All About Writing

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Posted on December 21, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

Puppy News: 1 Week Old

It is really hard for me to believe it has been one week since the puppies were born. It’s funny, because their original due date was Jan 1 (that would have been so cool!), so in my mind, I feel like we still have another week until they arrive. Don’t worry, they constantly remind me they are there, as does mama. They are so precious, and I am looking forward to next week as eyes and ears begin to open. I remember with my first litter how a calming voice would soothe them, and how they responded to voices. It was so precious and I cannot wait to do that with these sweet little guys. So, I’m sure you’d like me to shut up and just get on with the photos, so here they are.

For the record, they are MUCH more active, so it is a LOT harder to get good pictures.

Puppy #1 – Little Miss Pink

Puppy #2 – Big Brown

I love my daughter kissing him in the 2nd picture.

Puppy #3 – Purple Puppers

Puppy #4 – Little Boy Blue

Puppy #5 – Greenie

Well, that’s my update on my shih-tzu puppies at one week old. I will post again next week at 2 weeks old, however I won’t lie – if I get a cute picture between now and then, I’m so sharing

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Posted on December 21, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

December: News & Stuff

So I totally suck. After having the puppies, I apparently dropped off the planet. I didn’t mean to, but between caring for mama and puppies, five kids and getting ready for Christmas (plus a house guest immediately following Christmas), I did not update my blog this week. Sorry!!

Puppy News: Puppies are doing great. They are 1 week old today, and I will post pictures in a little bit, but if you want to see what they looked like at birth, check out the previous post. Mama is doing well too, and just over the past 48 hours has begun to want to be a bigger part of the family and come out for short intervals to play with the other dogs and kids. This makes me smile, because she is so different with her puppies this time. Very maternal, and I’m proud of her. Oh, and that puppy over there on the right? Not ours… but I would so do this to my puppies LOL That is so freakin’ cute! They aren’t big enough though.

Christmas News: I am finally finished shopping for my family. I have nothing left to buy for kids and hubby and this makes me smile. We decided to try a “secret santa” exchange between the kids instead of having them all buy stupid stuff for each other, and instead buy one really nice gift for one kid. I am proud of what they bought for their special person. I think this will definitely become a tradition.

Christmas Traditions: Our final Santa parade of 2010 was Sunday, and it was so bittersweet. We had an amazing time this holiday season and reminded us about what the season is about. It gave me little time for shopping but I think that was a good thing. We were so devoted to main street St. Charles every weekend. We have one last event for Christmas Traditions taking place the day after Christmas, but it is a silly and fun day, no parades and not as formal as the others. I will miss it.

Flash Mob: My girls & I joined a St. Louis Flash Mob, and have had a BLAST participating in everything. Unfortunately this past weekend was also the last one of the season, so our weekend was filled with bitter sweetness but we have the most amazing memories for Christmas 2010. LOVE IT! We’ll be mobbing again after the new year with a whole new song and dance.

MFA: I have decided to try and go back to school to earn my MFA (Masters of Fine Arts ) in Creative Writing. However, can I just say that finding programs is DIFFICULT to say the very least. Plus, I have two to choose from in my area (that have cropped up in just the past couple of years) but both are very limited in how many students they take. A total of 12 – 6 for poetry, 6 for fiction. I’m of course going for fiction. (would also like to check out the non-fiction area too). More on this later in another post, because through my research I learned a lot about the programs, and wish to share both my excitement and my frustrations. ha!

So that’s about it for now – will post those puppy pics in a little bit, but for now – you can just “awwwww” at the pics from last week.

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Posted on December 15, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

Puppy News: They’re here!

