-1-
Okay, I'm starting out with a bad pun. I suggest reading it aloud, for the full impact:
What's the difference between roast beef and pea soup?
. . . well, anyone can roast beef.
-2-
Here's a cool excerpt from the book I'm reading about St. Elizabeth of Hungary, by Nesta de Robeck:
"The one fact always associated with Saint Elizabeth is the miracle of th roses; in her story it takes the place of the Preaching to the Birds in that of Francis, indeed its poetry cannot fail to delight anyone. Such stories, however when divorced from their context, tend to limit and therefore to falsify the proportions of sanctity. The saints are witnesses to the reality of Christ's triumph, for they show what human beings can be when they are faithful to the divine grace of baptism and to the call of God. They show the redeemed creature suffering and working with Christ using His weapons and with Him conquering the evil of the world. They stand as witnesses to Christ's vivifying presence in His Church and to the fulfillment of God's promises in our midst. These wonderful human beings cannot be known though any single episode."
(emphasis mine)
-3-
I'm looking forward to celebrating St. Nicholas' Day this year, on Dec. 6. We've never managed to do it yet, but it sounds like so much fun. I want to make sure to have, along with a treat or two, an orange to put in each of the kids' shoes, because I remember that when I went to school up in northern Canada, we always got a bag with candy and an orange in it at Christmas. And when I was in northern Canada? fresh citrus really WAS a treat.
-4-
I'm excited about the new Anglican province that looks like it's forming here in the States. Excited and nervous. If there is an Anglican - really Anglican, in communion with the rest of teh Communion - AND orthodox place to go here, how can I not go? But I have the awful feeling that it'll mean leaving most of my parish behind, and that's a sickening feeling. For some it might be "property over theology" and for some it will be "leaving is never the answer; leaving is always surrender".
Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe my whole parish family will leave together. That would be a wonder and a miracle, and God can do it. Because I think it would not be leaving. I think we have been left, and it would be rejoining.
-5-
I'm rewriting a finished novel, which is a great good thing, but I've also started writing a new one and it's so much fun. Rewriting is work, and so is writing sometimes, but I get such a high out of writing new fiction. It's like a rollar-coaster ride and the wind off of the sea and the bliss of an endorphin high all rolled into one.
I am also thinking this book needs at least one duel in it. I've always liked a story with a good duel.
-6-
One of the best duels I've ever read was in a short story by Steve Miller and Sharon Lee, where the hero was provoked into a duel, and, because he was the one provoked, he got to chose the weapon. Because his provoker was a toad and a snob, the hero chose water balloons, the better to embarrass his opponent and ended up, among other things, breaking the provoker's nose, with a particularly hard throw. So awesome.
Georgette Heyer is also the mistress of writing the really good duel. If you're interested, I recommend "The Masqueraders" to start.
-7-
Am I the only one who thinks the new Star Trek trailer looks lame, but who totally wants to see the movie anyway?
More quick takes over at Jen's Conversion Diary blog; check them out!
peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
Showing posts with label St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Show all posts
Friday, November 21, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
writing and the morning.
The day stretches before me, and I'm curious about what it holds. It's my first breathing space of the day; after the rush of breakfast and diapers and nursing, and cleaning up from breakfast and reading some books and nursing again, the babies are down for their naps and the kids are down for their quiet times. Or, rather, up, since I'm the one sitting in the living room at the bottom of the stairs.
I'm always puzzled at what to do with this short half hour or forty-five minutes of peace. Do I pray? do I relax? do I try to get some chores done? do I write?
Often I do some combination of the four. I'll start by puttering around a bit with the house stuff: move this over there, put that away, start this part of dinner so the end of the day is less harried. Today it was getting all the dirty clothes into the laundry bags and fishing out a recipe for herbed bread that I want to make to go with tonight's creamy veggie soup. Then a bit of relaxation: reading a snatch of TWOP's recap of Survivor (the one TV show we actually watch on the TV - over at my mother-in-law's; what can I say? it's become a Grandma-time tradition: dinner and Survivor). And now the tea is on, and I might read through the morning daily devotion in the BCP and then try to get a bit more of my novel rewritten.
The novel now, that's a thing. I wrote it in the small space between when my son started sleeping through the night and when I got pregnant with Lucy and Anna. Now that Lucy and Anna are - not sleeping through the night - but only waking up once to nurse - I'm starting to rewrite it. I didn't expect to be doing it so soon, but my husband, who hadn't read it yet, started reading it aloud to me during our dishes-and-clean-up time that we have every night after the squirts are a in bed, and hearing the words rather than seeing them has given me a gift I never expected to have: the gift of being able to experience my own words as a reader, and not a writer. I'm terribly afraid Adam has just let himself in for an entire lifetime of reading my work back to me. Brave man.
