Jenyfer Matthews

Thanks to everyone who suggested fun blogs for me to visit when I asked last week. There has been an unexpected consequence to blog hopping though – now, not only am I in danger of frittering all my time away but I’m spending money too!

I popped in at Postcards from Cairo early last week and the post Jenny had up there had me taking a spontaneous – and expensive – shopping trip. The Association of Upper Egypt for Education and Development had an exhibition of embroidered portraits – one that I’ve been waiting for but had totally missed. Never heard a peep about it. I called the association and they kindly allowed me to pop in and take a look at what they had left before they returned them as unsold. It’s probably a good thing I missed the main show because even with only a couple dozen to choose from I had a very difficult time making my selections!

Let me show you what I got:

Peasant’s Life by Nawal Nessim

Cotton Planting by Naanaa Adib

Bir Al Ayn Road by Saod Sabet
(Rice harvest)

Tree of Our Love by Ferial Ahmad

You can probably guess I have a weakness for textile art. It’s either a good thing or a bad thing that the association took Visa card, depending on how you look at it. I could have bought at least four more they were so lovely. I have already hung the pictures artfully around my place hoping that the wow factor will distract my husband from asking me how much I spent in the end.

The other purchase I’m planning won’t be as expensive but will be just as satisfying (I hope!) A neighbor of mine had me over for lunch one day last week and for dessert served the most delicious homemade sorbet. When I asked how she had made it, she referred me to the Chocolate and Zucchini blog for the recipe. It’s super simple and thrillingly it doesn’t require an ice cream maker – but I will have to find myself some stainless steel mixing bowls and create some freezer space. I’m very excited to try this recipe. Not only will the hot weather be upon us soon, but the ice cream available in the shops here is pretty unappealing.

And after reading a post at Romancing the Blog on profession web presence, I’m considering a web site makeover. Stay tuned.

What’s the best thing you’ve found on a blog recently?

Last week Dear Author posted a blog topic that got me to thinking. Basically Jane was wondering why it was that more romances didn’t deal with serious issues and when they did, why the issues weren’t always handled as thoroughly as they might be:

“A legitimate criticism of romance as serious literature is it’s often cavalier treatment of important life topics. Too often, war, separation, human indignity, are treated as plot devices, conflict mechanisms, and not given the attention and treatment those important issues deserve. How many romance books are thought provoking? How many challenge your personal concepts of right and wrong? How many portray multi hued individuals as both heroic and villianous? Surely within the umbrella of the romance genre, there is room for these books.

Now, this is not to say that I think we should be preached to. Nor am I saying that romance should be about more serious issues. What I am saying is that the lack of these types of books within the genre does not help its image as frivolous literature.

{….}

I am advocating for more romances to tackle, seriously, hard issues and morally ambiguous characters. I think there is room under the tent for them and I think that those books would lend some grativas to the genre.”

The last time I checked there were nearly 100 comments posted in response. I am responding here and my answer is:

The likelihood is not only readers but more importantly publishers who don’t want romance books that deal with serious issues.

Way back when I first started writing, I blithely sent a query on my first manuscript, a romantic suspense, to Harlequin. Little did I know then how lucky I was that I actually got a request for a full manuscript. I went back and forth a few times with the editorial assistant there with suggestions for changes before I ultimately got a rejection letter.

Undaunted, I dashed off another story. As I recall it was set in southern Louisiana – the heroine was a doctor doing pro bono work at a free clinic in a low income neighborhood and the hero was a reporter. She started running into problems when she noticed a trend of illnesses that she traced back to a factory located close to the neighborhood of the free clinic and with the help of the reporter hero was going to blow the whistle on the factory. Never mind the fact that looking back at this story now makes me cringe. When I sent this story off to Harlequin I got a speedy reply.

Too political.

Terry Odell made a comment on the Friday Feature post with Liz Jasper in which she said that she’d been tagged in a writing contest when she had her hero get drunk after a particularly stressful day and in another instance had a heroine swearing – because it’s not “heroic” behavior. As an author, I’m trying to create a character that people can relate to, with all their human flaws, but it’s this sort of feedback that curtails introducing elements that might offend one group or another.

