I tried.

You have to want something so you can try it.
You have to try it so you can make mistakes.
You have to make mistakes so you can figure you out what you did wrong.
Once you figure out what you did wrong, you can do it right.

I want to be a good writer. So I tried.

My Creative Writing class is interesting. It's very laid back. For the poetry section, we have to post an original poem of any form to the forum online and revise it over the next few weeks. I guess what really bothered me was that there weren't any requirements as to what kind of poem we had to write. In another class I took (from a different school) we were required to write three poems of three different styles.

Anyway, it was really tempting to sit there and post a poem from the other class, because I had already been told it was well written. But I challenged myself and wrote a new one. Then I posted both of them to the forum.

The first one I wrote for Intro to Lit last year. It's a Shakespearean sonnet - the rhyme scheme is ABBA ACCA DEDEDE {with a subtle break between the first and second groups of four lines, and between the first 8 and following 6}. The form overall is that during the first eight lines, a dilemma or situation is described and in the second six, it is resolved or changed.

Battle Worthy Spring

I fain would have a battle-worthy Spring

To spite cold Winter's crude and cruel designs.

Invoked by her, our tired and weary sighs,

Our dirges and our mournful carols ring.

And winter's vice!—her mortal arrows sing—

Snow; snow; in drifting, streaming lines

The rain and weeping, howling wind betimes

Encircle dwellings all, with icy wings.

But sunlight warms, inspires our tongues to dance

With soft, sly songs of coming season's cheer

And words of buds and blooming. Every chance

Of stolen sunshine gives us reason more to leer

As wounded Winter with her shattered lance

Admits a battle-worthy Spring for one more year.

{It's coming guys!}

Second poem: (no name yet - another Shakespearean Sonnet)
We hold our breaths one season of each year.
Fall, spring and summer bring us joy; surprise;
Winter freezes through – snow in shocked eyes,
And cold outlines the warmth within our cheer.
A stouter heart arises out of fear
Our motto: we will champion, not enjoy.
We suspect charming Winter’s beauty ploy.
We hide our weakness from those held most dear.
But restlessness drags us outside in guilt.
One moment, just to feel the wind, I swear.
We laugh, grasp living white as if a hilt—
For the innocent spectator to appear.
And soon the snow is unarranged and spilt –
It’s pattern spelling love of winter clear.




Um...let me know if you have a good name for the second poem!! Critique is welcome. That's what they're here for. Like I said, we have to try so we can make mistakes. 

The rest of the gulp.

Chapter 1: Of Dangerous Bifocals  Part 2
   Hunger was the only force that could pull Maleya out of her area when she didn't want to. She pressed her thumbprint into the handle of the fridge before opening it. When she did, blue light shone on her favorite foods. Maleya pulled out feta cheese curds. She turned and leaned against the counter. To her right the counter ran in a U shape, curving around in front of her again six feet away. Across this counter from her, tan-ish hair bobbed and twisted, disappearing momentarily sometimes before coming back into view. Maleya smiled and threw a cheese curd at it. The tan-ishness ducked behind the counter and Barley tossed her a thumbs-up before nimbly retrieving the fallen cheese curd.

            "Leya."

            "Mmm."

            "You have writers 'spert stuff in a while."

            "Mm-hmm. S'why I'm eating." Another cheese curd. She savored the spices and the crumbling tangy cheese against the roof of her mouth.

            "Kay. Leya, think I'll ever be an expert?" It was a ridiculous question, which may have been why Barley loved asking it so often.

            "You're not practiced in the art of failing, so my suppositions are that yes, one day you too will be a spert." Half of a face appeared above the counter, cut abruptly off at the bridge of a nose. Tan hair and blue eyes stared at deep brown hair and green eyes.

            "Good." Barley's eyes thanked Maleya seriously. "In what?"

            "What do you love?"

            "Knowing."

            "Barley!"

            The eyes widened. "Why not? Other people have made up new expertesses before."

            "Areas of expertise, Barley."

            "Expertesses. It's a new word."

            "Um...Barley? Words are not invented." Maleya looked serious. Barley rolled his eyes and propped his chin on the counter.

            "D'they really? You're such a parrot, Maleya. You say everything you hear in your writer's class thingy because you're so scared to be different, a cross-over, to be a writer-techy, because people don't like that. So what? What can anyone do to you?"

            "Lot's of things."

