Tag: blogs

Tiny Tuesday!

In November 2007, while in the middle of a remodel at The Compound, I posted this photo on my blog (back then, it was LiveJournal). The back row includes McDonald’s Happy Meal Barbies from the early 1990s. I’m not sure who the front left is or her era, and I have no idea who front right is, but not Mattel. They were given to me by various people, including my nephew. No idea how he ended up with them, because I doubt he was eating McDonald’s Happy Meals as he was college age then and also a vegetarian. Plus I doubt a cool skateboarding kid with great taste in music was into Happy Meal Barbies.


The reason I share them again was because I found another mini set, this time Made to Move Barbies, at Ross. The only actual doll from this group I have is the Baseball Barbie, but I do like this series because they’re posable. Not really buying any female dolls right now, though the one on the right with the microphone might be interesting.

One of my LJ friends with whom I’ve remained in contact, Rio, sent me a link last week to show me some Barbies that are about to be released. I WILL NOT SUCCUMB TO TEMPTATION. (Translated: I probably will.)


Standing on the shoulders of all the Barbies who came before.

website down!

Did anyone notice that my site went down sometime on Friday and didn’t come back until late afternoon on Sunday? Thanks to Netfirms for their technical assistance.

I have no idea what I’d planned to post for Saturday, so I’m doing it after the fact and choosing to feature Monster High’s Catty Noir 13 Wishes doll since it’s the March 13 entry.


This is how she looked in the box when I got her in 2013. Which is eight freaking years ago.


Here’s her most up-to-date photo taken when I began my (still not finished) doll inventory. I need to find her sparkly pink microphone because I never know when my dolls will finish forming their band and will need more equipment. (Shhh, Catty won’t be in the band. Different universe.) =)

Photo Friday, No. 733

Current Photo Friday theme: Looking Back at 2020

This challenge will run for two weeks. This week, I decided to show you some of what I’ve done in 2020 since being laid off and quarantining at home due to the COVID pandemic.


(If you click here, you can see a larger version of this photo with more of the details.)

I have used dolls (represented by two Monster High dolls eating pizza here, my rock and roll dude and his baseball-loving girlfriend, and Summer, my Top Model) as muses, inspiration, and entertainment. Along with the small guitars, they evoke characters in my novels.

I finished a novel and began another. I finished three–maybe four?–pieces of art and sent them out. I have colored in coloring books.

I’ve eaten lots of popcorn and drunk Starbucks (but not as much as I used to).

I’ve continued to fill a Moleskine with little bits of memorabilia I find, and started another Moleskine for the same kinds of things from years dating back to 2008 (during my organize and purge efforts, which are ongoing).

I’ve blogged, Instagrammed, and even ventured back to Twitter a bit to find new authors, new thinkers, new voices for social justice, new animal advocates, and new people to make me laugh.

In the background, you see the laptop where I’ve written and the shelves that contain some of my most important tools: aromatherapy, stones, and soft candlelight.

This room and the space it has given me to think and create has been my sanctuary since March.

Next week, I’ll offer a different perspective of this year. Thank you for reading, commenting, and sticking with me. You are part of my journey whether you read silently or comment.

Whatever Wednesday

Just a few things I’ve seen here and there over the past couple of weeks or so and thought I’d share.


I don’t have kids, but I have this bizarre notion that parents aren’t willing to offer their children as part of that .02%. Not once, since she was appointed, has Betsy Devos ever let me down in my initial belief that she would be education’s worst nightmare. I never thought she’d advocate murdering children, though.

Under construction–sort of

Bear with me. The masthead will take a while because I have very little leisure time, and I’m not wanting to use it at a computer because I work too many hours a day here.

I have a yearlong plan for the blog that involves writing and photography. If you want to see those entries, please click on “Pet Prose” from the “tags” list.

Thanks for reading. January has been a challenging month, and I’m happy to have this outlet. Or rather, to provide an outlet for our rescue’s dogs and cats to express their creativity. 😉

which way do I go…

Photo Friday has changed their site. I’ve done 515 Photo Friday posts; my first one was July 14, 2006. Sometimes Photo Friday hasn’t posted new challenges–usually around holidays, and most recently, as they’ve revamped their site. But I don’t think I’ve missed a challenge in all that time, not even when I went on the occasional posting hiatus. I tried to follow every theme they used, no matter what a stretch I had to make between a photo and a theme.

I don’t know where I first saw Photo Friday. I’m sure it was on someone’s blog. I know several of my other blogging friends did Photo Fridays, too, but only one or two still do, and not always consistently. Shit, for that matter, who’s still blogging? I’m barely here other than Fridays and Sundays.

