2010 ICWF Spring WorDshop

ICWF Spring WorDshop 2010 is coming up soon! This year, it's the same weekend at my birthday and a friend's wedding, so I'm not sure how much of it I'll be able to take in—which is rather disappointing, as it was an awesome weekend last year and looks like it'll be just as much fun this year. If you can make it to Calgary for March 19-20, check it out!

Seven Quick Takes of Sunshine

Life with an almost-two-year-old is never boring! Sunshine’s latest game is “naptime.” She gets her blanket, curls up somewhere, says “night-night” and then closes her eyes and makes a snoring noise. Then her eyes pop open and she smiles at us, or laughs at us if we’re laughing at her, gets up to find a new place to curl up, and repeats the performance. Her daddy will sometimes play with her, creating much amusement for her.


Sunshine's favourite book is Bear Snores On. Somewhere about three-quarters of the way through the story, Bear wakes up with a big sneeze. Sunshine likes this part of the story, and one night while my husband was reading to her, she kept saying "achoooo!" with each page. He told her "not yet," and so by the time they got to the page where Bear actually sneezes, she'd stopped saying "achoo!"


Her aunt brought her a pink placemat from Disneyworld in France for Christmas. Sunshine unwrapped it with her usual care (putting each piece of paper in the garbage before taking another piece off), looked at it, then went back to playing with her cousins. However, the next day when I moved all the placemats, including that one, off the table to wipe the table, she got very upset at me. She came running into the kitchen crying, “Mine, mine,” and when I gave her the placemat, she took it back to the table to put it at her spot.


Now she’s into dressing herself. The other day before I left for work, she was wearing three shirts. She had chosen one shirt when she woke up, then changed her mind and wanted a little T-shirt instead. I helped her get into the T-shirt, but a few hours later, heard her squalling about something. I found her with the first shirt over her head; she needed help getting her arms into the sleeves. Shortly after that, she came out of her room with a third shirt stuck on her head


Potty training is advancing fairly well, especially for her daddy. She knows to tell us “poopy” when she is, and in the last couple days managed to tell her daddy that in time to do it in her potty. She will pee in the potty for me. Who knows—maybe she’ll be potty trained by the time Baby Two comes along and I’ll be able to switch all of her diapers to newborn size.


She also likes helping me bake. I’ve let her sit on the counter to watch me bake, cook, or wash dishes since she was very small, and now she expects that. She’s grown more interested in what I’m doing and wants to stir the dish herself—or add ingredients herself. The other day I had to fish a cup measure out of my Nanaimo bars, as she thought that would help with them.


She might also be inheriting some of my writing love, as she enjoys climbing onto the chair in front of my desk and drawing pictures for me. I went through all my pens and put some away in the desk (the waterproof ink ones, the pencils with erasers for her to chew off, and the heirloom fancy pens) and left a few out in the jar on top for her to play with. Now a few old envelopes and notepads have scribbles on them, evidence that she was there.

Happy Australia Day!

Yesterday was Australia Day, so in honour of the occasion, here's a few memories from my trip there in 2005 (hard to believe that was half a decade ago!). Of course, Koala Bear went with me.

I flew into Sydney and spent my first month there, then went back and forth from there to my other destinations. That's where I saw these flags with the Sydney Sky Tower in the background. Like any good tourist, I took a trip to the top of that tower and had a bird's eye view of Sydney—a great way to get a mental map in your head for later explorations.

I also took a day trip into the Blue Mountains (which are neither blue nor mountains), which included a stop at the Three Sisters. Usually a blue haze is created over the mountains by sunlight refracting through the eucalyptus oil hanging in the air, but because it was a cloudy day when I was there, the mountains weren't as blue as they could have been. I saw my first kangaroos there, as we stopped to watch the big grey kangaroos come out at dusk.

I spent a Sunday afternoon wandering around the Sydney Botanical Gardens, checking out the local Aussie flora and fauna. From there, I got this awesome view of the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge—both famous landmarks. For a slightly exorbitant price, you can climb the bridge, but I never did. I did attend a play at the Sydney Opera House, by a local Aboriginal playwright.

I escaped from the city to a small hostel nestled between the ocean and a national park, which is where I met this very friendly kookaburra. He usually joined me for breakfast on the deck in the mornings, including snatching my breakfast one morning. The wallabies usually came out around 4:00 in the afternoon, and we also had an iguana and a wild turkey wander through.

I spent a month in Alice Springs, and started it off with a tour of Uluru (Ayer's Rock) and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas). Uluru is definately the centre of Australia, and a sight worth seeing. We spent the nights sleeping around a campfire in our swags and watching the stars. Our "troopy" dodged camels and kangaroos as we bombed around the middle of Australia—there aren't many roads to and from Uluru.