            "Leya, seriously."

            "People could take away everything I've been working on. Everything. You don't know what that means."

            "Ok, ok. But whadda you really think about words. Aren't they invented? Do they always gotta come from the right people?"

            Barley, you know too much. You figure out so much more than anyone else would. It's because you always have to know! Maleya didn't voice her exasperation. It was better to just answer Barley's question. "Ok, fine. I don't think words grow. But I don't think they're invented either," she cast a superior glance at Barley, "they are discovered. They wait, hovering on the fringe of consciousness, dancing out of reach of our thoughts when we reach for them, and then slipping in when we need them and forget to look for them. It's perfection."

            "That's why you're a writer," Barley stated. They stared at each other for a few minutes.

            "I want a drink," Maleya intoned, pushing her off the counter. A cupboard opened and the tap started running.

            "That's why you're a techy." Barley stood up all the way and leaned against the counter, watching Maleya drink her water.

            "Barley, you have no idea."

            "But I will." Barley grinned and held a slender black wire, barely visible even in the brightness of the kitchen.

            "Is that a microphone?"

            "Mm-hmm. I've got a bunch. Dad brought 'em home," Barley championed grinning. Maleya sighed. Her father was the only real techy, and it was dangerous for him to be bringing supplies home to his family. It was hard to say exactly why, though. All areas of expertise just kept to themselves, without sharing what they had or what they knew with other areas, unless there was a finished product that would benefit everybody. Maleya's dad had always been bringing things home because his literal area was in the house, where he preferred to work on things. Naturally Maleya and Barley had grown up with more than their share of tech knowledge.

            Knowing some things about tech wasn't so much a problem, because everyone was allowed to have some tech. But not too much. The Hominy's had too much. Even that wasn't such a problem, except that they used it, instead of just knowing. Of course using the knowledge made them more proficient in it, and soon Maleya's dad had begun telling the children not to flaunt their tech knowledge. They obeyed. But Maleya still used it.

            And then had come her idea to use it in conjunction with writing. There she had crossed a line. Nobody knew about it yet, not even Barley, to whom Maleya told everything. It was too dangerous. It was mixing two areas of expertise. It would change the way things were. It would blur lines and confuse both techies and writers. It was a fascinating secret, and Maleya was confident that it was worth the time she spent on it, and worth the difficulty and the isolation of hiding it, but it was getting more difficult.

            "Leya."

            "What?!" Maleya scowled, confused by her thoughts.

            "You really should go. The writers' expert meeting is in a few minutes." Barley only used full words when he was serious.

            "I know." Maleya tried to ignore what she was thinking and went to her room – her area – to gather her manuscript and pert-paper for notes. Confounded technology.

             
{Hey - same rule here as before. Comment. And thank you kindly for reading, friend.}

*GULP*

Eyes closed, fingers crossed, I'm handing it over. 

Taggitenreadit. Pretty pretty please?

I'm posting the first part of a story I'm working on. Before you proceed, you must promise to comment. I don't care if it's only one word - I just want to know what you honestly think. Except still be nice. But comment regardless. I command thee. (I will be sneaky and check my page views and compare them to comments to make sure you all did. Don't think you'll get away with it. -_-  )

Chapter 1: Of Dangerous Bifocals
{Part two of chapter one to follow in a later post.}

Wind snapped through the grass with angry speed.

            "Nope," Maleya muttered darkly. She slid her fingers across the screen and tapped a different tab. Another tap and a keyboard appeared below codes dictating grass texture and strength. With one fingertip, she highlighted a section of code, deleted it, and typed something to replace it. She grabbed a pair of bulky, thick-lensed bifocals and slipped them on over her own tiny glasses. Tapping the screen again, she changed the control from touch to voice.

            "Wind snapped through the grass with angry speed."

            The bifocals – screens in reality – glowed for a moment, then grass appeared in them, waving and bending under a heavy wind. Maleya watched five seconds of footage before the motions began to repeat themselves.

            "Um...." she searched desperately for a word or a sentence that would keep the story going. “The two field mice were...were...unperturbed by um...the fury above them." Images flickered belatedly across the lenses. Two something-or-other’s blobbed together sheltered by the waving grass. Maleya grabbed the microphone and pulled it as far from the touch-screen as the limited cord would allow.

