Roland Yeomans's Blog, page 106

BEWARE THE HOLI-DAZE!

Even sugar-charged Ratatoskr has fallen victim to the dreaded HOLI-DAZE!  

(He is currently riding with me on one of my blood runs, having just collapsed after telling his last Christmas joke:

"Did you hear about the dyslexic Devil worshiper who sold his soul to Santa?")


SO: 
HOW CAN YOU AVOID THE HOLI-DAZE?




1.) REMEMBER THE REASON FOR THE SEASON:



The Great Mystery's Light visited our world in the human form of a tiny infant.

Take a moment to reflect that that very Light might reside in the hurrying body of the person next to you, 

that very Light formed the stars and the seas and the birds of the air.

Breathe in deeply and pause to soak in the wonder of His caring for the sparrows of the field ... 

and you  ... and what it cost Him.




https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MT8DNLY

 2.) SLOW DOWN AND SMELL THE MISTLETOE



And the cinnamon and the chestnuts and the turkey 

and all of the other delicious smells, beautiful sights, and familiar sounds 

that have become symbols of the joy of the holiday season.

Enjoy it in the way it was meant to be enjoyed, 

by relaxing and sharing quality time with family and friends. The rest is just window dressing.





3.) SLEEP



Don't allow the hustle and bustle of the season to cause you to sacrifice sleep. 

It's normal during the holidays to have more on your to-do list than usual, 

but that shouldn't result in cutting SLEEP from that list!

Sleep is restorative. 

It's the time when your body replenishes itself at a cellular level 

and repairs itself from the damage of mental stress, physical strain, infection, sun exposure, and pollutants. 

Without enough sleep, 

our minds and bodies don't function as well as they could, which makes us less productive.

And sleep even aids in LOSING WEIGHT!
http://www.webmd.com/diet/sleep-and-weight-loss

SO SLEEP MORE & WEIGH LESS!!



4.) AIM FOR PROGRESS NOT PERFECTION!



When you expect perfection in your holiday preparations, 

expect a lot of added and unnecessary stress and fatigue as well. 

No battle ever went as planned -- ask Napoleon.  
And Christmas can be a BATTLE!

If you're planning to host a party, why do you need to prepare a major feast? 

Why not try an assortment of easy-to-make side dishes or appetizers? 

Or why not consider sharing the load by making the event a pot luck? 

Most holiday guests feel compelled to bring something anyway, so why not let them bring a dish?




5.) PLAN A SILENT NIGHT

Block it in your calendar as if it were a visit from the Pope.

Plan a night for just you.  

Listen to your favorite music no matter if it is POLKA!  

Dance by yourself if the whim takes you.

Whatever would heal you in your down time, do it.


Even when you are alone, you are not alone if you love:




 6.) ELF YOURSELF




Or your boss.  Or your friends.  

Laughter has been around for awhile now.  There's a reason for that.  
Laughter heals!
Mark Twain has young Satan ask:

"Will a day come when your race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them?

 For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably only one really effective weapon--laughter. 

Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug,--

push it a little-- crowd it a little--weaken it a little, century by century: 

but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.
 
- "The Chronicle of Young Satan," Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts



7.) START AND END WITH GRATITUDE





In a sense THANKSGIVING starts the HOLIDAY season and there is WISDOM in that.


If you are not grateful for what you have, you will soon find yourself with even less.
Remember:
Somewhere in this world someone is happy with less than what you have.

The way to start and end the day is 

to pause and list the things and people that have made and make your day better just by being in your life.

You may have lost some things, beloved persons in your life -- give yourself permission to grieve.

Take ten minutes to feel shitty.

Then 

THINK OF HOW LUCKY YOU WERE TO HAVE THEM AT ALL --

HOW DIFFERENT A PERSON YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN WITHOUT THEM.

Decide then and there that at least for Christmas, 

you will be a healing presence in at least one person's life -- 

even if it is only to let some harried driver in the crowded lane ahead of you.


MY PRAYER FOR ALL YOU, MY FRIENDS, THIS HOLIDAY SEASON
HAVE A HEALING, PEACEFUL CHRISTMAS!

Ratatoskr just rolled over and told me to ask you guys:

"What do you call Batman when he skips church?

Christian Bail!"


Great!  
You groan at me, and Ratatoskr is fast asleep!!

