Weekly Links

From a lunchtime walk last week.

A quick note before I get to the links: if you're a regular here, you've probably noticed that my blogging has decreased sharply. That's because, as I wrote here, I've changed my habits significantly in this new year, most especially by taking off my editor hat for awhile in order to concentrate on my writing.

And I have been writing, mostly on a novel, although I have a few non-fiction assignments I've been working on too.

The result of all this non-blog writing is that, when I turn to my poor, neglected blog at the end of the day, I find that I don't have many words left. 

I think this will change soon--I'm taking lots of notes for posts I want to write!--but for now I'm just going to keep putting up these Sunday links posts. I love sharing good writing and interesting stories. I hope you'll stick around for the links and, eventually, for some more original work from yours truly.

Okay, now onto the good stuff!


~ LINKS TO SOME INTERESTING READING AND WATCHING, FOR WHAT'S LEFT OF YOUR WEEKEND ~

-"Are You Fighting the New Greed?" - on technology addiction

-"The Distinct God of the Book of Job"

-"The Benedict Option: What It Is and Isn't": the always-helpful Karen Swallow Prior, on the book of the moment.

-"What Will You Do? You Must Read to Lead"

-"Professing to be Wise, They Became LeFous": Linking to this especially for this good point that I've not seen anyone making elsewhere:

Disney...had to go and act like this story only exists to preach a bad sermon. This is worse than the most moralistic Christian films.

-"Family Christian Stores Close, But What Happens to Authors?"

-"Simple Rules for Healthy Eating"

-"Resist the Internet"

-"'London Bridge is Down': the Secret Plan for the Days After the Queen's Death"

I hope you have a lovely Sunday, full of worship and rest!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

I am so happy right now

This isn't even close to a proper blog entry. But I am so happy right now.

My computer was gone for almost three weeks (poor baby desperately needed the attention of the awesome technicians over at Dell), and I spent the three weeks decluttering the whole house. Seriously, there's only one room I didn't get to, and the one I didn't get to is the least messy room in the house. So the housework has gotten substantially easier, just because there's less stuff to pick up.

AND, I spent the weeks doing prep. work for a variety of writing projects - editing hard copies, writing outlines, etc. And now my computer's back and I can WRITE. And I am. And I have projects and stories I'm so excited to work on, and with three weeks thinking behind me, I know EXACTLY what I want to do on them.

And I'm doing it. And I'm so happy.

And I'm listening to Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive", which is pretty and funny and horrifying, but somehow exactly the right song for my mood right now.

Anyway. I'm happy. And who's ever happy without wanting to share?  :D

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Links: Wizards, Writers, Walks, and Walls

-In Hollywood and the Hacker, Steven Lloyd Wilson critiques the way television and movies handle technology:

Movies and television have conjured computer geeks into modern wizards in perhaps the truest sense of the word that has ever been realized, conjuring hidden knowledge from the very air with arcane language and the clattering of fingers. The reality of a computer expert is a black screen full of white text, completely impenetrable to the untrained, but too intimidating for an audience according to the standards of Hollywood. Fancy monitors and slick touch interfaces, anything to put a visual face on the black hole of text that represents real coding. Never mind that there’s a reason coders type. Text is the most efficient form of communication yet devised for interface with the human animal, a dense soup of information that can nonetheless be engineered into speech and processed into meaning like lightning. Graphical interfaces? Touching the screen to select things? That’s nice for your mp3 player, but if you want to tell the computer to do something complicated enough that it would take sentences to explain to another person, you’re going to need words not pictures. If words weren’t more efficient, our vocal cords would have atrophied by now in favor of charades and pictionary.

Great explication- of the way Hollywood treats technology like magic. As Wilson says later in the piece, "The effect is being idolized without understanding the cause." It's a great essay for the person who enjoys modern entertainment, but who doesn't want to digest it without analyzing it.

-In "Hold the Scalpel!", Jim Rubarts writes:

I'd finished the manuscript for my first novel, ROOMS and through connections I made at the Mt Hermon Writers Conference I got the story in front of three agents. All three were interested in representing me. But none signed me.

Why? My story needed more work. My novel was 90% of the way there. But as agent Steve Laube says, a novel from a first time author needs to be 95% - 98% of the way there . . .

