This is like a time capsule of Christian fiction around the turn of the millennium. Well worth the read for anyone writing Christian fiction.
Some time ago (as in a couple of months), having finished reading a book and wanting to find one to read that I wouldn’t keep, thus reducing my inventory, I found on the bookshelf tucked in my close Behind The Stories: Christian Novelists Reveal the Heart in the Art of their Writing. I don’t know where I got this, but suspect I picked it up at a thrift store. Nor do I know how long I’ve had it, but I suspect ten years. The copyright date is 2002. I have a fair number of books for writers on writing and publishing, and I need to work through them, read the ones I haven’t read and decide if any of the ones I have read I shouldn’t keep.
That makes it almost a time capsule type of piece. The author is Diane Eble, though in some ways she is more of an editor than an author. The book covers three to four page stories from 40 Christian novelists. This is as things existed in 2002, or a year before that based on publication schedules. So it misses any that came to prominence before that. Many of the names are familiar: Jerry B. Jenkins, Karen Kingsbury, Janette Oke, Bodie Thoene, Terri Blackstock, Francine Rivers, Beverly Lewis. Others are not as famous, but I actually met some of them at writers conferences: Robin Jones Gunn, Alton Gansky, Angela Elwell Hunt, Deborah Raney. They cover the full spectrum of types of Christian fiction.
It was encouraging to read their stories. Almost every one of them went through some kind of trial. Maybe it was a difficult childhood. Maybe it was a struggle to find their voice. Maybe it was the busyness of life. Each persevered and found authorial success. That is an encouragement for me.
I rate the book 4-stars. It loses a star for something I can’t quite put my finger on. And, it is not a keeper. Next time I leave The Dungeon, I will go out to the garage, and take it to join the other books for sale. Maybe someone else can find meaning in these brief stories.
Six ads running for this, getting impressions, clicks, and a few sales. Other promotion is bearing fruit.
This morning I went outside to work shortly after I got up at 6:45 a.m. The temperature was 60°, and it felt good. I planned to work a half hour, mainly cleaning up a few things and pulling a few weeds from the backyard. When I did what I wanted and went inside, I was surprised to find I’d worked more than 45 minutes. I was way past scheduled time for my blog post, but I wasn’t worried about it since I had a post partially started—two posts actually—and thus could post it quickly once I got to it.
Alas, I finally came to my dashboard here, found there was only one post, and realized it is no where ready to be posted. Bad memory I have.
So here I am with nothing prepared to say. I could talk about any number of things off the cuff: what I’m writing, what I’m reading, how book sales are, what I’m doing for book sales promotion, life in general. I guess I could tackle all of those.
I’m still working on little changes to the church centennial book. I got some new information yesterday that will require a minor change. I also have decided to double-check a couple of places in the book. One I’m fairly sure will require a change, the other one maybe or maybe not. Still, I come closer to done on this every day. Also, my short story inches along. Every couple of days I open the file, re-read it to remember where I was, and add a few hundred words. I need an uninterrupted , undistracted couple of hours to finish it.
For reading, my time is taken up with Way Truth Life, the book for our Life Group lessons. I’m also reading a book on the Genesis flood. Sorry, I don’t remember the exact title, except that it might be The Genesis Flood. It is a scholarly work from the late 50s-early 60s. I’m not enjoying it a whole lot, but will stay with it a while longer. As to recently finished books, I have four sitting here on my work table waiting for me to write my book reviews.
Book sales are good in September. So far I have 14 sales outright, and I think two accesses from Kindle Unlimited with both people finishing the book. This is my first time to have KU reads (not many of my books are in KU), and I need to figure how to account for them in my stats. I suppose as 2 sales, bringing the total to 16. That’s a good start to the month.
Sometime soon I’ll make a presentation to the local Civil War Roundtable. That will be my first author event since June 2019.
I have been a little more active in book promotion the last week. I still have my Amazon ads running for three books, and they seem to be generating sales. I contacted two influencers in our denomination, both men I’ve interacted with in the past, about giving a shout out to Acts Of Faith. I heard back from one on Friday and he is going to put a promo in his next newsletter. Another promotional item concerns my Civil War book, Documenting America: The Civil War Edition. Back in July I gave a copy of it to the president of the local Civil War Roundtable. I heard back from him yesterday. He liked the book and wants me to make a presentation to the Roundtable. I don’t yet know when that will be, but should know today or tomorrow. So book promotion is in progress and, at least a little, seems to be working.
