This video shows three different views of the Australian annular eclipse that just happened this month.

Another blog written in Minnesota: Writing synopses are never fun. Well, at least not for me. Maybe some anal plotter type enjoys them, but I find them torturous. While I was up in Minnesota, working on my house, I spent some time trying to come up with a five-page synopsis for my Work In Progress (WIP). I met with failure after failure.

Multiple tries for me on a synopsis is par for the course, but I was doing a particularly bad job with this story. We're talking world champion horrible. Something clearly needed to be done differently.

To get my head straight, I started listing the plot points I felt needed to be mentioned in the synopsis, and as I'm making this list, it dawned on me that I could do this for my hero's growth arc—it's his book since he's doing the major changing—my heroine's smaller growth arc, and the romance.

Four lists with the items all in bullet points. Now all I had to do was blend them together into one cohesive synopsis.

I started on that the same day I finished the final list and it helped. A lot. I came in at six pages, not five, but it's much more concise without a lot of unnecessary information thrown in. This was one of my primary problems with the earlier versions—lots and lots of extraneous detail.

This method actually proved helpful. I'm probably going to try it again the next time I have to torture myself by writing one.

Another blog written in Minnesota: It's really kind of amazing how dependent I am on the internet. I've jokingly called it Life Support, but it's become such a part of everyday life. I don't have internet while I'm in Minnesota. My parents don't need it and I gave it up when I moved to Atlanta. None of my neighbors were kind enough to leave their networks unsecured.

One of the things I need to do while I'm home is get my taxes done. I thought I'd copied all the information I needed to my computer only to discover I'd forgotten all about the information I had saved on my online email account. Oops.

Today I was getting my hair cut and I used the time at the salon to get that information written down. I didn't have time, though, to do everything else I needed to do and that was so frustrating. And with so much to do on my house, it's not like I can park my butt there and keep using it until I finished.

The other thing that's frustrating is I need to buy a few things for the house—namely new curtains for my bedroom and some new towels to put out in the master bathroom. I shop online all the time. I hate real, go-to-the-store shopping unless I have no other choice. I didn't have time to look at curtains or towels online either. Now I either have to bite the bullet and go to a store or hope the tax guy will let me use his wifi.

It's kind of amazing to realize that in 1999, I was one of the first people I knew to hop online. I remember how frustrated I was over how few businesses—no matter how big they were—had a web presence. I got coffee mugs from Amazon every year in the beginning because I was a good online customer. Among the earliest.

I'm feeling so cutoff right now. I think I need internet anonymous.

I thought this was cute.

Another blog written in Minnesota: I mentioned that I'd re-read a couple of old favorite books of mine while I was home in MN. I talked about slang, now I'll talk about a few other things that make them dated and I don't mean the technology or lack thereof so much as the attitude.

I've worried off and on about the technology dating my books. Things have changed so fast that it's hard to anticipate what to put in when writing a story. What will stay fresh and what will leave readers going, that's so 2006? Personally, as I read these books again, the typewriter and lack of cell phones didn't bother me because I knew the books were older. The hero's attitude, though, was another story.

First, let me say that I still enjoyed both books and I'd still re-read them. The author released them as ebooks and I'd love to see if she rewrote them or not. I know, for me personally, I left my stories as they were written originally. I call them O'Shea Classic and only fixed a couple of things that really bothered me. My thoughts on this were that people who wanted to get the original story in ebook format, should be able to get that. The other point is that I want to work on new stuff, not rewrite the old—which I could do indefinitely.

Um, but I digress. So anyway, I'm reading the original 1989 version of these books, and while I'm curious if the author rewrote them, I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't. And honestly, she didn't really have to although there were a few things the hero did that made me grit my teeth.

Pet peeve of mine is when the hero calls the heroine "a little idiot." This is something that happened a lot in the old 80s era romances I hunted down. There were books written in the early to mid-80s that I read in the 90s that had me rewriting the story so the heroine ditched the so-called hero and found a better man. These books weren't that far gone, but there was the little idiot factor at work.

There was the way the hero threatened the heroine with spankings and actually did spank her once. Not because it was a BDSM book or kinky in anyway. It was because the heroine got too mouthy. This seriously annoyed the hell out of me. The hero wasn't a full-blown asshole, but there were some lingering wisps of that here.

The one other pet peeve of mine—and I've blogged about this several times—is the constant use of the characters names in these old books. Some new books today, too, but I think the 80s were particularly bad for soap opera dialogue where the name is used in every paragraph of conversation between the h/h and sometimes more than once per paragraph. People do not talk that way. But I won't digress down that path any more than I already have.

Reading these older books do get me thinking, though, about how my own work will hold up to time. I already know one book where my reference to a website is already dated. It was almost to that point when the book was released, but I hadn't guessed how fast MySpace would fade from public use. It dropped like a rock. I've learned and I'll mull over my re-reading lessons a bit, too.