Faith

The screen freezes

Can’t go on

Or back

Stuck

Sitting here

Watching the blue spinning wheel

Round and round and round

Going nowhere

Doing nothing

A message pops up

“This page has become unresponsive.”

Wait? Exit?

Wait- have faith

You’ll get to where you need to be.

God’s got you.

(But maybe He’s telling me

To move, to proclaim His plans)

Exit- take action

Work for what God has promised.

Show your faith through works

(But maybe He wants me

To remain steadfast, to stay the course)

What is the right answer?

Which shows the most trust?

When is it time to reboot?

An Apple a Day

A few months ago, my book club read this book. Now, with the Peacock series out there, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the book as I contemplate whether or not to watch the show, which doesn’t have the greatest rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

My first thought on the book is it’s too long. There is just too much. The print length comes in at 480 pages, which does not seem like a lot, until you are reading it. The audio version is 18 hours and 3 minutes. The average audiobook length is 10 hours. That’s nearly double. I read the first 70% and listened to the last 30% (approximately). I eventually pumped the speed of the audio up to 1.75%. Even so, I kept asking myself, “when is this going to be over?”

The book switches back and forth in time between two fairly close time periods and includes memories/flashbacks to earlier days in both. It also switches the third person pov character. The first switch is signaled at the beginning of the chapter; the second is not. While I initially liked the switching back and forth, it eventually became tiresome. This is another case of too much. For example, there are too many times when we hear of the same incident from multiple points of view. While that could be really interesting, in many cases here the povs are not different enought warrant full retellings. Yes, okay, we get the idea that these family members were all affected in some way by the events of the family’s life, but well, isn’t that life? And, the detailed retellings from each member of the family don’t feel significant enough to warrant the time/space in the book, except that they lead to the next Too Much.

There are just too many coincidences in this book. SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING HERE AND JUMP AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK. There is just ONE day that Joy breaks down in grief over the death of her mother which happens to be the same day that Logan loses to Troy for the first time and throws his racket and is the same day Brooke catches a kid going through her bookbag and the same day Amy has the strength to stand up for herself and say no to the kid asking her to make her a sandwich. It’s just too much. Oh, and let’s not forget that that day just happens to be the ONE day that kid is at the tennis school.

SPOILER OVER, YOU CAN START READING AGAIN. I will say this in praise of the book, the characterization is very good. Each person’s strengths and insecurities are so believably drawn and the interaction among the family members and between them and outsiders are incredibly realistic. It is easy to see how each develops as a result of their interactions with others. But, those insecurities are so frequently reinforced it becomes too much. Okay, we get is, he/she is ….insert proper characteristic here…. In a sense, there is too much detail, and as a result, the book gets a little boring.

SECOND SPOILER ALERT. Once Joy returns, there are still six or seven chapters to go. There is far too much resolution given. You know how when you reach the end of a book or movie that brings characters together after a long, suspenseful ordeal and you think, “I’d like to see more of them finally happy.” Well, it turns out you don’t really want that after all. Leave that to the imagination.

And then there’s the end–Savannah on the plane and the flashbacks to before she left home, before the beginning of the story, and what she did to her mother. This changes the focus of the whole story. Perhaps this book is not about the Delaneys as all the blurbs claim. Giving Savannah the last word changes that and forces a reevaluation as to who this book is really about. With Savannah as main character, the story turns darker, like Ian McKeown’s The Company of Strangers or Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and much less like a Lianne Moriarity novel. Did the PR group get it wrong, or is this a new direction for LM? Or rather is it a mash up of the two? Either way, it again feels like too much.

Did you read the book or watch the series? Leave your thoughts below, especially on whether or not you think I should watch it.

Edging My Way Towards Creator

No, this isn’t a religious post. It’s a crafty one. For years now, I’ve been crocheting and sewing and painting. My Etsy shop has been up and running since 2015. So yes, I’ve created many blankets, home goods, shirts, dresses, accessories, paintings, etc. But, I’ve followed a pattern.

