Book Review of Loyalty by Ingrid Thoft

From Amazon Website

Too Many Characters, but Interesting Story

4 stars

Fina Ludlow, the main character, is a PI in a family of men.  First off, this girl is certainly not a role model for anyone.  She’s a junk-food addict.  How can you survive that way and have a body to-die-for?  The condo she got from her grandmother is a pigsty and she lives there rent-free.  This isn’t realistic in today’s society.

Fina is tough, as you can imagine a PI should be, and like any male counterpart, she drinks and cusses and isn’t afraid to kick-ass if necessary to get the information she wants.  However, this girl usually seeks out men that she’s slept with, or ones she wants to sleep with to get answers to her questions.

She works for her father’s law firm, which also employs her brothers as lawyers.  This story has an excessive amount of characters in it.  The author introduces them in the first part of the book.  It was very hard for me to read the first fifty or sixty pages and keep all these people straight.  After that, the story finally settled down a bit and I was able to follow it better.  I think the author would benefit by having a character list in the front of the book that the reader can refer to when necessary.

Ms. Ludlow constantly complains about her family, her mother in particular, and it’s hard for her to get any answers out of her dad or brothers, for her murder investigation, because she’s female and they don’t want to share any of their secrets with her.

If you can get past all this, this is an interesting story, even of it is a bit predictable.

NaNo Update

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All I’m doing at present besides the usual daily routine is writing and cleaning out my sewing room, with a tad of reading on the side.  NaNo is going well considering I don’t get many hours a day to write.  I’ve added 16,000 words the last three days, so I’ve really been on a roll.  My keyboard is smoking hot with me typing fast trying to keep up with the thoughts flying around in my head.

I’m hoping to finish the mystery I’m reading and post a review next time.  I also managed to get hold of a book from last year’s ABNA contest that was a finalist.  I expect it to be a fast read so will be posting that review too, hopefully by the end of the year.

Happy writing everyone

Busy weeding out and working on NaNo

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Hi readers, please excuse my lazy posting.  I’m involved in weeding out stuff to move and writing on my NaNo project when I get an hour here and there.  It’s moving along better than I would expect considering the few hours that I’ve actually spent writing.  I’m currently at 15,380 words, so not too far behind to catch up.  I can bang out about 3.000 words of this rough draft in an evening, if I’m lucky.  I’ll be posting once a week this month because of all the other stuff on my plate right now.  I have to spend every spare minute I have writing on my WIP and not writing up blog posts.  Bear with me.

Keyboard Shortcuts that may be Helpful

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This came across my mail today so thought I’d share.  I didn’t know about all of these.  Most of these are for a Windows operating system.

Ctrl + Shift + T lets you bring back the last webpage you were looking at.  In Google Chrome, you can restore up to ten browser tabs using this method.

Ctrl + Shift + Escape lets you get to the browser manager to terminate any frozen apps.  For Mac use Command + Option + Escape.

Alt + Left/Right Arrow Keys to navigate through browser history forward or back a page.  For Mac use Command + Left/Right Arrow Keys.

Ctrl + L will put your cursor on the location bar without using your mouse.  You can type in an address leaving out the www and .com and hitting Ctrl + Enter will automatically add that part and launch the site.  For Mac its Command + Enter.  This works in Chrome, not sure on other browsers.

Windows + Left/Right will make a page extend to the end of the screen without having to maximize the window to full screen.  This works in Windows 7 and can be useful for pairing two web browser windows next to each other.

For Fast YouTube Viewing hitting any number key will jump the video forward the corresponding percentage.  For example, hitting the 4 will jump the video by 40% regardless of the length.  Hitting the arrow keys will jump forward or backward by 5 seconds.  Also hitting the space bar at any time will pause the video.  This is useful when watching long videos and presentations.

Spacebar / Shift + Spacebar lets you browse the web without using the mouse.  If you’re reading something lengthy, hitting the Spacebar is like the Page Down Key.  Shift + Spacebar will scroll back up one page.  The Shift key is usually a modifier to reverse the action for other shortcuts.

Double tap Command or the FN key to turn on dictation.  This works for Mac only with Mountain Lion installed.  It lets you convert speech to text.  The first time you use it you will be asked if you want to turn dictation on.  For keyboards without a CMD or FN key, you can change the shortcuts keys in the dictation and speech settings found in system preference.  This sounds really cool.

Gmail shortcuts can be turned on if you have Gmail for email and spend lots of time on there.  There are six automatically turned on when you have a Gmail account.  To enable other ones go into Gmail settings.  The Google support page lists all the shortcuts or you can go here for a cheat sheet.

To keep your desktop free of icons to your programs, you can launch an application to bring them up in system search.  Windows and Mac index all your programs.  To launch this, use Command + Spacebar in Mac or just the Windows and typing for windows systems.

Have fun playing with all this stuff.  I’m not sure if it works in all browsers.  You’ll have to experiment.