I'm fond of this classic writing anecdote which illustrates my view:

An author and a brain surgeon went golfing one spring day and the brain surgeon said, "I'm taking a six weeks off this summer to write a book!"

The author stared at his friend and said, "That's a stunning coincidence. I'm taking six weeks off this summer to become a brain surgeon."

The rest of the post is really encouraging - encouraging in that actually encouraging, tough-love sort of way, not in the there-there-it's-all-just-fine sort of way. Love it.

-Anne's post on discovering new walks around her new home is beautiful.

-Check out the cool Church Year Timeline Kelly's put up on her wall!

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Help, I'm falling in love with Ravelry

Of course, I should have joined long ago. My friend Becca told me about this awesome website, a sort of Facebook/organizer for knitters and crocheters. But I, ever fearful of the virtual timesuck, stayed away for a long, long time. (And I'm still staying away from Facebook. I hear it's evil.)
But this Christmas, as I fell back into my annual love of fiber arts (brought on by the return of - can't say cold exactly, but - not hot weather), I decided to try Ravelry.
Wow. What a lovely, lovely place. Patterns, yarn, forums about patterns and yarn . . . and all the lovely, lovely pictures.
Is it a virtual timesuck? Yes. Yes, it is.
But it's also useful. I'm able to organize all my yarns, patterns, current projects and projected projects. They're all in one place. They're not floating around in my head anymore, driving me crazy like a little, imaginary cloud of gnats*.
I love organization. I may sometimes be a frustrated J, but I'm such a J. I love organization. I'm just bad at showing that loves sometime.
But today, I'm having fun getting my Ravelry notebook in order and dreaming about all the lovely things that might come from it. (Nevermind that I have about 5 WIPs going already - crochet projects are like books to me: if reading one at a time is fun, reading five at a time must be better.)
So, if you're on Ravelry, let me know. We could be friends. :)
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell
*"Gnats" is a word that makes me laugh today, because today I taught my first-grader the "silent G before N" rule, and there's nothing to bring up the giggles like hearing your six-year-old read about the gnats that make the gnomes gnash their teeth. Especially when she still isn't quite remembering to leave off the "G" sound each time.

on the deceptive ease of the internet age

 You know, I keep putting off these chores that "will just take a minute on the computer" and wondering why I put off things that seem so easy . . . but then I sit down and do them and find that "just a minute at the computer" is a wild underestimation and then I remember "ah, yes, this is why I put this off".
Anyway, CSA renewal? Done. Registering the eldest for next semester's local homeschool P. E. class? Done. Requesting books for the subjects of the next few weeks' history and science lessons? Done. Cleaning out my email box/responding to blogs in open tabs/bookmarking interesting sites? Never, never, never done.
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

links!

You might have heard about Steve Jobs refusing to let p0rn apps into the "app store" for iPods, iPads, etc. Someone twitted him about being anti-freedom, and Jobs answered that it was about freedom, it was about freedom from p0rn. (Doesn't that remind you of Augustine's comment about how real freedom of the will is the redeemed's freedom not to sin?)  Albert Mohler has an interesting commentary on Jobs' decision here.
Robin McKinley (who has written such lovely things as Beauty and Spindle's End) has a great post up right now on writing. A sample:

You may be trying to make the story do what you want it to do: you may really like the bit that comes next, or think it’s a really clever piece of plot, or it’s going to bridge that awkward transition between part one and part two, or you’ve been longing to stick the evil giant muskrat with the enchanted harpoon and you’re finally going to get to do it.

And you may very well not realise that that’s what you’re doing. Writing stories is hard* and one of the hardest things about it is the way EVERY FRELLING THING IS SO FRELLING FLUID. Every word you write may lead to almost any other word . . . and the word you wrote may already be the wrong word. Trying to translate that fabulous story that has taken over your brain and your life into words on paper . . . gah. It’s the worst. It’s the scariest. It’s the hardest.