            "The mice scurried!" she exclaimed trying to keep her tones natural. Frustration was taking over. The blobs in the vision of the bifocals shrank and became detailed images of the tiny rodents specified. With deft fingers she took control of the screen again, delicately dragging an iconic marker back to the first word, which had appeared on a digital paper with handwriting coded to her own.

            "And...open book." This time she paused the pantomime before the mice came into the story. Sky: blue. Grass: improvised mixes of green and tan. Soil: barely visible through the thick growth. Slowly Maleya nodded. Tap. Story deleted. Maleya removed the bifocals and slipped them into a soft velvet bag.

            "Now..." Maleya dug a sloppy sheaf of notebook paper out of a drawer in her desk and began to read it aloud to the screen.

            Maleya was a writer. Well, really she was a renegade. But she was supposed to be a writer. Writing was what she did. It was what she knew. It was her passion. Everyone knew Maleya was a writer. Even Maleya did. But that didn't change her mind about anything. It just scared her.

            Barley wasn't an anything yet. He would be, soon enough. Everyone knew that. He'd be an expert in something. He'd be the talk of the town. He'd learn from the best and improve on their methods, until he was the best. But he was still trying to figure out which pert to ex.

            Well, currently he wasn't figuring anything about exes or perts. Barley was rather viciously concerned with knowing. He seemed to always know what was going on with everybody in the family. It was his business, somehow. He'd pop up whenever anybody had an idea, or a new plan, or a change of plan, or a challenge. He was always the first to know. How he knew when to pop up was a mystery. Most likely he had programmed his intuition to sense that sort of thing – that time when someone is bursting with an idea or nervous about an appointment and just aching to tell someone. It wasn't an annoying thing. Barley was the family calendar. It was his quirk. Everyone had one of those too, just like they had an area of expertise. Things just were that way.

            There was really nothing wrong with the way things were. Everyone was an expert at something and their expertise usually became obvious when they were 10 or 11. Everyone had a quirk, and it always lasted at least a year or too after you became an expert (only cropping up occasionally thereafter.) Everyone was beautiful in some way. If you didn't have soulful eyes, you were bound to have beautiful lips. If you didn't have those, well your complexion was probably perfect. More people than not had several of these handy features. Most people only had a limited amount of techy stuff. It was typical. But the Hominy family had a bunch of tech knowledge and equipment. That part wasn't supposed to be that way. Only Maleya really took it too far though. But no one knew, so even though it wasn't supposed to be that way, it was, and it didn't matter.

***

       

Book order

My eternal gratitude to those 3 (three?!) faithful friends who actually took the time to vote. I'm giving you a list of the books that the first sentences were from - you are now obligated to read the books you voted for. Notice that there is no 11th book. Ah. The sad truth is that my short story didn't pass the first sentence test. (Inna, I had hoped for better things...) Sigh.

1. The Fellowship of the Ring J. R. R. Tolkien

2. The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley.

3. A Single Shard by Linda Sue park

4. Bat 6 by Virginia Euwer Wolff

5. Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss.

6. The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

7. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

8. Crazy Love by Francis Chan with Danae Yankoski

9. The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt.

10. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

First Sentence Test.

This is an intense test. It takes lots of studying to pass it. It takes tons of practice. But it takes even more skill. It's a short test, but you'd probably sweat buckets waiting for results from the FST. It's called the First Sentence Test.

It works like this. Judges vote on whether or not they would read your book and the answer is entirely based on their opinion of the first sentence.

Don't worry though. Today you're a judge. I'm providing you with the first sentences from several different books. They'll be numbered, so all you have to do is read the sentence, find the corresponding poll (also numbered) and vote. You will need to select 11 answers to vote on each book. Take note of how you voted for each (or some) sentence(s) and leave a comment regarding why you voted that way, or what you think of the sentence. To avoid scientific variables and all that jazz, I'm not giving you the authors or the book titles.

1. "When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."

2. "Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn't get to live it very often."

3. "'Eh, Tree-ear! Have you hungered well today?' Crane-man called out as Tree-ear drew near the bridge."

4. "Now that it's over, we are telling."

5. "Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't."

6. "In a city called Stonetown, near a port called Stonetown Harbor, a boy named Reynie Muldoon was preparing to take an important test."

7. "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."

8. "What if I said, 'Stop praying'?"

9. "In his workroom at the top of the tower, Decree, the Prime Minister, was pacing up and down."

