Friday's Flash: Christmas in July

I have decided to use Fridays for everyone to post something about their upcoming novel,story, WIP, or really, whatever they want to post, but it has to be 30 words or less. I'm calling it Friday's Flash.

Today, someone mentioned Christmas in July. So I decided to post a poem I wrote a couple of years ago. It's hardly 30 words or less, but I'm excusing myself from that rule for today! It's a parody of sorts on the age-old poem, The Night Before Christmas. I hope you enjoy it.

Twas The Night Before Christmas

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house
not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The children had all been out on the loose,
Now the house looked like it had been struck by a moose.

Kids had been settled all snug in their beds,
while visions of Christmas mayhem danced in their heads.
My husband had settled down for a long night’s nap
But this, I was sure, was just the first lap.

So I in my pjs and with my hair down to here
Said, “Aha! The children are abed, no one is near.
Now is the time to write a few more words.
Yet I knew as I spoke, the thought was absurd.

The computer was on, the house was still.
I pounded the keys, so determined …until
There arose on the lawn such a clatter
That I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter.

I flung open the door, and light showed outside
A lawn full of snow with nowhere to hide.
My wandering eyes followed footsteps to the roof
As four kids struggled to find a reindeer on the hoof.

I screamed and I yelled, I called them by name.
Down David, Down Lisa, down  Susan and Dane!
Onto the ladder, carefully onto the ground,
While you’re awake, Santa won’t be around.

Again into bed, where tears did abound,
“If we’re good now, will Santa come down?”
I could threaten or cajole, but the looks on their faces
Melted my heart and put them in my good graces.

I sank into my chair, the computer was still on.
I knew that now I could write until dawn.
But my brain was tired and slowly it closed
So my body could rest and then I dozed.

Sleigh bells were ringing, now where were they from?
I thought I was awake, so when had I become
An over-large elf dressed all in green?
I can’t be awake, this must be a bad dream!

Down the chimney he came, this little old man
With a fat round belly and clearly a plan.
For he spoke not a word but he winked at me,
As he placed all the presents under the tree.

He filled all the stockings, then gave me a smile
And nodded his head like elves were in style!
He grabbed all the cookies, made last night,
And looked quickly around, but no kid was in sight.

He adjusted his pack and pulled on his cap,
But he looked to me like he needed a nap.
The next thing I knew, he was gone in a flash.
All he had left was a sprinkling of ash.

I looked at my clothes but saw no elf,
“Of course it was a dream,” I said to myself.
But then I saw all the gifts under the tree,
Who had put them there? Certainly not me.

The cookies were all gone, the stockings were filled,
Toys everywhere, the children would be thrilled.
Was  this just a dream out of my writer’s mind,
Or could this Santa be real, jolly and kind?

T’was the night before Christmas and all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even my spouse.
I hurried upstairs to get into bed
A few hours sleep would be good for my head.

But then I heard the pattering on the roof
And  knew in my heart it was too heavy to be a hoof.
Out of bed I jumped, to the window I flew,
The kids, of course, I needed to pursue.

Three kids on the ground, one on the roof.
“Santa’s come!” he exclaimed, “here’s the proof!”
One tiny sleigh bell he held up in delight,
It shimmered and shined in bright moonlight.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house
The children were threatened , now quiet as a mouse.
Thank heavens that Christmas comes just once a year
It makes monsters of children who usually are dear.

Twas the dawn of Christmas and all through the house
The children were up and so was my spouse.
“Cool!” “Sweet!” “Oh boy!” sounds came from below,
The day had begun,  the morning was aglow.

The looks on their faces as I entered the room
Made it all worth while, and dispelled my gloom.
Their laughter and cries, the sparkle in their eyes
Made the night before Christmas a blessing in disguise.

Until next time,
That's a wrap.

Monday Musings

Do you ever get to a point in blogging where you think there is absolutely nothing for you to write about that will interest someone else? That's where I am now. Actually, I've been there for a while, as most of you know. With my son's diagnosis last August of FrontalTemporal Lobe dementia, and my husband's very serious and complicated surgery as an emergency in May, my creative thought process seems to have disappeared. So I'm trying to think of ways to jump-start that process again.

Some say, when you reach this point ( supposedly, all bloggers do), write about current events. Whoa! that's a decidely negative thought! Who wants to talk about the unrest and close-to-civil-war in Egypt? or the latest forced furloughs (one day a week working without pay) all government employees are having to take, thanks to our huge financial deficit? No thanks, that won't work for me.