So I am working on the little, obvious fixes that I've noted. Add dialogue here. Make that character more consistant throughout. Show, don't tell, that they had a lot of fun at the dinner party. And in the midst of these little changes, I'm hoping that the bigger one makes itself clear. The story starts with a flourish, and ends with a delightful build-up of tension and an even more delightful release, but there is something missing from the beginning-middle of the book, and though I can feel the shape of what ought to be there, I don't know the specifics yet.
The shape of the change is so clear in my mind; when I talk about it, I always make the same low, round motion with my hands. But I don't know exactly how it is to be done yet. So I'm hoping that by fixing the easy things - this paragraph, that scene - I'll be able to lure the big change out of hiding. It's there, I know it, I can feel it, and I hope that by innocently working in its vicinity, while paying it no direct mind, it will come out of hiding, and show me its face.
But for now? Tea and Psalms. I've read all the way through them again, my one consistant piece of Scripture reading this year, and I'm back at the beginning: "Blessed is the man . . ."
That, and perhaps the biography of St. Elizabeth of Hungary that I got out of the library. Today is her saint day, and I know nothing about her except that one of the other liturgical blogging moms around her had her daughter dress up as St. E of H for Halloween. It made me curious, and so now I have an old, yellow hardback from the library that's going to assuage my curiosity. I should have read it last week, but I was deep in the middle of Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. That's done as of this morning though, and so to St. E of H I go!
I hope your morning goes well, and that the best possibiities of the day become reality.
peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
I'm always puzzled at what to do with this short half hour or forty-five minutes of peace. Do I pray? do I relax? do I try to get some chores done? do I write?
Often I do some combination of the four. I'll start by puttering around a bit with the house stuff: move this over there, put that away, start this part of dinner so the end of the day is less harried. Today it was getting all the dirty clothes into the laundry bags and fishing out a recipe for herbed bread that I want to make to go with tonight's creamy veggie soup. Then a bit of relaxation: reading a snatch of TWOP's recap of Survivor (the one TV show we actually watch on the TV - over at my mother-in-law's; what can I say? it's become a Grandma-time tradition: dinner and Survivor). And now the tea is on, and I might read through the morning daily devotion in the BCP and then try to get a bit more of my novel rewritten.
The novel now, that's a thing. I wrote it in the small space between when my son started sleeping through the night and when I got pregnant with Lucy and Anna. Now that Lucy and Anna are - not sleeping through the night - but only waking up once to nurse - I'm starting to rewrite it. I didn't expect to be doing it so soon, but my husband, who hadn't read it yet, started reading it aloud to me during our dishes-and-clean-up time that we have every night after the squirts are a in bed, and hearing the words rather than seeing them has given me a gift I never expected to have: the gift of being able to experience my own words as a reader, and not a writer. I'm terribly afraid Adam has just let himself in for an entire lifetime of reading my work back to me. Brave man.
So I am working on the little, obvious fixes that I've noted. Add dialogue here. Make that character more consistant throughout. Show, don't tell, that they had a lot of fun at the dinner party. And in the midst of these little changes, I'm hoping that the bigger one makes itself clear. The story starts with a flourish, and ends with a delightful build-up of tension and an even more delightful release, but there is something missing from the beginning-middle of the book, and though I can feel the shape of what ought to be there, I don't know the specifics yet.
The shape of the change is so clear in my mind; when I talk about it, I always make the same low, round motion with my hands. But I don't know exactly how it is to be done yet. So I'm hoping that by fixing the easy things - this paragraph, that scene - I'll be able to lure the big change out of hiding. It's there, I know it, I can feel it, and I hope that by innocently working in its vicinity, while paying it no direct mind, it will come out of hiding, and show me its face.
But for now? Tea and Psalms. I've read all the way through them again, my one consistant piece of Scripture reading this year, and I'm back at the beginning: "Blessed is the man . . ."
That, and perhaps the biography of St. Elizabeth of Hungary that I got out of the library. Today is her saint day, and I know nothing about her except that one of the other liturgical blogging moms around her had her daughter dress up as St. E of H for Halloween. It made me curious, and so now I have an old, yellow hardback from the library that's going to assuage my curiosity. I should have read it last week, but I was deep in the middle of Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. That's done as of this morning though, and so to St. E of H I go!
I hope your morning goes well, and that the best possibiities of the day become reality.
peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
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