At first, I followed patterns religiously, or as religiously as I could when my fluency in crochet pattern reading was weak. Little by little, I learned new stitches and new abbreviations. I consulted books and websites. I stitched and ripped and stitched again.

The next phase was making things just to learn a new stitch. I’d choose a stitch from The Encyclopedia of Crochet and begin stitching. When I had a big enough piece to be something, I’d flip to the edging pages and choose an edging for the project. I guess I was creating something new-ish by putting one particular stitch with one particular edging, but I was still following someone else’s instructions.

My last project started the same way. I’ve stitched the pattern for Bev’s Preemie Coverlet many times. (@Bevscountrycottage is a great resource!) This time, as I have in the past, I just made it a little wider and longer to move out out of the Preemie range.

And then, I decided to add an edging. Instead of going to my book, however, I made it up as I went. In a second color, I continued the shell stitch from the body of the blanket all the way around the outer edge. Next, I added a picot stitch in the single crochet spaces between the shells. I’m very happy with the result, and I hope my customer is too.

Probably, this is nothing new to you creators out there on whom I have relied for so long, but it’s new to me, and I decided on it and executed it without consultation. Hopefully, it won’t be too long now till I start writing down some patterns of my own!

Metaphor Dice, Part 2

Yesterday was the recruiting event for my school, at which I ran a creative writing workshop for the accepted students. While none to choose to use the future is a reluctant curveball, the poems they came up with were strong. I’ve invited them to send them to me so I can set something up for them in September when they actually begin. I hope they do. When one of the students, an eighth grader mind you, ended her poem based on the metaphor death is an unruly drum with “thump, thump dead,” there was an audible gasp in the room. Truly inspiring.

As for me, I did as I promised and wrote my poem on the original metaphor: the future is a reluctant curveball. Here is the result.

Batter Up

Life happens at the speed of a fastball,

Moving inexorabley onward in the flash of an eye, but

The future is a reluctant curveball

Hurtling at us at 70 miles per hour-

Slow enough to see, maybe, but

Fast enough to miss when

It moves away from our expected trajectory.

Half of those turns bounce in the dirt

Half miss the zone altogether

Half arrive as a hitter’s pitch

Swing away at the best,

Ignore the rest,

Adjusting to the vageries of time

So that we don’t

Strike out.

Metaphor Dice, Part 1

The future is a reluctant curveball

Tomorrow I will be teaching a creative writing class to prospective students, and I can’t find my metaphor dice. Ugh. So, I went online and found a metaphor dice generator. Sorry Taylor Mali for using this imitation instead of your wonderful dice, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I will replace my own dice asap, but for tomorrow, I’ll have to use the knock off online version. It’s not as satisfying as actually rolling the dice, but it’ll do.

However, the first “roll” did generate something that stirs the metaphors of my mind with the words the future, reluctant, and curveball. I really like that image. I don’t know how well it will go over with eighth grade girls, so it’s a maybe for tomorrow’s play list, but I will definitely play with it and post my own poem with that starter tomorrow (or the next day).

How about you? What does this metaphor evoke in your own creative mind? Post your thoughts or poem in the comments (or on your own blog with a link back here.)

A Flawed Book Leads to Great Discussion

It finally came to me, luckily this morning and not in the middle of the night, what I was pondering yesterday: the Student-Faculty Book Club discussion of Dear Martin. I realized that a flawed book leads to great discussion. I’m not talking about a bad book, but rather, a good book that does not quite reach the level of great. It promises more than it delivers.

Nic Stone’s Dear Martin is such a book. It engendered lively discussion that only stopped when we ran out of time. The book serves as a place to start a discussion about race, but so much was left unexplored. And, in my opinion, too much attempted for the length of the book. In a book under 300 pages, there is institutional racism of the police, unconscious and conscious microaggressions, class struggles, interracial romance, gang violence, discrimination in the workplace, and more. It’s just too much.