From there, it was a few more months on the road, making my way back to Sydney and my flight home. I have about a thousand pictures, a few books and CDs, some jewellry and souvenirs, lots of memories of a very good trip, and plans to get back there someday. Until then... Happy Australia Day and g'day, mates!

Fiction and Nonfiction

My husband was going to see Avatar on the weekend with a friend, because, he said, he didn’t think I’d want to watch it. I said I honestly hadn’t heard that much about it and just assumed it was another action flick which, yes, I probably wouldn’t want to watch. So he looked up the trailer for me. And I wanted to watch it. I wasn’t disappointed, either. The movie was very good. One I’d like to watch again (soon, even) and have been thinking about ever since I watched it.

That’s the story I thought of when I read Eileen Astels’ comment that “Seriously, it's been far too long since I enjoyed reflecting on a good story and contemplating what it was about the story and characters that drew me in and continue to hold me to them long after the story end is complete.” What is it about Avatar that had the theatres still packed and sold out several weeks after it’s release?

Eileen also talks about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and why fiction lives on in our minds while we so quickly forget what we learned in a nonfiction book. To me, that’s the difference between the emotional and the intellectual. Fiction hits us in our emotions; it draws us into the story, gets us involved, makes us love or hate, and in the end, has a powerful affect on us. Nonfiction often just speaks to our intellect, to things that we know we should do or not do—but find harder to put into effect.

For example, as I looked at my list of favourite books from 2009, I realized that a lot of them deal with tough issues. Drugs. Alcohol. Abuse. Prostitution. Foster homes. Murder. Adultery. Do I want to read a book just about one of those topics? Probably not. But couch it in fiction, make me care about the characters and what happens to them, and along the way, I’ll learn something about how it feels to be in those situations.

Uwem Akpan could have written nonfiction about the plight of children in Africa. Instead, he wrote fiction—short stories. Stories that make us care about each of his characters and leave us crying at the end when there isn’t a fairy tale ending for them. Because he wrote fiction—and touched hearts—his book has become a best-seller, made the Oprah Book Club list, and been read by millions. Will it make a difference in Africa? I’m sure it will, because nobody who reads that book will forget those stories.

Best Books of 2009

Browsing through my book reviews from last year was like a fun walk down memory lane. I’d forgotten some of the books that I read. Many were books I received for review, others were books I picked up for myself. Yet picking my favourites out of that list was easy, and so here are the top five books that I read in 2009 (and think everyone else should read too!):

Fiction:The Passion of Mary-Margaret by Lisa Samson (beautiful novel by a Catholic author about love, redemption, and how Jesus changes our plans for our lives)

Talking to the Dead by Bonnie Grove (excellent novel by a debut author about dealing with grief and betrayal)

Running Toward Home by Betty Jane Hegerat (brilliant novel by a Calgary, Alberta, author about a foster boy who spends a night alone at the Calgary zoo)

Daisy Chain by Mary E. Demuth (touching novel about a small town shocked by the death of a little girl)

Nonfiction:Blue Like Play Dough by Tricia Goyer (encouraging book about motherhood and how God uses that to shape us like play dough)

What was the best book you read last year?

On Writing

Someone was asking me the other day about my writing – how I write, how I come up with ideas, what I write about. Most of my writing sits on my computer, unread, except for the two novels that I printed for my family to read (after they spent years pestering me to let them read one of my stories).

Sooner or later in writing discussions, the same question comes up: when do you share your ideas with other people? I think most writers are in agreement that you share your ideas or writing with your audience when you feel it is ready to be shared. We joke that our writing is our “baby,” and maybe that’s a good analogy. A baby spends nine months hidden inside its mother’s womb, growing, developing, preparing for life in the world. It doesn’t always take me that long to write something – and sometimes it takes longer than that – but my writing also needs to grow, develop, prepare. During that time, I keep it hidden in my mind, and probably won’t say much about it. What am I writing, you ask? A story about a girl.

I found a quote the other day that I really like. E. L. Doctorow wrote, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make a whole trip that way.” I’ve written most of my novels this way. My first novel started with an image in my head, a vague idea. I wrote that down, and then I kept writing. The idea became the prologue. By the time I hit about 150 pages (single-spaced, typed), I figured I should be ending the novel, but I couldn’t see the ending yet. Then I had a nice vague discussion with my dad about what I was writing, and from that hatched the idea for the ending.