The reason I began blogging was because I enjoyed other people’s blogs. Tim started a LiveJournal and I liked it, so I started one, too. That was in late 2004. In time, I realized what my other writer friends knew–keeping an online journal or blog was PUBLICITY for what we published. And readers could find us on our blogs and interact with us in a way that rarely happened in the old snail mail days. I still have friends I made via blogging. I also met some people who are with good reason not friends. It’s a weird world out there.

I migrated from LJ to a WordPress blog in April of 2011 because I already owned beckycochrane.com and didn’t have anything to put there, not having published a novel since 2009. I figured I might as well use it as my blogging platform. In time, I stopped talking politics because that became too mean and no fun. After even more time, I wrote only occasionally. Facebook and Twitter and Instagram pretty much killed blogs. Who wants to read some longass post from a stranger when you can read 140 characters from tons of strangers. After all, didn’t the Bell Companies–and by that, I mean Southern, Western, Mountain, etc. Bell who later became AT&T–teach us that a romantic story or a sentimental celebration among aging parents and their children or a girl’s idol worship of her big brother could be conveyed in 30 to 60 seconds? Who needs movies? Or even half-hour sitcoms? Those phone commercials were the forerunner of Twitter.

I doggedly blogged even when almost everyone I knew stopped because I WASN’T writing novels. The blog became a creative outlet for my photographs, my paintings, my magnetic poetry, my nostalgia, my doll fashions. When the animal rescue group began to consume my time–and you have no idea how much time that is, but all the people I never call or write or meet for lunch or email or see or travel to see or send birthday cards to: THEY know–the only things I was sure I’d make time for were those Photo Friday and Button Sunday posts. Even so, I linked to them on FB and people would comment there and never here, so my traffic must be pretty slim compared to the number of readers in blogging days of yore. A “like” button on FB is easy, and a comment there is mostly private since almost all my FB posts are friends and family only. This blog remains public, and though the dozens of comments from the old days are now only a few comments here and there, I still read them with the same interest and delight because connecting here continues to feel more genuine than on all those other quick and easy social media sites. This is one-to-one time between me and YOU, who still reads and comments. We’re not just one of a long line of tweets or FB posts or instagram photos. For a moment, we meet, just you and me, because we both want to be HERE, not just two voices lost in a cacophony of more voices than most of us, or at least I, care to hear at one time.

And Photo Friday–well, honestly, I started participating because by making the photos public in my otherwise mostly private Flickr account, and by posting them to the Photo Friday site, I could drive more traffic to the blog and therefore expose the Timothy James Beck novels and the edited anthologies and my own novels to a wider audience.

But now, as I say, Photo Friday has changed. I’ve been trying to figure out its new design, and as best I can tell, it allows us a better view of all the photos submitted on the actual site rather than clicking on the photographers’ links and going to their websites. In other words, Photo Friday has joined the quick and easy view it on your phone or tablet generation, no need to go to all those other places to see photos anymore. YAY!

Except…not yay. Because I liked clicking on those links and never knowing what I might see. A brilliant photographer from some country whose name I couldn’t pronounce? A hobby photographer who wrote really engaging stories about her crazy friends? By going to those contributors’ blogs or journals or websites, I have discovered whole new worlds that intrigued or entertained or dismayed or educated me.

And I, who am not a brilliant photographer and don’t pretend to be, am supposed to upload my photos there to be eclipsed by many far superior photos, and there’ll be no more visits from people who came to see one photo and, maybe intrigued by my tags, poked around and found other things that interested them, or that we had in common or–hey, you wrote BOOKS? Real books on paper that were sold in bookstores? I’m going to order one right now!

Anyway, this has all been WAY more than 140 characters, and thank you if you read this far as it means you are a rare and wondrous creature who still has an attention span and I probably love you more than Charlie the Unicorn. If I stop doing the Photo Friday challenges, I’ll still do something. I actually have a list in the notes app on my phone of what people told me they wanted me to blog about. It’s from July 17, 2010, and it makes me smile when I scroll down that far and discover it again.

YOU make me smile. Thank you for still reading here. I still love reading your thoughts.

Photo Friday, No. 450

Current Photo Friday theme: Road Trip


I do have photos from road trips, but I’m dedicating this Photo Friday to Linda (Raven Moore) Gentile, one of the loveliest people I never met.

I first became acquainted with Linda through mutual blogging/online journaling friends. Over the years, I admired her gentle nature, her nomadic spirit, and her lovely humor. I wrote in my own blog about my enjoyment of her book A Little Twist of Texas, the tale of a road trip she took on her motorcycle, Beastie.