Life in general is good. I’m still having trouble losing weight, but in general my weight is dropping very slowly. My blood sugars have been under control, though just a little higher than I’d like. This morning’s was good. My right knee has been hurting more of late. Perhaps replacement surgery will have to be moved up. Although, the last three or four days I’ve done a few different things to try and ease the pain and it seems to be working. Four nights of good sleep in a row. Yardwork is in much better shape than in past years. Household projects are slowly being done. My devotional life remains consistent, with room for improvement.
Life goes on. I’ll have a better post on Friday, and will start getting some of these book reviews done.
I must be losing my mind, for I forgot that, at the change of the month, I was supposed to do my usual progress and goals post. No, not losing my mind, but totally absorbed in a research project. I finished that Friday (I’ll discuss it in the progress section below) and it was like blinders came off. I realized I needed to do this post. But, having already made a post on Friday Sept 3, I’m writing this on Friday but will schedule it to post on Monday Sept 6.
First, here are the goals I posted to begin August and what progress I made against them.
Continue to tweak the church anniversary book. I can think of only two more interviews to do. I may add in photos this month. Well, I more or less did this. I tweaked the book. I did all the interviews I intend to do. I even reached out on the internet to find relatives of our church’s charter members, with some success. I added a few photos, but for the most part let the research of charter members overwhelm the tweaking/finishing the book, so it will be a September goal.
Finish a short story in the Sharon Williams Fonseca series, tentatively titled “Foxtrot Alpha Tango”. I wrote four pages in July to share with the Scribblers & Scribes critique group when we met that month. With just under 2,000 words written, I believe it’s 2/3 done. I guess I did some work on this, since it sits at 3600 words, but it’s not done. Add it to September goals.
Work on the middle grade novel I started in July. The Forest Throne is technically to be co-authored by my oldest grandson, though I’ll do most of the writing and he will edit it, helping me to understand what 10-13 year old boys like. I wrote the first chapter of this in July and sent it to him for comments, receiving his approbation of the sample. I’d like to add another 5,000 words to it this month to go with the 1350 written so far. I’ve brainstormed out most of the plot but not specific scenes. No writing on this at all. I brainstormed the plot some more (which is work and progress) and figured out how to solve another plot problem that I was uncertain of. Hoping to get back to this in September.
Blog twice a week, as always. Did this, as always.
Do some work on my website. I’m not sure what, but I have to overcome this technophobia and improve it. Nope, put this off again. I still need to do this. Oh, if I were only a techie!
Attend meetings of my three writing groups, assuming they don’t get cancelled because of local corona virus outbreaks. Two of the groups cancelled, with the pandemic figuring in each. The Scribblers & Scribes of Bella Vista met, and I attended.
If the cover artist gets the covers re-done, re-publish the three older church history novels, updating them for new copyright info and list of works, as well as link them in a series. The cover artist wasn’t able to do this, so my goal remains not done.
So, what are my goals for September 2021? Just about everything from last month, I reckon.
Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
Wrap up my research project on our church’s charter member. I’ve come to a stopping point of sorts. What remains is to get my research notes into a useful format so that a future researcher, maybe at our 150th anniversary in 2071, will find the notes legible and useful and the research accurate.
Finish “Foxtrot Alpha Tango”, the short story I’ve been working on for two or three months.
Link the books in my Church History Novels series on Amazon. This is an easy process. I’ve been holding off until the new covers were done, but it’s time to just do it.
I still have a few more tweaks to do on the church centennial book. I’m going to work on it after I finish this post and may finish them today (Friday afternoon).
Attend my writers’ groups. At the moment all three are scheduled.
Document one Bible study idea I had and put it in the queue.
That’s enough. I wonder if I can achieve much of this in September. See you in early October. October 1 is a Friday, so possibly I’ll post progress and goals on the 1st.
This is how I would like to see citations done. Kudos to the author and publisher. Pay no attention to the curving text. That’s a photographer’s error (meaning mine).
