Maggie Hates Hot Cookies

Maggie 4-1/2 months ago

I need to take a new picture of her, but I gotta get a new SD card first. Current one bit the dust and there is no transferring images to the computer without one.

In the interest of healthier treats, and to use up the Skippy peanut butter no one in the house will eat, I started making peanut butter doggie cookies(biscuits) for Maggie. I make them like this recipe but I use 3/4 c. milk and add 2T sugar.

She loves them. Unless they're hot from the oven--then she is terrified of them. I have not yet figured this dog out, she's really the craziest little hound I've ever known, but she's funny so that offsets the confusion I often experience around her.

Anyway, I made a batch last night took one to her while the others cooled. It was hot but not hot enough to burn my fingers--I carried it to her in my unprotected hand--but it was hotter than anything else she eats and she didn't know what to make of it.

At first, she peeled her lips back to try and take it with just her teeth, but she couldn't bring herself to bite it. So she just bit the air around the cookie several times and bounced back and forth.

I put it on the floor in front of her and she RAN AWAY from the evil-hot-cookie and hid across the room, behind the table.

Naturally, I had to milk this. I picked it up and pretended to eat it and she came rushing at me, barking like an insane thing, and I couldn't resist chasing her around the room with the hot cookie. She hid again. I sat again and pretended to eat the cookie--that never fails to bring her out of hiding. She might not want that cookie but she'll be damned if I'm going to eat it!

It was quite cool by this point, but she couldn't risk it. I know she could smell what it was, the whole house smelled of peanut butter, and she wanted it but still couldn't bring herself to eat it. Thus began phase 3 of her attempt to eat the cookie: running back and forth in front of me, biting the air by the cookie once as she zoomed past, and then barking more until she got turned around and ready to take another bite at it on the next lap.

This went on for a good twenty minutes and may be my new favorite game: Chasing Dog with Hot Cookie... Or Chasing Dog with Previously Hot Cookie... She refused to believe it had cooled off until I broke it into several pieces and lay it on the floor again. Once it no longer looked like the cookie, she came and gobbled it up.

I recommend ya'l bake doggie cookies and chase your dog with them. Best. Baking. Ever.

Star Wars and Storytelling Choices

I know, I've been gone. I tend to do that, like a cat that suddenly decides it has to be in another room RIGHT NOW and flees. I'd like to claim that I'm back and steady now, but I know that's probably not true. But, in my defense, I have been writing up a storm in my absence! If I'm productive here, I'm not productive with my projects and it looks like the opposite is true as well: if I'm productive with projects, I fall off the face of the blogosphere. Need to work on that.

Anyway.... So, first, what's new with me:

• I am currently in revision process on my medical romance with Harlequin. Dunno if it will turn into a sale, but I'm working with an editor to try and make it publishable with them. We'll see how that goes, but I'm actually loving the revision process. Learning heaptons as I go through the editor's notes. 
• Wrote and subbed a 30K novella in July, still out with another publisher but I'm hoping something it will return something good even if it's just a contact.

The past few days, I've been trying to figure out what story I want to work on next. I have three options, but before I pick one, I decided to explore a setting that's been tempting for me a two years. I couldn't imagine where I'd send this story in 2010 when the idea bloomed, but there are now options to send it and today I decided to explore the idea in my plotbook! Ideally, this story would take place over many years, not necessarily a family-saga, but kinda like that. And while deciding what story to start with, I started thinking about Star Wars and all the many episodes... which brings me to my questions:

• Do people who have experienced these movies from the standpoint of beginning with current Episode IV have the same experience as folks for whom Episode I is where they start watching? Is it the same story for them? Does it illicit the same emotions? 
• Are current-Episodes I-III as compelling as they are for those who first saw current-Episodes IV-VI and then really wanted to know how Vader became a bad guy? 
• Do you feel like with the addition of the new first three stories, that the whole of the six stories became more a chronicle of Vader's life or that it subjugated Luke's story some? I don't think I felt that way before the new three, but now that there is a chronicle of Vader-puppy thru to his 5 minutes of redemption and death... and the stories END there... it sure does feel like Vader-chronicles to me. 
• If these stories always existed for Lucas(even if initially as backstory), why did he choose to start the movies with current-Episode IV? Could he not have hooked his audience as well if he started with current-Episode I?