In short, it’s not always the authors making a choice to avoid serious themes in their books. Publishers have guidelines for story lines, particularly category romance, and they tend to go with character types and story lines that they know will sell.

In the comment thread at Dear Author, Nora Roberts responded and said that she didn’t want to read romance books about “issues” and I’m sure it isn’t just me that agrees with her. I read romance for the HEA. I can handle characters with baggage / tragic pasts that they have to overcome during the course of the story (my favorite sort of story actually) but if I want to read a book about an “issue” then I’ll go find a nonfiction title. (or not)

Does a lack of serious issues make romance automatically inferior to other genres with a more serious tone? I don’t think so. It just makes them different. But I suspect that even if authors started dealing with more serious topics, critics would just find another aspect of the genre to criticize. For people who look down on romance (or sci-fi or horror or any other genre fiction) there will always be something they can find to pick on in even the best written novels.

I do agree with Jane on one thing though – if an author does introduce an “issue” into the story, whatever that issue may be, they owe it to their readers to deal with it realistically, accurately and as thoroughly as necessary.

If the flowering trees hadn’t tipped me off that spring had officially arrived in Cairo, we had our first sandstorm of the khamseen season on Saturday.

Khamseen means 50 and the season is 50 days of sandstorms. Or at least the possibility of them. Dust and dirt is a fact of life in Cairo, but the khamseen is different. It’s a hot wind out of the desert that carries sand with it. There are days when the sky turns brown with the sand, but it’s not like what you see in the movies where it’s a blizzard of sand in your face (though it can be). It’s much more insidious in fact. It’s a fine sand that hangs in the air. Even with the windows shut, it creeps in around every crack and crevice. You might not even notice it until you feel it coating the inside of your mouth. It makes your hair feel like straw and it sits on your skin like a coating of powder. Dirt comes out when you blow your nose. It simply sucks the moisture out of your pores.

Neat, huh? Fortunately it doesn’t happen every day. The khamseen makes even something mundane like line drying your clothes an adventure since it can be hard to tell when it will happen.

Yesterday’s sandstorm was a sneaky one. I didn’t even notice at first. There wasn’t much wind to speak of and I was inside much of the day. It wasn’t until I went out and saw the dull beige of the sky that I realized what was going on. And by that time it was too late to go back and shut the two windows I had open or take in the laundry hanging outside the line.

Guess how I spent my time when I returned? The irony is that it wouldn’t have really mattered if I had shut my windows, they are so warped and ill fitting.

It’s going to be a fun month.

My husband left for a conference only a couple of days after we returned from our trip to Siwa Oasis. In spite of the fact that he left me on my own for five days during the children’s spring break, I was looking forward to being on my own. I had big plans! I was going to eat all my favorite junk foods, watch all my favorite girl movies, and catch up on my writing as well as quilting. It’s not as if I can’t do these things when he’s around but somehow having him go away just seems…different.

Things haven’t exactly turn out as I expected. There just isn’t enough time in the day to do all the things I want to do.Not surprisingly, most of my daytime hours are taken up with child care / entertainment. And unfortunately I’m not one of those writers who can write between doing the dishes and making yet *another* snack. I need uninterrupted time, which these days only comes at night – when my mental energy is at it’s lowest point. I wrote a bit, but not nearly as much as I would have liked. (story of my life!)

I haven’t watched a single movie but I’ve more than made up for that with the junk food I’ve been eating. KFC (and most other restaurants) delivers in Cairo. The children? I’ve been getting them food at the club where my daughter takes tennis lessons three nights a week. Shame on me!

The only area I have made some progress is my sewing. I had an order for four baby quilts in my email when I got back from my trip – 2 girl, 2 boy – my choice of colors and design. I did the girl tops this weekend.

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What do you think?

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Still waiting for some inspiration on the boy quilts but in the meantime I can go ahead and layer and quilt these.What did you do this weekend?