A couple of days ago, a Facebook friend I seldom interact with posted a C.S. Lewis quote. I’ve seen this quote before. It seems to be politically conservative, would seem to support certain memes you see on social media. The quote was not attributed except to say it was by C.S. Lewis. Having seen it so posted at least three times, I decided to not let it go this time. I asked the poster what the source was, where Lewis wrote this. She came back with a fuller quote and said it was from “God In The Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (1948).
Fine, I thought, I have a copy of God In The Dock. I’ll just go there and see if I can find the place. Alas, as I looked through it, I re-discovered (having seen some time ago but forgotten) that GITD is collection of essays. As I looked further, I discovered that not only was GITD the title of a book, it was also the title of an essay. “God In The Dock” was an essay from 1948. God In The Dock was a book, a collection of Lewis’s essays published posthumously in 1970. Which did she mean? Since she said 1948 in the source, I figured it was the essay. So I went to it in the book and…the quote wasn’t in the essay.
A little bit of searching—something I’m getting good at these days—revealed “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”, an essay that appeared first in an Australian periodical in 1949 and republished in an Australian legal journal in 1953. So her source as presented was technically incorrect.
All of which got me to thinking about sources, which in turn got me to thinking about footnotes and citations. I do a lot of reading and research in the older writers, those who are long out of copyright. You can find lots of their works on line at no cost, though not the more modern reprints. a book I’m reading right now has a lot of quotes and citations in footnotes. In quotes from the writings of John Wesley, they refer to a specific set of collected works. Here’s an example.
4. John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, vol. 12 (Kansas City, MO: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1978)
If I wanted to find this particular quote, perhaps to read it in context and see if the author had used Wesley’s words correctly, I would have to go somewhere and get that specific set of his collected works and find the specific volume, the specific page—oops, he didn’t give the page. Shame on the author and the publisher. Let’s try a different citation in a footnote.
16. Wesley, Works, vol VI, 512
A footnote immediately prior to this one identifies which of Wesley’s collected works is meant. That’s a little more helpful, but, again, only if I have that specific volume. But, all of Wesley’s works are out of copyright. They are all available in a great on-line library called the Internet, both pictures of them from the 18th and 19th centuries and electronic versions newer than that. Why not just say where it’s found? Why not say, for example:
John Wesley, “Sermon No. 17”
or whatever of Wesley’s writing you need. How easy it would be to find the original document and do the research you want to do.
So I am making the proposal that we start modernizing citations and footnotes to recognize how data is accessed these days.
Back to the C.S, Lewis quote in question. Here are two ways to do that citation, first the old way, then my proposed new way.
C.S. Lewis, The Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis, 2003 (New York, NY, Inspirational Press), 499
C.S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”, 1949, paragraph 10
I ask you, which would be easier to find? You can go to whatever Lewis collection you have, find the essay, thumb to the paragraph, and read the quote. You can read the whole essay to get the context, and make up your mind if those posting the quote are using Lewis correctly. Or, if you don’t have it, you know what to look for in a library or a book store. Want a little more information? You could expand it as follows.
C.S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”, paragraph 10. Anthologized in God In The Dock,
Since God In The Dock, the book, has been published several times in several formats, you don’t even need to give the year of publication of who the publisher is. The name of the book is sufficient for any reader or researcher of reasonable intelligence to find the work, verify the quote, and go on with whatever project had caused him to look the information up.
I followed this system, at least somewhat, in my two family history/genealogy books. I referenced works without getting into specific printed matter, publishers, and dates of publication. I like the way it turned out.
And, while I’m at it about citations/footnotes, how about we once and for all bury Latin references and abbreviations? Sure, I can look up what op cit and ibid mean and learn them. But with the cost of printing as cheap as it is nowadays, why not just repeat the work, perhaps in a slightly shorter form, and change the page number? Give complete references in a Bibliography at the end. This I also did in my two genealogy books.
Well, that’s my proposal. I don’t expect it to catch on in my lifetime, but I made it and put it out there for public scrutiny. I’d like to hear what everyone things of it.
Oh, to be fair, the book I’m reading for church does include some footnotes as I suggest. For example:
12. Wesley, “Sermon 85, On Working Out Our Own Salvation,” III.2
I’m having a restful Sunday. Took a nap or two this afternoon. It’s evening now, and I may try to write a little this evening. Or maybe I’ll continue to work on old e-mails, deciding what to keep, what to discard, what to archive. For some reason I find that a restful occupation. Right now I’m going through e-mails from 2011.