10. "Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived right where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed by alders and ladie's eardrops and traversed a little brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; itprobably  was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof."

11. "Deep in the soul of my family is a trait that lies hidden for most of the year but becomes manifest in mid-November."

Life is! (by Faith) Pt. 2

I am just collecting my thoughts as I write this so don't criticize me for thinking abstractly or drawing strange connections that don't relate. This is a rought draft that's published.



Yesterday during my devo's I was unsure what to read in my Bible. I wanted something that would make sense. I wanted something that I hadn't been reading over mindlessly for a few weeks already. I wanted something that would give me another Life is! blog post. Finally I sacrificed all areas except the second one and started in on Romans 1.



I'm going to go re-read it now.



Only one verse really stood out to me last night: Romans 1:17 "For in the Gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, 'The righteous will live by faith.'" (This verse quotes Hubakkuk 2:4)



Then today as I read, I noticed that word so many more times. Romans 1:5, 8 and 12. "Through him and for his name's sake we received grace and apostleship to call people from among the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith...First, I thank my God...because your faith is being reported all over the world...that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith."



I gathered that we are to live lives of righteousness through faith. To organize this like an boring professor-ish lecture, I should present a working definition of faith. I won't be elaborate. Read Hebrews 11:1, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."



What questions remain? How do we live by faith? What do we do that requires faith?

I'm really not going to answer the questions, I'm just going to put down my insights about faith and you determine if you still have questions (which you then procede to leave posted as comments.)



"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certian of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith he still speaks, even though he is dead." Hebrews 11:1-4



Wouldn't you like to leave a legacy like that? Wouldn't you love to have people talking about you and your faith after the great-grand children who attended your funeral are dead and gone...2,000 years after your favorite niece sang that horrible swinging tune at your funeral...all those years and people talk about your faith and not the flowers on your casket! That's what I'm talkin' - sign me up!



Moving on.



"And without faith it is impossible to please God because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exixts and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him." Hebrews 11:6.



That is a powerful verse. Read it again.



Stop and think about it.



We can't live as Christians without faith. It just doesn't work. It's like trying to make a picture-perfect puzzle without using all the pieces. Not gonna happen.



As I was reading Crazy Love by Francis Chan I came across this question. "What are you doing right now that requires faith?"

For me, it takes faith to serve God. I want to do what I want to do so that I achieve what I want to achieve. But it takes all my faith to stop inviting Self to drive my car and make him sit in the back seat (or lock him in the trunk.) It's hard to keep reminding myself that God has a plan for my life, and it is the best plan possible for me. It won't always be what I want it to be, but it will be His plan, and that is all I need to know. In theory. In truth, I am constantly asking Jesus to pull over so I can run back and unlock that trunk. Ish-ta. Horrible idea. It never works out the way I think it should. I usually end up crying and clutching the keys on the side of the road, or handing them back to Jesus and leaning my aching head on his shoulder.

I want to leave this as a challenge to us.

"What are we doing right now that requires faith?"

Related blog post by a friend.

Books you MUST read. And why.

In the past I have posted book lists as posts and books as a list on my sidebar, but now I'm going to select a few books that you must read and tell you why you must read them. Whenever somebody tells me to read a book I immediately ask what it's about, so it's only fair that I tell you why as well as what. I begin.



The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. This is an excellent book about one year in a boy's life during which he becomes a man. The story line is entertaining, flowing, and unexpected. The words are well chosen and the story is very well written. The theme of the book is deep and wonderful. (Did I seriously just write a review without giving anything away? *Cheers!*)



The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien. It's a fantasy set in another world. I would describe the world as magical because simply put, it is. But the word "magical" seemed so fairy-like and flippant. That is not this book! This book has a deep history in other tales which enhances the action and the understanding of this book. It is a story that is very mystical and wonderful, but very human (in a non-human way), real, and even painful. Beautiful beyond description. For a good description by C. S. Lewis go here.



The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley. This book is made amazing by its highly amusing, rare and marvelous perspective. I cannot recommend a more entertaining or relieving read. I was amazing when I read this book, and you will be too (because you WILL read it. No?)


Now. Your turn. Leave a comment and tell me 1. If you have already read any of the above and 2. If you have any books that I MUST read. Also leave a comment if: I must leave a longer list. I must be more convincing (Really, people?) or You have not already left a comment on this post.