Write Now!

I have put my novel aside for longer than I care to admit.

Months.

Two months??? That can't be right. But, sadly, it is. I've been working on magazines, teaching, or tutoring. These all pay the bills, but I've missed...me! I've missed me.

As Stephen Covey or somebody like that kinda smarter than me (can you tell I'm too lazy to go look this up?) said, I've been stuck in the tyranny of the urgent, not the important.

Not that this young adult chick-lit novella is "important!" But it is to me. And it's good to be back.

And, (for my US readers) I voted today!! Go Vote!

Can Men and Women Just Be Friends?

Can men and women just be friends? Since When Harry Met Sally is a ROMANTIC comedy, the answer is, "Of course not!"

Did anybody ever succeed at this?

Ice Cream Guilt and God

". . . once I realized that I could glorify God by enjoying Him, I started really, really working on enjoying Him, expecting that, in the enjoyment, I would glorify Him. It didn’t work. The more I worked at it, the less I enjoyed God. In fact, by trying to enjoy God, I ended up desiring to…well…uh…go to a movie or buy an ice cream cone. Then I started feeling pretty guilty about the movie, the ice cream and all. It became a spiral of guilt. I decided that I was a “worm” and, after all that Jesus had done for me, I ought to enjoy Him more. What kind of Christian was I anyway if I enjoyed a movie and an ice cream cone more than God? . . . Enjoyment is a hard thing to program. I figured that maybe enjoying God was an acquired taste. So I stayed with it which led to more guilt…which led to more effort…which led to more guilt…which led to more effort…which…well, you get the picture." - Steve Brown

We are "justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."

- Romans 3:24

My Article!

My short article, "Talking Points for Teens," is in the November/December 2008 (Issue 168) of Discipleship Journal! (It's a different cover... this is the only picture I could find.)

Yay!

One Tree Hill

One Tree Hill.

It's pretty awful. It gets made fun of by The Soup. It gets made fun of by my husband. And here, Chad Michael Murray was voted one of the worst actors on TV. Sheesh, he's even a tri-named-actor... have you ever heard of one of those who was any good?

But, I confess, I love it. Love, love, love it. It's set to record every Monday on my DVR, but that is completely unnecessary, because I am always ready to watch at nine o'clock no matter what!

I just started it last season, but I found a friend who owns the box set. Every episode! All six seasons! I can't wait!

I should tell you the occupations of these characters, which are all so unlikely in small-town North Carolina.

Lucas is a high school basketball coach and also a major American author. Haley is teacher as well as a recording artist. Brooke is the former (at 24!) owner of her own multi-million dollar fashion empire. Peyton is a music producer and owns a recording studio. And Nathan is a former pro-basketball player.

Do you see? It's all so ridiculous. Which might be why I like it.

Boogers!

Monday: Other's Writer's Articles Day! This is from my friend, Ginger. She's a really great photographer! Check out her blog here and work here:

Boogers...
Apparently, we’ve forgotten to teach something rather substantial on our seven-year road of parenting…

Where to put boogers.

Tonight, as David and I were putting the boys in bed, just before devotionals, David spied something on the wall outside of the bathroom. As he got closer, he realized, without having to ask Cael, that it was in fact a large booger smeared on the wall. He did ask Cael, who immediately broke into tears…confirming David’s question. David cleaned the wall as we talked to him about why he would put a booger on the wall in the first place. Our conversation:

David: “Cael, why did you put a booger on the wall?”
Cael: “I don’t know…I guess I didn’t know where else to put it.”
Mom: “The bathroom is right there.”
Cael: “I know, but sometimes I’m…not…near…the bathroom”
David: “Have you put them other places?”(Both of us chuckling at this point)
Cael: “Yeeeeeesssss….(boo-hooing)
Both of us: “Where else?”
Cael: “In the car, all over my carseat…”
David (only because I was laughing so hard…): Why would you do that?
Cael: “I don’t know…there’s not a bathroom in the car…”

We told Cael he was going to have to clean his car seat tomorrow after church, but that it was late and he needed to go to bed. As we knelt to pray next to the bed, however, I ran my hand across a crusty mess of at least four boogers on the side of his bed. Gross! Cael immediately started crying again.
Mom: “Cael, why would you put a booger on the side of your bed?”
Cael: “Cause there wasn’t any more room on the other side…”

David and I are still chuckling over this one. Tomorrow, we plan on checking the whole house. Under chairs and tables, on the walls…everywhere. Cael will be right behind us with cleaning supplies and a sponge.

Poem In October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

- Dylan Thomas

Writer-y Quotes

"I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction." - Katherine Anne Porter

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma... In the afternoon - well, I put it back again." - Oscar Wilde

"You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?" - George Bernard Shaw

"The difference between the almost right word and the the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning. - Mark Twain

"At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction." - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal." - T.S. Eliot

Never Say Never

I will never be a teacher.

I will never say, "Because I said so!"

I will never use the TV as a babysitter.

I will never feed my kids peanut butter crackers and call it lunch.

I will never make macaroni and glow-in-the-dark-cheese from a blue box.

I will never be a runner.

I will never talk politics with my in-laws during an election year.

I will never watch shows on the CW that were meant for girls half my age.

Writing Like Running

Feel free to decide which of these describes running. Or writing.

It is addictive like Crackberries.

You have to do it six days a week, or everything falls apart.

Sometimes it's boring, but love/hate is usually pretty accurate.

It takes practice.

Even though you shouldn't be, you are jealous of somebody who is better than you.

Cold, rainy, wet blustery days spent under the covers are for chumps.

It is the perfect creative outlet for your sorry excuses.

Nobody wants to hear about it.