Well, I set out yesterday morning to hop on twitter and make a totally non-writing related announcement. The tweet should have looked like this:

My sweet shih-tzu girl is preggo with her 2nd litter. It had been confirmed at the vet and she is expecting 5 pups. #exciting

The thing is, I never got to tweet that. In fact, my tweet instead read:

Well, I planned on making the announcement this morning that we are expecting our 2nd litter of 5 puppies. See next tweet for more….
7:34 AM Dec 14th via TweetDeck

followed by this one:

However, instead I’m announcing that we are HAVING them… right now. Mama is in beginning stages of labor… its gonna be a long day!
7:34 AM Dec 14th via TweetDeck

I tweeted one more time after puppy 1 & 2 had arrived. I had no idea she was this close to delivering. I stopped tweeting after the 1st and 2nd arrived, mostly because I had to have my focus on mama and not the computer. It’s like a full-time job. Anyway, all five pups are here, delivered and healthy. We had a bit of a scare with the last little girl, who didn’t seem to feel as if she needed to enter the world, and the vet asked me to bring her in for an emergency c-section. By the time I had gathered everything together, started the car so it would warm up and begun to plot how I would transport mama and four babies, the last one made her arrival – pretty much saving me a very large amount of money. Thank you.

So I thought I would post some pics because I am getting emails and tweets asking how everything is – so here are all pups as of this morning. Oh, and in case I hadn’t made it clear, they are shih-tzu pups.

Puppy #1 – a girl

This was the first puppy born at 8:08am on December 14, 2010. She weighed 5.7 oz @ birth. She is the smallest pup. (the runt, I presume)

Puppy #2 – a boy

This is the second puppy born at 8:31am. He weighed 6.0 oz. This is the piggy of the bunch. I cannot wait to see how big he gets… we had one of these little guys in our first litter too, and he’s huge now. (at least for a Shih-tzu he’s a big guy)

Puppy #3 – a girl

Third puppy born at 8:52am, weighing 6.2 oz. At this point, I was assuming the puppies seemed to be coming about every 20 minutes or so. I was terribly wrong.

Puppy #4 – a boy

This is the 4th born at 10:00am, which completely threw my 20 minute labor off – it was over an hour. He weighed 5.8oz. Not even the biggest one. Of course, this wasn’t even the biggest surprise.

Side note: This one is a noisy little guy – he also seems to be a bit of a mama’s boy – he’ll be quiet as long as he’s nestled in her fur – not even needing to suckle – the noisy side of him is why mama is checking on him. She was worried. She’s a good mama. I love that picture.

Puppy #5 – a girl

This little girl, who for some reason happens to be my favorite, was born at 12:21pm. She weighed 6.0oz and after 2 hours of labor, we were ready to rush mama in for an emergency c-section to deliver the last pup. We’d also been told that she might not survive based on the amount of time it had taken at this point. In the 21 minutes or so that it took me to gather all the stuff up to transport them all in as much warmth as I could muster on a 20 degree day, mama delivered this sweet little girl. Oh, and while I love the picture of mama and son above, the 2nd picture below is my very favorite. So sweet!

So, these are the puppies. I will update next week when they have hit their first milestone – 1 week old. Aren’t they cute?

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Posted on November 30, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

I won, but it’s not done

I am so completely shocked that I did it. I actually finished NaNoWriMo 2010 with 56,544 words. I wrote about 8,000+ words in the last 24 hours or so. I had no idea I could write that much in the small amounts of time that I used to do it. I took a LOT of breaks and then just kept coming back and writing scene after scene.

Can I just tell you that when I validated – and saw this – I almost cried. Almost. I didn’t say I did.

Now that I’ve changed my status on facebook to announce to the entire world (or those that are my friends) that I did it, sent a tweet and wrote this posts – I am now off to take a hot bath, start a new book I want to read and SLEEP. A LOT.
Yipee!! Doing a happy dance. (So glad you cannot see me!) LOL

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Posted on October 28, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

Best Video Ever for NaNoWriMo. And there’s Puppets!! You’re Welcome.

If you don’t smile when you watch this, I Don’t know what is wrong with you.

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Posted on October 11, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

Author Interview: Liz Borino

We’re here with Liz Borino, author of the upcoming novel Expectations due out in December.

Nicole Humphrey Cook: Hi Liz, I am excited to be interviewing you today. Can you tell us a little about yourself so we can get to know you better?

Liz: Well, first of all I feel so lucky to get the chance to be interviewed here. I love to tell stories, travel, and spend time in the city (New York City). I must say, I’ve been to London twice and it’s my all time favorite city in the world. The mix of cultures there is incredible. I always feel so inspired after having visited.

Nicole Humphrey Cook: I’ve never been to London, but I’d love to travel there one day. If it’s anything like New York City it has to be exciting and busy and full of all kinds of cultures. I think it’s great that you enjoy traveling as well as writing. When did you start writing?