My Christmas gift to you:

THE SIN OF NATIVITY SCENES

I drove past a Catholic Hospital on my way to work this morning, and I saw a lovingly crafted Nativity Scene.




I felt a bit more in the Christmas mood just seeing it
despite the "summer" temperature here in Louisiana


 since you do not see them very often anymore.


After all this is the Age of Enlightenment, of Sophistication, of Religious Tolerance ...




Unless you are a Christian ...


then, keep your beliefs to yourself, thank you very much!


Kindly stay hidden




and do not bother us with your world-view ...

though you are a lout if you do not give us the freedom of expression to beat you over the head with our beliefs.


But that is fitting in an odd way actually ...






The first Christians in the Roman Empire were hunted and persecuted.


Say at an inn, you sat across from a traveler and wondered from his words if he were a fellow believer,


you took your finger and drew the top swirl of the fish image from the condensation of your drink ...


If he completed the bottom image of the crude fish with his own finger, 

you knew you were in the company of a fellow believer.




The Greek word for fish is "ichthys."


 As early as the first century, Christians made an acrostic from this word: 



Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, i.e. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.


The fish has plenty of other theological overtones as well, for Christ fed the 5,000 with 2 fishes and 5 loaves.




So if we are now once again cordoned off because of our beliefs, we are in good company.




But we can still reach out quietly in Christian Love, 

giving comfort and compassion during this season, silently living the world-view in which we believe.


Once again, I end with Alan Paton's wise words:

“There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.”


Now, for a bit of Christmas cheer:

MARK TWAIN: ghost - TRUMP is an ugly Christmas Sweater

Ghost of Mark Twain here ...



while I was waiting for Roland to come back from one of his rare blood runs,


I flipped through the pages of the New York Times.




Now, I am a humorist ...


which means I am politically amoral. 


I just make jokes while Congress makes laws of them.


And, no, "we are not better than this."



When folks have to choose between Tammany Hall and P. T. Barnum, 


these sort of things just happen, don't you know?




As I was pontificating earlier,


I was reading what made Ugly Christmas Sweaters beautiful


as opposed to just tacky to make a dollar for the sweater company.


Call me contrary,


but I insist that a true Ugly Christmas Sweater should lack any irony when it is made.




The maker of said sweater should truly believe the sweater is a thing of beauty,
despite the badly stitched Santa, tinny bells, and glaring colors.

It got me to pondering that old P.T., ah, Trump
probably thinks he is quite the catch for the American public.
And just as certain, many voting pilgrims thought so, too.
Maybe they still do.
Me?


I haven't had so much material for my humor


since old Clinton got himself impeached for being confused about what constituted sex!

IN MY BEGINNING IS MY END_ WEP The End Is The Beginning entry

 https://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com.au/2017/12/wep-ff-december-challenge-end-is.html



What might have been and what has been, Point to one end, which is always present.
- T S Eliot

  
Stephen King can spend months or even years on his opening line.

Listen to what he told me at Meilori's:

"There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. 

It's a tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft --

 I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar.


But there's one thing I'm sure about:    An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. 

It should say: 

Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this."


 With really good books, a powerful sense of voice is established in the first line. 


Yet, it is not just whim that has the title of this post on first lines be a quote from T S Elliot's East Coker. 

I have "In my beginning is my end" start THE RIVAL and end it as well.

All through THE RIVAL that line is a foreshadowing of the ending, 

lending what I hope is depth to the climax and to all the action that leads relentlessly to the death of a major character.


Award-winning mystery author, Craig Johnson, is a master of beginnings mirroring the ending.

"My hero, Walt Longmire, is a sadder-but-wiser sheriff. 

My favorite musketeer was Athos, the heartbroken one.”


 It was building his house in Wyoming that gave him the discipline to finish his first novel, he believes. “I kind of think of it as the blue-collar school of literature,” Mr. Johnson says.   “Never have I met a ditch digger who said,    ‘I’m just not feeling the ditch today, the ditch muse is not with me, I have to put my shovel down now.’ ”  Johnson tells of Longmire’s adventures from the sheriff’s perspective.  In the novel, KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED, Craig starts out with Walt reading to a first grade class from the Brother's Grimm tale of Sleeping Beauty   that he read to his daughter when she was the age of his listeners. The off-the-wall questions by the first graders will have you smiling and chuckling out loud at Walt's squirming discomfort.  
He accompanies his Cheyenne best friend, Henry Standing Bear, to Philadelphia,  and then a very personal act of violence pulls him into a string of murders that he will solve or die trying. 
The novel ends with Walt again reading the tale of Sleeping Beauty out loud but now to only one person.   And the ending will tear your heart out.  If your eyes do not fill with tears, you have a heart of stone. 

