What book should I blog about next?

The Reader

If you enjoy reading my reviews of books I have read, or following my thoughts as I read through a book, maybe you can give me some ideas of books you would like for me to blog about. If I have read it I will review it here. If I have not, and it is a classic on my to-read list, I will consider it for my next selection. Over the next week or two I will primarily be writing about "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", but will try to make it interesting for those who are not reading it as well. As always thank you for reading and commenting!

The Lovely Award

I have been awarded the Lovely Award by Charlotte at Cheeky Pink Girl.

“These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.”

I award the Lovely Award to

1. Leticia Velasquez at Cause of Our Joy
2. Loren Christie at Dude, Where am I?
3. Macbeth Derham at Macbeth’s Opinion
4. Heather at Doodle Acres
5. Alice Gunther at Cottage Blessings

Thank you for your lovely writing.

“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." Proverbs 25:11

I Have Walked in Many Shoes

25 Random Thoughts Game

I was tagged for this meme by Loren Christie.

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about yourself. At the end, choose people to be tagged. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you. (copy this paragraph to start your note)

Call me a conundrum if you like. Although I consider myself to be a traditional sort of person, I also eschew having to play by strict rules. When I thought of a list of 25 things, what first came to mind was a list of all the types of jobs I have held in my lifetime. So here is a list of 25 jobs I have held. They are also not random. I have put them in chronological order, starting with the first job I ever had. For temporary jobs I have put the length of time in parentheses. For jobs I still hold in some capacity, I mention no time period.

The only one of my readers I can think of who might want to carry on this meme is Leticia. If any other bloggers read this and think it might be fun, consider yourself tagged.

My 25 Jobs:

1. Babysitter
2. Birthday party puppet show entertainer (self-employed, 6 months)
3. Chocolate house maker
4. Leaf raker
5. Religious education instructor
6. Lector
7. Piano accompanist at a ballet school (3 months – they neglected to tell me it was a non-paying position)
8. Lifeguard and swim instructor (3 years)
9. Bank teller (2 years)
10. Chimney company dispatcher/office manager (2 years)
11. Pizza delivery-person (1 week – they only paid you if you got sent out on a run)
12. Research assistant (2 years, during my MA at SJU)
13. Aerobics instructor (3 months – to pay bills in between semesters)
14. Door-to-door environmentalist (1 hour – I had no idea what this job entailed. They dropped me off in a random neighborhood; I found the nearest telephone and called my husband to pick me up.)
15. Teacher’s assistant (1 year, during my post-MA credits)
16. Junior High School Teacher (1 year – I left to be a stay-at-home mom)
17. Stay-at-home mom
18. Daycare teacher (1 month – they thought the program I put together was too advanced for little minds to grasp)
19. Church nursery coordinator (6 months – I was expected to tolerate children kicking me)
20. Bookkeeper (for my husband’s business)
21. Notary (for my husband’s business)
22. Home school teacher
23. Leader of homeschool field trip group (2 years – until I sent my kids to Catholic school)
24. E-bay seller
25. Freelance writer!

The Sandwich Cookie Personality Test

You Are Traditional and Dependable

You are optimistic, friendly, and cheerful. People appreciate the hopefulness and good vibes you bring to any situation. Your life is all about change. Right now, you may be going through some changes you really don't like. You're easy going and easy to be around. You aren't picky or high maintenance. You seek security in your life. Feeling safe is important to you.

Take the Sandwich Cookie Personality Test here!

What Font Are You?

I got this quiz from my friend Loren’s blog.
My results were fitting, as this is the font I always choose.
“You Are Times New Roman. Some call you timeless - others call you a snob. Either way, you’re a class act all around. Just don’t take yourself too seriously.”
Take the quiz here.

Ordinary People

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This is the opening sentence of “Anna Karenina”, by Leo Tolstoy.

I have often heard complaints about the similarities of blogs circulating among Catholic Mothers Online. Everyone wants to paint her life in a positive light. She leaves out the dirty details. We all talk about the nice little family traditions we have. Most of us eat dinner with our families. We try to make nutritious meals and homemade items whenever possible. Many of us are stay-at-home moms, or work-at-home moms with flexible schedules, or moms who work outside the home but have found a wonderful way to strike a happy balance between home and work. If there is family drama, it is rarely mentioned in public.

All is as it should be. We come to this circle for support. We need to know that there are other moms out there who march to the tune of their own drummer, who uphold traditional Catholic values, who aren’t afraid to run counter-culture. In every day life, we are surrounded by those who are driven by pop culture – even in our Church and Catholic schools – even among other homeschoolers, sometimes.

I am in the heart of reading Anna Karenina with some other avid readers, and will have much more to say about it in the future. (There will be no spoilers here, my dear friends!) The lengthy novel is quite complex, with several threads running through three main characters and their significant others. Anna escapes a loveless marriage to an aristocrat by running away with a lover; the signs point to a tragic end. Dolly, the mother of several children, has an unfaithful husband, also a member of the aristocracy, who sees nothing wrong with his hypocrisy and deceit. Levin is the one likeable character who seems destined for happiness.

