Quote for the Day

I'm a great lover of quotes of all kinds.  Here's one I received through email--it's Gretchen Rubin's Moment of Happiness for today.

"Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers."
— Madame du Chatele

Happy writing!

Banned Book News

I ran across this information in an issue of Publishers Weekly online and thought it might be of interest.

"The ALA has released its list of the Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2011. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received 326 reports regarding attempts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves. The most challenged books were as follows:

1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle (offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group)

2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa (nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group)

3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins (anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence)

4. My Mom's Having A Baby! A Kid's Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler (nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group)

5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group)

6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint)

7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit)

8. What My Mother Doesn't Know, by Sonya Sones (nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit)

9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar (drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit)

10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (offensive language; racism)."

I'm glad to see To Kill a Mockingbird still in there, mixing things up and making people THINK!  It's my favorite book of all time.

As a public librarian I always encouraged parents to read the books their children are reading, preferably before their children read them, so that they can provide guidance if need be.  I once had to tell a mom that just because her 10 year-old could read on a college level that didn't mean she was ready for Twilight!

The Daily Beast published a terrific interview with Lauren Myracle, author of ttyl, ttfn and l8r, g8r here.  Moms, if your daughters are reading these books for instruction instead of entertainment, it's probably because you're not talking to them.

I encourage you to read banned books and to talk about publishing and censorship when and where ever you can.  Your mind will thank you for it!

Happy reading.

Tidbits

I'm back on my feet--or I guess I should say, my seat--and writing again.  Still not as one with my desk chair, though.  It has a hard spot right where it meets my tailbone (ouch!) so I'm wandering around the house, trying to find a good spot with a view of the back yard. 

The porch was great until I let a mosquito in from the yard and in a matter of seconds I had several painful bites on my right leg.  Based on the amount of Hot Shot I sprayed around out there, that sucker should be dead by now.

While I was on the porch this morning I started thinking about cutting down the Magnolia that hosts the bird water station and the Hummingbird feeder.  Right at that second a Ruby Throated Hummingbird flew up and fed.  It's been back two more times.  I haven't seen a Hummer for almost two months (okay, I was flat on my back for part of that time, but I did manage to keep the feeder clean and filled) so I have to admit to being completely confused by Hummer behavior.

I got the new squirrels I was expecting--two babies.  Saw one of them taking a sand bath the other day.  It was cute but still annoying.  I'm not sure where the tipping point will be.  The squirrels are messy and eat so much more than the birds it's hard to keep seeds in the feeder.  I've asked the squirrels nicely to go away and they just ignore me.  It's illegal to shoot them.  It's a puzzler, alright.

I missed a month of CFRW's 250 words-a-day challenge, so I've got some catching up to do.  I spent my off-time reading and enjoyed some books on homesteading, small-scale farming and eating locally.    Barbara Kingsolver (another Kentucky writer) wrote an amazing story of her family's year of eating locally in Animal Vegetable Miracle.  Kristen Kimball's A Dirty Life was fun, but neither book made me long  for the farmer's life.  I wouldn't last a day once the bugs started biting.

So, I'm still not sure if A Trick of the Light's young Julia will learn how to cook on her pot-bellied stove or not.  She will definitely be gardening, though, and growing flowers (because I adore flowers...).  I'm not Julia, and she isn't me, but if you're going to write a book you should be able to sneak in a personal passion every once in a while, if you want.

Happy writing.

Fast Food For Writers: special report

Hummus, where have you been all my life?

I dragged myself out of bed last week to have lunch with my friend Jennifer.  She shared her White Bean Hummus with me and I thought it was out of this world!  I took her left-overs home with me and enjoyed them for another two days.

On an excursion to the grocery store the other day I found some chickpea hummus in the deli section and brought it home.  At a salad bar I always put chickpeas on my salad, so I figured they'd make pretty good hummus, too.  Boy, was I right.  I sprinkled some chili powder on it (because that's what they did at the restaurant) and ate it with blue corn tortillas and red pepper strips.  Yum.  Six gorgeous Florida strawberries on the side and I called it lunch.

Hummus.  It's fast and delicious.  Try it, you'll like it.

Happy writing.

What I'm Reading

Resting up from an episode with my back (do they still call it "slipped disc"?) and unable to sit up the past five days, I've had a chance to catch up on some reading. 

While browsing downloadable e-books available from my library I saw one of Linda Lael Miller's cowboy books and borrowed it immediately--A Creed in Stone Creek--and was hooked by the characters, settings, story lines...everything that makes a great cowboy book.  The other books in this mini-part of the larger Creed series are The Creed Legacy and Creed's Honor. 