Crying illogical, miserable tears because you JUST CAN'T...

But sometimes, sometimes, there are days when you can.

Write on!

Write a Novel In A Month? Crazy.

November is National Novel Writing

Month. I had heard about this, but quickly put it far in the recesses of the mind.

This is an idea for only the slightly insane, gluttons-for-punishment types. But this year, my friend Chanda signed up! And she's really great! And really normal!

The goal is simple: for thirty days, write like crazy until you have a 50,000 word novel.

How?

It involves literary abandon. It is pen-to-paper, starting from scratch, free writing without thinking, gogogo until it's finished! It is the opposite of editing, self-consciousness, and agonizing. And, really, who could find the time for agonizing?

This is from the National Novel Writing Month Website:

"If I am just writing 50,000 words of crap, why bother? Why not just write a real novel later, when I have more time?"

There are three reasons.

1) If you don't do it now, you probably never will. Novel writing is mostly a "one day" event. As in "One day, I'd like to write a novel." Here's the truth: 99% of us, if left to our own devices, would never make the time to write a novel. It's just so far outside our normal lives that it constantly slips down to the bottom of our to-do lists. The structure of NaNoWriMo forces you to put away all those self-defeating worries and START. Once you have the first five chapters under your belt, the rest will come easily. Or painfully. But it will come. And you'll have friends to help you see it through to 50k.

2) Aiming low is the best way to succeed. With entry-level novel writing, shooting for the moon is the surest way to get nowhere. With high expectations, everything you write will sound cheesy and awkward. Once you start evaluating your story in terms of word count, you take that pressure off yourself. And you'll start surprising yourself with a great bit of dialogue here and a ingenious plot twist there. Characters will start doing things you never expected, taking the story places you'd never imagined. There will be much execrable prose, yes. But amidst the crap, there will be beauty. A lot of it.

3) Art for art's sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and "must-dos" of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.

Check it out here.

What do you think? Is this crazy? Anybody want to do it with me?

I Feel His Pleasure

OK. Here goes.

I am training for a 5K. Again.

Stop Laughing!!!

Somehow, many, many of my friends are athletes. I never got the gene. And I certainly never understood runners. Despite me often asking stupid questions like, "How do you STAND it?" they stayed my friend and loved me even though we did not share the addiction.

Because it is. An addiction.

I did a 5K once. It didn't go very well. I finished, but I couldn't even run the entire time. Even though I managed to beat a few people, these were the racers who were also holding cheeseburgers.

But this time, I am ready. I'm preparing earlier. I'm training harder. MP3 players have been invented. All of this bodes well, I believe. I'll let you know how it goes!

Nobel Prize Loser

Three men are traveling to Stockholm soon to pick up their Nobel Prizes for chemistry and large cash rewards thanks to somebody else.

That somebody else? He now drives a courtesy van for an auto dealership.

Check out the story on NPR here.

Let me know what you think!

The Road Not Taken

I just finished The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver. While NOT RECOMMENDING IT, I keep thinking about it.

(Unrelated aside: The nemesis is named Bethany. Favorite quote? "...but from the look of those arms, Bethany spent hours in the gym every week, and must have needed to get her boredom's worth. The rippling shoulders and veined forearms reminded Irina unpleasantly of her mother, who had bequeathed to her a gut aversion to exercise fanatics of any description. Alas, Bethany crossed the room first, and so got credit for being the friendly one before Irina had quite resigned herself to the inevitable.")

Anyway, The Post Birthday-World is about a crossroads: how one event can change the rest of your life. The main character, Irina McGovern, one night, makes one decision.

But in this book, however, she makes two. The second half of the novel is split into two sections. One set of chapters is based on one road taken. The other set of chapters imagines what had happened if she made a different choice that night.

These parallel universes that keep intersecting with each other. It is "two competing alternate futures."

Can one decision change everything? And, of course, it is a waste of time to wonder "what if," but I keep thinking about crossroads. Decisions are so funny! At the time, they always seem tiny, like what to wear or what to drink with dinner. Only in retrospect does it become clear which ones were life-changers.

Birthday Plans or Death Wish?

In celebration of her thirtieth birthday, this crazy person and a few friends decided to sky dive over Mt. Everest.

"They fell at speeds reaching 140mph, hurtling past the highest ridges of the snow-laden Himalayas, before each released a parachute, made three times the size of a normal canopy to cope with the thin air. The jumpers wore oxygen masks to prevent their lungs from collapsing as they fell. Wearing neoprene underwear was compulsory — to prevent them from being frozen to death."

What are you doing today? For me, this made staying in with a good book sound mighty inviting!

Like Me, Please!

Can I tell you something really embarrassing?

One of the biggest pitfalls that comes with teaching teenagers is wanting to be LIKED!

I want them to think I am a cool old lady. I want them to tell me enough about themselves so I can steal all the details for my stories. I want them to want to be in my class.

Weren't these teachers, the ones who thought they were too cool for school, the worst? Well, let me answer for you. Yes, yes they were the worst.

Today, my game face is on! No more Mr. Nice Guy. Girl.

Do you think they'll like Halloween candy, though? Chocolate, right? And they like movie day, right? And the gold stars? That's kitchy and funny, right? RIGHT???!!

Needing a City!

Yesterday, I wrote on my Facebook page, "I am in need of a big city. Atlanta, anyone?"

My friend Sally wrote this: "I'm with you, Bethany! I need an IKEA fix. I need to weave effortlessly among five lanes of traffic while dialing my cell phone and sipping my Starbucks. A symphony orchestra I don't feel nervous for. A Container Store. A really, really really big museum. I need, just for a day, to wear a crisp white blouse with jeans and heels and not feel out of place."

Could not have said it better myself.