Our second (and last) full day in Siwa started with a visit to Gebel El Mawta (mountain of the dead). There were two very old Egyptian tombs we went into – the paintings were amazing (alas, no photos allowed) The rest of the mountain was honeycombed with Greco-Roman tombs.

A view through a tomb at the top of the “mountain”

like this one.

Views of the remains of Old Shali fortress

A hillside riddled with Greco-Roman tombs. Amazing to me, but merely a blip in the grand scheme of Egyptian history!

Some local boys visiting Ain Shuruf Spring

Our last day away was spent on a bus as we drove back to Cairo in one shot – twelve hours!! It too had its interesting points. I was sitting there reading on my ebookwise book reader and got to chatting with an older man sitting across the aisle from me. He was so interested in my reader and the concept of ebooks that he’s planning on buying his own! Not only that, but after talking about books for a while, he confided that he’d recently read the Nora Roberts book “Birthright” and really enjoyed it. I just loaned him four more from my own collection. Always willing to do my part to woo more people to romance.

I’ve glossed over so many details of the history of the Siwa area. For a more detailed account you can visit this site.

Next month: Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. Can’t wait!!

Edited to add: In other news, my daugher’s Tamagotchi (virtual pet) got married and had a baby while we were away. Guess she’s doing something right

For the interest of anyone who is curious where exactly Siwa Oasis is in relation to Cairo, I’ve included a map. (Click on it to enlarge). It’s roughly 800km from Cairo to Siwa.

Our second day started with the drive from Marsa Matrouh to Siwa, which takes about 4 hours. This is pretty much what the scenery looked like:

Here’s Mr. Matthews standing in the middle of nowhere. What the picture doesn’t capture is the buffeting wind that was sweeping across this broad flat expanse – bringing mouthfuls of grit with it. I could have tied a rope on my youngest and used him for a kite. I hopped out to stretch my legs and take his picture then promptly got back on the bus!

After arriving in the town of Siwa and checking in at our hotel, our first outing was to the Temple of the Oracle, the place where Alexander the Great was allegedly told that he was to be the king of Egypt.

A village girl, coming out to sell trinkets to people on our bus

A glance down a side street in Siwa. I love the Vodafone sign in such a rural and rustic place. I do have to say that I had excellent cell phone reception nearly the entire time!

It was unusually hot for this time of year, reaching near 104F most days. It was an exceptionally dry heat, but there is only so much of that sort of baking in the sun a person can take before they need to cool down. Fortunately our hotel had its own “spring”

I have no idea if this was an actual spring – there are several in the area – but the water was near frigid. I prefer my pool water temperature to be closer to bath water, but even I took a dip after a day spent walking around in the heat of the desert. A one time splash in that water was enough to numb my outer layer. After that I basked in the sun to dry off – an enterprise that took about 10 minutes. Did I mention how dry it was?

One more day of pictures to share and then Liz Jasper will be here over the weekend as my Friday Feature. Where has the week gone?

First a little information about Siwa:

The oasis of Siwa is more than the gateway to the Great Sand Sea. This once sleepy frontier town, less than 50 kilometers from the border of Libya, has a rich cultural history. Siwa is home to Egypt’s only native Berber population as well as the famed Temple of the Oracle. Alexander the Great traveled here and obtained the confirmation he sought: the priests of the Oracle addressed him as deity and established his right to rule Egypt. Famous for its olives and dates, Siwa was once an important stop on the Caravan Route. But to protect the oasis from hostile invaders the Siwans built the Fortress of Shali in the 12th century and for hundreds of years no one went in. And while Siwa first appeared on an Egyptian map in the 26th dynasty, it was likely settled long before that. Flints found in the area suggest that Siwa was inhabited during the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras when the barren desert was a lush savannah.

We left Cairo for the Siwa Oasis, located in north central Egypt, bright and early on Thursday morning. This was a tour organized by the university where my husband works so there were about 50 of us on a huge bus, driving time two days. There are worse ways to travel in Egypt, believe me!