Others say, create a specific day-writing, like Kelly Hashway's Monday Mishmash, or Katrina deLallo's Six Sentence Saturday. Hmm...well, I guess there could be...Wednesday's Wannabe, where I could encourage visitors to talk about the most famous author, or any celebrity, they want to grow up to be like. Or how about Friday's Flashers, where everyone can give a Flash of their soon-to-be-published book or their WIP in 25 words or less? Okay, so maybe that one isn't so bad, at least it refers to writing! Umm, of course, new visitors to my blog might mistake the word "Flasher" to mean something else, and then we'd all be embarrassed.

Obviously, if I'm going to do this "day-writing" thingy, I need to give it some more thought. Serious thought.

So today, I'll just talk briefly about a new experience I had...some very nice welcoming comments from the Authors Forum at MuseItUp publishing, where my debut novel, The Freedom Thief, will be coming out in November. I just joined the forum, introduced myself ( and probably talked to long, at that), and my Inbox was almost immediately full of lovely "welcomes" from other authors. It was such a friendly experience! I tried to answer each one independently, and then wondered if that was going overboard. I think there are about 296 authors, so I guess I shouldn't respond to each one, if they all send me welcome notes, right? Hmm. Probably not. But it's fun getting to hear from so many individually.

I guess I should probably stop for today, and get back to thinking. "Friday's Flashers" is still on my mind. I don't think it's such a bad premise, but I definitely need to come up with a new word. "Flashers" just doesn't seem to quite do it, for writers, ya' think?

Until next time,
That's a wrap.

Thoughts on the Fourth of July

Happy 4th of July! I hope everyone has a safe and cool day and evening. So far, on the Central Coast of California, it is a quiet day, relatively cool at 7:30 in the morning, but we all know the heat is coming.

Fireworks are not allowed in the small town where I live on the coast, and for us, that's a good thing. Our Corgi is, like so many dogs, deathly afraid of the noise, and no amount of "tranquilizers" help him. Usually, we just take off in the car and drive up the coast until the noise from surrounding towns has died down, but we're hoping we don't have to do that this year. Because of our unusual heat wave that has been so prolonged, most of the 4th's celebrations have been cancelled due to the supreme fire hazard.

Nevertheless, many townfolks are upset and resentful that fireworks are not going to be allowed. It got me to wondering, what have fireworks to do with celebrating our day of Independence?

First, did you know that the original and correct day of Independence was actually July 2nd? July 2nd, 1776, was the day Congress voted for the Independence of the United States of America. However, when the document was sent to the printer on July 4th, he printed that date as the date of Independence, and consequently, July 4th has been celebrated ever since. ( The Document of Independence was not signed, sealed, and delivered until November, 1776.)

The following year, 1777, Congress authorized the use of fireworks to celebrate the 4th. However, for most of the remaining 18th Century, and even into the early years of the 19th Century, artillery salutes ran all day long. They fired off the explosives left over from past wars and skirmishes, until finally all the ammunition was gone, and the cannons began to age and fall apart, and fail to fire.

The Fourth of July was not declared a Federal holiday until 1941.

I wonder if the kids of today, or even the last 60 or 70 years, really know and understand what July 4th really stands for? Do they know about the war of Independence, about the sacrifices made by the people of the United States in those years in order for America to be free from dominance by another country? Do they even care, in today's world? Or is the 4th of July just another day to kick off a hot summer, with family fun, picnics, barbeques, hot dogs and ice cream? Oh yes, and sparklers, cherry bombs, fire crackers, and all the other fireworks that light up the sky with their beautiful arrays.

Today, our freedom and independence is taken for granted. We marvel at the stories of other countries, like Egypt in recent days, who fight for their independence and ability to have freedom of thought and action from their previous dictators. We oh and ah and sigh sadly at the words we read and the pictures we see of their wars, their dead and wounded, the sacrifices made by the families left behind, but does it really mean anything to US? We have become such a nation of greed, of complacency, of wanting what we want when we want it and we want it now, that I truly wonder if we actually respect those nations who are fighting for their freedoms and their independence, or if we merely watch our TV sets until we get bored with images of terror and turn to some insipid comedy that doesn't take any intelligence or thought to understand.

Maybe we should turn back the clock a little, and really give serious thought to what it took to give us this day, this 4th of July, where we could sit back and simply enjoy the freedom and the Independence we have. What do you think?

Until next time,
That's a wrap.

Frustration, Resignation, and Other Thoughts

I admit, I have been extremely frustrated over all this website building...stuff. Too many so-called "free" sites to supposedly help you build a website of your own offer little or nothing for "free," so you end up having to pay for a "premium" service. I didn't want to do this, especially since I am one of those terribly technologically challenged individuals, for whom "easy-to-follow-directions" are just so much Greek. So I've spend the last few weeks agonizing over WordPress, which I have been assured by many people is very easy to implement. I suppose it is, if you have a degree in Techological Engineering from Harvard. Or maybe I'm just really, really dumb in this area.

