Life's Little Blessings

As I sit here at the computer this Christmas Eve, unable to really concentrate on serious writing, bored with reading, and unwilling to do anymore work around the house, I have spent some time thinking back on 2014, only a week away from coming to an end.

It has been a year filled with change for our family.

My husband lost his job in February. While it has forced us to live on my income as a teacher and the royalties I make as a writer (not yet where I wish them to be!), I considered it to be a blessing. For the past six years, he had worked at a job far enough from our home that he had to live there during the week and was only home for weekends. Maintaining a family life long distance is never easy. It also brings with it enough increased expenses in maintaining a second household (even though his lodgings were rent-free) that I often questioned whether we were really better off.

Adjusting our lifestyle to such a cut in income has had its ups and downs, sometimes like the most insane roller coaster ride you can ever imagine. Yet each time that I have grown concerned that we couldn’t possibly make it through a month, somehow we did. Royalty checks, big and small, arrived just in the nick of time, or my husband picked up some freelance work that helped to tide us over. A litter of puppies brought in additional income.

We planted a garden, then added a watermelon and cantaloupe patch in a different location on our mini-farm. Plentiful rain and moderate temperatures provided us with an abundance of fresh vegetables and incredibly flavorful melons. A neighbor killed and butchered one of his steers and brought us a box of beef. Just before Thanksgiving, my husband expressed the wish that he could add a deer ham to our smoker, and less than an hour later we were hauling an eight point buck home in the back of our truck.

In May, I earned my masters in education. Thanks to a gift from two very good friends, we had gas money so we could attend commencement in Virginia Beach. The pomp and ceremony had a wonderful bonus effect: my son, who was not at all excited about his own upcoming high school graduation ceremony, suddenly looked forward to the event. The smile on his face after that ceremony will live in my memory forever. School was not the easy academic ride for him that it had been for me and his father.

With the change in his employment, my husband decided to take a hard look at what he wanted to do. He had already completed a course in fixing small engines, which—to my thinking—paid for itself when he was able to fix our riding lawnmower himself.  He is now back in school and has completed his first semester of a very fine gunsmithing program.

My career as a writer has continued to grow and expand this year. I had a book release under a different pen name in July, which has done very well. My next release as Laura Browning, Special Delivery, will come out May 12, 2015, and is already available for pre-order.

Just this week, my husband finally secured a part-time job that he can fit around his schedule as a student and as the coach of a high school fencing team. My son has matured during this year, now holding down two part-time jobs as he continues to explore what he would like to do for a career.

In all, though this year has been filled with tremendous change, it has also been filled with such timely blessings, I can’t help but believe in the divine hand of providence at work. Through the many adventures and misadventures during my life, I have always felt I must have a very special guardian angel. Now I am sure of it.

I don’t wear my faith on my sleeve. Maybe that’s a function of being a Lutheran, maybe it’s just my personality. However, I have spent many moments this year thanking God for his assistance in so many little ways. So this holiday season, when we think about the miracle of faith embodied in the birth of God’s son, remember that miracles occur every day in many little ways. It might be the garden blessed with good weather or a timely gift from a friend. It might even be that longer than usual wait in a checkout line that put you two cars behind the impaired driver instead of right next to him when he lost control of his vehicle and crashed.

As Walt Whitman says, “Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.”

So as 2014 winds down and 2015 begins, remember to look for the best in every situation. Find those little blessings that can brighten your day and help you brighten the day of someone else. 

Hey, Mom, I'm Finally Learning Grammar!

Teaching has taught me a couple of very valuable lessons: how much I still don’t know, and how fortunate I was in the circumstances in which I grew up.

One of the facts every teacher understands is that to own knowledge, you must be able to impart that knowledge to another person. That’s what teachers do every day, but it’s also an excellent tool in observing whether students truly own what you’ve taught them. When they can teach that knowledge to a classmate—it’s theirs forever.

That’s been my experience with grammar, and that’s also where the second part of my valuable learning has come in. You see, I grew up in a household where writing and speaking correctly were simply facts of life. My father, who was a high school dropout, rose to become a top executive in a television broadcasting company. He did it in the way many self-taught people do, by emulating those he admired and by grasping firmly onto any knowledge he could. He read voraciously and had an extensive active vocabulary. While my father devoured a lot of non-fiction and bestsellers, my mother gravitated toward the classics (although she does read what I write – thanks, Mom!). In addition to plenty of time spent reading or locating books in the library to read, we were also a family of debaters. We loved to argue and prove points and learned to do so in a friendly way.

