This makes me insane.

Is it really so difficult to say please and thank you? Is it such an imposition to actually respond to an RSVP request? I’m not talking about handwritten thank you notes on personalized stationery or whether that fork is for seafood or spaetzle. No, I’m talking about basic courtesy.

The problem, as I see it, is that manners are the grease that helps the wheels of society slide along easily. Without that grease, society grinds along, but it’s painful and it keeps jamming and freezing up.

So, while I don’t intend to go all Emily Post on you, I do want to mention some small things that make life easier for everyone. Plus, I’m nearly completely convinced that as manners fall away, the tendency to see people as people (as opposed to obstacles) also degrades. As manners decline, so does the general “nice” quotient. And that’s just sad.

Say please and thank you. Sadly, when you do, you’ll likely get a look of shocked gratitude. Which should tell you how bad things are for manners in the real world. If someone does you the courtesy of sending you an invitation, the least you can do is pick up the phone and call to tell them yes or no. Open doors for people. Pick things up and hand them back to the person who dropped them. These small niceties make a big difference. And you might just find that your mood improves. I know it’ll improve mine.

I have noticed that, as I get older, my sense of time is more shortened. By that I mean that the time seems to go faster. Do you remember when you were a kid and it seemed like eons until you could go to your friend’s party in two weeks? And summer seemed to last for EVER? Yeah, I remember that, too.

But somehow, some way, the time got away from me. Now the summer has flown past, and deadlines are on top of me that I thought were miles off. Things that seem to have happened yesterday happened months or years ago.

Any minute now, I’m going to start talking about the “good old days” and telling those kids to get off my lawn.

Too late. I already told them to get off my lawn. *sigh*

The new job, however, will necessitate a move for us. And in preparation for his starting that job (on Monday!), we’ve a lot of things to do. So, I spent Tuesday neck deep in medical, dental, vision, and life insurance. Short and long-term disability. Accidental Death and Dismemberment. Long Term Care. Flexible Spending accounts. Retirement plans. All that benefits stuff you have to sort out when you start a new job (or, in this case, when DH starts a new job).

I also spent a chunk of the day hunting around looking for short-term housing options, since it’s a beastly commute from here and it makes more sense for DH to do a weekly commute (M-Th nights there, F/S/S nights home).

Oh. And somewhere in there I edited two chapters of the joint project with Emily Ryan-Davis, uploaded a syllabus for a course I’m teaching in the fall, worked on two other syllabi for courses I’m teaching.

Did four loads of laundry, emptied the sink of dishes, made most of a gazpacho, took out the recycling.

DH was busy riding herd on the munchkin and taking stuff to his parents (i.e., getting it out of our house) and returning with a lawn mower (which will hopefully work, since ours died). He also cleaned the cat boxes this morning, and that cannot be overstated.  Today he goes up to the new job and starts all the paperwork and gunk, gets to meet the other members of the team. Then we have dinner with friends and we’ll be watching their kids tonight (in exchange, they’ll watch Munchkin next week while I’m teaching).

Busy? No. Why do you ask?

But, naturally, our primary objective was to get rid of the nasty beasts.

Here’s what I learned.

1) The chemicals don’t work as well as you might think. The literature varies on this, giving effective rates for over the counter lice treatments of between 50% and 70%.

2) The chemicals in question are neurotoxins. And they might be absorbed in small amounts topically. Nasty stuff.

3) Even if you use the chemicals, you still have to remove the nits by hand (or, rather, by nit comb).

4) Lice eggs (nits) take around 10 days to hatch.

5) A louse can lay between 3 and 10 eggs daily. Average is around 4.

6) Nits are tan or dark when they contain a louse, but white after hatching.

7) A louse takes between 8 and 24 days to reach sexual maturity.

8 ) A louse breathes through holes along the side of it’s body. It can hold it’s breath for several hours.

9) Lice prefer clean hair for laying eggs. Eggs don’t attach well to hair shafts coated in styling products or dirt.

10) Human head lice can’t live on pets.

