Giving Thanks...before Christmas

It seems that holiday decorations go up earlier and earlier each year, with hardly a breath between
Halloween and the hallowed season of Christmas. In our frenzied anticipation of yuletide cheer, I sense an air of desperation. I totally get it. Like the song from the musical, Mame, proclaims, "We need a little Christmas, right this very minute!" Indeed, we do. But. Let's not just skim over Thanksgiving as a day to try out roasting turkey as practice for Christmas dinner. Let's stop and relish this quiet day, Christmas's gentle sister.

With this thought in mind, I composed a little poem today for some "compare and contrast" between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Full disclosure: it's not art, but it's from the heart.

Giving Thanks Before Christmas

by Kathryn Wood Ahearn

Christmas is cake, and Thanksgiving's a pie.

Thanksgiving is earth, and Christmas is sky.

Thanksgiving's a sweater—Christmas, a gown.

One wears a cap while the other, a crown.

                                    ~

Thanksgiving's a whistler, and Christmas, a choir.

One plugs in bright lights, one stokes a warm fire.

Thanksgiving's a turkey—Christmas, a dove.

Both celebrate blessings, and friendship, and love.

How perfect Thanksgiving preludes Christmas glee,

a day to give thanks before lighting the tree.

                                    ~

Christmas will sparkle, Thanksgiving will glow.

Both honor the one from whom all blessings flow.

Thanksgiving is sunlight, and Christmas, a star,

but wise men and family both travel afar

to give up their thanks, then give presents away,

gifts from the heart by camel or sleigh.

                                    ~

They say Christmas comes but one day a year,

but a time to count blessings is always right here.

So give thanks each night as you kneel down to pray

and honor the lessons of Thanksgiving Day.

Thanks for stopping by.  Y'all come back, now (and have a Happy Thanksgiving!)

Kate

Taking Time...isn't wasting time

 It's been awhile since I "took the time" to write a blog post. There always seemed to be other projects to
which I needed to bend my efforts. But then, this morning, I began mulling over the whole concept of taking the time to do something and knew it was time to write another post...aimed squarely at yours truly. (And if any of you see some benefit here, then...bonus!) 

I had a bit of a Eureka moment when I thought about what taking time means. It's not about taking precious time away from other things we deem more worthy. It's not losing time. It's taking ownership of time. We take it into our keeping. 

So with that notion in mind, I thought of a few things for which I need to take the time on a regular basis. Perhaps some will speak to you, as well.

Take the time to:

Listen. 

To people of all ages, even to those on opposite sides of the "fence," whatever fence it is that divides us. Perhaps, especially to them. It doesn't mean we condone their opinions, but it does mean we recognize them as fellow human beings. And, really, if we are arming ourselves for whatever social or political battles we see fit to engage in, then we sure better know what the other folks are saying. Not just saying, but feeling. And that, my friend, takes real listening. Not just listening with our ears, but with our hearts and minds.

To the sounds of nature. There is another world out there, beyond our human making, and it is alive with sound! I find the best time to plug into that world is early morning before so many of us fill the air with our vehicles, and lawnmowers, and radios, and words. It's a reminder that we share this planet with innumerable other beings, ones that live their lives alongside us and, if we listen, fill it with beautiful and fascinating song and chatter.

Read.

I'm aiming this specifically at my writer-side. Reading enlarges our world and allows us to live vicariously through a universe of characters, both fictional and historical, who go places and do deeds beyond our ken. As a writer, immersing myself in a well-written book helps inform my own writing for the better. ("Just look how effortlessly this author spins dialogue..." "Those short, punchy sentences really help build up the tension in this chapter..." etc) And even reading less than stellar material can be a literary object lesson. ("Whoa. I better watch out for these kind of run-on sentences in my manuscript...")

Practice Self-Care.

An especially difficult concept since this seems to be simultaneously time-wasting and self-serving. But, honestly, how well can we do the other more "important" things if our health suffers: mental, physical, or both? 

As a writer, hyper-focusing on the computer screen in front of me, this means I must set my alarm and get up and move around (particularly my stiff neck and shoulders) on a regular basis. My physical therapist, trying to help me alleviate my terrible neck stiffness and pain, is the source of this advice. He wants me to take a break every thirty minutes. Thirty minutes! I'm trying. 