The ending of your novel should birth your opening line and shape all the chapters which follow.  Only upon reaching the ending should your reader see the symmetry and breathe out low. 
I hope this helps in some small way.

 

ONE CHRISTMAS NIGHT

MUSIC TO READ THIS FABLE BY

I am the Charioteer

A rather grandiose name considering my present occupation.


But here in the ironic dying of civilization's light in the 21st Century's dawn, 

there are precious few ways to to roam abroad on horse-drawn vehicles.


After my days as the Cid, I forswore riding for any king or country.  

My days at Camelot should have taught me better than to think any king worth the blood of his followers.


Once I drove Apollo's chariot across the skies, not that he was worth the deaths he caused in his vain wisdom. 


But I was young enough to sacrifice good sense for the thrill of flying across the heavens, 

my fiery steeds singing their joy at the celestial race in tones that thrummed my bones like tuning forks.


Yes, I contested in the Roman Colosseum races as well.  Not for the thrill of victory nor for the roar of the brutish crowds.

I did not know then for what I raced.


I do now.

I raced in a vain attempt to outrun my mistakes of the past. 

But you cannot outrun regret or the pain of memory.

Pain always catches up.


Perhaps that is why my pace is so much slower now.  

My valiant warhorse patiently pulls my light-festooned carriage, waiting for me to come to my senses and race the moon again.


My passengers chatter behind me, their words becoming more shallow and empty with every passing year. 

Soon their words will become so slight and without meaning that they will fly away on the chill winds before they can reach my ears.

One can only hope.

I no longer turn when a passenger boards my carriage.

I hear the rustle of the worthless paper money go into the slot of the metal box behind Sir's back.

Sir?

Once his name had frozen the blood of humans ... as had mine.  

He thinks himself a Foo Dog.

I let him.  

After all, do we not all deserve to write our own myths?


Few see his two other heads. They only see death if they should attack me.  

Few do attack.  And none twice.


Snow drifts like dreams' echoes around me and Sir.  I feel my carriage shift from the slight weight of another passenger.

No paper money.  The heavy thudding of gold coins.

Sir rumbles a greeting, something he has not done for centuries.

"Good to see you, too, Cerberus."

The Voice whispers icy tingles through my blood.  Tender, cold fingers feather the back of my neck.

I turn.


Turquoise eyes laugh into my very soul.  

A face, its beauty terrible and haunting beyond any singing of it, study me with wry amusement.

"Oh, Helios, how often I beckoned to you, but always you raced faster than my words."

"I move slower now, Gaia."

Her whole face glows in a smile.  Snow flurries swirl around us.  

"Perhaps our nights will no longer be lonely."

Nor were they ... ever again.

Perhaps on Christmas Night, miracles still happen.

WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT NET NEUTRALITY?

WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT NET NEUTRALITY?

Without net neutrality, Internet service providers will be able to charge web companies

for "fast lanes," which they can't do now. 

Want 4G Netflix or YouTube access that doesn't stutter continuously?

Your provider may provide you that --

 for a monthly fee.
YouTube may no longer be free.  

Facebook, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon may charge us a premium rate to get access.

Not because they are greedy, 

but because they have to pay their internet providers increased prices to get service.

 Higher fees for lousier service. 
Does this sound familiar? 
That's how cable companies have operated for years.

Your Internet service provider (ISP) will be allowed to bundle websites 

j ust like they bundle television channels. 

Of course, ISPs say they will do no such thing, 

But companies have no morality.  
What they do have are shareholders and board of directors to answer to.

The boards want as high an increase in profits each quarter as they can get.

What if your internet provider is liberal?  

It could now legally deny Fox news access to its services.

The same goes for liberal providers.

An informed public is the basis for democracy.  
Imagine if your water company charged you different rates for water used for toilets 

as compared for drinking? 

There can be no truly open internet without net neutrality. 

To believe otherwise is to be captive to special interest power brokers 

or to an old and discredited ideology that thinks monopoly 

and not government oversight best serves the nation.