Sharon Hinck said you might be a writer if (among other things), “A police car with sirens blaring drives in to a scene you’re writing – and you didn’t see it coming.” Writing is about getting caught up in the story, knowing your characters so intimately that you are just writing down what they are doing and sometimes what they do surprises even you. I can see my characters in my head, hear what they are saying to each other, feel their emotions. When writing one scene in one of my novels, I was sitting at my computer bawling my eyes out, because my character had just found out that her mother had died, and she was miles away from her home and family, grieving by herself. It was a good thing there was nobody else around the house right then!

Writing is what I do automatically. A story is always percolating in the back of my brain, ready to be written down when it gets formed enough. I saw a man walk onto the bus the other day, and that started a story. Sometimes something will remind me of another character, another story, and I’ll get thinking about what I want to change or add. Half of my brain can be away in a story while the other is doing what I’m supposed to be doing – editing a manuscript, making supper, cleaning house. Give me a computer and watch my fingers fly.

The topic for one FaithWriter's challenge was “sport or fitness.” I looked at that and immediately put myself into a spectator role, because that is usually where I am with sports. Then I got stuck with going further, because of how little I know about sports (just ask my husband, whom I emailed once upon a time to ask if our Canadian football teams played in the NFL). My mind switched to fitness and from there to swimming, which is what I usually do for fitness. Add some conflict (a key element in any story) and my story was hatched.

Several years ago, I was surfing the web (something new to me, as we’d just gotten Internet shortly before that) and discovered a local Christian writer’s group. I immediately joined. A few years later, the editor of the group’s newletter contacted me to write an article for them. I puzzled over that for several days. What would I write? Finally I came up with a topic. I asked myself why I wrote. The answer was because I must. I can’t not write.

Top Three Questions to Ask a Pregnant Woman

This is a repost from my first pregnancy, but some things don't change... :)

“How are you feeling?”
I hear this question a few times a day, especially as more people around the office have heard that I’m pregnant. Everyone knows of morning sickness, so that’s the first thing they think of when they see me. Am I sick? Well, not since I hit the second trimester. All my nausea and exhaustion went away then – thankfully, though I’ve heard that it may return for the third trimester.

“Have you had any weird cravings?”
Pregnant women are notorious for craving weird things. One friend told me that her doctor advised her to indulge any craving except for those that weren't edible, such as dirt or laundry detergent. Those who are curious about this are disappointed when I answer that I haven’t had any cravings at all. I’ve heard that cravings usually indicate your body needs nutrients or something, so if you have no cravings, then you probably have a fairly balanced diet. Another friend of ours was telling us how her husband was so disappointed that she had no cravings, because he was ready for the midnight dash for an orange slushy or whatever it was that she craved. I’ve been trying to eat well but also to listen to what my body tells me.

“Are you going to find out what you’re having?”
This is probably the most common question that we get. Because modern technology has given mankind the ability (sometimes) to find out what sex the baby is before it is born, everyone wants to know if we’re going to do that. One of my coworkers told everyone her baby's sex and name months before the baby was born. But we're waiting. Even if we’d opted for the ultrasound, we wouldn’t have asked what sex our baby was. We want the surprise at the end of the nine months.

And the other most common comment that I get (even though I’m wearing maternity clothes and nothing in my closet fits anymore)… “You’re five and a half months pregnant? You don’t look it!”

Old Writing Made New

What do you do with those stories and articles you wrote years ago when you first started writing? Today over at Inscribe Writers' Online, I take a look at some writers' answers to that question.

Just a Little Belly

I told my doctor at my first prenatal appointment that I’d gained a total of twenty pounds when I was pregnant with Sunshine. She said that was good, that she usually recommended a weight gain of 20-30 pounds for the pregnancy. However, at every appointment since, she seems to think I’m not gaining quite enough. At my last appointment, I’d gained 6 pounds so far for this pregnancy. I’m obviously showing now and have a healthy two-year-old running around as proof of a good previous pregnancy, so she said everything seems to be okay.

When I was pregnant with Sunshine, the midwives said that weight gain was the last indication of a healthy pregnancy. Women gain weight so differently that how much weight was gained didn’t tell them much about how the pregnancy was going. A friend of mine whose baby was born a couple weeks after Sunshine was still losing weight from morning sickness at the time that was I just starting to gain weight. In the end, however, her daughter was three pounds heavier than Sunshine.

I told my boss about my pregnancy just after Christmas. Since then, I’ve been telling my other co-workers. Someone asked, “So that was nice Christmas news for you?” I laughed and said, “Um, we’ve known for a little while. I’m five and a half months pregnant.” Jaws drop. Just last night another barista noticed my little belly and couldn’t believe that I’d hidden my news for so long.