Liz: I’d say I was eight or nine when I started writing stories. Before that I’d just tell them to whoever wanted to listen. I’d scribble them long hand on legal pads. Problem was I had horrific handwriting. So…no one, including me, knew what they said a few hours later.

Honestly, though, I was a weird little kid and I wasn’t very good at socializing, or making friends. So, I used my stories as an escape. I’d be able to alter reality just a little bit to make things go my way. Maybe that was more than a little bit, but it was my way of exploring the world.

I eventually came out of my shell, but I never lost my passion for stories.

Nicole Humphrey Cook: Honestly, I’m sure a lot of people can understand where you are coming from. Most writer’s seem to start when they are young, often because of books they read themselves. What books from your childhood/teen years captured your imagination and gave you the thought that you might like to write books?

Liz: S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. I devoured that book repeatedly before I reached out and found more of her novels. I learned a lot from reading her. The two biggest things that caught my attention were that she wrote from a male POV, something I tend to do and she was published at 14. I love that fact. It’s part of what kept me writing when other people told me I was too young.

Nicole Humphrey Cook: Do you have a favorite genre or one that you tend to write in more? If you do, why?

Liz: This is fun. Ok, I don’t know what drew me to this genre. As a matter of fact, up until I got my publishing contract, I didn’t know what genre I wrote in! No, seriously, I asked my editor on Twitter one day. I just tell the story and this one happened to come out as a Contemporary Romance, but I like it.

Nicole Humphrey Cook: Wow, that’s actually interesting. I wonder if there are other authors that are like that too?  What authors do you admire and what about them do you love?

Liz: Besides S.E. Hinton, I love Michael Cunningham. If you haven’t read him, you really should. A Home at the End of the World continues to influence my writing every day. He was also directly responsible for turning that book into a very powerful movie.

Nicole Humphrey Cook: I have read A Home at the End of the World, and it was excellent. I have not seen the movie, though I’d like to.  I understand that you are one of the founding authors of Lazy Day Publishing. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Liz: It’s a dream come true. No, really, when you’re writing a novel you hope against all hope that someone else out there will get it enough to be able to want to publish it. I got that and more. They’re excited about my novel and supportive through the editing and promoting process. All the other authors feel the same. Incredible experience.

Nicole Humphrey Cook: Congratulations on your publishing contract through Lazy Day. I understand your first novel is due out on December 1. Can you tell us a little about Expectations?

Liz: Expectations depicts the story of twins Matt and Chris, who are trying to win their overbearing father’s approval and ‘earn’ their trust funds. This requires both of them to make huge sacrifices in what they want in life and they have to come to terms with whether or not it’s actually worth it.

Nicole Humphrey Cook: I cannot wait to read it, the story sounds as if it will be very inspiring. What are your future aspirations with your writing?

Liz: My aspirations are really two-fold. First, I want to be able to ‘comfortably’ support myself with my novels. And maybe more importantly, I want to inspire people with my writing. I want people to look at something I conveyed in my story and stop to think about how they view that issue.

Nicole Humphrey Cook: And what do you think the future will hold for you?

Liz: I can only tell you what I hope the future holds for me. In five years, I want to be living in or near a city with two dogs, making enough money to support my Snapple habit. Oh, I guess my future husband can live there too. How about just most of the time?

Nicole Humphrey Cook: Liz, I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to get to know you better and I really look forward to the release of your book. I hope I have the opportunity to interview you again down the line to see how everything is going with you. Congratulations again on the upcoming release of your new book.

Contact Liz

Blog: http://writewords.typepad.com/write-words/
Twitter: @LizBorino

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Posted on September 17, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

Lost My Mind

I get MANY comments referencing the fact that I have five kids. On Twitter, on Facebook, on my Blog, at the store, at the school and it just keeps happening. I am NOT a saint. I’m just the mom of five. Three of which I obtained through marriage, but am quite proud to call them my kids. This is really not the point of this post, though.

So with five kids, many wonder how I find time to write, get out, hang with friends, clean my house, and do lots of other things that weird people actually ask about. At any rate, while I do find time management to be somewhat of a problem for me, I spend loads of time with my family and love every second of it. I have to make time for the rest of my life.

