…but on a much smaller scale.

When I’m not working my day-job, or playing games on Facebook, I write short stories.  I finally have enough to compile into a small e-book, which I am publishing through SmashWords.com with a tentative release date of Feb 22, Ash Wednesday.  The date is tentative because it depends on my newly hired graphic artist getting a cover created for me by then. She’s confident she can do it, even though there are several people ahead of me on her project list. I have no graphic art genes anywhere in my body, so I’m trusting her.

Like you, I’ve watched and admired Sgt Mom on her journey from blogger extraordinaire to “real live arthur,” and I gotta tell you honestly, I don’t want to work that hard. I’m more of a dabbler.   My day job comes first and the writing is only a hobby, albeit a slightly more serious one than it’s been in the past. Short stories by unknown authors are hard to sell, which is my primary reason for self-publishing. I’m just glad we live in a time when the technology makes it possible.

Now, if you’ll pardon a little self-promotion… (clears throat self-consciously)

 Front Cover:

Their lives changed forever when they saw themselves

..and their God…

Through Love’s Eyes

 

 

Back cover (for the print edition, whenever it happens):

A chronically ill woman; a crazy man; a grieving mother. Only God could ease their pain, but would He?

 

You think you know their stories: you’ve read them since childhood. Read them again – it will feel like the first time. Mary Young takes you inside their heads and hearts, and shows you their encounters with the Christ through their own eyes.

Anyone who has ever doubted whether God would really help him or her will find encouragement in these pages.

I was originally going to just print a few copies and give them to friends last year for Christmas, but as I worked on perfecting the stories, I felt they deserved a wider audience. It will be interesting to see if I was right.

Hopefully, you’ve never had to suffer through a presentation like this one. I’m confident none of our readers has ever been the perpetrator of a presentation like this one.

Mostly Cajun has a good post with a couple political cartoons that are spot on for today.

More than fifty years after he came home from Korea, my dad finally told me how he got injured. Someone parked a tank in front of the foxhole sheltering his 2 buddies and him. When the tank was destroyed, shrapnel ripped through the foxhole. One Marine was decapitated, the other severely wounded. Dad had a “minor” injury that took a year of rehab.

We know that all gave some. Today, we remember those who gave all.

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Note: I don’t normally blog here about internal things, preferring instead to share thoughts on my “yardening” or memories of other phases of my life. But since I was 13, part of my self-identification has been “writer.” But I had lately begun to wonder if I could still use that description — is one a writer if one isn’t really writing? Apparently so. Apparently thoughts and ideas have been wintering in plowed ground, waiting for spring’s warmth to sprout into new growth. I posted the following on my personal blog this morning, but I wanted to share with my friends here, as well.
***********************

I’m writing again, for the first time in a decade or so, and it feels like coming home to my true self. Really writing — the kind of writing that I used to do, that left me marveling in awe as the words flowed from my pen to paper, almost as if the pen had a mind of its own.

That’s how it used to feel, when God would give me ideas for stories. It was almost like watching the story on a movie screen in my brain, and simply transcribing what I saw on the screen. I had thought the dearth of words related to my very desultory Christian walk. I claim Jesus as my savior, and believe the truths set forth in the Apostles’ Creed, but I do no daily Bible reading, attend no weekly church services.

That said, I constantly dialogue with Jehovah God, and recognize that all good gifts in my life are from His hand. Like this gift of writing, that has recently returned with so much power. The more ideas flow into my brain, the more I return to Bible reading, specifically the Gospels. I’m seeing things I don’t remember seeing there before. And I see stories.

In “Steel Magnolias,” Truvey says “Every person has a story.” The same is true of the Bible characters – no, not characters. These were real, live people, like you and me. They worried about keeping their jobs, their homes, their sanity. They loved and laughed, wept and prayed, cooked and sewed and cleaned, got married, had children, lost children…

Their lives were more immediate than ours, less removed from reality. No air conditioning there – when it was hot, their own sweat cooled them. If they caught no fish, or grew no crops, they went hungry.

Life was struggle and joy all in one. Sometimes, life was sorrow. Through it all, they persevered, holding to the hope of their faith that Yahweh was not as other gods – that Yahweh was a God who listened, a God who cared. He had delivered them from Egyptians and Philistines – he would deliver them again.

If he didn’t? He was still Yahweh, still in charge. The prophet Habakuk perhaps said it best:

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. Hab. 3:17-18

Those are tough words, from a tough person – a faithful person. I’ve wanted those words to be true in my own life for years, and never really noticed that they already were.

The fig tree of my writing has not blossomed in close to ten years. Oh, there were little buds here and there – snippets of stories, or thoughts or poems that reassured me I could still write when it mattered, but not the effortless flow of words that I remembered.

Until this spring, when all outside was green with new life, and it was time again to remember our Lord’s sacrifice on our behalf. This Easter season, the words began to flow again, and I pray they never stop. But even if they do, like Habakkuk, I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior.

Meantime, I’ll revel in the feeling of being home again.

No, really… I mean it! I don’t really care if you go whole hog for the bound copy, or go with the very affordably priced Kindle copy (which can be read via the free kindle app on any PC)… BUY IT! READ IT!

You won’t regret it.

Well… that’s not entirely true, but the only regret will be that you have to wait six more months for the next installment.

My autographed copy arrived in my mailbox far earlier than I expected, especially as I hadn’t gotten around to purchasing it yet. Sgt Mom sent me a copy just to celebrate our friendship. I read the first few pages and set it aside, not wanting to ruin the binding by reading it in the bathtub, which is where I do most of my book reading these days (someday I’ll own a couch again, and read in places other than the tub).