BELIEVING IN THE MAGIC OF CHRISTMAS

The magic memories of Christmas that most of us treasure are unique to each of us.

Yet, sometimes clarity comes only upon reflection. 

We get so caught up with the tugs and pulls of the season that we miss the truly priceless people and moments. 

If we but reflect we will see that 
We were blind to the love healing us and holding us tight in the arms, words, and actions of those we too often took for granted.

Still, 
we were innocent enough to see fairies dancing upon frosted lake surfaces, 
to taste the falling snow, 
and to laughingly make snow-angels.

As adults the world is too much with us. 

Yet, The Great Mystery has given us one month out of 12 to see the world as the child we once were, 
the child we can once again be if only we put down the hates and anguish that only harm us anyway.


If the yellow, green, red, and blue lights don’t twinkle with their normal festive happiness 
and instead glower like warning beacons, it is the mind that views them that has changed.

The magic is still there, waiting for the child you once were to believe in it again.

By years of Hurt and Anger, you have closed the door to it. 

But each time you smile to a hurried face that seems lost in life, 

each time you back up to allow a weary older person in line ahead of you,
each time you pause to look at the snow-layered buildings as the child you once were would see them --
you open the door to that Christmas Magic a little wider.

Every day you live can be magical if you work at it.  

The path of least resistense is to live in a world leeched of its color and vitality by Anger and Hate. 


Choose to find the laughter and beauty as you live each hour.  
Each laugh, each act of compassion is a brushstroke that adds the color of magic back to your life.

The magic of Christmas has nothing to do with decorations, lights, presents, Christmas trees or anything so material.


It has everything to do with a little girl’s smile 

and a mom who buys real candy canes for their tree 

so she can hear her little girl giggle as they decorate it together.


Give a smile or a laugh to someone.  The present you will receive will be ...  Magical

The gifts we give that matter most are the ones that cannot be bought or sold. 
Me and Midnight looking for that Christmas Star
The love we share and the memories we leave behind, are the greatest gifts we can give. 
They are the only gifts that last a lifetime.

THINK  
ABOUT HIBBS  FOR A CHRISTMAS GIFT
TO THOSE YOU
KNOW WHO ARE
YOUNG AT HEART.

THE LIE OF CHRISTMAS MAGIC

Some say Christmas has never been magical, not even from the beginning.

We tend to overlook that the Holy Birth occurred in Bethlehem because of an act of oppression, and the threat of violence,

 when a man and woman were forced to travel from Nazareth to their ancestral home 

by the decree of an occupying army in the final days of the young woman’s pregnancy.


And, although we tend to be only vaguely aware of it, the massacre of innocents is woven inextricably into the story.

Only three days after Christmas Day, on Dec. 28, the Church’s calendar remembers the other children of Bethlehem,

the ones left behind when Joseph fled with Mary and Jesus to Egypt for safety following an angelic warning, 

the ones slaughtered by King Herod in a fearful rage.


Magic in Christmas? 
No matter how much we might like to make it so, magic was not prominent in these events.

Though we may rarely come to terms with it, 

the Christmas story begins and ends in violence.

We should not be surprised.

We should not be surprised that the incarnation of good, of which the innocence of all children reminds us, 

is not received either warmly or passively by the presence of evil.

Sometimes that evil finds its expression in armies of violence, sometimes in greed and fear and power,

and sometimes in clouds of darkness that overtake and consume those among us most vulnerable

to delusion left to their own devices by a society deaf to the needs of those without power: the old, the mentally ill, the poor.


The thought that there is no magic in Christmas might even do some good:


Magic too easily lets us off the hook for the role we are called to play in the story,

the story of goodness being birthed in the world, 

the story of light that the darkness would overcome, the story of innocence confronted by evil, the story of Christ.



No, there is no magic.
What there is is an age-old struggle with evil that comes in many forms.

Christmas comes into play, 

not because it represents even a temporary respite from reality, 

but because the birth of incarnate love lays bare the reality 

that it is the evil that does not belong here. 



The birth of incarnate love lays bare that the slaughter of innocents in whatever form, 

child or adult, finds no place, no home, no tolerance, no business as usual in the world of which God dreams.

And once we are robbed of the magic of Christmas, we begin, maybe, to grasp its reality. 


The reality is that the birth of the Christ child does not cast a magical spell rendering the presence of evil ineffectual.

It does not relieve humankind of the hell-before hell we have made of this world. 

