Monthly Archives: August 2022

Hidden Drama

Posted on by

A friend forwarded this editorial/opinion article to me. I read it and had more of a reaction to it than I thought I might have, so I wanted to put this out here for further discussion.

The article

The answer:

Thanks for sending this one along. It was an interesting read, but I think it highlights a couple of things that I have changed my mind about over the years.

The author talks about all the things to hide from your children. This is untrue, and in fact can lead to sincerely dangerous consequences for your kids. Do you want to have a raging argument in front of your kids? No. Do you want them to understand it’s OK to disagree so long as you work something out to mutual agreement? You bet. You can’t have the mutual agreement without seeing / understanding the differences and disagreements. This I think is one of the core issues with so many children that come up not understanding the privilege they have. They fail to understand how the world works and they are crushed when somebody denies them anything – even if that thing is of no consequence in the greater picture. It’s why so many are deemed to be “Karens” who demand to see the manager about how much milk is in a coffee.

People are chaotic, messy and individualistic in the extreme… but they need to see others and understand the shared environment we live in. Hiding the swirling chaos of the world from a kid doesn’t help them. Protect them from it? Of course. Just be certain they understand and can see what’s going on out there. It’s how they go about making the world a better place as society moves forward. They need to know the history or root of why things are happening, so they can (hopefully) do better than we did.

Children also need to understand that the emotions they’re having are real and can’t be dictated by others. “Putting on a brave face” only becomes a saying if you allow them to see that you are scared too. Show them you have feelings and allow them to understand how you process these complex things in life. I have told the younger couples I know with kids – you will never have a mirror that will reflect YOU as clearly as your kids do. They dominate your time. They are with you almost constantly for years, and so they see far more than you think they do. Don’t lie to them. It’s a bad road to travel. Don’t hurt them purposefully, but allow them to fail and recover on their own when they’re young and the consequences are limited (or can be so long as you’re paying attention). It’s one in a long list of very important lessons.

I understand what the author is saying. It was extremely stressful to have (my daughter) get on a plane and fly away for a year. It’s not even like the author’s situation where we could soothe our emotions by knowing she’d be home for the next holiday. She wasn’t. Not for the one after that nor the one after that either. It was a long and stressful year – and we all shared that with each other. We are better and stronger for it. Now we’re trying to do the same thing for a wonderful young lady here from France. It’s going to be a wild ride, and one that we share all our emotions with them for.

I am going to add here that this is a learning process and there is no substitute for experience. There’s only one way to get experience and that’s to do a thing. Sometimes you fail… and that makes all the difference in the world. It’s how you learn and a way for you to discover new things. A partial quote from an old movie I enjoy, “…think what you’ll know tomorrow”.

Flash Prompt – The Doorway

Posted on by
artist: Douglas Murakami – https://www.artstation.com/dougmurakami

It was a warm day, but not a hot one. Carrying the bag of tools, the mapping equipment and the supplies was an effort, but not an extraordinary one. The quest had almost become routine. Almost.

Endless searching. They couldn’t say that anymore. They’d finally found it.

Now they could step through.

SPEAR

Posted on by

Spear by Nicola Griffith

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


First – I hate beyond measure that no matter what I change the settings to on the Kindle it marks these things as read on Goodreads before I get out here to post things. That is a completely different topic, so to the book review.

Giving this book 2 stars doesn’t seem fair, but the “it was ok” that hovers up is the closest thing I could say based on the super limited star system.

The writing, the language, the way this book came together just drew me in. I was enthralled. I love the way this author uses words. I was reading this magical story and loving it.

I was loving it because of my lack of knowledge. I don’t know they myriad forms that the Arthurian legend carries through history. I’m going to say that’s on me. I went into this book cold, no reviews, no understanding of what it was, no blurbs, nothing. I grabbed it from a publisher I know to serve up things I enjoy. This certainly seemed to fit the bill. Then, about 2/3 of the way through the story Christianity was thrown in. That jarred me hard enough to almost stop reading right then and there. THAT is most certainly NOT what I want in my fantasy stories. There’s more to it than that, but we’ll leave it as ‘bad’ in terms of the story.

Then I started to pull all the parts together and understand this as a King Arthur retelling.

IF you want a gender swapped story from the King Arthur story vein, this is an excellent choice. I still believe what I said about the language. It’s wonderfully written. I may go and look at other works by this author… but I will certainly look into what the story is before hand. My feeling toward the story never recovered after that jarring moment – so I don’t know that I could recommend the book.



View all my reviews

Squeezing

Posted on by

I have come to discover that writing in any form is a struggle. Yes, I know – all the writers and creative types I know just collectively said “duh”. I get it, but sometimes saying it (or typing it) helps with the reality of making a change.

I am a writer that runs on inspiration. Long haul work is extremely difficult doing that, and finishing something the size and scope of a novel is exactly that – a long haul. I suck at that.

I’ve been chipping away at the edges of writing for many years, but what I have been doing is clearly not working, nor is it getting me the result I desire. I need to finish more, but in order to finish more I need to actually create more. I can’t sit and wait for inspiration or the ever elusive (thought to be mythical) ‘free time’.

So – I’m going to be squeezing things in. Maybe the edits won’t be great. There will be grammar and spelling issues. I can’t edit if it’s not created. The secret story in my head will never go anywhere without trying to record it in some form.

There you go – I squoze it myself.