Why

Why would you give up so many hours?
The planning, the cooking, the teaching.

Why would you forsake so many others?
For four little boys in your home.

Why do you struggle throughout your whole day?
For rest, for instruction, for their well-being.

Why do your freely enter their world?
To pretend, to dance, to climb the playgrounds.

Why do you  make sure they have what they need?
Pancakes, new pajamas, head butts.

Why do you…
Love.

That’s why you give up your time every day.
You love as you plan, cook, and teach.

That’s why you choose them over all of your friends.
You love as you sacrifice for them.

That’s why your willing to keep fighting on.
You love as you strain for their best.

That’s why you’ll take off your adult attitude.
You love as you pretend, dance, and play.

That’s why you give them the things that they need.
You love them with pancakes.

That’s why…
You’re a great mom.

An incredible mother with her four beneficiaries. Five will be here soon enough.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GINA!

Gina’s Haiku

Colorado was
invaded by Gina
and never the same

Gina’s Cinquain

Gina
Older sister
She shares my love, Roma’s
In Augusta, two slices each
Sausage

Gina’s Limerick

She should settle down for her poor mother’s sake.
Gina longs, but her heart cannot fake.
Only time’s in the way.
Maybe this is the day.
That she’ll finally win Timberlake.

In A Sunburned Country

“From a distance it has a kind of gallant restraint, majestic but not assertive, but up close it is all might. It soars above you, so high that you could pass a ten-story building beneath it, and looks like the heaviest thing on earth. Everything that is in it – the stone blocks in its four towers, the latticework of girders, the metal plates, the 6 million rivets (with heads like halved apples) – is the biggest of its type you have ever seen. This is a bridge built by people who have had an Industrial Revolution, people with mountains of coal and ovens in which you could melt down a battleship. The arch alone weighs thirty thousand tons. This is a great bridge.”

Describing the Harbor Bridge in Sydney, Australia

The Harbor Bridge

In a continuing effort to improve as a writer, I’ve added this exercise to my weekly drills. Writers from all over are prompted and must write a response in 100 words. It demands efficiency, encourages creativity, and I think it’s fun. Let me know what you think, and click on the image above if you’d like to participate.

This week’s prompt was: …‘What was the rabbit late for,’ wondered Alice…

The chef’s a curmudgeon and often disrespectful, but he’s never been anything less than excellent in the kitchen. He’ll never run a five-star restaurant, but in his niche there’s no one better. For the first time in decades Alice was on the other side of the counter. Vera –  cheerful, but hiding something – delivered the drinks, meticulously recorded the order, and returned with the sides. What was the rabbit late for, wondered Alice. Was Mel worried about her taking the job in Tempe? She looked into the kitchen and started to slide out of the booth.

“Don’t get up,” Vera was insistent, “Everything’s fine.”

Alice wasn’t so sure.

“Kangaroos hopped into the expansive foreground and began grazing picturesquely, and the sun plonked onto the horizon, like a stage prop lowered on a wire, and the towering western skies before us spread with color in a hundred layered shades – glowing pinks, deep purples, careless banners of pure crimson – all on a scale you cannot imagine, for there was not a scrap of intrusion in the forty miles of visible desert that lay between us and the far horizon.”

 

The first two are from Randy Alcorn’s book, Deception. The novel features a homicide detective named Ollie Chandler. Ollie’s investigating a murder and every detective on the force is a suspect, including himself. I enjoyed the story, as I did the first two in the trilogy: Deadline and Dominion.

This first scene is where Ollie is interrogating a room full of his fellow detectives, each of them a potential suspect. You might imagine they are none too happy with one of their own questioning their integrity. One of the officers expresses his displeasure, (Ollie’s the narrator)

“Chandler’s a horse’s rear end,” Cimmatoni said, or something to that effect.

We all have guesses as to what Cimmatoni said, and that’s what I appreciate – the reader fills the blank. He avoids the character coming off as corny, while still keeping the book clean.

