Teresa Robeson's Blog, page 13

Don’t waste a thing (or string)

My mom, having lived through World War II with almost nothing but clothes on her back while fleeing from enemy soldiers, was always the epitome of frugal. She was a practitioner of “reuse, reduce, and recycle” decades before it was a thing.

While I’m not nearly as good as she is, I have been influenced by her to not be wasteful. Food waste, in particular, drives me batty. But even little things like strings are worth considering.

Back around 1990 to 1992, I worked in the office of the sociology department at the University of Delaware. The mail would come delivered tied up with string (no, no brown paper). The other secretary would just cut the string and toss it. Me, I carefully untied the knot and then wound the string in a neat coil and saved it to be used later.

And, indeed, it was used later. In the 30+ years since, the Spousal Unit would use these perfectly good cotton strings to prop up plants in the garden along with other miscellaneous tasks that need strings. We’ve not had to buy strings…ever. I know it’s just a small thing in the grand scheme of the universe, but it makes me feel good that I didn’t waste something perfectly serviceable, and the SU and I have a good laugh about it every so often about my squirreling habits.

What do you like to not see wasted?

Story Monsters Ink!

I’m super tickled to be featured in the very cool magazine, Story Monsters Ink! There’s an associated activity in the Kids’ Corner section.

And, I can’t believe I’m in an issue with the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis and Drew Daywalt!! Go check out this fun publication!

Bird by bird

Does size matter?

Only when you’re territorial and trying to coexist at the feeders. The Red-bellied (left, female) and Hairy (right, male) Woodpeckers are well-matched…

and tolerate each other’s presence. But even the slightest mismatch…

as with the Downy Woodpecker (left, female) and the Hairy (right, male), and they won’t feed as equals.

We won’t even go into the size difference between the little female Downy and the enormous male Pileated Woodpecker here. But the little one boldly stands her ground and waits for her opportunity to take over.

There might be a lesson here for the rest of us.

Oh, hey! If you or a young person you know are interested in astronomy, Barnes & Noble is having a 25% off sale on preorders right now. If you use the code PREORDERS25 you can get CLOUDS IN SPACE at a discount!

Author SMASH!

I am super thrilled to be guest posting today on Tara Lazar’s fabulous kid lit writing challenge, Storystorm! Pop on over to see how I become an author cyclotron.

Storystorm 2024 Day 21: Teresa Ho Robeson Smashes Ideas Together

Storytelling at its best

It’s been a while since a show wowed me, but this gem did just that.

Besides being an excellent commentary on racism, corruption, and human nature, it also hits all the right notes of excellent storytelling. The hero (handsomely and charmingly played by Omar Sy) is flawed and operating on some misguided beliefs. But he is also sympathetic, clever, and proactive. His backstory is doled out bit by bit in skillfully placed flashbacks which garners the audience’s growing support.

As a thriller, it keeps you in suspense with fair misdirections and pacing. The reveals are satisfactory and releases the tension you might not even know was built up in you.

Story one ends with the bad guys (who are also shown with sympathy or some good points to make them more human and not one-dimensional) getting their comeuppance, wrapping things up in an appropriate but open-ended way so that the audience can expect more adventures to follow.

I’m currently reading a number of books on how to write good stories and this show and I can’t help but insert scenes from this show in my mind as examples of what was done right.

Plus, I really love that while it’s an action thriller, there’s not excessive violence/blood or gratuitous sex (at least not in the first story). It’s mainly all about perfect storytelling.

If you’ve not seen it yet, you’re missing out!

P.S.: Season/Story 2 is not as tight and well-written as 1 but it’s still pretty fun to watch.

P.P.S.: I love how the show emphasizes the joy of reading and importance of books.

What? What? What?

What? What? What?

So I read Chuck Palahniuk’s writing book, Consider This, over the holidays and I was highly befuddled.

1) He goes on book tours. What even are those?