11) Human head lice can only live 24-48 hours off a host. They also require a blood meal (host) within 10 hours of hatching.

12) There are several effective non-neuro-toxin treatments for lice. I’ll detail 2 – but I’ll also say that if you have a boy – or a very secure girl – just shave the head. Wash the head thoroughly and without hair to adhere to, no eggs will be laid. For all treatments, it’s a good idea to wash clothing, linens and towels in hot water. Stuffed animals and other non-washable items can be tumbled in a hot dryer for 20-30 minutes. The prolonged heat will kill the lice (keep in mind that if your dryer has a cool down feature, you should extend the drying time to ensure that the high heat lasts at least 20 minutes).

13) The mayonnaise treatment. This is what we used – and it was extremely effective, though also extremely labor-intensive. Mayo works by suffocating the lice. It must be left on a minimum of 4 hours, and preferably overnight. Do not use light mayo or “salad dressing” style mayo – use cheap, full-fat, “real” mayo. You’ll also need SEVERAL shower caps. The mayo needs to be applied to the roots of the hair and all over the scalp. This is most easily accomplished by doing it in small sections and working it into the roots and scalp. Be VERY generous. Once the scalp and roots are covered, coat the rest of the hair. My daughter has short hair and we used 1/3 of a large jar of mayo for each treatment. After the hair is coated, put on the shower cap. You can seal the shower cap with gauze or something similar to hold it in place overnight. In the morning, remove the cap and comb out as much excess mayo as possible using a regular comb. You’ll want to have SEVERAL towels or rags available, since you will need to wipe the mayo out of the comb frequently. At this point, the mayo will be loaded with lice and some nits. You’re going to need to wash those towels a couple of times in hot water. After you’ve combed out most of the mayo, section the hair into small sections, no more than about an inch square. I used hair pins to secure my daughter’s hair during this process. Now, using a nit comb, starting at the back hairline, moving around toward the ears and up the head, comb each section carefully with a nit comb. I dipped the nit comb in rubbing alcohol to help unstick the nits. Again, you will be wiping off lots of mayo, so be prepared. The first time we did this it took about 3 hours – I didn’t know what I was doing so it took much longer than necessary. By the last time we did this, it only took half that. In any case, after you have combed the entire head with the nit comb, wash the mayo out. Repeat every 2-3 days for 10 days to 2 weeks. That should catch the entire life cycle. Yes, it’s a lot of work – but no chemicals and very effective.

14) Now I’ll tell you the easy way. The way I didn’t find out about until too late for us. But I’m sharing with you because I’m sure you don’t want to bother with the mayo treatment. Sure, it works, but daaaaang that’s a lot of effort. So, here’s the Nuvo treatment. The instructions are very detailed, but it’s important to follow them exactly. You will need Cetaphil cleanser, a regular fine-tooth comb, a hair dryer, a condiment bottle (the kind used for ketchup or mustard with the pointy tip), and possibly a nit comb. The treatment involves putting the Cetaphil on in a specific way, combing out the excess cleanser, then using the hairdryer to dry the Cetaphil onto the hair and scalp. The Cetaphil is left in place for several hours (overnight, usually), then washed out. This is repeated exactly one week later, and a third time exactly one week after that. If you are interested in trying this method, I urge you to read the instructions at the link above. This method is 96% effective. That’s pretty stinking good for no chemicals and not much effort.

So… now you know way more than you want to about lice. And, if you’re like me, you’ll have psychosomatic itching every time you think about it.

But, to return to my point, I noticed that I include food a lot in my writing. It figures prominently in Trusting Destiny, more as a background element in This Fire and Twice as High. So it made me think about why I feel compelled to include food and meals in these stories.

I’ve come to the conclusion that for me, food represents nurturing. It’s caring for someone and making sure they get what they need, and I find that very attractive, so I include it in my stories. But, there’s a whole other level – the foodie level.