The second example uses a different technique and it’s equally effective. Chandler’s about to be grilled by the internally unpopular Chief of Police. Here’s how their dialogue begins.

Finally he stepped out and said to Mona, “Any calls?”

“Yeah,” I said under my breath. “Your proctologist called. They found your head in your –”

“Chandler!” Though he couldn’t have heard me, he beckoned, and before I was through the door he asked, “Situation changed with the professor?”

“No. He’s still dead.”

Waster basket? Clouds? Neighbor’s business? I guess we’ll never know. But then again, we all know exactly what Ollie was about to say. However, the pages are still free from the colorful language that graffiti so many books.

There was a third trick Alcorn used, but I was unable to find it as I flipped back through the book.

Another author, Dale Cramer, used some creative means to help give voice to his gruff characters without profaning the reader’s experience. His novel, Bad Ground, was in storage when I wrote this but Mr. Cramer kindly posted one of his methods in a comment.

He broke into a run— actually started running down the road toward the dead chair, the way a sane person might have done if a child had been run over— and as he ran he let fly with a veritable river of caustic poetry, a unified body of professional-grade profanity so focused and intense that Jeremy pictured it snuffing out entire constellations on its way to punching a new hole in the envelope of the universe.

None of us know what was said, but there’s no denying the emotional intensity of the moment. Each of these examples are methods of creatively dealing with emotion without cheaply penning the profane.

I appreciate the effort these guys are making to keep the pages clean.

Keep Discovering Writing.

Taken from “House Rules, by Jodi Picoult. Theo is speaking, a teenager with a brother that has Asperger’s.

It felt cumbersome when I wrote it, and worse when I read it, but I was on a self-imposed, totally irrelevant deadline and posted it. Then, I received the following, sincerely appreciated comment.

Wow. Poor kid. Poor mom. (Not referring to me and my mom. Get your mind out of the gutter.)

English writer’s note. Try “whose brother has”.
A brother is a person. So, like God, should have “who” in descriptive phrase, not that.
A brother who has Asperger’s syndrome. A God who loves us. A human parent who is not perfect….
From a friend who loves reading your posts…..

She was, and is, spot on. I couldn’t articulate the “why,” but I knew something was wrong. Without boasting, had I taken a minute to think I would have made the correction. I must remember to TAKE THE TIME. Now the passage reads like this:

Taken from “House Rules, by Jodi Picoult. Theo is speaking, a teenager whose brother has Asperger’s.

I think that’s much better.

The Grammar Girl said basically the same thing as my friend (I’ve never actually seen them in the same room, hmmmm….)

The quick and dirty answer is that you use who when you are talking about a person and that when you are talking about an object. Stick with that rule and you’ll be safe.

Grammar Girl did find some interesting facts about the “Who vs. That” debate. did you know Chaucer used that when talking about people?

Don’t buy the myth that writing is easy. It’s not. I heard one author say, “Writing is like giving birth to barbed wire.” Others say writing is 5 percent inspiration and 95 percent perspiration. Books that were easy to write are invariably hard to read. Some writers seem so natural, so effortless. Don’t be fooled. It takes a lot of effort to appear effortless. With everything else competing for your reader’s attention, you must work to earn it. Many people say they want to write a book, but what they really want is to have written a book. Big difference! – Randy Alcorn

If there’s anything I’ve become certain of, it’s this idea. There have been days where I knew I was a hopeless, talentless, fraud of a writer. I’ve stared at a monitor and struggled to find words. I know what it is to read my own work, and hate it. But I also believe it’s part of the process of becoming. I don’t believe we will ever “arrive” as writers. I hope to improve with each paragraph, rewrite, and project… especially after reading my last effort. We have to keep our fingers on the keys, our bums in the seat, and write, even when it’s hard.

For a few more tips, you can read Randy’s Insights on Writing Inspirational Fiction.

Keep Discovering Writing.

“You see, no matter what, in spite of everything, God would love his children – with a Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.