I took my first picture of the trip at a rest stop about an 1 1/2 hours outside of Cairo. (Note: clicking on any picture will make it larger)

I love taking pictures of goofy signs and how on earth could I resist the irony of this one – of a coffee with a name like this in such a conservative country? Sole Agent of Latin Lover in Egypt, indeed!

Our first real stop was at the Al Alamein War Memorial. I am no WWII history buff but apparently Al Alamein was the site of a huge battle in which the allies were able to defeat the Germans, ending German hopes of occupying Egypt, controlling access to the Suez Canal and gaining access to Middle East oil fields. An important turning point in the war in North Africa.

For a while I read the headstones, the names and ages of the soldiers killed, the inscriptions added by the family they left behind, but I soon had to stop. It was incredibly poignant to see the number of headstones – so many young men, life ended too soon, interred in this remote and dusty foreign place so far from home, some unidentified. The number of headstones here represents those they actually found – there were apparently tens of thousands killed whose bodies were never recovered.

We then drove a few more hours to Marsa Matrouh, a city on the North Coast, arriving late afternoon. Our hotel sat on the edge of the Mediterranean. It was almost impossible to look away from the vivid aquas and blues of the water there – and equally impossible to capture the colors with my camera at that time of the day. I suspect we’ll go back at some point, just to spend the weekend on the beach. The children did not get their fill of beach time during our short stay there.

Stay tuned…tomorrow I will post more pictures taken in and around the Siwa area….

Looks like Mona kept you entertained while I was away. Congratulations, Chris Power, you won the St. Patrick’s Day mug!I’ve only been gone since Thursday but it feels like much much longer. And don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t fret about my lack of internet access even once while I was away – that’s really saying something because I’m a total addict otherwise.

It was a fabulous trip – in spite of the fact that I under-packed for myself and ended up wearing the same things a couple of times, in spite of the 12 hour return bus trip with two antsy kids in tow, and in spite of the mountain of laundry I now have to do (my husband and kids had plenty of clothes with them!) Keep checking back because I’ll be posting pictures soon.

After I cleared out my inbox, I cruised around some of my usual blog haunts and found a wonderful surprise. Shelley Munro awarded me an Excellent Blog Award over the weekend. I was incredibly pleased and touched since I feel like I’m just muddling along most of the time. It’s nice to know that someone is actually enjoying my ramblings!

Now it’s my turn. The Rules: By accepting this Excellent Blog Award, you agree to award it to 10 more people whose blogs you find Excellent Award worthy. You can give it to as many people as you want but please award at least 10. You deserve this! Feel free to recognize blogs that have already received this award.

This is a bit tough for me because I actually actively try to NOT look at too many blogs. I’m easily distractible and could easily spend all my time cruising around looking at other people’s blogs rather than doing any writing of my own. But here are some of the blogs I visit regularly (in addition to Shelley’s of course!) in no particular order:

Postcards from Cairo
15 Minute Lunch
Yarnstorm
Paperback Writer
Killer Fiction
Smart Bitches
Argh Ink
Dear Author
Anny Cook’s Blog
Nathan Bransford

Does anyone have any favorite blogs they’d like to tempt me with? I’m all ears…

There are pretty much two types of writers: plotters and pantsters. The first type is self explanatory: plotters plot. They know exactly what they are going to do throughout their whole book and probably even have flow charts and note cards to keep everything on course.

Pantsters just fly by the seat of their pants – they get a germ of an idea and then sit down and write, letting the characters lead them this way and that.

I am sort of halfway between myself. I usually have the major plot points in mind when I start but the rest? Pantster all the way. I have a tatty notebook that I occasionally scribble things in, but the rest I make up as I go along.

Turns out that’s what I do when I’m quilting too.

Obviously there is a certain amount of planning involved when you make a quilt – you have to pick fabrics and a pattern before you start. (Unless you are making a crazy quilt, but I digress) And then comes the actual quilting – securing all the layers together with decorative stitching.