Now, this next bit of self-care will surely bring out the scatological fifth-grade humorist in us, but it's important to take time to...poop. Yes, I said it. When I grew up, our family bathrooms were devoid of reading material. We were encouraged to spend as little time there as possible. It wasn't until I began visiting the bathrooms of friends that I discovered the whole "reading room" concept. ("What the heck are all these magazines doing in the bathroom?!") Needless to say, years of chronic constipation taught me that some things just can't be rushed. 

Take time to rest. If we grind ourselves down to the bone (again, mentally or physically,) there is nothing left with which to carry out that important work we are driving ourselves to perform.  And sleep. Oh my goodness, food of the gods. Science is now telling us that sleep isn't a waste of time; it's essential to our brain cells to regroup and revive and keep on ticking away.

Savor Food.

Think of this as a subset of Self-Care. Even the most humble of meals, deserves our attention. After all, without food, where would we be? Nowhere. And, I've been told that focusing on each bite we take, really tasting it, noticing its texture, is one way to slow down our consumption and actually eat less. Eat less, enjoy more. Mindful eating. Sounds reasonable to me. And, lucky for me, I'm married to a man who loves to cook! Win/win! (Time to pull this post together because I smell something delectable coming from the kitchen...)

-There are many more things for which I need to take the time, but this is a start. I welcome your own thoughts on taking time in the comments, below.

Thanks for stopping by. Y'all come back, now!

Kate

Baking a Book...don't judge a book or cake by its cover!

As I was preparing my latest cake, celebrating member birthdays for my writers group, it dawned on me how similar the baking process was to the writing process. Especially with this cake, baked in the shape of a giant, open book, with its particular challenges. I have to say that, in the end, it was delicious and well-received, but it was quite a journey getting there!

Choosing the Confection Type/Literary Vehicle:

First, I had to make a choice of the type of baked goods.

Cupcakes/Short Stories? Cookies/Poetry? Cake/Novel? OK, cake it was. A full-fledged novel of a cake seemed most appropriate for a birthday party.

 Flavor/ Genre:

Chocolate/Mystery? Coffee/Literary? Coconut/Fantasy? Citrus/Humor?

Oh, we all needed a good laugh, so citrus was my choice.

 

Cake Size/Word Count:

Single Layer-Double Layer-Large Sheet/60,000-120,000 Words?

Well, the book-shaped cake pan I purchased for the occasion determined this—a large, very large sheet cake, the equivalent of three cake mixes worth. With the frosting, my cake weighed in at a whopping ten pounds. (I weighed myself, empty-handed, on our bathroom scale, then stepped back up on the scale balancing the finished cake in my hands.)

This was not going to be a fast read! If it were a book, it would be pushing close to a 200,000- word tome. At least there would be plenty extra cake to hand out to all the group members to take home to their families!

 

Customizing the Cake/Literary Voice:

Just as the author’s own unique word choice and narrative style determine the voice of a book, so does adding those extras to a basic recipe to make the end product special. I normally make my baked goods completely from scratch, but this time I began with three boxes of orange cake mix to which I added/exchanged some extra ingredients (orange juice, sour cream, vanilla instant pudding mix, orange zest) that made it sing with moist flavor.

 

Icing the Cake/Mixing Genres:

All went well until I got to the icing of the cake. I wanted a lemony cream cheese-based frosting for the balance of flavors, but I needed a frosting that would dry firm enough to allow me to write on it with edible markers. So...I created a combo icing, much like mixing genres. (Fantasy and humor. Literary and mystery. Harder than I thought!)

 

First, I laid down my yummy cream cheese frosting and let it chill well in the refrigerator. Then, I (attempted) to coat the cream cheese frosting with buttercream frosting. All that lovely, soft, slippery cream cheese icing didn’t make a very sturdy foundation for the heftier buttercream! And, sadly, even after allowing the buttercream topping to dry, it still wasn’t firm enough for writing with the edible markers. Argh! So, I made matters even more complicated by adding medallions of firm, glossy royal icing on top of the buttercream (on top of the cream cheese on top of the orange cake.) By then, I was running low on time to have my masterpiece completed for the night’s meeting.