Finally, I just sighed and resigned myself to continuing, at least for a while, with Blogger. I went, once again, to the Pages part, and tried to add some pages to my menu. Voila! It actually worked this time. The other three or four times I tried, it refused to cooperate. Probably something on my end, rather than Blogger's, however. Of course, this is my first post on my "new" blog, Painted Words and Other Oddities, so I'm still not sure this is going to work the way I want it to. So now, I'm going to stop and see what happens.

The Freedom Thief: The First Edits

When I received my manuscript for The Freedom Thief back for edits, my content editor said, "This is the first round of edits." Oh wow! What does 'first round' mean? Are there a lot of corrections, a lot of mistakes on my part? I am pretty good with SPAG, so I couldn't imagine there were mistakes in that area. So what else was wrong?

I needn't have worried. My SPAG was fine. The edits were minor, except for the word "towards." For some reason, I kept leaving the 's' off at the end of the word, and I used it a lot. That was piddly but tedious stuff to add the 's' every single time I used that word. Bet I won't ever leave it off again.

I don't like dialogue tags, use only a few, and seldom anything other than 'he said,' or 'she said.' Hmmm. My editor doesn't like dialogue tags. Any of them. Almost every one of the 'he/she said' she deleted. Sometimes she changed a word or two, but mostly she just deleted them, or even put them at the end of a sentence instead of at the beginning, as I had them. In some places, I thought it was a little odd that she thought a 'he/she said' should be deleted, but overall, after giving it a final read-through, she had improved the smoothness of the read. Now to go over my next novel, and delete or replace the 'he/she saids' that I probably have too many of, no matter how few I originally thought I had. Umm, if you follow that...

There were a couple of times in Thief where she had inserted a phrase I just couldn't go along with. It didn't sound like me, or my writing. More than that, it just didn't sound like it went along with a 14 year old boy's way of thinking or talking in pre-Civil War times. Those were the places I really disagreed with my editor on. Those were the places where I changed what I had originally written, but didn't add what she had written. After each change, I explained my thinking and why I hadn't done what she wanted. I can only hope we are still on the same page! I have a good working relationship with my content editor, and am going to work hard at keeping it that way. I also have a line editor, but I don't know who she is or when I will get her edits.

All in all, it was a good edit, nothing major, and nothing to do with plot, characterization, setting, or dialogue...except for the tags.

When you work with an editor, how many times do you disagree with her/him? How far are you allowed to go in disagreeing, or do you allow yourself to disagree at all? It would be interesting to see how other writers work with an editor, and what differences there are in philosophy in working with them.

As for me, I'm now wondering what my "second round of edits" will be like!

Until next time,
That's a wrap.

Book Review, Part Two: Hate List by Jennifer Brown

I have a little extra time this morning before I go see my DH, so thought I go ahead and post the second half of the book review.

Hate List is more than the story of a school shooting. It is the story of a journey: the journey Valerie takes from being unpopular, unloved, and finally, hated and blamed, to becoming a young woman who learns how to deal with the situations life is handing her. Along the way, she learns to accept reality, to confront her feelings of guilt and fear, and to adjust to the loss of her boyfriend and to the disintegrating marriage of her parents.

The story is told from Valerie's POV, and augmented with her flashbacks and with newspaper reports that are skillfully integrated throughout the book. As for that horrific morning in the school cafeteria, we've never really told exactly what took place; mostly it's left to our imagination. It's understated, and in bits and pieces so there is a growing sense of something awful coming, but you're not sure exactly what.

Valerie is not exactly the most heroic person, nor is she someone you can easily relate to and sympathize with. No, she didn't shoot anyone. Yes, she tried to stop Nick, and in doing so, saved the life of another girl and got shot herself. But you begin to get a little tired of her commiserating with herself. She did write up the Hate List; she did exchange numerous emails with Nick about how she hated these people, and how she could understand why HE hated the people on the list.  And, everyone he killed or wounded was on her list. But her lack of understanding about the feelings of the parents of those he killed and wounded make you want to take her out of the pages and shake her good! You want her to try to make amends, to try to accept the reality, and finality, of what happened, and to quit feeling sorry for herself. It takes awhile.