But this blog post is about a small writing success story that happened late last week. I think it was on Friday, but it might have been Thursday. This involves poetry. Now, years ago I wrote poetry, but I transferred away from that and concentrated on prose for a long time, with many works under my belt. From time to time over the last ten years I would try my hand at poetry, but none came to me, either by inspiration or perspiration. I have ideas for poetry books, but no means to make them happen.
So Friday evening, I had a minor breakthrough, a two word breakthrough. I wish I could explain how this happened, what inspired me to bring this poem to mind and to figure out those two word needed to replace two unproductive words. I’ve been reading in three books: Behind The Stories, a 2002 book about a couple of dozen Christian novelists; The Joyful Christian, a library book that is a compilation of a number of Lewis’s writings; and, on my phone, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol 3. I think my catalyst may have been in the letters book. Lewis probably wrote something to someone about some poetry that person had sent him. As a result, the problem poem came to mind. It’s a sonnet I wrote in 2002, my 18th sonnet. But as I said, I was never happy with the closing line. I had emended it several times, maybe improving it, but never feeling that it gave the required punch the sonnet needed.
Well, the words came to me while I was reading. I didn’t have my computer open, so I wrote the revised line on a sheet of paper by my reading chair, and said it over and over to myself. I went to bed saying it, mulling it over and over. It seemed good. I’m going to paste in the poem here. I would type it, but I don’t know html and poetry lines don’t come in right on this platform.
A snip from my Word file. Alas, I don’t like the way poems format on this platform. If the poem isn’t readable, click to enlarge.
I’m not going to explain it. Native Rhode Islanders will understand, both the place references and the object references.
I’m not saying poetry is back for me. My mind is still mainly on prose: stories, novels, articles, letters. But I’m glad for a small poetic break-though. I leave it to poetry critics to explicate that last line and judge its worthiness. Now, back to my prose.
Some of the area already cut. I started at our mailbox (just out of the photo to the left) and am working my way uphill along the street and downhill toward the woods.
It’s hot out. Yesterday’s high was 97°. That’s actually around average for this time of year in Northwest Arkansas. I think our summer, overall, has been slightly cooler than normal—not by much, just a few degrees. Certainly within a standard deviation of normal.
In these temperatures, if I have yardwork to do, I go out immediately upon getting up and do it. This year I have yardwork every day. That’s anywhere from 6:30 to 7:00 a.m., depending on when I wake up and how fast I’m moving. Today it was 06:45, and I was out the door in just five minutes. I worked until 07:45, so just under and hour.
Some of the isolated blackberries. Still some weeds to cut away if I want to, but I’ll probably leave them. So long as I know where the blackberries are that’s good enough.
The front yard (a rock yard, not grass), is picked free of weeds; nothing to do there. Our unplanted flower bed needs to be picked of weeds again, but the lack of rain has resulted them being impossible to pull out; nothing to do there. The backyard (also a rock yard) needs much weed pulling. I think I’ve weeded twice this year. But I never blew the leaves off of it last year, which has prevented many weeds from growing. Still, that was a possibility.
However, I also had work to do on our wood lot. This is the lot south of our house. It’s our lot. Over a year ago, the power company did a lot of cutting on their easement on this lot, clearing growth away from their lines. The shredded the smaller saplings and hauled off the bigger stuff. This left about 30 feet of a combination of grass and wood-covered bare earth. I raked down a bunch of the shreddings and put them on a brush pile on the lot. Naturally, plants have come up in that area. The favorable rains and temperatures have resulted in a lot of plants growing in this area, some as tall as 6 feet.
I’ll start working in this direction either tomorrow or, more likely, next week.
Most of those plants are weeds and grass. Some are wildflowers. A few are blackberry plants. Everyone knows I want more blackberries, and to have them growing on my own lot instead of across the street in the right-of-way would be great. So, to remove the unsightliness of the tall weeds and to isolate the emergent blackberry plants, I’ve been manually cutting weeds on this lot using hedge sheers. That’s my only option since my weed eater quit and I haven’t replaced it yet.
