Difficult Scenes

I hear this, I believe it, but I’m not doing it. It’s not that I don’t want to be doing it… Okay, that’s a lie. When the going gets tough, I want to play games and surf the internet.

Right now things are tough. In real life and in my writing life. These days it’s games, games, and more games. I’ve even moved to internet games which I used to do my best to stay away from.

I sat myself down, got back to writing, and pounded through the wall I had hit back in February. There are certain scenes I find supremely difficult to write.

• In between scenes
• Conversations

For some reason I decided my Norse mythology ms would be driven by conversations. What on earth was I thinking?? I mean, so far it feels right that I do this and I believe it’s aiding character development (I hope), but it’s super difficult. I’m a talkative person but not much of what I say is interesting because I am a boring person. I have my moments of course but, essentially, I believe I’m boring. In fact, if you meet me in person (unless you’re my parents), you’ll see that I’m super quiet because I don’t want to bore you to death. That and I’m gauging what kind of a person I’m dealing with so I know what I should and should not say.

As for writing witty conversations when I’m not a witty person…HA! Here’s hoping I don’t bomb the whole thing!

I think the trick with in between or filler scenes is to either make them interesting or make them important so that there are no filler scenes. This was supremely difficult in Night’s Treasure and I’m not entirely sure I managed it. I think I did but as I have yet to find an agent for it… *cough*

I’m doing my best to make every scene interesting and important to the overall storyline and flow of the story. Since February this scene was not coming. At first I would sit at the computer day after day trying to write without much success. Then it all sort of drifted off. After being inspired to capture that elusive title (still no luck though I’m closer than before), the scene came rather easily and less than 2 hours later I was done with it.

Yay! Now to continue with the rest of the book. Good grief. And I’ve just barely passed the 10k mark. Out of 90k? Ugh. And all my head wants to do lately is play games and think about my old horror ms. Helpful. Really helpful.

“Hot Body Year Round” by Cassey Ho

Cassey Ho is a worldwide famous fitness guru. And when I say worldwide, I mean worldwide. She has fans literally all around the world. Who knew that a 10-minute Pilates video stuck on Youtube to say goodbye to her Pilates students in SoCal would eventually grow to become the phenomenon that is POP Pilates?

I joined Cassey’s POPsters as her fans are labeled a bit late. I discovered her awesomeness sometime around the Summer of 2014 but didn’t join her ranks until the following Autumn. For me all it took (other than super fun workouts and a bubbly teacher), was a personalized reply to me on Facebook when I commented on one of her videos. At the time my self-esteem was pretty low and a personal comment to me from someone I had come to admire and be in awe of was out of this world.

Yep, I’m pretty easy to please sometimes.

All this has been mentioned before on my Fitness Freak blog so I won’t go into it again. What I will go into is Cassey’s new book – Hot Body Year Round.

I’ll try to keep this simple. Included in the book are:

• 20 workouts
• Detailed instructions (with pictures) of 120+ exercises
• Gorgeous photos
• Some general weekly plans for Beginners, Intermediate, and Advanced people
• Vitamin/Health info
• 4 seasons worth of Cassey’s fav recipes (she likes seasonal ingredients)
• 4 ideas (one for each season) for weekly menus
• Inspiration and tips for staying motivated all year

In general, her printed workouts are easier than her videos because they have exact numbers to do (and I don’t usually lose count) and they don’t add in little flourishes such as pulses or holding a position for a little longer. But they are more convenient to take with you when you go to a place that doesn’t have the internet (such as everywhere in my world it seems).

And the backgrounds Cassey found for her exercises are GORGEOUS!

Boston got Fall. Utah was Winter and Spring as well I believe. Cassey thought the Salt Lake Flats looked like snow. I guess they do here but at the same time not because she’s wearing so little and snow is freakin’ cold! She had to use a ton of ingenuity to make Winter and Spring work in Utah when it was the middle of Fall and it had just rained the day before or something so the whole place was flooded.

And Summer was of course in SoCal (she lives there). I’m not altogether certain how I feel about her having recipes and meal plans in her book because I have yet to hear that she’s a certified nutritionist. I imagine this could cause some potential lawsuits in the future. While I’m not a certified nutritionist of any kind, I believe I can identify healthy food when I see it. The same goes for yummy food. And the recipes she provides look AWESOME! Because they’re all her favorite recipes, I also know that they’ve been tried and tested by a semi-normal tongue. These recipes don’t look insanely healthy and therefore they don’t look nasty. I won’t even go into what I think of most super healthy foods.

I’m DYING to try the Egg Nog Smoothie which, oddly enough, has no eggs…or egg nog for that matter. Nor alcohol because Cassey doesn’t drink. It causes her to go blind. I’m already a huge fan of her Berrylicious Microwave Minute Muffins so I’m practically drooling to try this pumpkin variation: And now I’ve successfully made myself hungry so I will shove off and try out that Egg Nog Smoothie that isn’t real egg nog. I’m guessing it’ll taste like bananas because the main ingredient is a…banana. Rocket science.

Oh yeah. And by the way, Hot Body Year Round is the top fitness book being sold right now. It actually sold out on the preorders so they had to hurry their butts to publish more copies to meet demand. If you’re interested in getting this book, it’s being sold through multiple sites such as Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc. I got my copy from Amazon. If you want to check out Cassey Ho and her mini-empire further, you can visit her pretty much everywhere.

• Youtube
• Blogilates
• Facebook
• Twitter (@blogilates)
• Instagram (@blogilates)

The list goes on but I won’t. Google Cassey Ho and/or Blogilates and you’ll find her.

And her two online stores:

• OGorgeous
• BodyPopActive

What’s your favorite healthy recipe?

Guilty of Laziness

I’ve been such a lazy blogger lately. Do I have an excuse? Not really. I mean, I did last week – my son was out for Spring break and was down with a fever and massive pain (6-year-molars coming in) pretty much the whole time.

Result: Grounded

My poor baby.

He was fine by Easter so that’s all good.

It wasn’t a total loss of time though (just in blogging time). I read A LOT. Finished 2 books by Agatha Christie – Murder in Mesopotamia and Death on the Nile. Both are awesome books. Of course. I believe I’ve only read one book of Christie’s that I didn’t care for – By The Pricking Of My Thumb. It was a Tommy & Tuppence book and I found it pretty dull. I prefer her Poirot novels. One of my favorites, however, was a Miss Marple book.

Thinking I had watched the movie with him, my husband “reminded” me who the culprit was in Death on the Nile. Nope, I hadn’t seen the movie. Total spoiler. Then he proceeded to tell me important details on how the book ends. I wanted to slap him. Sometimes I think he does this to get a rise out of me. The first information I could understand – he thought I had seen it and was reminding me. Okay, I can live with that. But the second bout of information? No excuse for that since I had assured him I hadn’t read it or seen it because it wasn’t remotely familiar to me.

Despite my husband’s lack of survival instinct, I found myself second-guessing him, doubting that he was remembering the correct story. Maybe the movie changed it big time. They’ve been known to change things though, granted, not the actual plot but still. It seemed so impossible to me that he could be right.

The minor details/mysteries were pretty easy to predict/solve but it really wasn’t until the end that I believed my husband was right. Poirot explained how it all happened and it was so perfect. It was amazing.

Agatha Christie was amazing. If you’re ever in need of a cozy mystery, go for Agatha Christie. Poirot rocks. Ms. Marple is pretty cool too but Poirot is better.