Rather, it invites us to participate in its redemption.

The birth of the Christ child is not a tool for us to use, like sorcerer’s apprentices, 

magically relieving us from doing the hard work that needs to be done. 

It is a call to action

God has entered the world in a profoundly real, not magical, way. 

And that in this particular child, Light has come into the world,

 and the darkness did not, and will not, overcome it.


Tomorrow:  
BELIEVE IN THE MAGIC OF CHRISTMAS

IS CHRISTMAS DYING?

Reindeer and Christmas trees are two of the most recognizable symbols of the Yuletide season, 



but future generations may never get to see either of them.

 New research has revealed that both are at risk of being wiped out, as a result of climate change.


 Arctic reindeer are becoming smaller and lighter due to the impact of climate change on their food supplies.



But is the Christmas Spirit itself being starved?  Are we becoming a country of Scrooges?

We cross out Christ in the windows of our stores with Xmas; 

We decree it illegal to show Nativity Scenes in front of the Courthouse, 

whose sculpture of the Ten Commandments over its doors have also been taken down; 

TV's bombard us with commercials of people only being made happy with the acquisition of more and more things.





 And we wonder why we feel cold and alone as we wander this culture of frozen hearts and grasping hands.

Do you long for that childlike innocence you had so very long ago?



Or does your sense of your childhood seem as far removed and cold as the withered, dead leaves of your past?

 But the wonder and awe still live in your thirsty heart and bruised mind.

Search the corridors of your heart and find a memory of a time as a child when you felt loved and safe.

Reach out for a smell that lives in that moment: 

Perhaps it is the scent of vanilla your mother is pouring into the preparation of your favorite Christmas treat.

Perhaps it the tingle of the cold morning grass beneath your bare feet as you play with your puppy as it runs beside you.

Love can have a feel like the tickling of your mother's hair about your cheeks as she hugs the pain of your scuffed knee away ...

Love is the sense of being made to feel grown up, though a child, as when your mother included you in adult things.

The Christmas Spirit lives within you still.
But like a fire that dies to cold embers if it is not constantly fed, 

the Christmas Spirit must be refreshed with such memories ... and more ...

It must be fed with acts of kindness to strangers, and even more importantly, 

to those close about us who we have stopped seeing as feeling, hurting souls

as we dwell on past hurts and slights.

Love is a perfume that lingers upon the fingers of those who give it to others.

Happy Christmas, Everyone, from me and Midnight

IS YOUR NOVEL A STILL LIFE or LIVING? IWSG post

http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html
WHAT MAKES A NOVEL  COME ALIVE?


1.) Memorable characters
More than plot, riveting, absorbing characters draw us in.
I read and re-read the Spenser mysteries for the quick wit and snappy dialogue 
between Spenser, Hawk, and Susan.
Raymond Chandler made Philip Marlowe a person you wanted to listen to no matter how confusing the mystery.
“From 30 feet away 
she looked like a lot of class. 
From 10 feet away  she looked like something  made up to be seen 
from 30 feet away.”



2.) Original Plot
Take the movie, Mirage:
 Gregory Peck is caught in a building’s blackout, 
and rather than wait for the power to return and use the elevator, 
he makes his way down the stairs. 
He bumps into Diane Baker who greets him as a friend, but he does not know her. 
Alarmed, she flees into a sub-basement.
On the street, he finds the body of a man who supposedly jumped out of a window.  

He returns to try to find Diane only to discover there is no sub-basement.

Shaken, Gregory hires a private investigator to help him sort things out.  

He brings the detective to his office, only to find a blank wall.

It is an absorbing, riveting film because the plot is totally unique.  

And since it was made in 1966, there are no Matrix explanations ... only well-thought out ones.




3.) Do you like being a victim?
Neither does your reader.  

Most of us feel powerless in life more than we wish.  

We read to lose ourselves, to live vicariously adventures 

where the protagonists take control of their problems 

and after thrilling adventures triumph.



4.) Make them laugh.
Novels with serious themes like The Fault in Our Stars and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl 

use humor for good reason.

 Joss Whedon:

“Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough,  but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.” 
A good laugh is a great way to relieve non-stop tension to set up the reader for the next jolt.

Humor in dialogue also is a way to quickly, subtly convey character relationships.


WHAT ARE SOME GOOD WAYS  YOU BREATHE LIFE  INTO YOUR NOVEL?