Later, she and her husband Don put most of their stuff in storage and began living on the road in their RV, Harvey. Linda’s passion was finding historical landmarks and historical markers, and she and her fellow travelers recorded them on her website Markeroni. Somewhere along the way, when she found out about my collection of Barbie dolls, she offered to dig through that storage room the next time they were there and send me the two Harley Barbies pictured above. In typical road trip fashion Linda could appreciate, the dolls were lost for a while en route, and we’d both given up on their ever making it to my house, but finally they did.

Harvey became one of the inspirations for part of my novel A Coventry Wedding, which reminds me of another way Linda was generous with me. When I had book signings, she encouraged her Houston-area friends to come see me and buy my novels.

In her quiet, graceful fashion, when Linda became ill with metastatic melanoma, she shared the news with only her family and a few close friends. Since I was a reader of her blog (the link no longer works), I wondered why she’d grown quiet, and my heart ached for Don, her family, and friends when he shared the news of her death in March in an email. As Don said, On the custom of flowers or contributions in her name, she preferred that flowers be left to grow, and suggested we simply “pay it forwards.” Linda’s mindset, intentions, and actions often included “paying it forwards” – altruistically redirecting repayment of her good deeds to others, increasing them, rather than back to herself.

I will think of her now whenever I see wildflowers and historical markers along the highways I drive. I will think of the adventurous spirit that drew her to the United States from England, to build a life with Don on a road less traveled. I will never have the opportunity to meet her in person, so I choose to think of her continuing her journey–not without a few misadventures. Those were the moments that tested her and that she rose above, choosing to look back on them with humor. She had a big heart, a sharp mind, and a gift of sharing both with her readers.

Thank you, Linda, for your many gifts. As the old Irish blessing goes, “May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face; the rains fall soft upon your fields.”

For you

Some of the spam comments I get on this blog are unintentionally hilarious so I often peruse them before I delete them. Today included a new favorite:

“This text is worth everyone”

No punctuation, nothing else, just that. I want y’all to remember that my writing is worth EVERYONE. When the planet decides to shrug us all off, probably this text will remain. With the cockroaches. And Cher.

Here, let me distract you from that hard reality with a pretty photo of Tim’s azaleas and roses.

Six Things

  1. The last time I went to the post office, I had a package from Rob, also known as The Smiling Bagel. I call him St. Louis’s goodwill ambassador, because his blog always makes me want to visit that city. He sent me some bottle caps for my ongoing art series. I haven’t painted in a while. Maybe this is the nudge I needed. It wasn’t until I photographed the bottle caps and uploaded the picture that I became aware of….
  2. A tiny wrapped package of pressed pennies from the St. Louis Zoo featuring a train, a hippo, a peacock, and a butterfly. See what I mean about how he promotes his home city? He remembered that I like to collect pressed pennies from tourist attractions, and now I have four new ones. Thank you so much, Rob–for the bottle caps and the pressed pennies!
  3. In going through some old pictures, I found this photo of my mother’s desk. I think Laura and Jess got that desk. The four paintings on the top are four of my One Word Art paintings that she once picked out for either her birthday or Christmas. They were the four that spoke to her, she said. Rather than reclaiming them, I believe I sent them with a box of stuff to Daniel. I’d forgotten them until I saw this photo. I believe they are, left to right, “Trust,” “Surrender,” “Plant,” and “Learn.”
  4. I’m reading Karl Soehnlein’s novel Robin and Ruby.
    I wanted to photograph one of Barnaby’s bigger-than-your-head salads to show you how enormous it is. I usually get a dinner, the next day’s lunch, and maybe a third small salad out of one of these. The salad is excellent, but their ranch dressing is THE BEST. It’s great for dipping fries in, too.
  5. When Jim was here, one afternoon we went to the Menil Collection and the Cy Twombly Gallery. I have to go back to the Menil soon. The next day, we hit up the Museum of Fine Arts, the Lawndale Art Center, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. The last is where Jim got me into trouble when he posed for me–it was like the dozenth photo I’d taken, but only when Jim got all goofy were we told, “You can’t take photos of the art here!” Oops. I’d like to say I feel remorse, but I don’t (and I didn’t use a flash). I do recommend that particular exhibit: INTERSTITIAL SPACES: JULIA BARELLO & BEVERLY PENN. It’s there until September 1.
  6. I finally persuaded myself to download Instagram to my iPhone. That’s my first photo: Pixie and Penny all bored, watching out the window for something exciting like a squirrel to appear. I don’t know how much I’ll use Instagram–I have two other photo apps on my phone that I never use. I need to feel the heft of a camera in my hands. But at least now I can look at other people’s Instagram galleries, and some of their pictures are beautiful and creative.

I was not compensated by any businesses, artists, or products mentioned in this post other than sales of my own art work.