Jane Brucker, 2011 reading at her Art Opening photograph by Caroline Gerardo copyright 2011
I have not checked in on ROW80. I have kept to my writing every day schedule .I threw out word count for now as I am reducing the novel from 151108 words to around 80000. I will have second revision done done done by July 4. I am going to Thriller Fest in New York on the following day. I am focusing on finding an agent who has passion and obsession for literary thrillers. My work is not a “pigeonhole able” single genre. I am writing thrillers, but they are literary and more general fiction than just financial thrillers.
I have settled on a title now that the narrative is set in stone. The Lucky Boy.
What do you think? I had toyed with Lucky, but Alice Sebold has a novel/memoir (that I love by the way) of the same start word title. My novel is not the same.
Side note: One of my son’s first phrases was, “I’m a yucky boy.” By this he spoke with a slight lisp intending to express his joy and good fortune, upon which his sister and I would crack into shards of laughter. Now that he is fourteen, he uses it with a sarcasm that points out that being raised by two women has it’s downfalls.
Little Sycamore Canyon Trail Ridge June 2, 2011 photograph copyright Caroline Gerardo
I ask you to vote on one title: A Lucky Boy or The Lucky Boy.
Goals this week: Get Chapters 8-10 into clean speaking order by Saturday, exercise, love my children, and pray. No gardening, no dating (sorry Harvard guy), no time for frills. Focus on the finish line.
I will have the keen eye of the red tailed hawk that we nursed back to health. My eye is on the ribbon at the end of the race.
Dispel a stereotype is my challenge from Jen O.
Please click on all videos to open before you read, yes all at once.
I am experimenting with interactive links. Please provide input about the interactive aspect. Readers please provide comments. I will include your words and ideas. I will make changes each day this next week. If you want your personal link added, please post url in the comments. All free links in the text. Thank you - have fun.
I am looking for your story changes, ideas, and responses.
Should AB 376 be thrown out of California?
Is it prejudicial against Asian culture to ban shark fin soup?
Everything you say I intend to incorporate in the body of the text.
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Sharks actually save lives. Sharks provide oxygen.
Sharks are an apex predator. They are a necessary balance in the universe. There are about sixty shark attacks on humans worldwide on humans. Sharks need a new Public Relations Representative. Over fishing and shark finning have placed many shark species on endangered lists. We will miss the mighty shark. http://bit.ly/dycB0S
The brutal practice of shark finning is a multibillion-dollar industry. While the shark is living, the fins are sliced off. The anglers throw the body back into the sea to drown. The process is wasteful and cruel.
Shark fin soup is a delicacy in Asian restaurants sold for up to three hundred and fifty dollars a bowl. The fin provides no flavor to the broth. Chicken and pork stock reduce to provide the taste in the dish. Believers think the fin provides mythical powers of strength and an aphrodisiac.
Seventy percent of the world's oxygen comes from phytoplankton if we kill off sharks we will reduce the air we breathe. Sharks feed on many of these plankton-eating fish. Sharks keep the ocean in balance and provide the world’s oxygen supply.
The ecosystem of the Atlantic Ocean is off balance. The disappearance of species of sharks is one cause. This demonstrates why we must conserve remaining shark species. Sea scallops disappeared from the lack of large predatory sharks in the coastal waters of the Atlantic. During the past thirty years, an explosion in the number of ray, skate and small shark species that they prey on, devastated organisms at the bottom of the food chain.
"Large sharks have been functionally eliminated from the east coast of the US, meaning that they can no longer perform their ecosystem role as top predators," said Julia Baum a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada and co-author of the study.
"With fewer sharks around, the species they prey upon - like cownose rays - have increased in numbers, and in turn, hordes of cownose rays dining on bay scallops have wiped the scallops out."
Several of the larger shark species in the northwest Atlantic are verging on extinction, according to Baum and colleagues who analysed a dozen surveys dating from 1970 up to 2005.”
The Assembly Bill 376 has passed through the first hurdles. Many emails have come in in support of saving many species of sharks. Few have posted links or information. Above is a wonderful link from SuperMaren to her utube swimming with he sharks.