I've been noticing my bigger belly and feeling heavier, even if it's just a few pounds. I'm into low-rise jeans and baggy T-shirts now most of the time. My favourite pair of work pants is going to get too small soon, as they are just a pair of Reitman's stretch pants that still go over my tummy. (Some of my best maternity clothes have been found at non-maternity stores!) However, I dislike my other pair of pants; they have that silly belly band that slides all over the place and makes me feel like my pants are falling down every time I bend over.

Past halfway—only four more months to go!

Book Review: Thicker Than Blood

I couldn’t wait to get my copy of Thicker Than Blood because it’s another book (like Bonnie Grove’s Talking to the Dead) that I’d heard lots about through the blogosphere. Author C.J. Darlington won the Christian Writers’ Guild Operation First Novel Contest for the novel, which she says she’s been working on since she was about 14 (nice to know I wasn’t the only introverted 14-year-old hammering away at a keyboard).

Christy hasn’t talked to her younger sister May since she left May at their great-aunt’s place following their parents’ death. Now she’s ashamed to face her sister, fearful that May will hate her for abandoning her—and for some other actions from Christy’s past that continue to haunt her. Christy’s life is finally going good—until a jealous ex-boyfriend starts causing problems.

May is living her dream life on a ranch, but the bank has threatened to foreclose on the ranch unless she can pay the entire mortgage. She hasn’t forgotten about Christy, hoping always that her older sister will someday return. When Christy does show up, May isn’t prepared for the anger she feels—or the trouble that Christy brings with her. As the sisters get to know each other again, they’ll learn that there are connections thicker than blood.

One thing that intrigued me immediately about the book was Christy’s job in a bookstore and her work in acquiring valuable books for the store. I was surprised to learn what made a book more valuable (first edition, dust cover, autographs, etc) and what the value of some of those books was. C.J.’s own background in this showed up in the details that she was able to provide for Christy’s profession.

Readers looking for romance in this book may be disappointed. Other than Christy’s ex and a hint of romantic interest from another fellow, there is no love story; instead, the story focuses on the sisters’ relationship. I liked that. Too often, our society is obsessed with romance, including love stories in plots for no other reason than that audiences like love stories, and the Christian fiction market is seldom better.

Thicker Than Blood was another good read from another debut author. The first chapter, as well as reviews and a book trailer, are posted on C.J.'s website.

This book was provided for review courtesty of the publisher or publicist.

Driving Lessons

It’s barely snowing as I shift through fourth gear on the road out of town. The man on the radio says it’s time for the road report and I turn it up slightly, expecting the usual report of city roads that doesn’t affect me. Instead, a man comes on who claims to be northbound on the highway out of the city, approaching the same overpass I can see just ahead of me; he says he’s just passed his eleventh vehicle in the ditch since he left the city an hour ago.

Great, I think. Roads are icy and I’m driving our “new” car for the first time. Right away I wish to have my Jeep back, with its familiarity and trusty 4x4. We bought this car—a 1991 diesel Jetta—for its gas mileage after our truck got totalled in one of the bad snowstorms before Christmas. My husband has spent the past few weeks tinkering with the car, getting it running fine, and today is our virgin run together. So little car, I think, let’s see how the roads are.

I merge onto the highway without problems and within five minutes see the first three cars in the median. The highway doesn’t seem that icy to me and I think back to one of my first driving lessons. It began on a country back road, where I was waiting in a driveway for a big dump truck to go past when Mom told me just to go. So I pulled into the road and as our truck climbed a hill, all I could see in my rear view mirror was the dump truck grill.

I began going a bit faster and a bit faster, until I’d hit the 80-km speed limit and left the truck behind. I smiled; I was doing this driving thing just fine! As the road wound through a few hills, I kept up my speed and Mom said nothing. The road turned to gravel and still I was doing 80 km/hr. Then, as the road curved around a broad corner, the back end of the truck began to slide on the gravel. I l my foot down on the break as hard as I could. The truck swung completely around, slid sideways into the ditch and stopped with a shudder facing back the way we’d come.

I was shaking as I stared through the windshield. I’d just put our truck in the ditch. My dad would never let me drive again. I couldn’t even remember what I’d done to get the truck there. Then Mom said calmly, “Well, let’s keep going.” I looked at her. She told me I could either do a three-point turn here or go back to a driveway we’d passed earlier and turn around there. Since I was too frazzled to figure out a three-point turn then, I elected to go back to the driveway.

It took me a few days to remember what I’d done to cause the truck to go into the ditch. Over the next years, though, that lesson stood me in great stead. I learned to steer out of skids, rather than panicking and slamming on my breaks.

Now, as I face icy roads once again in a strange car, I remember that lesson again and the icy roads no longer bother me.

Dream

Dream what you want to dream;

go where you want to go;

be what you want to be,

because you only have one life and one chance to do all the things you want to do.