag #MerlinClub, and on Fridays we share our thoughts about the episode we watched earlier in the week.
When I was twelve years old, I found a book at a garage sale that would forever change my life. The book was called All The Sweet Tomorrows, and it told the tale of Skye O’Malley, a beautiful raven-haired widow on a mission to find her not-so-dead-after-all husband in Algiers. This book introduced me to dildos, dubcon, anal sex, foot torture, and pony play. No, I’m not kidding, this book, which was originally published in 1986, had all of that.
That book set in stone my destiny as a romance reader and writer. It also really helped hone my reading skills; as a child with learning disabilities, I was supposed to practice my reading. Nothing makes you want to practice reading more than learning about the seedy sorts of things adults are getting up to with their private parts.
Since that book, I’ve read many, but not all, of Ms. Small’s novels. I say not all because she wrote over fifty in her career, each one a grand, sweeping saga that helped define old school romance, as well as evolve the historical genre. When I had the pleasure of meeting her at the Romantic Times convention in 2008, I asked her to sign my favorite.
When I handed it to her, she smiled fondly at the cover and said, “Oh! I love this book.” There is nothing quite as fantastic as hearing the creator of something you love express how much they also love it. It’s a feeling I will never forget.
I also told her my story about finding All The Sweet Tomorrows and how her work had shaped my career. “And now,” I told her proudly, “I’m a USA Today bestselling romance author, and I never would have been if I hadn’t read your book.” I had tears in my eyes. So did she.
That was the one and only time I ever met Ms. Small, who wrote “God bless!” in her kink-tastic novels and dotted the “i” in her name with a heart. She passed away on Tuesday at age seventy-seven, leaving behind a legacy that will live on for as long as the romance genre endures. I won’t say that we lost one of the greats, because that phrase doesn’t cover it. I will say instead that we were lucky enough that she shared her ingenuity, her boundless talent, and her fantastically wicked imagination with us all.
Rest in peace, Ms. Small.
So, a few weeks ago someone on Facebook signed my death warrant by posting a link to CandyJar.com, a website that sells bulk candy by the jar. You pick a small, medium, or large “jar” and fill it by selecting “scoops” of the candy you want.
Since candy is my writing fuel and I’m also a shut-in, I decided to give it a shot. No one at CandyJar.com asked me to do this, and I’m not receiving anything in trade for this review, but just heads up, CandyJar.com, I’m really the perfect spokesperson. Email me.
The “jars” come in three sizes, and none of them have cutesy names, which I appreciate. They’re just small (32 oz), medium (64 oz), and large (128 oz). Standard, normal, no “Vente” or “Gotta Have It!” or anything like that.
I ordered the large jar. And yes, I was aware at the time that the large is basically one gallon of candy. It says so in the little window where you select your jar size, almost as if in a warning. I did it anyway. It’s not like it showed up and I was surprised by the amount of candy I had ordered. I did this to myself.
The shipping was fairly quick. I think from order to delivery it was something like a week. But I’ll be honest, for me, that was too long. Once I start thinking about candy, I want the candy like, now. So, the shipping is speedy, but if you’re like me, even an Amazon drone wouldn’t be able to deliver sweet, sweet lady sugar faster enough.
When it did arrive, it came like this:
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the details when I ordered, probably because I was so focused on the whole “I’m buying an actual gallon of candy” thing. I didn’t know if I was just going to get a box of candy at the approximate weight, or if there would be an physical jar. The answer was both:
Some of the candy came on top, and the rest came like this:
It’s all wrapped up in neat little bundles inside the jar, which is made out of slightly flexible plastic, like a peanut butter jar, and has a metal screw-top lid. You have the option of keeping it all separate, if you’re too good for candy that’s all mixed together, you snob.
Having ordered candy through the mail before, I know that things can go wrong (for example, I can tell the difference between a broken Zotz and a whole Zotz by feel alone these days). I am happy to report that only one type of candy didn’t quite make the journey in pristine condition:
I don’t know how candy corn manages to shatter, but it totally did. The outside was dry and crumbled into pieces, the inside was oddly moist and stuck together. It was really strange, considering the rock candy, the one I was most concerned about, came so perfect that not even a single crystal had broken off:
One of the things that confused me about the site was that on some items, I couldn’t tell what, exactly, constituted a “scoop.” For example, I ordered three “scoops” of rock candy, which ended up being equal to three of these bundles (that either had four or five sticks in it, I should have counted). But I ordered five scoops of Chupa Chups and got nine of these:
which each had four pieces inside. I mean, I’m not complaining, because I love these (they were absolutely huge in the ’90’s, if you don’t remember. Celebrities were being photographed with them. They were the PinkBerry or Ugg Boots of 1996). But it’s just nice info to have for next time.
I wanted to see if I could indeed fit all of this candy:
into the jar. I’m sure that if I’d bought all gummies or all taffy they would have fit with no problem, but the Pixy Stix threw off the whole groove. Even the Chupa Chups didn’t have a problem playing nice with the other candy, but the Pixy Stix and Smarties just couldn’t fit in with the rest.