Levin is a landowner, also part of the nobility, who takes a personal interest in the well-being of the peasants who labor in his fields. On occasion he will take part in the dirty work, just because he enjoys the physical labor, which relieves his emotional and intellectual tension. He sees the beauty in the lives of these peasants. He watches the way a newlywed couple looks at one another and, for that, would readily give up all his wordly possessions. Unlike his city-dwelling peers, he sees the extraordinary qualities of ordinary people. He shuns the hypocrisy of the aristocracy, as well as the inequalities that exist between men and women, longing for a good wife who will complete him.

Through the eyes of Levin, Tolstoy lays bare all he sees that is wrong in his contemporary Russian society: especially the unfairness of how women are treated, as well as the contempt the upper classes have for those they see as beneath them.

Comparing the lives of women in nineteenth-century Russia , modern American women have it made. We have legal rights: civil rights, marital rights, rights to property and to our children. We have the right to pursue an education if we wish. We can pursue just about any job a man can do if we wish. We can also choose to stay at home and run the household. We can even do a little of both.

Do I feel lucky to be an ordinary woman living in an ordinary place, in an ordinary time? You betcha.

I guess I could count myself as a “woman of leisure”, as well, as I have been able to find the time to read Russian novels!

The picture above is a movie still from the movie “Anna Karenina” (1997). Could it be Levin and his beloved Kitty? I haven’t seen the movie (nor have I finished the book) so I don’t know.

100

Tonight I reach a bloggers’ milestone: 100 posts. As I keep to a simple theme and yet try not to be redundant, it is always a challenge to try to see and say things from a different perspective. And yet every day is new, with its share of blessings and challenges as we walk the pilgrim’s walk toward salvation. The mothers’ tasks are at once the same and ever-changing, like a river. With Christ in our hearts we can take advantage of every moment to live for Him, and to teach our children to do the same.

Tonight we went to the Sat. evening mass, as we are expecting a big snowstorm tonight. Later, after dinner, we waited outside as the local fire department sent round its Santa Claus parade. Then, with candy canes in hand, we read Isaiah 11 as part of our Jesse Tree tradition for Advent. One of the most beautiful images of the Bible is contained therein:
“The calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them.”(verse 6b)

Pictured above: “A Jesse Tree”, by Girolamo Genga, c. 1535, National Gallery, London.

How do I find appropriate art to go with the Bible verses I quote?
I recommend the web site “Bible Art: Resources for Catholic Educators”.

Blogging and the Creative Writer

What, you may ask, does blogging have to do with the novel you are writing?

There are several reasons a creative writer may start an online journal.

First of all, writing a first novel is a very lengthy and difficult journey. Believe it or not, you have time on your side. Being an unknown, no agent is knocking down your door to complete your next book. You can take as many years as you need to perfect your craft and edit your novel to meet your standards.

During this time, it can be rewarding to be able to complete shorter projects and have them published in print or online. Small successes like this tell you that someone out there believes you deserve to be in print. You can tell people you are a writer and point to your publications as proof.

A web log can accomplish this objective as well as give you immediate feedback from your audience. You can also use your web log to draw attention to your print publications, or put your web page in your “bio” to bring print readers to your blog.

Blogging gets you into writing mode and helps you to hone your writing skills. Prolific writer Leticia Velasquez, whose award-winning blog http://cause-of-our-joy.blogspot.com/ brings awareness to many important issues, says, “My blog keeps my writing in top form,and I am learning to edit myself, which is the hardest thing to do. Not every word I type is a pearl of wisdom!”

The blogosphere is an arena in which writers encourage and inspire one another. When I recently contacted my old homeschooling friend Leticia to send her some information about the abortion-breast cancer link (you can read up on this at the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute website which is bcpinstitute.org ), she (who already was quite aware of this issue) told me about her blogs (yes, she has two!).

That same night, I started my own blog. I sent the link to my sister, Joanna Gerold, also an aspiring writer and new graduate, and she started one too! Hers is about the creative process: http://part-of-something.blogspot.com/

It may not seem like one form of writing, such as the blog, may have anything to do with another, such as the novel. However, I have found that the inspiration for each type of writing runs from one to another. For example, when I am writing in my private journal I tend to have ideas for articles I might want to write for magazines. I jot them in the margin of my journal. Sometimes I have a dream that inspires a short story. These go into my idea notebook, which I keep next to my bed along with my journal. During the day, I constantly have ideas for my blog. When I am done blogging, I often think of new ideas I want to put into my novel. So it warms me up for that mode of work.

Once I get into my fictional world, it is very difficult to bring my back to earth. While I blog and write short essays on the computer, I write my novel long-hand in steno books. In the back of the book, I keep a journal of where I think I am going with a character or plot. Occasionally I have an idea for something else I want to write while in the middle of drafting a new chapter. So I don’t lost this idea, I pause what I am doing and write that down on a new page in the back of the same notebook.

I recently read some advice for writers that I did not agree with at all. (Feel free to discard any advice that runs counter to your own intuition - only you know how you work at your best!) This person said that you should concentrate on one project at a time, so as not to drain your energy from what is most important.

I think that is like saying love should not be spread out among too many people. When parents have more children, their capacity for love grows with the size of their family. Parents of large families have very large hearts! Our writing is like our children in that way. As we nurture one facet, it only helps the others.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John 1:1

Pictured above are me and my sister, Joanna Gerold, when she came last August to help me with my newborn baby.