2) His editor plants him near influential people to get promo opportunities. My editors couldn’t pick me out of a police lineup to bail my ass out of jail (not that I have opportunities to land myself in jail…see #1 and #3…and not that they would bail me out even if I were to be in jail).

3) His Italian/French/foreign publishers (his what now?) conspire to give him surreal and exciting experiences while he’s visiting them. Does it seem like every author I know has multiple language editions of their books besides me? Yes. Do authors really get to fly to the different countries to meet those publishing teams? Apparently also yes.

Mr. Palahniul inhabits an alternate publishing world that I can’t possibly get to from my reality, for better or worse.

All joking aside, it’s actually a highly readable and helpful book on the writing craft and life. I plan to take some of his advice to heart…and hope the physics of writing works as well in my universe as it does in his.

Happy 2024!

I hope you’ve enjoyed a restful holiday break and managed to avoid getting sick from the revelry. These days, it’s more likely the flu and Covid nipping at your nose than Jack Frost.

Us, we stayed home and had our own kind of party…making sauerkraut (the Spousal Unit)

propagating more fig trees (also the SO; I tell him he needs to start a business selling these things because our house is not the inside of the Tardis and not many of our friends want to grow them)

canning marmalade (me)

baking (also me)

this was for Kid1’s Christmas Bird Count tallying dinner contribution my all-time favorite cookies: peanut, peanut butter, oatmeal chocolate chip

and putting together many LEGO sets (the kids…and by “kids,” I mean 26 and 27 year olds who bought the sets with their own money).

What did you end up doing during the holidays? Anything that carried over to 2024 like our activities?

Still time to join in!

Storystorm 2024 Day 1: Tara Lazar Picks a Winning Word

Storystorm, one of the most fun and enduring kid lit writers challenge out there, has begun! There’s still time to join in (register here) and maybe win some prizes.

What will you do with your wild and precious life?

As we consign 2023 to a dusty storage bin in the attic and get ready to plunge into a heady affair with the new year, I took some time to consider the ragged edges of my mortality. It seems appropriate to quote the beloved poet, Mary Oliver, who asked:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

What do I plan to do? I feel like I’ve already wasted 30 perfectly good years of my life…59, if you count all the years, but I cut myself some slack until the age of 29 when I should have known better by then.

So, now, as I wonder what to do with my remaining 20 years (30 if I’m lucky and 12 if I’m not and go the way of my mother and her sister), I can only regret that I choose as slow a career as publishing and came to it late in life. But since I did, times two, I would like to charge on, full speed ahead, and write as many books as I can…and hopefully get just as many published. For instance, one of my top wishes this coming year is for my agent to sell the picture book manuscript that includes, among other gorgeous bits of nature, a mackerel sky.

Another thing that I plan to tackle is finishing a few sewing projects. I’m not allowing myself to buy any more fabric from now on. Anything I don’t finish will have to be dealt with by my family and that’s not fair to them..

Same with my ginormous stash of yarn. It’s not like I’m not knitting; I usually have at least three projects going on simultaneously.

But with me being a slow knitter and my fiber hoarding habits legend–or at least it used to be; I no longer allow myself to buy yarn either–even with constant knitting, I doubt I will ever use up all the yarn I bought.

This is about 1/100th of my stash.

What do I plan to do with my wild and precious life? Besides nursing a lot of regrets with far too little alcohol, I plan to write, sew, and knit. Not wild, perhaps, but precious to me.

How about you? What have you planned for yourself in 2024 and beyond? Tell me.

Whatever it may be, I wish you joy and satisfaction.

A year in pictures

Because we’re all scrambling to get everything ready for the holidays (a.k.a. nobody will be reading blog posts most likely), I thought I’d just do a quick and fun one of choosing a drawing from each month of this past year. So, here goes with 12 random photos picked from what I did each month (though July’s is really August’s as I apparently didn’t draw in July).

This is a 2 minute doodle of me preparing to tackle the new year.