There’s been a lot of activity around Houndstooth Hall for the past few days, plumbers, electricians, and utility company inspectors coming and going. This has kept the dogs riled up. I did manage to make a traditional New Year’s Day good luck and prosperity meal, this time with ham, biscuits (Tom made), steamed broccoli, turnip greens, and black-eyed peas.
The dogs violently spoke out about these strangers all over the property, and my brain couldn’t possibly have written in such an environment. I did manage to get a new banner with events, people, and dogs from 2024 on here. I also did something long overdue (not done since 2022) and cleaned up the original Timothy James Beck website. There were broken links, strange coding characters messing up pages, some pages even had our OLD P.O. Box address (and I’ve had the current one for around ten years). The author photo collages were so outdated that I deleted them–basically, the site was a hot mess.
I know some HTML code thanks to this site, but there were things I had to research, and I managed to learn new tricks and fix the invasive and bad code. I hope it’s all correct and up-to-date now. There’s a page on the site with reviews and quotes from readers. I haven’t read any of that in years, and when I did, it gave me quite a lift.
I told Tim and Jim from now on, when I start feeling like I haven’t done much, I need to treat that page on the site like a scene from the movie Soapdish. Sally Field’s character Maggie, a daytime drama actress, would go with the show’s head writer Rose (played by Whoopi Goldberg) to a mall in New Jersey. Rose would pretend to “notice” Maggie and start fan-girling, which would make people in the crowd stop, stare, recognize, and rush Maggie for autographs, telling her how much they loved her and her show’s character, “Celeste Talbert,” and it would help Maggie emerge from her funk.
Since I snagged the TJB banner from one of my Flickr albums (related to book publicity), I also noticed this blue-dominant photo to share again. Mattel’s Summer doll, who I bought in 2008 (on a shopping trip either before or after an amazing dinner Lynne treated me to) specifically to publicize this book. Summer (named Jandy in the novel) started a whole world of sewing, top modeling, Mattel Model Muse doll buying, and the Runway Monday series on LiveJournal.
You never know when another muse may come along, as I was reminded today. But that’s a story for another time. =)
And, here I was betting on it being Bruce Springsteen’s. Then, in Avenger’s: Endgame there was the infamous “There’s America’s Ass!” Both, were in blue.
Nope. That is a fictional denim-clad ass. Our fiction–our choice. 🤣