Lavender and Oreos

Jonnie and Steve asked me to dogsit this past weekend. I just hung out with the dogs, watching the Deadzone and 4400 marathons on USA, reading some Neil Gaiman short stories from Smoke and Mirrors. A really great weekend.

When you watch a lot of television, however, you end up watching a lot of ads. It seems that everything is lavender scented these days. Air freshener, fabric softener, detergent. I happen to like lavender. The handcream on my desk is lavender and bergamot. It's a relaxing scent. But why now? Why did the marketers decide 2007 is the year of lavender? There was once a glut of lemon-scented things. Then 'herbal'. They never said which herbs, just herbal. Then there were the esoteric 'morning rain' and 'mountain air' scents. Now we're into lavender.

And I'm thinking there was an accident at the Oreo cookie factory and they couldn't shut the machines off, because everybody and Adam's tomcat are offering Oreo cookie things. Oreo cookie sundaes and milkshakes and pizza (I'm not kidding about that one).

How does this relate to writing? Well, I did the watching television and playing with dogs instead of working actively on MMG. But, more directly, I think creative people can fall into the trap of looking at what's hot right now and trying to duplicate that success. The danger of too many seminars on marketing and publicity.

If I'm going to be part of a trend, I want to lead it. So no lavender and Oreos for me. Guess I need to buy new hand cream.

New AL Submission Trend

For almost a year, the number of submissions to Apollo's Lyre was low. And so was the quality of most of those submissions. I went to The Group on more than one occasion to beg for stories.

Within the last six weeks, I've received several really good submissions. A lovely trend to be sure. But there's a trend within the trend. Many of them are from overseas, particularly Israel. Which raises an interesting question: Why?

Bret, if you're out there, can you answer? Are we targeting this market?

And why is the writing so good? Or is it? Am I just impressed because the style is different from what I receive from 'local' writers? Or is there really a quality difference?

I'll leave that to you to decide when the next issue of Apollo's Lyre is published.