This led me to the McKettrick series and McKettrick's Luck and McKettrick's Pride.  McKettrick's Heart is being reprinted in May and not available at the library (like I could get there to borrow it...).  There is a vast backlist of Miller cowboy books I look forward to diving into, but I'm just as eager to get back to my own writing.

Can't resist a backyard update:  I had my first Hummingbirds of the season last Sunday--a gorgeous Ruby Throat and a female.  I had to cover my mouth to keep from squealing.  I was so excited and pleased to see them at my feeder.  It's dreary and rainy here today, no one at the feeders but squirrels.

Happy writing (and birdwatching)!

Everything is Research

So, you may be wondering…doesn’t she do anything but sit on the porch and count birds? Well, yes, she does. It’s called research.

In my work in progress, A Trick of the Light, the protagonist (not the heroine; this one’s straight fiction and not a romance) Julia, has left her childhood home and moved into an abandoned barn. Julia is thirteen years old. It’s fall in Kentucky. The landscape is pretty pitiful, as is her life, and there’s not a lot of beauty to describe. Her fall and winter will be, stylistically, pretty bland. She’s learning the lessons of survival (with a little help from her friends) and doing a lot of growing up. 

What I’m doing now is soaking up spring for the time when I start to write about it. Spring in Kentucky is glorious. Spring in Kentucky in the woods is breath-taking. Spring for Julia (all four of the springs she spends in the barn) will be life affirming. Summer will be hot. Her second fall and winter will mimic the first, but she’ll have the lessons of the year before to fall back on, and then, once again, it will be glorious spring.

For now, my “research” includes these activities and sightings:

I planted some Creeping Phlox seeds on the 15th and had seedlings on the 21st. I took this photo last night.

Tiny, huh?  Imagine what they'll look like in a month.

One of the many squirrels populating my woods is sprawled across the peaked roof of a feeder, sunning. I guess they have to occasionally take a break to digest. I think one of them is pregnant. Yippee, more squirrels.

There’s been a large yellow butterfly, a Cloudless Sulphur, flying around the yard for the past week. Nothing is blooming around here so I don’t know what they’re eating. I put the Hummingbird feeder out on Sunday. Last weekend (Friday through Monday, actually) was the Hummingbird count in Florida. My count was zero, but my hopes were high. Sometimes you have to have a feeder out for a long time before the hummers notice you. On my next trip to the home store I’ll be looking for firecracker plants and hibiscus. Red. Hummers love red.

And here come the Titmice, loud and raucous. The squirrels are wising up and vacate the feeders before the onslaught. The Cardinals are also catching on to the ability of the Titmice to temporarily clear the room. They fly in with the Titmice and snatch a seed or two while the squirrels are cringing up in the branches. There is a fledgling titmouse who can land on the feeder but hasn’t yet figured out how to navigate its way onto the ant-trap above the hummer feeder, now filled with water and serving as a water station. Did you know a nesting Titmouse will hiss like a snake when disturbed? Ah, well, I digress.

Here's a Cardinal who's stopped by for a drink:

Did you know that Cardinals generally stay up about half an hour later than squirrels?  And that they are often the first birds active at dawn?  When seed is low at the end of the day I wait until the squirrels have gone to bed, then fill for the late diners and early risers.  Julia will discover this in A Trick of the Light as she learns the rhythms of the woods where she lives.

The bottom line? Everything is research.

Happy writing (and researching)!

Powering Up the Way-Back Machine

February 20, 1962. 

I don’t remember it like it was yesterday.

The memories come back to me in snatches.  The pale green paint on the walls, the desks in orderly rows.   The waist-high bank of windows that ran the length of the room and looked out over the playground.  No one’s eyes were on the playground that day. 

That day, fifty years ago, when I sat in my sixth grade classroom watching the grainy picture on the black and white television our teacher brought in.  The smart alecs in the back of the room making bets on whether the rocket would explode and our place in the space race would be lost along with our newest hero, John Glenn. 

I do remember the faces of my classmates.  Oh, we were so young, babies really, with our whole lives in front of us.  Don, who dreamed of being an astronaut like Glenn, musical Jane, shy Sandy, artistic Charles. 

A year and a half later, on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, I sat in a room with those same classmates and listened to our teacher read Walt Whitman’s Oh Captain, My Captain.  Six years later we mourned the death of a beloved teacher together.  We graduated.  We parted.  We swore we’d never lose touch, but we did. 

A lot can change in fifty years.  We still have lots of life ahead of us, but the question still remains…

Where are you guys???