But then I realized it was available in Kindle format, and having succumbed to the Kindle siren this past January, I was good to go. Daughter of Texas flew wirelessly to my Kindle, and I flew into the past, riding the wings of her vivid imagination and prodigious talent/skill at writing.

Texas is my heart state — of all the places I’ve lived in my life, San Antonio is home, even though I no longer live there. I still remember the first time I learned about the Goliad Massacre, the first time I toured the Alamo (like so many Air Force people, it was on a day pass while in basic training there), the first time I learned about the massacre of the German settlers who were Union sympathizers during the Civil War years.

Sgt Mom’s books bring all these things to life. First with the Adelsveiren Trilogy, which had me wanting to Google the characters when the book ended, to see what happened next in their lives, and now with Daughter of Texas.

You’ve read her sample chapters here over the past few months. They pale beside the completed whole. I told her today I was hesitant to finish the book (Kindle told me I was 85% complete), because I’d read her samples here and knew somewhat of what was ahead, and didn’t want to face it. I knew a character was going to die, and I hated to see it happen — couldn’t bear to read it. What I didn’t tell her was that I couldn’t bear having the book end and still have 6 months to wait for the next one.

You can read the reviews on Amazon, and other places. I’m not a reviewer – I’m just a reader who knows what she likes, and I like Sgt Mom’s style of writing, and her choice of topics. In my opinion, you can never go wrong grabbing one of her books — and there’s a link to them conveniently posted just over there, on the upper left side of this blog.

So what are you waiting for? Buy her books! Read them! You won’t be disappointed, other than having to wait for the next one.

I learned long ago to ignore most TV weather forecasters, but I’ve found that Weather Underground gives me fairly accurate forecasts for my area. Even so, when they said Christmas snow, I was skeptical. I’ve lived in GA for nine years now, and have never seen snow on Christmas, not even flurries. Heck, before this year, I had never seen snow in December here! About two weeks ago, we had some flurries one morning, so I figured if we got snow at Christmas, it would be like that.

Christmas morning, the forecast for my zip code was 100% chance of snow, and the skies were clear. At 1130am, the forecast was still 100% chance of snow, and the skies were still clear. I was about to put a very sarcastic post on my Facebook status about the odds of GA having a white Christmas, when I glanced out my window, and saw big fluffy white flakes in the sky.

I put the dogs in the backyard and grabbed my camera. As I explained on FB, I needed the dogs so you could have some scale by which to judge the size of the flakes. LOL Pippin, the 90lb greyhound who is afraid he’ll melt if he gets rained on, was NOT impressed.

This being Georgia, if it had been any day other than Dec 25, the stores would have been jammed with people buying bread and milk, convinced the world would end (or at least be shut down for several days) if the white stuff stuck to the ground, as it seemed like it was doing.

When I left my house at 1230 to head to Christmas dinner with friends, the streets were wet. When I drove back home 3 hours later, they were slushy. By nightfall, they were white.

Our final tally after eight hours of steady snowfall, was approximately three inches. Laughable to our northern friends, but exciting to us. Apparently, the last time it was snowy at Christmas was 1993, and that was only a dusting, not measurable snow. The last time Georgia had measurable snow on Christmas was around 1889. Yep – it’s been 121 years since GA has had measurable snow at Christmas time. (I reserve the right to be wrong on the actual year, but I”m in the right century and decade)

The sub-freezing temps kept the snow on the ground through Boxing Day. We’re projected to hit the mid-30s today, and 40s tomorrow, so it will soon just be a memory.

This is making the rounds on facebook. I was hard put to name the authors, and in some cases had to resort to Google (to find the author of Hawk, I’m Your Brother, for one). I couldn’t find one book, but in high school I read a non-fiction work that I could swear was titled “Not Every German was a Nazi,” but the book might have been a collection of essays, and that might have been the title of one of the essays, instead.

It’s an eclectic mix. I had to keep stopping myself from just listing favorite authors, and focus on those who influenced. There’s a difference, although I think we are, or can be, influenced by everything we read. The names on my list are authors who helped shape my thoughts, or who changed my thoughts, or whose words I can never get out of my head. Some are recent, and some go back to childhood

The official instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who’ve influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

Madeleine L’Engle
Robert Frost
Elizabeth Moon
R.A. Heinlein
Altsheler
Sally Roth
Byrd Baylor (think of his book every time I see a hawk in the sky)
Thomas Jefferson, et al (“When in the course of human events…”)
James Madison, et al (“We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union…”)
Celia Hayes (not sucking up – constantly remembering scenes from the Trilogy, and when my local PBS recently aired a show about the Germans coming to TX, I compared their data with what I remembered from Celia’s books, trusting her to be accurate, and them to have errors)
Bess Streeter Aldrich
Sara Stein
Ayn Rand
Dr Seuss
Shel Silverstein

Feel free to add yours in the comments.

Cross-posted to In My Own Little Corner, with a plug to Sgt Mom’s Amazon page

Read the article here.

It sounds like something our own Sgt Mom could have written (some of the comments do, as well).

From the article:

No, the Tea Party is that rare beast, a genuinely spontaneous popular movement. Its proximate cause is easily enough discerned: the US federal government is 30 per cent bigger than it was two years ago, a position both main parties would have considered unthinkable as recently as 2007.

From the comments:

What are the common characteristic of Tea Party supporters?

We pay our bills, we save for our retirement, we are responsible for ourselves, and we demand the same for the rest of the country. (snip)

We want to cut the government back to its constitutionally mandated limits, and progressives/libs can bray like the symbol of their party while we do it.

(snip)

Final characteristic of Tea Party supporters, is the ability to judge the results of policy, whether it’s welfare, tax, or foreign policy, on results of that policy, NOT on the intentions of those who passed and implemented the policy.

Thanks to my real-life and facebook buddy, Jerry Henry for the link.