It’s not really hard work. I work from the downhill side so that I have to bend less. Still, it includes a lot of bending. Once I find a blackberry plant the bending increases, as I go slowly, cutting weeds and grass around it to isolate it. I have around six or seven viable blackberry plants isolated so far. I’m not sure if I’ll find any others, but I still have a long way to go, so I may.
The hickory is down. The clean-up remains. That will be tomorrow, along with raking down some of the cuttings of the weeds.
Another thing I’ve been doing in my morning outdoor work is cutting down a 4-inch diameter hickory sapling. This is growing right against an oak, and the two of them don’t need to be so close together. Until the power company did its clearing, I never noticed this tree encroaching on the oak’s territory. Again, I’m using manual tools: my ancient bow saw and my little folding pruning saw. Sawing is hard work, especially when bending or kneeling. No, 4 inches isn’t a lot to cut through. Hickory is a hard wood, however, so the combination of conditions meant I decided to do this over a few days—four days to be precise. Today, down it came after the last little bit of sawing. Now I get to do the clean-up.
If I had to guess, I’d say I have about five more mornings of work on the woodlot, a morning of work on the flower bed (once it rains), and at least five mornings of weed pulling in the backyard. By then a few weeds will have come up in the front yard and I’ll pull them.
All of this should be of no real interest to my regular readers. So in my retirement I get up early in the summer months and do yardwork. Big deal, right? It’s of interest to me, however. I figure I have another month of doing this, having a little less daylight each day.
This work, while it helps keep me limber and “young”—young being a relative term—it does cut into my writing time. My short story is sitting there, waiting for me to add the final conflict and last 2,000 words. The Forest Throne is sitting there, waiting for me to get beyond the first chapter and make a book out of it. Documenting America: Run-Up to Revolution is sitting there, waiting for me to move from completed research to writing. And sorely needed updates to this website are begging me to get to them.
This too shall pass, and soon I’ll be back to starting my day off with writing, the yardwork either being completed or the days cool enough to do the yardwork later in the day. I’ll be glad for that time to come.
No new work on this, except to link the three main volumes in a series. I sold 4 copies of The Civil War Edition in the last ten days. More about that in another post.
Well, July came and went without me establishing any writing goals. Yes, you astute observers will have noticed that I didn’t post goals at the beginning of July nor give a recap of how I did with my June goals. When July started we were busy heading to Chicago for a family event. I prepared a few posts ahead of time and scheduled them to post while we were away. Writing progress and new goals wasn’t something I could write early.
But here are my June goals and how I did on them over a two month period. You can get through them then see my August goals after that.
Finish the church anniversary book. I think I’m doing well on this, and should be able to add the final portions and declare it done by the end of the month. …I have some more interviews to conduct, which may hold it up, and some contributions by some others. I won’t say that I’ll have those contributions, but without these interviews the book won’t be done. The book is DONE! I’m at the point where I am so far ahead of schedule with it that, if I had to go to press today I would be satisfied with it. However, since I still have time available, I will continue to tweak it. Maybe do a few more interviews, work on some more photos, etc. It will still be an August goal, and probably every month going forward until it goes to print.
Blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. With this post I’m well on my way toward achieving that. I achieved this goal.
Explore a little more the linking of a series together on Amazon. I have four series among my Amazon publications, none currently linked. This was on my list of things to do last month but didn’t get done. Not only did I explore this, but I managed to get two series created, linking existing publications with their related publications. That was the Danny Tompkins short stories and the Sharon Williams Fonseca short stories. No, wait, it was three series. I also linked my Documenting American non-fiction books into a series.
Work on this website, creating a new landing page and updating some content. I did not do this, technophobia taking over I suppose. I don’t think this is a difficult thing to do, but I put it off and allowed other things to fill the time.
Work with the cover designer concerning new covers for the Church History Novels series. This is somewhat out of my control, based on her schedule. I haven’t checked with her in a couple of weeks. I stayed in touch with the cover creator. She has had a very busy summer, interning somewhere. She contacted me last week to say she is just about ready to get back to them and wanted the print book dimensions. So this is good news, and a goal sort of met.
Watch some Amazon videos on how to better do Amazon ads. They keep sending me e-mails about available webinars, several of which look beneficial. I’d like to watch at least one a week. Goal partially met. I watched two Amazon advertising webinars. They weren’t very helpful. I also re-took the 5-day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge in July, the fourth time I’ve gone through it. I created six ads for Acts Of Faith, bringing me up to 16 ads running. Are they profitable? I’ll cover that in a future post.
