It’s been a long winter for many of us. Extreme cold. Loads of snow. Lots of sickness. Let’s celebrate Our Risen Lord and the return…
Leave a CommentRelevant Fiction for Body & Soul
Category: My Scribbler’s Heart
Two-hundred words based on this photo prompt at Sunday Photo Fiction:
Tabitha steadied the gun and took aim. A red line marked her target, wiggling as her wrist quavered. She pulled the trigger.
“There.” She foisted the gun on Stephen, then returned the flatware to its shelf. “What’s next?”
Stephen sighed and studied the papers he held. “Uh, twelve chargers?” He glanced around the housewares section, empty save for another browbeaten guy and overeager woman. “Wouldn’t that be in electronics?”
She giggled. “No, silly. It’s a decorative base for the plate.”
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Prayer Edition
I missed the Lenten midway checkpoint. Maybe on purpose. I haven’t exactly done a bang-up job with Lent this year. I can’ t say I mustered any great ambition to kick off the annual forty days of preparation for Easter. I share a bathroom with five other people, have no automatic dishwasher or microwave, and no hot water in the bathroom sink. Don’t I sacrifice enough every day?
Uh, no. Not really. Not that those couldn’t be legitimate sacrifices, but it would require performing them with the right intention. Which I haven’t.
A recent Smithsonian article (“Why Can’t Romance Novels Get Any Love?”) discusses the lack of academic and intellectual respect given to the romance genre. It’s an interesting read, but just as illuminating were the comments, some dismissive not only of the genre but specifically the “happily ever after.” (HEA) The article offers many points for discussion, but I’m going to focus specifically on the HEA element.
Is the HEA a product of our deluded imaginations – our desperate grasp at a world in which everything turns out well in the end? Or does it point to a divine hope – something more profound than a feel-good conclusion? Is it a meaningless trope or does it point to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love?
Read my guest post today at 10 Minute Novelists, What 10 Minute Novelists Means to Me. Writing time was—and is—whenever I can grab it amid diaper…
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Why small success? Because that’s the only kind I know! Even the big ones come in small steps. Here’s my paltry offering for the week.
- Cleaned the high chair. If you have one of those modern, plastic, easily-wipeable high chairs, right now you’re thinking, “This lady is really pathetic. That’s not a small success, that’s a nano success easily accomplished by trained monkeys.” We do not, however, own an easily-wipeable high chair. (Nor any trained monkeys. Ours are strictly untrained.) We chose a high chair that would blend with our dining room furniture. (If you’ve seen our dining room, you can stop laughing now. There IS furniture beneath the toys and mess.) Our lovely, ornate, Amish-built high chair is ridiculously difficult to clean. After weeks of scraping with cloths, tooth picks, and other dangerous devices, it is sufficiently clean to be stored. Or almost. I’m going to go at it with a mild baking soda solution and hope that takes care of the last bits.
Two-hundred words based on this photo prompt at Sunday Photo Fiction:
Kiyara sprinted down the sidewalk, shouldering past old ladies lugging shopping bags, kids dodging cracks in the pavement, and business men preoccupied by their cell phones. Oblivious to all but her escape route, she ignored the commotion in the street, where a Hummer had rear-ended a compact sedan.
This week I interview Jessica White, fellow member of 10 Minute Novelists. Although I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting Jessica in person, I know that she is a diligent, generous, and devout woman with a passion for historical fiction. She published her debut novel, Surviving the Stillness, late last year. You can read my review here.
Surviving the Stillness is Book 1 in The Seasons of Healing Series. It takes place in rural 1920’s Montana. How did you pick the time period and the setting for this series, and what kind of research has it required?
My methodology of coming up with a time and place was at best happenstance. This story actually originated from a manuscript I wrote in the seventh grade about the renovation of an old house with an attached school. The Queen Anne Victorian style was specific to the late 1880’s-1890’s (although it was replicated among the middle class as late as the 1910’s). I spent so much time creating the story of the house and its previous owners, that I kept coming back to it over the years. Originally, I needed the house to be abandoned in the 1930’s during the Great Depression, so I came up with what became the deaths of Abigail and Samuel Morgan’s parents. When I picked up the manuscript again about ten years ago, it was Abigail’s story that I focused in on. Her mother’s death in the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 was the catalyst for her coming of age, so the 1920’s became the setting when I picked up the manuscript again in 2013.