So with already a jam packed house that seems to be bursting at the seems with seven people, within the last five years we added four dogs (Shih-tzus), a cat, mice and a tank full of fish. About a week ago, a family friend of ours (teenage boy) found himself looking for a home for his dog. The dog is a Boston Terrier – six months old, so .. rather a puppy. And what do I do? I offer to give it a home. Honestly, my intentions were good. The kids in a bad spot right now. The family is staying with someone to help that family out and that family (one member) is being a pain about the dog and made them get rid of it. So I said I’d keep it until they found a place to live that would accept it. This appeased the teenager, but the dad made it sound a little more permanent when I spoke to him. I’m not sure what’s going on at this point, BUT we have a new puppy. His name is Louie. This seems to fit him for some reason. I have no experience with Boston’s except that I have always found them cute. It’s day five and I’m not sure if we are doing well or not.

• He follows me everywhere. Okay for now, but will this stop? I would really like to pee in peace again. It would be nice not to have a dog that does not need to accompany me up and down the stairs, in and out of the garage, up and down the halls, in and out of the kitchen, the bedroom…. and maybe, just maybe there will come a day where I can actually take a shower without little beady eyes staring at me through the curtain or lapping up water out of the bathtub or off my leg as I step out of the shower.
• He snores. Alot. Like –  All.The.Time. Loudly. It’s cute, but there is no way I’m sleeping next to that. He sleeps with the kids!
• He randomly whines. Sometimes while he is just sitting there. Sometimes he wakes up doing it. I don’t know what’s wrong. He usually comes and attacks my face with kisses at that point. Which brings me to the next point.
• He is the sweetest thing in the world, but gives so many kisses you can’t breathe. He will literally attack your face with his tongue. And omg, make sure you breathe through your nose and not your mouth, because as soon as you open it… yeah. I feel like I need a bath 80 times a day and I love that he is so sweet but man that’s a lot of kissing. I don’t even kiss my husband that much!
• Either he doesn’t know his name is Louie or he’s the most stubborn dog I have ever owned. He has the attention span of a flea and doesn’t respond about 50% of the time that you say Louie unless you say it in your sweetest, most preschool-esk sounding voice.
• He sleeps behind me on the couch. Yes, behind me. If I sit up for even a second, he crawls behind me and tries to get comfy and then lays down and sleeps. He very obviously does not care about my comfort. Possibly not even his either. I like my pillow better.

With all that said, we do adore him. He has only been here a week, and I’ve seen loads of improvement since day one, so I’m giving it time. Thankfully I have loads of patience and he’s a total sweetheart.

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Posted on September 16, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

The Crazy Coffee Shop Lady

Finally got out of the house for a bit. Met my friend Cyndi at a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi so we could both get some work done. This is a rarity for me, because she doesn’t usually work from home, but today she is – so we decided to meet and get some work done together.

She’s sitting across from me, frantically scribbling in her notebook, I think its some school work for a class she’s taking. I’m not sure. I’ve spent the past half hour trying to get some words out. I’m proud because I’ve laid down almost 500, but I got stuck a few minutes ago, so I took a break. During my break, I started paying attention to the noise and chatter around me. First, there is the annoying alarm that keeps going off. It’s driving me crazy and whatever it is for, must not be too important to anyone here, because nobody actually seems to be attending to it. Second, there is this crazy coffee shop barista. Okay, so she’s probably not crazy, she’s just VERY happy. And she offers every single person that comes in, the exact same item (can’t tell what it is, because its part of my story twist and I want to leave it to the imagination at this point). And if they turn her down, she gets it for them anyway. We aren’t far from the counter, so we have had to endure at least 80 mentions of this in the past hour or so. It’s driving me crazy. It’s driving Cyndi crazy, and at least 50% of the customers seem annoyed by it too.

So why am I telling you all this? Because I think I just found a nice little addition to my writing spot that I got stuck at – the crazy coffee shop barista. I love it when I’m annoyed but it turns into something usable and manageable. Can I also just say, this lady really isn’t that bad, she’s just a tad annoying and I think she really loves her job. Not so bad.