Continue work on the next volume of Documenting America. I’m still mainly in the reading for research phase, though I also did some of the book planning and created the book file. I want to at least complete the basic reading (40 more pages) and move on to some other sources. I think that is very do-able. I did finish reading the source materials. I also add somethings to the book file and even began the process of editing down the source documents. But, I would have to say I did not complete this goal.
Six ads running. Not a lot if impressions or clicks, and only one sale in July.
So all in all, June and July, while not stellar with accomplishments, did have their moments. Lack of July goals has reflected in that lack of accomplishment.
Now, time to set some goals for August.
Continue to tweak the church anniversary book. I can think of only two more interviews to do. I may add in photos this month. I have a bunch in the file now, but have more I could add. As I do this, I will first format the book for print dimensions. That will let me bring in photos at the right size.
Finish a short story in the Sharon Williams Fonseca series, tentatively titled “Foxtrot Alpha Tango”. I wrote four pages in July to share with the Scribblers & Scribes critique group when we met that month. With just under 2,000 words written, I believe it’s 2/3 done.
Work on the middle grade novel I started in July. The Forest Throne is technically to be co-authored by my oldest grandson, though I’ll do most of the writing and he will edit it, helping me to understand what 10-13 year old boys like. I wrote the first chapter of this in July and sent it to him for comments, receiving his approbation of the sample. I’d like to add another 5,000 words to it this month to go with the 1350 written so far. I’ve brainstormed out most of the plot but not specific scenes.
Blog twice a week, as always.
Do some work on my website. I’m not sure what, but I have to overcome this technophobia and improve it.
Attend meetings of my three writing groups, assuming they don’t get cancelled because of local corona virus outbreaks.
If the cover artist gets the covers re-done, re-publish the three older church history novels, updating them for new copyright info and list of works, as well as link them in a series.
That’s it. See you in September with a progress update.
Good morning, folks. Yes, I’m late with my post today, which will be somewhat of a nothing post. The last several days have been quite busy and didn’t plan a post in advance.
What has kept me busy? One thing is the church anniversary book. This has been a week of sending e-mails, making phone calls, gathering information from previously untapped sources, and adding text to the book. I have only one more interview to do, which I hope to do today. The text is now over 27,000 words, so definitely longer than I expected. I added some photos to the manuscript, but most of the photo work is still to come. Hopefully I’ll have some help with that.
Stock trading has taken up some of the day each day this week. Yesterday and today were especially busy with it. The days were profitable, so I don’t mind the work. It does cut into either writing time or reading/idle time, though.
Other than that, I stay busy with household chores as well as outdoors work. My day starts at ±06:30, when I am outside to do some yardwork. Right now I’m pulling weeds in our horribly overgrown and unplanted flower bed in the front yard. It’s a slow process, even with a shovel to loosen the clods. I would say I have another week of that work. Tomorrow I hope to finish trimming bushes in the front yard and removing the cuttings. That’s a very do-able goal. Hopefully I’ll find a little time for reading as well.
Today will be busy with a grocery run, work on the book, some Amazon listings maintenance, and maybe vacuuming. Or I may leave that for tomorrow.
Well, this has been a blah sort of blog post, but it’s what I have for today.
Is this considered a craft? Oh, no, I did a craft! What’s to become of me? I feel the dendrites in my nervous system getting all worried.
Whether the pandemic is over or not, it’s good to be coming out of it. To go to the grocery store and not wear a mask. To go to church, not wear a mask, and get a cup of coffee (while staying 6 ft. distanced the whole time). To have long-interrupted groups meet for the first time in over a year. Yes, while we realize the spread of the virus isn’t over, and questions remain as to the effectiveness of the vaccine against all mutations of the virus, it’s still good to open up.
One group I belong to has been meeting. The Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers took a few months off, then decided to meet outdoors. I joined this group in March 2020 and attended one meeting before the pandemic hit. These are people who enjoy writing letters, on paper, that get sent through the mail. We have been meeting at a church not too far from me, under a drive-under at the back door, skipping the coldest and hottest months. That was good to keep seeing each other and talk about our letter writing activities.