All of this is simply to say that what I learned of the English language was largely through osmosis. I understood the principles of good grammar because that was what we used in our home on a daily basis. Utilizing an extensive vocabulary was second nature, and if I encountered a word I didn’t know, I was either given a definition or synonym, or directed to the dictionary.

Did I pay attention to grammar instruction in school? Oh no. I yawned through it and relied on my innate ability to slide through—like many other students, I’m sure. It wasn’t until I began learning German that I finally discovered the disadvantages of not having learned the difference between indirect and direct objects, of understanding the parts of speech and how each word functions in a sentence. If I could go back (lol) I swear I would pay more attention to that sentence diagramming we did in 5th grade.

Life has handed me a second chance, though, to learn the technical aspects of grammar that I ignored during my education. That’s one of the great aspects of being a teacher. States require continuing education in order to renew teaching licenses. So right now, I am in the midst of an online grammar course offered by one of the state universities. This time—I’m paying attention because I expect it to pay off in two ways. First of all, a better understanding of the mechanics of the English language should help me improve my instruction to my own students. There is also the payoff in my writing career. I hope, and I’m sure my editors do too, that it will make editing and revising a much less laborious endeavor. We’ll see.

Sometimes It's Good to Kick Back and Relax

In my real life, I teach. Some days are rewarding, Some days are frustrating and some are both. They are always busy. When I worked in television news, each day built to a crescendo that culminated in a newscast, but then the day was over. One thing I can tell you about being an English teacher, the pile of "to be graded" papers constantly renews itself. Rarely is there an occasion when I leave feeling my work is "done."
But I do leave it. Unless it is the direst of emergencies, I do not bring school work home.

Home is for my other work--being a writer. Somewhere in there, I sometimes manage to squeeze mom and wife. Okay, so my son's dinner came from the place with the golden arches tonight, but it was payday, and that was his request.

The one thing I have come to realize is babies and puppies have the right idea. Sometimes you just have to kick back, relax and let it all hang out. LOL.

Fine-Tune-It Friday: When Spicy Becomes Erotic

Welcome to what I call Fine-tune-it Fridays… a day to look at some of the skills and techniques in writing, and those necessary to writing spicy and erotic romance.
In fact, that’s the first topic I’m going to tackle. When does spicy become erotic? That line’s grown finer and finer over the years. Having cut my romance teeth on stories that always shut the bedroom door right when it started to get good, it’s difficult to imagine some of the books on shelves in stores now.
Deciding exactly where the line rests, though, is a problem I’ve encountered as an author. Having written what I considered to be simply a very spicy story, my editor asked me to remove some scenes because they were too hot. In the end, it didn’t matter. One scene in the book resulted in its move from simply being spicy to becoming erotic.
So, what was the line in the sand? When I asked, a senior editor explained that if the sex scenes moved the plot forward in some way, i.e. through characterization, increasing tension or resolution of the story, as long as we didn’t get into obvious erotica territory, then that was all right, but if the love scene was sex for sex’s sake, designed solely to titillate the reader? That’s erotic.
Another editor draws a more definite line by saying an erotic romance has sex and the development of the relationship through sex at its core. This may be a clearer definition, but isn’t always entirely accurate. Stick in that gratuitous sex scene and find out what happens (see above), sex certainly wasn’t at the core of that novel’s plot.
Author Sylvia Day defines erotic romance as, “stories written about the development of a romantic relationship through sexual interaction. The sex is an inherent part of the story, character growth, and relationship development, and couldn’t be removed without damaging the storyline.”
As with any romance, Happily Ever After is a requirement, although that too has been stretched to “Happily for now.”
Of course, there are still topics that are off limits for anyone hoping to land a contract with a mainstream publisher: rape, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, for example. Hmm, wonder how everyone justified those zombie romances?
Like every other business, romance writing has trends—like zombies—and the trend in terms of sex has been to throw the covers off and come out into the open. I write hot stories. I like seeing how the hero and heroine interact with each other in what is, let’s face it, all of our most vulnerable moments. Truly making love with a partner requires you to lay yourself bare, literally and figuratively, and it can reveal a lot about the characters in your book.
Does it also entertain? I hope so. That’s the point of writing romantic fiction after all, but the important thing to remember is keeping the romance at the forefront.