Nick is something else altogether. We don't learn enough about him to be satisfied that he could so abruptly turn from an intelligent, loving ( at least, to Valerie) young man into a killer. He isn't created as a monster. He isn't painted as a kid who is damaged in some respect, although he comes from a disfunctional family. Nor do we know the kind or extent of the influence he received from Jeremy, although we do know he was introduced to drugs. But it's never made clear that drugs played an important part in the shooting. So what happened to Nick?

Another thing that annoyed me was that it's never clearly explained why Nick and Valerie were bullied, nor the extent of it, other than some name-calling by some of the girls who disliked both of them. But why? And why was it so intense that they felt the need to write out a Hate List?

Jeremy played an important part in the downfall of Nick...we think...but his role was never explored, his story never told. In fact, from about the middle of the book on, he wasn't even mentioned again. That left yet another hole in the story: who was Jeremy, and how and why did he become the catalyst to set Nick off? Or...was he?

I think the stories of these two young men could have been, and should have been told. Perhaps then we would have a much clearer idea of why Nick did what he did, why he felt so driven to shoot these kids, and what Jeremy's true role was in all of this. Yet none of this was ever fully explained.

All in all, it was a good book. It was told with empathy, with poignancy, and some of the scenes were heartbreakingly accurate, particularly in light of the recent Sandy Hook killings. I felt sympathy for Valerie, but I was a little disappointed in her, too. She seems too often to want to play the victim, without giving much thought or consideration to the real victims, and to how their families are trying to get on with their lives. She doesn't seem to understand, or even want to understand, that they hold her somewhat responsible because their children were on her Hate List, and they died.

It becomes a little puzzling when at last she is accepted once again by her old friends...the other outcasts...and by the new ones, who just happen to be the girls and boys she once hated, and even put some of them on the Hate List. This aspect of the book was also not thoroughly explored. It just seemed to "happen," because these kids were 'followers' of the girl whose life Valerie inadvertantly saved. This girl feels she owes her life to Val, therefore she is going to be her friend whether Val wants her to be or not, and subsequently, her friends are going to be Val's friends. Yet, she never apologizes to them, they never discuss why they were on her Hate List, and they never even mention what was going on between all of them and her before the shooting. Another place that leaves you wondering.

Still, it is a good book, and it is still the kind that makes you snarl when you have to put it down. You want answers you don't get, but that doesn't make it any less a fascinating read.

Until next time,
That's a wrap.

Book Review, Part One: Hate List, by Jennifer Brown

I just finished reading a YA book,  Hate List, by Jennifer Brown. It's one of those books that you can't put down without snarling at whoever or whatever interrupted your reading.

Five months ago, sixteen year old Valerie Leftman's boyfriend, Nick, walks into the high school cafeteria and opens fire on the students. When she tries to stop him, he shoots her in the thigh and then turns the gun on himself. In flinging herself at him, she unknowingly saves the life of one of the girls who has been bullying her throughout high school. The final toll of the shooting: six students dead, one teacher dead, and several students wounded.

Valerie and Nick have several things in common: both come from dysfunctional families, both are bullied, both feel unloved and unwanted by their parents, and totally unaccepted by the kids in school. It is almost predestined that they will end up in a commited relationship. 

One day, in a joking way, Valerie suggests they write up a "Hate List", putting on it every kid who has ever laughed at them or made fun of them, as well as teachers who seem to dislike them as much as  the other students. When Nick takes up with an older boy, his whole personality begins to change, and the end result is that all those attacked that day are on the Hate List.

Valerie is painted with the same brush as Nick. The parents of the dead kids, in fact, most of the adults in town, believe she is as much responsible for thetragedy as Nick. This goes from bad to worse when even the police, her few friends and their families, and both her parents, believe the same thing...especially after they find both the Hate List, and emails back and forth from Valerie and Nick attesting to how much they hate these people.

Now Valerie must deal with overcoming her feelings of guilt, anger, hurt, sadness, and confusion, and amid this, try to decide whether or not she should go back to school in the fall and try to graduate with her class, or move away and attempt to start over. In the midst of her parents' constant fighting, of finding out her father is having an affair,  of trying to reconcile her image of Nick with what is, seemingly, the "real" Nick, and of constant police harrassment, she decides to stay in school.

She gets no comfort or support from either parent, and in fact, learns that her father does believe she had a part in the shooting and will never forgive her. However, she finds what she needs to go on with life from  her psychologist, Dr. Heiler. Through her much needed therapy sessions, she learns to accept reality as it is. She begins to analyze what her role in the shooting really is, and she develops the courage, determination, and self-confidence to face both her friends, and those she put on the Hate List.

This is already a long post, so I'm going to save my comments about this book for next week.

Until next time,
That's a wrap.