 

Checking online for ways to make royal icing firm up faster, I discovered the quickest method was warming it with a heat gun. My husband just happened to have one of those in his workshop, so I plugged it in and set to firming up the royal icing. Of course, you can already see the problem. Heat is great for drying out royal icing in a jiffy, but also for melting its buttercream and cream cheese underpinnings. Having failed to first create a high enough border between the medallions and the rest of the top of the cake, the confectionary dam broke in places and royal icing oozed out of its assigned position. My cake was taking on a decidedly surreal Salvador Daliesque appearance.

 

But! I finally wrestled the frosting back into place (kind of) and was able to write words on the royal icing medallions. Not beautifully, but at least somewhat legibly. Then, there was the challenge of storing the cake before its evening presentation. You guessed it. Mixing genres and frosting were, again, the issue. Cream cheese frosting requires refrigeration, but the moisture inside a fridge will soften royal icing and make it run. Noooooo! So, that’s why, our home office that has its own window air conditioner was sealed off with the AC running full blast. We turned it into a giant, dry, cooling area for the giant mixed-genre cake!

 

The time arrived for transporting the cake to the meeting. With no container big enough to safely cover it, I sat in the backseat of our car, balancing the cake on my lap. “No sudden stops or fast corners!” I instructed my husband.

 

We made it with the cake in one piece and it was, after all the drama, a hit with our beloved group members. They are astute enough readers and writers to know you can’t always judge a book by its cover! (And they know me well enough to know my heart was in the right place even if I did make some misguided frosting decisions.) So, lesson learned. Think ahead when baking or writing and if you decide to mix genres, be sure they are compatible!

Thanks for stopping by! Y'all come back, now.

Kate

If Spring Had a Color...then yellow, it must be

It's the end of April, and Spring has come at last. Not the false spring of February, or the teasing spring of March, but finally, the true Spring! I'm celebrating with an original poem inspired by that most springy of colors: yellow. All of the photos are ones that I took in my own backyard (with the exception of the forsythia and Carolina jasmine which I let slip past my camera lens this year—those are from the royalty-free Pixabay site, bless 'em.)

 Spring Yellow/Yellow Spring

by Kathryn Louise Wood

If Spring had a color,

then yellow, it must be.

Buttercups, and daffodils,

and Carolina jasmine,

forsythia, and dandelions,

and yellow powdered pollen.

It's as though the flowers,

 and their magical dust—

                       

 collected by the bees,

 and spread from bloom to bloom—

 encourage the young sun

  to linger, ever longer,

  until the old world dances

  in the golden youth of Spring.

Thanks for stopping by. Y'all come back now. (And Happy Spring!)

Kate

On Writing...just do it

("Foreword"— Please forgive any wonky formatting you see in this and future posts. I am still trying to get a handle on Blogger's new version! )               With my first traditionally published book, Zephyr Stone and the Moon Mist Ghost, being launched by Blue Ink Press, next month, I am in the midst of developing my author website. One of my pages will be a section "On Writing." And, so, I thought I'd give you a preview of my soon-to-be-published website by sharing this page with you, ahead of time.      When asked my advice on writing, my words are simple. Just do it. Set out a time each day (or each week,) pour yourself a cup or glass of your favorite beverage and set pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and start writing. This part of your writing is for your eyes only. You know that popular phrase, “Dance like nobody’s watching?” Well, write like nobody’s reading over your shoulder. Not your family, not your friends, and certainly not your former English teacher. It doesn’t have to be pretty and it probably won’t be. The procrastinator’s best friend is perfectionism. Trust me, I know this intimately. You can and will always go back and clean things up, hunt for that perfect word, run down that bit of research, and polish that diamond in the rough until it shines. But...if you don’t write something down, there will be nothing to polish. 

My second piece of advice is also simple. Read. Read, read, read. Read within your current genre, read outside of your current genre, read the classics, read the new, read the great, and read the not-so-great. We learn from it all. Read. Write. Repeat.                                                       

My third suggestion, is to find yourself a group of Kindred Spirits, either in person or online, in which you share your written work with one another and where each member reads and offers impressions of the writing. You will learn at least as much from the act of reading and thoughtfully considering the writing of others as you will from the insights they provide into your own writing. I am so very fortunate to be a member of a wonderful and supportive local writers group that meets twice monthly for this purpose. Even in the time of Covid 19, we continued to meet via Zoom. It has truly helped me stay sane and grounded!