Sarah, from Fumbling Toward Grace has a guest post up at There Is No Wealth But Life about why she wants to be a stay-at-home mom. I have to say, it's one of the best things on the subject I've ever read. I really liked this part:

There are people who make arguments from Scripture, or who try to blame all of society’s problems on the fact that fewer women stay-at-home anymore. While I’m sure that those arguments have some valid points, I think that ultimately they are unhelpful in aiding individual families in deciding what the parenting/working relationship should be for them. I think Catholic social teaching does have something helpful to contribute, namely the principle of Subsidiarity. What this means, is that prudential decisions ought to be made on the lowest level possible. In other words, within the parameters of what is moral, decisions about parenting and work ought to be made by individual families. Each family will know it’s situation better than anyone else will.

Finally, although it's sometimes worth skipping, (and although I actually like what Emma Watson is wearing here) it is for entries like this that GoFugYourself is still in my feed-reader.
Find any fun links recently?
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Links: Whiskey, Weight, Word and more

This is a recipe for something called a "hot skin". I don't know why it's called that, but it's made from lapsang souchong tea and whiskey, with a few other ingredients, and it is smoky goodness.
Why do you gain weight when you start a new workout? This is the most clearly I've ever seen it explained, and I think knowing this can save you a lot of discouragement when you start that new weights or yoga routine!
This made me laugh so hard. To my writer friends especially: check it out. It's an autocorrect hack for Word. "No! No! No!"  Ha!
Staying on the topic of books, I've learned a lot about publishing in the past year, but I did not know about signatures. Apparently, the possible page counts for your masterpiece were determined hundreds of years ago by none other than Johannes Gutenberg.
I've been thinking a lot about how I use my computer, and I appreciated reading Challies' thoughts about how he moderates his use of technology. (Here is the computer verse: "All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial. All things are beneficial, but I will not be mastered by anything." Emphasis mine.)
Here's an easy and super-cute Valentine's Day craft for the kids.

look for me, baby

It's been a bit more than a month since my old computer died, but now I'm all set up on a spiffy little (and I mean little) new one. I love it; I've christened it Baby Ivan.

The past month has been full of good things, and a lot of them, I think, have been helped by being offline. There's been more breathing room in life, and in that time, I've:

-got our homeschool organized and started
-got some peace about having to leave our old church
-finish plotting my next novel (so excited about this one!)
-start a new housework routine
-thought about how I need to change how I use my computer
-read lots of books (reviews upcoming)
-learn how to care for long hair

Yes, the last one is a little weird, but doing the research was fun. I've been growing my hair out for a year now, and I thought that since I was planning on continuing, I ought to find out how to do it properly. Most interesting tip I found? That long hair ought to be treated as if it were old lace. Why? Because if your hair is very long at all, it's also very old, and so it's got to be treated gently or it will fall apart (i.e., start to split).

Most practical tip? Um, don't cut it. No, honestly, that's apparently what most people get wrong. They're always told to trim ever 6-8 weeks, but if you do that, you're probably cutting most, if not all, of your growth. The truth is, if your hair is healthy, you don't have to trim it more than about every six months.

Huh. I didn't think my first blog back would be talking about hair. But, there you go. I can braid it all the way around my head now, and I'm very happy about that.

Anyway, I missed you all. Though I've kept up on reading blogs (and so many of you are so encouraging), I've missed being part of the conversation. I'm looking forward to sharing more books, and homeschool plans, and kid stories, and church year celebrations, and novelist adventures as the year (finally! I hope!) slips out of summer and into the glorious, crisp, lovely clean air of fall.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

p.s. the title of this post refers to a song by Fiction Family. It's good. Buy it on iTunes. :)

gone, long gone

My beloved laptop, Ivan's Brain, has finally died. It's going to be a week or two before I can get another computer (happily it's near the time of year when my husband's work sells off their old ones), so I'm mostly email-less. Just wanted to let folks know - I have access occasionally, but won't be posting much for awhile, and will probably be slow in answering emails and comments and such.

On the other hand, without blogs to read or emails to check or time-wasting forums to be tempted by, the mental silence during the day is proving remarkably refreshing. I have the feeling God has some things to say to me about how computers are "tools and not for toys meant/take and use at Christ's employment". I'm planning on listening. (I've learned it's best to listen when He has something to say.)

But I wanted to explain why I'm not around much online right now.

Hope you all are well!

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica snell