I will admit, happily, that I am, in some ways a foodie. Well, not really. Not in the sense of being snobby about it. I just love food. The smells, the textures, the tastes, the visual stimulation, the sound of it as it cooks. It’s a total sensory experience. Which, I think, is another reason to include food with your romance. But, again, I am wandering from my point. My point on this is that writing about food allows me to venture into food fantasy and to share with my readers some of the wonderful finds I have made.

For example, in This Fire (in the Hearts Afire duology), Seth and Eden go to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant. Now, I realize that most people probably haven’t ever eaten Ethiopian food, but let me assure you that it is seriously tasty stuff. The meal is served family style, with small mounds of food dotting a large piece of soft, spongy sourdough called injera, with more injera alongside. You don’t use any utensils. Instead, you tear off small pieces of injera and use it to scoop up bits of meat and vegetables. Fun and ridiculously yummy. But where else would I get to tell people about that? Oh. Right. Here.

In any case, food plays a big part in my stories – and in my life. What about you? Do you have food stories?

What interested me about this discussion was not only the fact that some peoples’ worsts reads were others’ keepers, but also the reasons the readers found stories to be such clunkers.

The reasons, I think, are instructive.

Inconsistency

In character, in setting, in dialogue. This gets a bit to the discussion going on at Dear Author about how accurate historicals need to be (do you really want to read about how badly they smelled or how wretched the teeth were, or how drafty and uncomfortable the living quarters could be?). But it also gets to inconsistency of plot, and of character. If your plot is headed one direction and then, inexplicably, takes a hard right turn, that’s going to leave a reader hanging out wondering what happened. If your character is supposed to be virginal and innocent, having her giving blow jobs to random guys in the hall is going to throw the reader off. There are all kinds of ways to be inconsistent, but it boils down to the expectations of the reader. If something in the book throws the reader completely off stride, it’s hard to come back and convince them to love the story.

Unsympathetic hero/heroine

It’s one thing to have unsympathetic villains. I mean, they’re supposed to be the bad guy, so you can get away with that. But the hero? The heroine? That’s a fast train ride to Hateville, right there. In romance, especially, the reader wants to like the characters. They want to enjoy going through the adventure and angst with them. It’s very hard to do that if the characters are unsympathetic. On the one hand, you can have characters which skirt the line – characters who aren’t angelic or even particularly good, but are sympathetic. One of my favorites like this is Linda Howard’s John Medina. He’s not really a nice guy. He does what he thinks is necessary and doesn’t have any real guilt about doing it. He shot and killed his own wife because she was about to cause catastrophic damage to US security. He isn’t tortured about it, he just sees it as necessary. Because he isn’t tortured about it, he could easily become unsympathetic. But Howard manages to make his priorities so clear, and to make his relationship with the heroine so intense, he never quite crosses the line into unsympathetic. Some authors really like skirting the lines here. Rhage in JR Ward’s Lover Eternal does a lot of line skirting. Enough line skirting that it really pissed off some people.

Breaking the rules.

There are some rules in Romancelandia. Rules like Happily Ever After (or at least Happy for Now), or like not killing off the main characters (this is how Nicholas Sparks likes to think he gets out of being a romance author). Or like the hero and heroine aren’t supposed to cheat on each other on screen. Now, with menage and open relationships, it’s not cheating. You avoid this problem because of the expectations of the characters and the openness of the interaction. But, no cheating. When authors break these rules, you often default to the numero uno rule above – veering off the reader’s expectations. And we already talked about that.

Crappy Craft

This is the most technical of the reasons, I think, and the hardest to pin down, while simultaneously being the easiest to recognize. Sloppy writing, repetition, bad flow, broken rhythm, stilted dialogue, hosed up sentence structure, odd word choices, bizarre imagery. Any of these things can interrupt the reading experience, and when enough of them stack up, the reading becomes painful. This is, I think, a bigger problem now than ever before, simply because there are more and more books being published – through the big houses, through small press, through e-pubs, through self-publishing and through vanity publishing. Many of these books are good. But there are going to be a lot of stinkers. And when the stinkers are bad enough, it can taint everything around it. But, the point here is that basic craft skills can and should be employed. And if they aren’t, the book is going to smell. Badly.