Another group I’m a member of is the Scribblers & Scribes of Bella Vista. This is a writers critique group. We had our last meeting at a library in early March 2020. We typically had four or five people attend out of six active members. One of those has moved away; two others were new and we don’t know what their current interest is. Three of us were core members who rarely missed a meeting. While we were shut down, we sent pieces for critique by e-mail and received feedback the same way, but it wasn’t quite the same as reading pages in front of other writers and receiving comments then.
We began meeting again last Tuesday, all except me, as I had a one time church meeting to attend. I e-mailed in for critique the beginning of a short story. I’ll have to wait for the July meeting to see them all again. Anyone reading this who is interested in a writing critique group can find us through MeetUp.
The other group I’m a member of is the Village on the Lakes Writers and Poets. This group is a diverse bunch of writers, a fair number being poets. They met once a month at a writers retreat center in Bella Vista, sometimes as many as 20 people. The meetings were about inspiration for and education concerning writing, along with read-around of our work. Then the pandemic hit. The March 2020 meeting was cancelled. By April we were ready for Zoom meetings and did this every month during the pandemic.
In May, the State having lifted many restrictions, we met at a coffee shop, just five of us, and did some planning and dreaming. In June, we met at a pavilion of one of Bella Vista’s parks. One of our two group leaders led us in an exercise. Now, I hate writing exercises. I’m not sure why; I’d just rather write what I want to write and be done with it. But I took part. The leader had brought plucked off leaves, colored pens, pencils, and sketching paper. We were to trace a leaf (or leaves, whatever we wanted), then take fifteen minutes to write about it, after which we read our exercise to the group.
Not trace. I’m not exactly sure what this craft is called. Put the leaf on wax paper, then a sketch sheet above it, and rub the leaf through the paper so that the features come through. Leaf rubbing I suppose it’s called. My leaf didn’t want to cooperate. I chose yellow as my rubbing color. Probably not the best, as yellow doesn’t show well. The thick parts of the leaf didn’t show well, so I took a green pencil and traced them.
As to the writing, I stared at my leaf and couldn’t think of a thing. Then I took note of the dendritic pattern of the leaf and remembered an e-mail discussion with my now-deceased friend, Gary Boden, and a train of though came to mind. Here’s what I wrote and read to the group.
Dendritic Passage
As the trace of the leaf shows more prominently the division of segments—i.e. the spine and the hard, thick parts, so is my writing life and all that has brought me to this point. These start at the periphery and end at the bottom of the stem in what is called a dendritic pattern.
Dendritic? Yes, that’s the term. We used it in hydrology to describe the nature of a drainage basin, coming together from the far-flung edges and arriving at the main channel. But I think the word comes from the natural sciences, for I first heard it from Gary, a zoologist by education who ended up his career in computer systems. Branches coming together but with a fabric between them is what makes a dendritic pattern.
As I look at this leaf from an unknown plant and see its dendritic pattern, I see my writing. Each little spine is a genre that captures some of my time and results in a book or story. The latch-key teen experiences resulted in the Danny Tompkins stories. The many places visited early in adult life are being turned into the Sharon Williams stories and Operation Lotus Sunday. My love of God’s story and His word & church has moved to a branch that is the church history novels and
Hydrology, botany, and neurology (if that’s the right word) all make use of the term dendritic. Who knew?
At that point the leader said “Time.” When I read what I had to the group, someone talked about the dendritic pattern of the nervous system. I later looked up a dictionary definition, and both the pattern of a tree and the nervous system were used in the definition of dendritic. And the word “dendrite” for the first time came to my attention. Guess I should have figured that.
This is not a profound post. I have no conclusion to draw, no inspirational thing to write. Just an observations. Groups are coming back. I took part in a writing exercise. I did a craft-like thing and lived to write about it. All is not right with the world, but it was better that day when we met.
My camera is not with me right now. When it is, I’ll edit in a photo of my leaf rubbing, quite possibly the first and last I’ll ever do. Now, on to my day’s dendritic activities.
Oh, and why did I write “Passage” instead of “Pattern” in the title? I guess I don’t know.
Our only reason for going to Universal was the Harry Potter exhibit. We didn’t see much of this. We went on the Hogwarts ride and, while it made me a little sick, I managed not to puke.