Yesterday I sat down at my sewing machine with a quilt top that I’d whipped together a couple of weekends ago. Normally I hand quilt, but I have a fancy machine that I bought a few years ago with the idea that I’d learn to machine quilt. I finally decided that I’d procrastinated that lesson long enough so I off I went.

Turns out I’m a pantster machine quilter.

I didn’t mark the quilt top with my motif. I just sat down and doodled. It’s not perfect but it’s not terrible. Unfortunately, editing in this case isn’t as easy as it is with writing – I’d have to rip all that stitching out if I decided I was unhappy with it.

If only I hadn’t run out of thread before I finished. Guess there’s something to be said for planning things out after all!

I’m going out of town with my family for a few days to visit the Siwa Oasis. I’ve heard nothing but good things about the area so I’m looking forward to it. We’ll be returning to Cairo on Sunday night. I’ll be preparing Easter baskets ahead of time, to preserve that illusion of the Easter Bunny visiting while we are away.

Since I’ll be away, I’ll be posting my Friday Feature a day early. Mona Risk will be here over the weekend with her book To Love a Hero. I hope you’ll stop by and take a look.

Have a wonderful weekend! Happy Spring! Happy Easter!

Congratulations, Janet H, you won yourself a copy of All The Way Home! Drop me an email and I’ll get that to you. The instant gratification of e-books is a wonderful thing!

Back in January, I mentioned that I had found and planted a tulip kit that I purchased in the airport in Amsterdam last summer. It had started to sprout on its own in the dark, cold corner of my bedroom. Once I remembered it, I planted it as instructed and then placed it in the darkest, coldest place I could think of: my refrigerator.

Turns out that wasn’t a brilliant place to pick because not only did my daughter mistake it for food and sample one of the decorative rocks, but the bulbs stalled. In fact, the soil started to grow mold. So, just before my trip to Dubai at the end of February, I took the bowl out of the fridge and put it in a cupboard at the top of the wardrobe in my children’s room, where I promptly forgot all about it.

(I was running the heater in my own room to encourage our laundry to dry)

Earlier this week, I was looking at a blog called Yarnstorm, home of an English domestic goddess, and saw the pictures she’d posted of some lovely bulbs she had grown and suddenly remembered my own. I ran to check on them, sure they would be as I left them only parched from lack of water and this is what I found:

Clearly my best strategy with plants is neglect. I didn’t water my tomato plants as much as I should have and yet I have a nice crop of cherry tomatoes coming in. Even my poinsettia are still going strong.

Guess my distracted, multi-tasking, drop-the-ball mommy brain is good for something after all.

And now to write. I only have three days before my kids get out of school for a two week Easter holiday. Think I’ll get much writing done during that time? Me either.

I saw an advertisement for a digital camera while I was in the airport in Dubai – a digital camera so smart that it will only take the picture when it sees a smile.

I looked it up when I got home and the Sony website says:

Smile Shutter^TM technology captures smiles the moment they happen^TM – without the need to press the shutter. The mode can be set to capture when your subject laughs, smiles or even grins, and like Face Detection is able to differentiate children and adults to set priority.

No more sad faces! Edit your life to look like everyone is having nothing but fun and good times, all the time!

But think of all the other moods you’d miss : broody, smoldering, alluring, sexy, sullen, morose. And all the shades in between. If I could only snap a picture when the camera saw a smile I’d never have gotten a picture of my best friend from high school. The minute she sees a camera, all smiles vanish.

I have a picture of my son as a two year old, with a grumpy post-nap look on his face and a runny nose. Every time my daughter sees that picture she asks why I took it. Because it is real life.It’s not that I don’t like smiles or selective memory on occasion. It’s probably more that I don’t like machines telling me what to do. I don’t even like it when my mother’s car automatically locks the doors when you start the car and don’t get me going on the annoying insistent alarm that goes off for seatbelts. The car thinks it’s so smart – it’s my purse in the passenger seat, stupid!

There’s probably a button you can press on that camera to turn off the smile feature but I’ll do one better and just not buy it.