I wondered if the price would be worth it ($49.99 USD for the large… I’m not sure what sounds worse, “I bought a gallon of candy,” or “I bought fifty dollars worth of candy.”), and to be honest, I haven’t really researched the prices of these individual items. They definitely don’t have as wide a selection as some bulk candy websites, but you have more control over the amount you can order, so you can get more variety. Most bulk sites are fine if you want to buy 5 lbs. of, say, Zotz, but this gives you a chance to make a customized mix without having to shell out for huge amounts. They do carry chocolate candies, but I didn’t buy those, because I like candy, not chocolate. Get out of here with that chocolate business (although I will eat it occasionally).
All in all, I’m happy with my experience with CandyJar.com. Two thumbs up, will be ordering again. Probably next month. Because I have a real impulse control problem.
Hey everybody! Just a few more 50 Shades of Grey related things for all of us to shake our heads about this lovely Saturday evening.
A 50 Shades of Grey fan has doxed an anti-fifty blogger. @Kaydeelex has had to choose between her professional career or her blog, which points out the abuse in 50 Shades of Grey. You can read more here. I am not at all surprised to see a 50 Shades of Grey stan behave so abusively, for obvious reasons.
Miss Quin and I talked about 50 Shades of Grey…for like almost an hour. If you’re interested in hearing our somewhat bewildered take on the movie we watched the night before, you’re in luck!
The images in the 50 Shades of Grey posts will soon be fixed! There is a crack team ready to roll on this. They are not unlike the Avengers. PS. I was in this total state of crushing anxiety, like, how am I going to meet my deadline and fix this and I’m letting everybody down, etc. and then so many of you emailed me to help out with this. When I told Mr. Jen, he said, “I knew they would have your back.” So thank you, thank you, thank you for having my back.
E.L. James is fixin’ to tank her sequels. Variety reports that James is demanding more control over the sequels (including writing the screenplays, despite having no experience), and Vanity Fair reports that Universal is actually entertaining the idea. Meanwhile, notoriously accurate Hollywood gossip peddler @EntyLawyer had this to say (thanks, @Katiebabs, for bringing this to my attention)
Jamie Dornan has out clause for 50 Shades sequel if production does not start by certain date. EL James will delay it beyond that date
— Enty Lawyer (@entylawyer) February 21, 2015
@katiebabs No script. No writer. No director. No start date. They wanted sequel V’Day 2016. Shooting won’t start until at least then.
— Enty Lawyer (@entylawyer) February 21, 2015
@LindsTR There are huge delays and right now it is 50/50 that you will be looking at a new Christian Grey.
— Enty Lawyer (@entylawyer) February 21, 2015
No matter what happens, it’s surely not great news for the franchise if the sequels are in this much trouble just a week after the first movie opened.
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THANK YOU FOR YOUR OVERWHELMING AND SPEEDY RESPONSE, GUYS! I THINK I’VE GOT WHAT I NEED, BUT IF THE CRACK TEAM THAT SIGNED ON NEEDS MORE HELP, I’LL LET YOU ALL KNOW! AGAIN, THANKS SO MUCH FOR THE OVERWHELMING SUPPORT!
Hey everybody! You may have noticed that suddenly, there are no images on most of this blog? Why is that? Let me tell you a tale.
Back when I moved from my old wordpress site to my own domain, I exported the blog using WordPress’s export tool. It tells you that your posts, pages, and comments will export. The comments part is hit-or-miss; most of my comments didn’t follow me over here, which is a shame. My pictures all did, thank goodness. Eventually, I didn’t need the old blog anymore, so I deleted it.
And suddenly, all my pictures were gone. See, one thing that was never brought up during the export process was that the images don’t export, just the source URLs do. So all of my content was linking to where the old files were. And when I deleted the old blog, all of those pictures went up in smoke.
There’s a way I can fix this. I can go through archive.org and my old blogspot blogs, grab all the pictures from my old blog, and painstakingly slot them back in. That’s all my Buffy recaps, 50 Shades posts, and basically any blog post since before January, 2014. As a bonus, this is the only way it can be done; the hard drive that contained the bulk of those photos had to be wiped due to some technical thing that I’m just calling “hard drive no workey.”
This is where you guys come in. I don’t know anyone I can hire for this job, but that’s what I’m looking to do. I don’t even know what the job title of a person who does this would be, or what they would charge to do it. I don’t even know if I can afford to do it, but I know for a fact that I can’t do it. It’s too much work and I’m already spread too thin. So, if you know anyone who does this type of work, or you yourself would be willing to do this type of work, please let me know. We’ll hash out the details of how many posts you’d be willing to do and what you want to be paid. At this point, I’m fucking desperate (not a great way to open a negotiation of fees, I know, but I’m being honest) and I’m feeling so incredibly hopeless in the face of having years of work damaged.
If you or anyone you know can help, please contact me at jenny@jennytrout.com, and thank you for your patience if this is bumming you out as you try to read through Buffy and 50 Shades recaps.
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Merlin club is a weekly feature in which Jessica Jarman, Bronwyn Green, and myself gather at 8pm EST to watch an episode of the amazing BBC series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan and literally nobody else I care about except Colin Morgan.
Okay, I lie. A lot of other really cool people are in it, too.
Anyway, we watch the show, we tweet to the hashtag #MerlinClub, and on Fridays we share our thoughts about the episode we watched earlier in the week.