There you go – four big categories of why books stink. But flip them on their head, and you get four reasons good books are good. And that is the lesson for today, grasshopper.

In case you missed it, yesterday was my birthday. And Monday was release day for Twice as High. I had a bit of a party for myself and readers, giving stuff away. Oh, you  did miss it? Gosh. I’m sorry.

Fine, comment on this post and I’ll chuck you into a drawing for the end of this week for winner’s choice of a backlist title. Freebies!

To continue the theme of doing stuff, after my day of sloth today (and, really, do you actually believe I will be able to avoid turning on a computer? Well,  I suppose it’s possible. Are there World Cup games? Maybe Wimbledon? I might can manage to avoid the computer), Thursday is hard core fiction lockdown. No Munchkin. No distractions. Just bust it out.

Starting Friday, I’m participating in a blog hop. The tour will feature a whole mess of eye candy and a metric ass-ton of prizes. These are always such fun – a great way to check out new authors.

I’ll retrieve Munchkin on Friday evening, and then I will be working on figuring out what a summer schedule looks like for us. Won’t that be fun?

What are you doing this week?

There are a few really memorable WTF moments – and many, many available for your viewing pleasure on the internet. It’s like one giant tribute to the Darwin Awards.

So, here are a couple that just made me shake my head.

The soccer player in me just wants to card this kid something fierce.

This one: warning.  not for the squeamish.

So, he does it. falls. again. again. again. Are you seeing a pattern? yeah. What did he think would happen?

I think my favorite part of this one is the look on his face. Where did that window come from?!

and just to prove guys don’t have stupid cornered:

remind me never, ever, ever to do these things. kthx.

It made me think – always dangerous business.  What are some lines now that are, well, for lack of a better term modern cliche? I mean by this that it is something that has become cliche in, oh, say the last decade or two.  I’ll start you out with a few. And because I’m me, you get some reference material.

“You make me want to be a better man.” – Famously from As Good as it Gets

“You complete  me.” from Jerry Maguire is a close runner up on the romantic cliche to that one, but good delivery can make these two lines actually work.

“I’m the king of the world!” – from Titanic. Which makes me want to hurl.

“It’s not a tum-ah!” – from Kindergarten Cop. Which makes me laugh like a loon.

And….

“Get out of there!” – from nearly every action movie ever made.

Do you have faves?

In other ways, though, she’s not so standard. Now, I realize that all kids are different and all parents think their kid is brilliant, but mine is. She’s reading at far above her grade level, can do the first grade math with ease, and can do complicated puzzles herself (though she WANTS people to do it with her, which is really more social than skill). She  does Sudoku (not my level, but she does do it).

So I have a bit of a problem.  When it comes to reading materials and computer games, she’s a challenge to me. Intellectually, she’s definitely ready for the 7-10, some things even higher. Socially, not so much. So I’m having some difficulty finding books and games that are both intellectually challenging and age-appropriate. I can find things that are age-appropriate, and she is less than challenged. I can find things that are challenging, but they aren’t age appropriate. Why is this such a pain? Don’t other people have smart 6-year-olds? They have to, right?

I figured I’d open this up to the collective mind of the internet. Help me. I don’t want to spend scads of money, but I want her to have things that are both challenging and appropriate.

Some things I have found that work are the I Spy hidden object games from Scholastic – but they’re pretty expensive for what you get. E-bay helps some there. My BFF sent some interesting books – some are not so challenging, some more challenging. She did a good job. She digs the Magic Tree House and Magic School Bus books, and we definitely do lots of those.  But I’d welcome more book suggestions. Keep in mind I want her to read them herself, so short chapters work better. Also, she has a vivid imagination, so she will scare herself sick if it’s too creepy or scary.

Do you have suggestions for PC games and/or books that might work for an intellectually advanced but socially/emotionally average 6-year-old girl? Heeeelp meeeee…..