My clever pharmacist husband gave me a mini i-pad for Valentine's Day!!!! Awww, that's true love!

We made election Jell-O.

Red states, blue states and those pretty purple undecided states!

Happy Election Day!

The BIG FIVE

Back in January 2011, when it seemed the world still had come out of its first spin from the transition to the digital world of books and media, I wrote a bit about the BIG SIX—the six largest (and at that time and for many years past) the most lucrative publishing houses in the world.

Ten years ago, if you were writing and you had “made” it, it was very likely that you had been published by one of the imprints belonging to one of the legendary BIG SIX.

Fast Forward to the brink of 2013 and it appears the publishing world has not stopped spinning after all. According to an article by Eric Pfanner in today’s New York Times, two of the Big Six will merge:

“Bertelsmann, the owner of Random House, and Pearson, which owns Penguin, said Monday that they had reached an agreement to combine the two houses to create the largest consumer book publisher in the world. Analysts said the deal between Bertelsmann, of Germany, and Pearson, of Britain, would give the combined companies greater scale to deal with the challenges arising from the growth of electronic books and the power of Internet retailers.

Together, Penguin Random House would have a global market share of more than 25 percent, and a book list that includes contemporary best sellers like Random House’s “Fifty Shades of Grey” and Penguin’s back list of classics from authors including George Orwell.”

Here is a link to a letter to their agents: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/random-house-letter-to-agents-explaining-merger/

It’s an interesting time in publishing!

One of the nice things about living in Hawaii is that when the computer is acting up at home, I can always grab a stack of papers and take it to my "other office" to edit.

My daughter and I went for our regular late afternoon swim today and it was anything but an ordinary late night afternoon swim.

In spite of the quality of these pictures (everything on earth seems to be coated in silver) that is the entire cast of Hawaii Five-O (Danno, McGarett, Kono and  what's Daniel Dae Kim's character's name?) and crew out filming a prayer or surf circle (surfers on their boards holding hands for a funeral in a circle) in our swimming neighborhood.

Danno and McGarrett came within 10 feet of us on a jet ski. We waved and yelled Book`em Danno. On shore, Daniel Dae Kim smiled at us. Kono walked by in a bathrobe.

Look for Anna and I as accidental extras in the ocean on an upcoming episode.

 And if that's not enough--and perhaps even more exciting--on our way swimming back to shore we saw, between the two of us, two turtles, two eels and three mantis shrimp!!!

My goals this summer were simple:

1. Get in the ocean everyday (i.e go swimming, snorkeling, surfing, or paddle-baording every single day).

2. And write everyday.

In the 75 days between May first and today, I have missed 12 days of ocean time and 8 days of writing.

I think my priorities are remarkably in order!!!

I find it odd--and yet somewhat comforting--that the day that the great writer Ray Bradbury passed into the great unknown was also the day of one of the most rare celestial phenomenom.

Venus transits the sun and Ray Bradbury makes his exit.

 Goodbye and what a great journey it has been.

Transits of Venus—when Venus moves visibly across the sun—are among the rarest of predictable celestial phenomena. How rare?

Well, this phenomenon, which occurs in pairs spaced eight years apart, has only happened four times in modern history and today was one of those days!!!

The last correlating pair of transits occurred in:

1631 and 1639

1761 and 1769 (Captain Cook saw this one from Tahiti)

1874 and 1882 (King David Kalakaua set up veiwing stations for this one.)

2004 and 2012 (TODAY!! We saw this one!!!)

How important?

The first correlating pair noted in modern history in 1631 and 1639 helped physicists and mathematicians determine how big the universe was. They got it wrong, of course, but they were like a zillion times closer after this than they were when they thought the sun rotated around the earth.

Today we watched this event unfold on the beach in Waikiki with the Institute for Astronomy (University of Hawaii).

With our naked eyes. On huge telescopes. On a televised screen on the beach of video taken from the top of Mauna Kea on the Big Island.

It was AWESOME!!!

Almost Magical.

Rare: Handout image courtesy of NASA shows the planet Venus at the start of its transit of the Sun, June 5, 2012. This won't happen again until 2117

Being a writer, people are always asking me, “Where do you get your material from?”

As a human being I always think, “How can you not see the story material all around you?”

Take a walk in the woods. Walk along a seashore. Look up at the sky. Literally.

Talk to people.

Pay attention.

And then make connections. Stories are all about connections.

Personalize the tale.

And then leave people hanging a little bit, before you give them more.

A quick story for you:

When my youngest daughter was about two and a half, we went for a walk in the neighborhood one evening. As we were walking, the little peanut looked up into the sky and froze. Her eyes grew big and her mouth quivered. She pointed at the bright crescent moon that had just risen over the mountain and whispered, “Mommy. The moon is bwoken!”

She had never before noticed a crescent moon. To her little eyes the moon was always full. Mommy, the moon is broken, became a family mantra. We look at the sky for a broken moon all the time now. It’s become a family story.

Last night, I was up late writing and doing laundry. I happened to go outside around midnight to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer. I looked up at the sky through the skylight of our covered lanai and WOW! there was something really wrong with the moon.

I blinked. Holy crap! The moon was actually broken!

I walked out from under our covered lanai and blinked and looked again. It was seriously broken.

I checked my pulse, I blinked again. Nope. Still broken.

My older daughter had her light still on in her room and so I called her. “Can you please come and look? I think the moon is seriously broken.” I smiled sheepishly.

“Ha!” she laughed, but came and looked anyway.

“What is that?” She asked when she saw the big chunk of missing moon. “Look it up! Seriously. Look it up. That’s not right!”

So we looked it up and sure enough we were witnessing a partial lunar eclipse. My son woke up in the ensuing oohing and awing and the three of us sat there for almost an hour watching the earth’s shadow “break” (haha)  across the moon.

While looking up the lunar eclipse of yesterday, we also came across a very, very rare celestial event that is going to happen here on the Islands tomorrow.

A very, very rare celestial event. It happens in pairs and has only happened (in pairs) four times in modern history and won’t happen again until the year 2117, when we’ll all be dead and not able to see it again.

More on that tomorrow.

So.

There.

I just told you a story about how to find stories. Everywhere. Every day.

You look up. You look around. You pay attention. You personalize. And you make connections.

And then you always have more to tell...

You should always have more to tell....