On May 20, about noon, Lynda and I pulled out of our driveway and began a three-day drive to Orlando, Florida. We had much preparation for this trip, though the decision to make it took a long time. We were to meet our daughter and her family there. They had saved up for a long time for a big family vacation, and this was it. They had invited us to go along, and we were providing the accommodation through a timeshare exchange.
We weren’t sure we were going to go, what with covid and then the gas shortage. But things seemed to be falling into place, and a few days before the time, we made the decision to go. We told our son in a phone call but forgot to tell our daughter. The first night in the motel we let her know via Messenger and she replied, “Oh, I didn’t know you had decided to go.” She wasn’t upset; we just had forgotten to tell her. That meant that she wasn’t able to make suggestions about things we could bring with us that they would need but couldn’t take on the plane.
You go to Florida you expect to see an alligator in the wild, right? We had two in our resort ponds.
Fast forward to Orlando. Our daughter, her husband, and their four kids had four days planned for theme parks: three at Disney and one at Universal. Then they added a second day at Universal. We bought tickets to go to Universal the same day they did. The other days we planned to just stay in the resort (which was very nice), doing the usual things we did at home, plus maybe a little walking, a little shopping, a little sight-seeing. In truth, we did less than that. Other than preparation of meals for everyone, or taking everyone out to eat, we just had a restful time. Oh, yeah, I played chauffer to reduce parking costs.
What’s a vacation without a little trauma? In this case, a foot gashed on barnacle-encrusted rocks at a Gulf beach, requiring 4 stitches.
We had great interaction with all the grandkids. I had several good conversations with Ephraim, the oldest. He and I are sort of planning a book together. I think I’ve mentioned it before in these posts. Tentatively titled, The Forest Throne, it will be a time-travel sort of book. I’m brainstorming it now, trying to figure out how to make it unique, not just a run-of-the-mill time travel story. I talked to Ephraim that I was concerned that I’m too far removed from being a 12-year-old and how to make the book suitable for kids that age. He said not to worry. I should write the book and he’ll make adjustments to make it suitable for kids his age.
The lines and noise level at Universal made the experience less that satisfactory for us boring, old folks.
The day we went to Universal I had problems getting Lynda and me into the park, something about our e-tickets wasn’t right. So the rest went on. Later we all met up. Then Lynda and I got in line to do the Hogwarts Castle ride. That was an hour, maybe more. From there we went to the Three Broomsticks for lunch. That was over an hour wait, most of it in the sun. Lynda was tired, I wasn’t tolerating the noise level very well, the heat bothered both of us, and the walk to find a quicker place to eat took us all the way back to near the park entrance. So we left, getting some ice cream near the entrance.
A big city has a variety of foods. One evening of a down day I sprung for Indian food, which made the day worthwhile.
It was a couple of days later that I was talking again with Ephraim. I don’t remember exactly what it was we were talking about, but probably about my not enjoying amusement parts because of lines, noise, and not liking any rides that are high, fast, or quick turning (which is all of them). Ephraim said, “Grandpa, you’re boring.” I replied, “I try to be.”
He didn’t mean it in a bad way, but I’m very happy to be described as boring. Maybe it isn’t quite true that I’m boring. As I look back on my life, I’ve done a fair amount of risk taking and exciting things. But no more. I’m happy to sit at home, write my books, trade my stocks, walk the streets and trails for exercise or on the elliptical. Let others have their amusement parks. I’ll take boring any and every day of the week.
Masks and wands at the ready is how you do theme park at the end of a global pandemic.
We were with the kids from Saturday May 22 through Tuesday June 1. They left for the airport and a couple of hours later we hit the road. We made it home in two days this time, as we were in a mind to travel and, except for one major slowdown on I-40 in western Arkansas, the roads were clear. Now having been home for five days, I can say, “It was good to be with the kids, and it’s good to be back to our boring existence at home.”
What’s going to happen with The Forest Throne? If I don’t make it my next book, Ephraim may be too old by the time I get to it for him to help with it. My brainstorming is causing all the parts to come together. I’ve figured out an angle to make the time travel different. I’ve figured out two stories of this unique time travel. The last piece will be how to finish it all, for it won’t be a series that goes on forever. I’m brainstorming that now.