The letters to Martin themselves became a problem for me. There is so much promise through the title of a young Black man struggling with the ideas of Dr. King through a steady influx of letters, but they fall off so soon that they lose their power. When things get really tough for Justyce, he abandons his letters and attempt to be like Dr. King. So, what was the point of them in the first place? We could have as easily received Justyce’s mindset through narration. But the real grappling with Dr. King wasn’t there.

Overall, I still really enjoyed the book. The length makes it consumable in one day, one sitting even. And this is a plus. The reader is immersed in Justyce’s world and caught up in his story that the many threads left hanging are nothing more than a minor nagging at the back of one’s mind. He is an engaging character; the trajectory of the story is a bit a of a surprise after the opening scene; so much happens. All this adds up to a good book.

If you just read it and don’t discuss it, perhaps you never even pick at those loose threads. But if you do, you start to realize why it’s not great, but you might also open up a much needed dialogue about race.

Write It Down

My New Year’s resolution is to write more. I know that’s a little vague, but that was purposeful. “More” is achievable. A specific number or schedule is easily missed.

So earlier this evening I was thinking about… well, I’ve forgotten already,,,, and I crafted a pithy tweet in my head. It was good. But, I spent a little too long meditating on it before picking up my phone to send it out… and… whoosh, it was gone.

So today, my writing advice is the oldest in the world: write it down. Get pen to paper or fingers to keyboard before your internal computer either hits the delete button or files it in the dark recesses of your brain waiting to reappear in the middle of some night when you’re worrying about something else.

And remember, even if you are writing The Great American Novel, it doesn’t have to be every day. Some days a pithy tweet will do.

Welcome 2023

Take It Easy

I started walking through the park today after work for the first time in quite a while. When I got to Bethesda fountain, there was a bride taking pictures of her sister? friend? and her SO with her phone. There were just the four of them. She wore a lovely off white full length sleeveless lace gown. Her husband wore a gray suit and a man bun. The female friend/sister had a floral dress and her boyfriend/husband had on dark gray trousers and a white dress shirt. I loved the tableau the four of them created, so I decided to sit down and try surreptitiously to get a pic. I failed to do so. Someone walked right in front of me just as I snapped. And then, the moment was gone. But that’s okay because I have the memory and because of them, I stopped instead of just powering through the park.

I decided to enjoy the moment despite the overcast nature of the day. Work had been full of time sucking paperwork, mind-numbing forms. Being in the park felt rejuvenating. In between spurts of people watching, I decided to check Facebook and came across this blog post from Kim of The Holderness Family in which she advocates for being lazy sometimes. Go read it and come back. I’ll wait. 😁

A Surgery Forced Me To Rest

I looked at my watch and realized that I’d better get a move on if I was going to make the next train. And then I thought, “why do I need to make the next train? Why not take the one after that (35 minutes later) instead?” Last (school) year, I’d gotten so used to rushing out of the city to beat the evening rush and the crush of people that accompanies it to avoid big crowds and possible Covid exposure and then getting home and “doing something.” I’d forgotten the mental health benefit of walking in the park and people watching. How good it felt today to stop for a little while. Once student papers start pouring in and after school activities ramp up, this will be harder to do, but I hope to remember this feeling and indulge in a leisurely walk and people watching every now and again nonetheless. I want to see the seasons change in the park and revel in each one. I need to remember that this is just a important as “doing something.”

I hope that between Kim’s post and mine you too are inspired to give some time to beneficial laziness.

Counterpoint: “Legacies”

Today’s poem, another new poem from an old favorite, is a counterpoint to yesterday’s poem. Instead of two people learning how to communicate, these two, grandmother and granddaughter, hold their feelings inside. They deny the love they feel for each other and the connection between them, missing, perhaps deliberately, the coded messages in our common parlance. One wishes to strengthen their bond; the other is afraid of losing it: “neither of them ever/said what they meant” (ll. 16-17). Did they understand each other anyway? Do we understand each other?

Read the poem here.