Okay, so its time for me to get back to writing. It’s a sad thing when I type nearly 500 words and then get stuck and just sit lost in thought. Then I decide to blog and look down at my word count for my blog entry and see another 400 words. I could have just written those into this chapter I’m stuck on. What am I thinking?

Have a great writing day, what are you working on?

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Posted on August 28, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

A Little Bit Stalker, a Whole Lot Fan

In St. Louis today in Tower Grove Park, there were hundreds of thousands of people that came out for the Festival of the Nations. I’ve never attended before, but have always been curious. A family in our Fife and Drum corp., that we’ve only know a couple of months (this is important for much later in this post) is also in a Scottish Pipe Band and they were performing at the Festival. And it is my birthday, so we needed to do something. We decided to go and support them (and stalk them… er I mean watch them) because our whole family had been curious about the Pipe Band they talk about all the time. Plus, if you know anything about me at all, you would know that I am truly 100% obsessed with anything/all things Celtic. First and foremost all things Irish, and well, Scottish is darn close and my husband loves him some Scot. He’s also some odd percentage Scottish and/or Welsh, but don’t ask me how much. You probably shouldn’t ask him either, he really doesn’t know.

Anyway, so off we go to see the pipe band perform. We got there uber early, and by uber early, I mean pretty much 5 hours too early, but we wanted to see other stuff too. I won’t bore you with all the  details of the day, but I will show you some highlights.

We did this:

Henna Tatoos

and then we saw this:

The Dance of Life:

Yeah, I got nothing. I can’t even describe this enough to make it real in your mind. You just had to be there. It was….

• Disturbing
• Fascinating
• Creative
• Awkward
• Crazy

But that’s okay. She’s doing “The Dance of Life” – see, her chair even says so. Sorry about her head being cut off in the second photo, my daughter was snapping the photo and she couldn’t quite get past her uhm…. costume.

Yeah, uhm. So anyway, we were there to see the St. Louis Caledonian Pipe Band play. So let’s move on, and not reflect too much on the oddness that was the above two photos.

The St. Louis Caledonian Pipe Band

(oh, and before you ask – those red arrows were not actually above their heads when I took the photos. The dude on the left is Braden, who teaches Ryan and Brie color guard. The dude on the left with that gigantic drum is Dave, his dad. They are some of the coolest people you will ever meet. The whole family actually. Not pictured are Robin, the totally non-musical mom (her words, not mine!) who is actually standing to my left in these photos (don’t look for her, she’s behind the camera lens) and Dakota who is her totally musical son and also in our Fife and Drum corp. who just wasn’t there that day. But don’t worry, I have more to say on him in a minute).

and since you weren’t there with us, I am including a very tiny video clip of them playing. Please don’t mind the dude at the end of the clip that gets in the way. That was all he did the entire time we were standing there. (Ah, but if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, Nicole.)

Okay, so I said I was going to come back to Dakota, and I meant it and now’s the time. So we are standing there watching the pipe band, and it didn’t take us but a few seconds of them playing to start looking at each other, and by each other, I pretty much mean my kids and I. Not because the pipe band was bad, they so weren’t bad, they were SO good. But that was the problem, it became clear immediately that we had heard them before. Like a couple of times before. In fact, I remembered being obsessed with the group back at the Missouri Tartan Days 2 years ago. I mentioned this to said non-musical mom and she just sort of laughed it off. Remember, we’ve only known them a couple of months… She laughed until I sent her these little captures of history:

I present, my photos from the 2008 Missouri Tartan days (that might actually be somewhere on this blog or my other blog already, but here they are again…)

So see the guy in the last picture… and again in the next photo? That’s her son Dakota. mhmm…. who’s laughing now? And then see the guy playing that gigantic drum in the sixth photo? (second below) – That’s her husband. mhmm…. again, who’s the stalker uhm… I mean fan, now?

So yeah, this is only 8 of about 50 photos we took of the group performing. I’m a huge stalker fan. And that was of course proven again today, while watching them. Sorry I took up such a huge post, but it was worth sharing the story. Plus the different music, food and fun at the Festival of Nations was definitely worth mentioning.

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Posted on July 20, 2010 - by Nicole Humphrey Cook

“Old Spice” Guy in the Library – Simply Awesome!

What do you think? I’m still smiling. I love this guy.

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