I am often asked if I am a planner, creating thorough outlines and character sketches          before I write that first chapter, or am I a pantser, writing by the seat

of my pants without a safety net? Just like my car, I am a hybrid of the two. Long before I begin writing my new manuscript, I’ve thought in generalized terms about the plot, the setting, the characters and what they have at stake in the world I will be creating around them, as well as the genre, and the target audience. Then, as I consider the book as a whole, I write out a loose outline of the action. Opening, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. I include my main characters, but leave them LOTS of leeway to expand upon themselves and introduce me to supporting characters I didn’t even know I needed. This flexibility allows my book to live and breathe as it takes on a life of its own. But the general outline makes sure my characters don’t lead me too far astray and down a rabbit hole that might take me weeks from which to dig back out. 

My favorite music to write by? The sound of a fire crackling in the fireplace (or a virtual one on my computer or TV,) the sounds of the natural outside world: birds, rain, wind, and waves.  When it comes to manmade music, it has to be purely instrumental. I am way too verbally-oriented to tune out lyrics. That goes for either vocal music or even tunes associated with lyrics known to me. I will hear the unsung words in my head and they interfere with my concentration. I enjoy movie soundtracks for background music, especially music from the Harry Potter films.

One more thought. I love to bake. (Check out my recipe Face Book page, Kate’s Giving Plate:
https://www.facebook.com/KatePlate15 ) And I see a direct correlation between baking and writing. Both take forethought, assembling the right ingredients, measuring them out into workable proportions, mixing them together, then allowing them enough time in the right environment to bake to delicious fruition. Food for thought, you might say! With that in mind, I look forward to meeting with school children as we step into my literary kitchen and “bake books” together. 

Thanks for stopping by. Y'all come back, now. (And "write on!")

Kate

Old Dog, Young Year...Wolf Moon

Having had both big and small dogs share his life over the years, my brother once told me that little dogs often live longer but...they were old for a lot longer, too. This is certainly playing out with our experience with our dear little Shih Tzu, Minna, who turned fourteen, this past December. She has lost her sight and  has become increasingly frail, suffering what her vet calls "cognitive decline." In other words, doggy dementia. Hers mostly takes the form of getting turned around in odd places, getting "stuck" in corners or behind doors, and barking for no apparent reason. Our younger dog, Sophie, just looks at her then, with a puzzled look on her face, as though trying to understand what she's

talking about. 

But just as with some old humans, who have a sudden decline in physical and mental abilities, it's important to keep in mind that in the big picture of a lifespan, these last years of fragility are just a tiny part of the life they give to the world. And so, I was inspired to write a poem after our wee-hours-of-the-morning experience, today. (Please forgive the awkward formatting. I've yet to master the new version of Blogger!)

Old Dog, Young Year, Wolf Moon

by Kathryn Louise Wood

~Since her decline in body and mind,

blind in eye though not in soul,

we watch and listen for signs of distress,

and come to her aid when she's stuck behind doors.

And ask, without hope of answering word,

what it is that she needs when she croaks out a bark,

as, sometimes, her blind eyes stare out into space

and she shouts to the empty air that surrounds her.

Now, our sleep comes in fits and in frustrating starts

as she "woofs" in our bed, just under her breath,

and our muscles clench tight at the 3am hour,

we know that soft woof will reach desperate pitch.

Then it's jump-up-and-carry her into the night,

out the back door in the wintery cold.

But, sometimes, the chore is a gift, unexpected,

as early this morning, when urgency barked.

I gathered her up, throwing coat over gown,

and carried her out for her needed relief,

into the frost (prayed inspiration would strike her,)

and hoped she'd remember our purpose outside.

I noticed the snow-laden ground was quite glowing

and, turning my gaze away from her snuffling,

my tired eyes were filled with the shimmer of moonlight,

from a moon, crystal clear, in the frozen expanse.

And, then, I remembered its sky-spirit name,

the one for the first full moon of the year.

Then, looking back down at our tiny canine,

knew her heart was as large as the Wolf Moon was full.

I sensed the wild blood that coursed through her veins

as the clear lunar light set her form all a' glimmer,

bathing her body with bright primal beauty,

her fierce, ageless spirit belying her years.

Though shivering cold, warmth flooded my heart

for the privilege of caring for such a dear soul

who the universe granted our love to entwine, 

and the years of sheer joy she's brought to our world.~

Thanks for stopping by. Y'all come back, now!

Kate (and Minna)

-All photos by either Kate or husband, Bill Ahearn-