USA Jello Shots Red White Blue Celebration Jelly

USA Jello Shots: Nothing says 'MURICA quite like these USA jello shots. They're red, they're white, they're blue and packed full of the good stuff (vanilla vodka, obviously). Whip these up over a summer holiday wee...



For readers of British English, Jello is an American brand of jelly, which has become the standard name for jelly.



Angela Lansbury, author, travel writer and photographer, English language teacher.

Horror Stories by Lovecraft and his Advice on how to write Horror Stories

I read a horror story by Lovecraft, then found his advice on writing. Most useful.

Amusing name. Love craft. He loved the craft of writing, and writing horror stories.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/hb.aspx

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/nwwf.aspx

Angela Lansbury, author, travel writer, photographer, teacher.

Editing a Blog Post - Why Re-Reading Text and Photo Captions Helps

CHECKING TEXT
I just retyped my headline. I typed fast and out came blag post instead of blog post. Typing this sentence in the text I typed blah post.

When you re-read your work you find these mistakes. I often neglect to go into VIEW to see what the reader will see. But if you are writing blog posts, it really improves your posts.

When I create my post I type in a wide box. But when the text appears in the blog the right hand side is filled with links and advertisements. One result is that two sentences are often enough for a paragraph. More makes a long block of text so I have to shorten paragraphs.

CHECKING PHOTOS
For example, only after writing for several years did I discover the facility to enlarge your photo to large or extra large. You can make a picture bigger so you can see the food or the expression on somebody's face.

However, sometimes the picture bleeds outside the column width. You might lose the person on the right or left of the picture. Or find the text and picture are overlapping.

Finally, when you add a photo it may slip into the place where you last left your cursor. The picture moves up, the text wraps around it and the picture captions apply to the wrong picture or sit in the middle of nowhere as if a picture has vanished. If it confuses the author, what must it do to a reader from Japan.

The other surprise is that if you have two or more blogs, you alter the frame of one and get narrow columns, but your other blog has wide columns. So what you imagine your text looks like, as you flit from updating one blog to another, is not what you expect.

Now I must save this - and check how it looks.

Remember to add your selling point or call to action at the end. You could create a signature and repeat it every time.

Angela Lansbury BA Hons. Author. Freelance writer of travel and features. Photographer. Please look at Lulu.com and Youtube and other blogs. Angela is also a speaker and speech trainer if you need one.

Too Many Adjectives, said writer Dahl

I read an article in the Daily Mail online. A man re-discovered a letter which he received from Raould Dahl, responding to a request from a then 17 year old for comments on a school project short story.

I would agree with Dahl that too many adjectives slow down an action story. However, different types of stories and audiences and subject matter require different styles.

I disagree with the example Dahl chose. 'She had a bosom' is a nonsense. Every woman has a bosom. to say that implies the writer has a one track mind. (He didn't care whether she was intelligent or had a job. She had a bosom. That was enough.)

The first four word sentence is terse. It did not create any picture in my mind's eye of the woman, but of the writer or speaker.

'A shapely, prominent bosom', however, focuses my mind on a vision of a rather well-endowed woman. A novelist has time for such long sentences. Descriptions are expected in novels as a pause between action.

But a short story writer might need to cut down on adjectives simply to cram more action into one thousand words. One thousand is the limit for the many modern short stories, because that number or words will fit into on one or two pages in a magazine with advertisements down the side.
***
Readers' comments on the same article express surprise that a letter from such a famous person had been mislaid and only just discovered.

The loss of a letter does not surprise me at all. A single sheet of paper can easily sit in an untouched file for years, stored in an attic or at the back of a cupboard. Today's houses are filled with paperwork. Writers and creative people are notorious collectors.

It takes a scientific mind to catalogue every paper and be able to locate everything.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2983602/Dear-Jay-asking-Roald-Dahl-s-brutally-honest-letter-boy-17-asked-author-advice-Level-project.html


Angela Lansbury BA Hons is an author with books on lulu.com, videos on Youtube and more blog posts on travel and other subjects. She is also a freelance photo-journalist, author and caricaturist and gives speeches and trains speakers. 

Stairs as drawers - space saving and space illusion in small spaces and small homes

I tried to leave a comment with a like on Facebook but the site would not connect me to Facebook so here's my comment.

Stairs made into drawers are a really interesting and inspiring idea. Many homes already have a cupboard under the stairs, either a coat cupboard or a toilet or a mini office, depending on the size of the staircase.

I can see the disadvantage of the drawers - if you leave one open you squash the contents when you step on them, break the drawer base and miss your footing in the night.

An alternative would be to open the drawers sideways. The drawers supported by the stair below are less dangerous from the point of view of toppling furniture such as unstable chests of drawers which can tilt and crush climbing children and absent-minded adults. I wonder whether some compromise could be reached. For example:

Secret drawers in the staircase as a Safe. (Although could only be used when nobody else was around or they'd spot it.)

Cut the drawers in half and have one coming forward and one going sideways (like some underbid drawers). This could halve or double your problems depending on the layout of the staircase.

I would always want a grab rail on the wall beside the staircase and another on the outside. More security for frail granny, overweight or pregnant mummy, slimming toddler, tipsy teenager on new year's eve, galloping Dad or guest wearing slippery slippers.

Lots of interesting ideas.

Read more at
www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2956959/The-world-s-stylish-studio-apartments.html#reader-comments

How to get your blog post noticed - mention Madonna or Beyonce

How do I get my blog post noticed? I asked the SEO experts in my family. They said, mention somebody well-known or famous. If somebody famous such as Beyonce or Madonna dined in your restaurant, that will get your blog post more attention than the food. That's why the Daily Mail has links to posts to famous people all down the right hand side.

We indulged in a little speculating on what else gets attention. Headlines which scream shocking.

That explains something which has always puzzled and annoyed me. When I trained as a journalist we were taught to be impartial when writing news, or even features. You should not say that a man is amazingly old, but that he is 113 years old. The reader can form their own conclusion.

Now I realise why the headlines scream. It is not ignorance, hysteria, amateur. It is marketing. Madonna would understand that.

Angela Lansbury B A Hons
Author, blogger, speaker.
See also LinkedIn, Youtube, Facebook, Lulu.com

Have you ever wanted to change a comment or click?

"I wish the cite wood let me change that."

Comments upgrade could do any or all of the following:

1 Allow one minute in which commentators could change if clicking the wrong plus/minus by mistake.

2 Spellcheck option and delay during which you can and are advised to read before approving.

3 Alternatively spellcheck adding alternatives (labelled corrected, or in new colour, various reasons - to allow for posts to show the education or native language of speaker, to show the original is labelled original spelling sic' or in colour to show alternative spelling for the benefit of the reader and/or writer e.g. USA spelling, colour and colour - c o l o r - it has already changed mine!

4 Anybody searching for reasons for an accident is made to waste time or often gives up because too many comments are emotional adding no new facts: 'Shocking'.  'I cried when I read this', 'tell them we care'.

Label the first five different emotional reactions as such (e.g. positive; sending sympathy; negative: they deserve it; neutral who cares, move on).  Allow other posters to either click on agreement or be diverted to a page of condolences. Allow the primary comments to be additional facts (e g a similar accident took place at this location in such a year).