IT'S WIN A T-SHIRT DAY!

Just for fun and following my blog and because Fall Break is over and the kids are back in school and because I want to and actually said on this blog a couple of times that I would do it, YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO WIN A T-SHIRT! It can be this one, which I love love...



OR, it can be one of your choosing...meaning you choose the phrase you want on it.

Here are the guidelines:

1. BE A FOLLOWER! I know that goes against what your parents and Sunday School teacher taught you, but humor me. It's okay when the crowd is doing a good thing like following my blog, right? :D

2. VISIT MY DAUGHTER'S NEW BLOG here (yes, my daughter's now a blogger...*TEARING UP*) and tell me something interesting you learned there. Feel free to comment or follow her--that will really surprise her.

3. LEAVE A COMMENT stating the above two things.

Easy enough. And if you want to Tweet or Facebook this opportunity-to-win, please do and mention it in your comment...I'll tack on an extra point for you towards winning.

Save the Child--new release by Margaret Turley

From the back cover:

"You are not going to pour poison straight into her heart!" Nancy's determination to protect her daughter from the chemotherapy doctors insist she needs is fueled by boundless fury. She has seen cancer patients successfully treated with naturopathy. She wants the right to do this for Sharon, her eight year old child suffering from Leukemia.

Cancer is the enemy. Love is the remedy and Grandma is the angel who glues the family picture back together again.

Author Margaret Turley says:

While I was traveling to work one day the news broadcast a story about a mother who was refusing chemotherapy treatment for her son. Because I am a nurse I asked myself why would a mother decide against the best that medicine could offer. The doctors insisted the boy had a virulent cancer that needed immediate attention. Even when threatened with jail and loss of custody the parents did not want him to receive chemotherapy. After they were charged with kidnapping their own child because they crossed state lines [with him] a judge listened to the parents and halted the medical community and government forces.

What the parents wanted was an independent, out-of-state medical work-up for their son. The judge allowed them to seek this consultation. The result was that the child was discovered to be free of cancer. I sighed with relief. The judge saved this boy from the horrible side-effects of chemotherapy which include nausea, pain, sores, compromised immune systems, sterility, major organ damage, secondary cancers, and even death.

One of the most important roles of a nurse is to be a patient advocate. During my thirty-four-year career I have observed more than one situation where a patient and/or their family were not listened to. This can cause grave problems and errors, not the least of which being patients and families enduring procedures they do not understand or agree with. It is my hope that the medical community and the law can expeditiously come together to serve the best interest for the child and family.

Purchase Save the Child at Amazon.com.

Adverb's Revenge

I don't know if you non-writers out there realize that adverbs = bad.

I know. Your high school English teacher never told you. You probably received high marks for beautifully decorating your verbs with all those -ly wonders.

Well, it's something you pick up on the street when you hang with the creative writing crowd. Beef up your verb choice and then who needs an adverb. Ran quickly becomes raced. Cried loudly sounds better as wailed. And glitters brightly is just plain redundant. And repetitive.

It's beautiful in its simplicity: Kill the adverb.

But wait. Don't sentence it to death row just yet. (At least not till you read this blog post.) Adverbs don't only modify verbs, people. They have other reasons for living.

In Spunk & Bite-a writer's guide to punchier, more engaging language & style, by Arthur Plotnik, he devotes an entire chapter to fresh adverbs. He talks about "adverbs of manner [that] reveal the way in which a thing or quality is distinguished." For example:
"hugely boring or minutely entertaining." (Those don't even remotely describe (most) blog posts found here at Of Writerly Things...right? Right? :/)

Adverbs can become fresh when they modify adjectives. And though they are called "fresh," they have been used in this way (as Plotnik points out) long before Nixon's "perfectly clear" speech, in fact their usage dates back to as early as 1570 with phrases found in literature like "curiously dainty."

Here's a match game taken from Spunk & Bite, pgs. 40-41. See if you can match the actual adverb-adjective pairings taken from print. The subject of the sentence is shown in parenthesis. (See answers below.)

[Note: I added the second list in green to differentiate it, so choose an adverb from the list on the left and pair it with an adjective from the green list--Blogger wouldn't let me separate the two into columns. If anyone knows how to do that, let me know.]

1. dormantly a. ordinary (plot structure)

2. gloriously b. fervent (devotion)

3. scarily c. naive (conviction)

4. militantly d. Mormon (guy from Philly)

5. incongruously e. hostile (speech)

6. juicily f. unclever (writer)

7. resolutely g. ridiculous (role as pirate)

8. wittily h. intricate (dance step)

9. inflammatorily i. prosaic (men's fashions)

10. metaphysically j. uproarious (doings)

ANSWERS:
1. d (Patricia Marx, The New Yorker)
2. j (Kirkus Reviews)
3. b (Sarah Miller, The New York Times)
4. i (Judith Thurman, The New Yorker)
5. a (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)
6. g (David Denby, The New Yorker)
7. f (Bruno Maddox, The New Yorker)
8. h (Richard Eder, The New York Times)
9. e (John Updike, The New Yorker)
10. c (Lydia Davis, Granta)

Now wasn't that fun? I loved trying out all the adverbs with Mormon, just to see the different images they conjured up. Suddenly (since 1570, anyway) adverbs are crazily fun again. And surprisingly useful. And blazingly fresh... okay, I guess I don't need to overdo it. One must still choose wisely. Not all adverb-adjective pairings will be gloriously, resolutely, or wittily fresh.

[This post is a rerun of my Tuesday post at anwafounder.blogspot.com]

READ MY SHIRT

Check out my other blog for information on ordering writer tees. They make great personalized Christmas gifts for all your crazy writer friends.

Are you doing what I'm doing?

So I had brain surgery today, well, okay, it was on my head and it was minor.

So minor I could even drive myself home afterward.

So minor that the doctor had me sit in a normal doctor room chair for the procedure and not on the examination table. (That's a bit demeaning, isn't it, to the purpose of my being there?)

So minor the nurse stuck one of those small circle bandaids on it when it was done.

What? No "Go home and take it easy?"

No resting on the couch with propped up pillows and clear liquids?

No "Can you bring me some ice water and jello, please?" offered up in a pathetic voice?

He said I can wash my hair and, get this, I can swim.

Again. What? I am not submersing my cut-open-head in water, chlorinated or otherwise. I very specifically washed and straightened my hair this morning so that I could go a few days without shampooing.

Sheesh. Surgery these days.

Sorry, but I'm still going to take advantage. I've got a frozen lasagna going in the oven for dinner and at exactly 3 PM, I'm going on the couch with the ice water and propped up pillows. Oprah's interviewing author JK Rowling and I'm not going to miss it.



Yes, I overcame the whole must-watch-Oprah thing a while back when I determined that if I was going to finish a novel I had to give some things up, but I make an exception for authors and especially this one. How 'bout you? Even if a scalpel wasn't taken to your scalp today, I'm sure you can think of a good excuse for plopping yourself in front of the television for an hour. Call it research.

Amazing Prizes For Writers

No, not here. Over at The Bookshelf Muse blog.
http://tinyurl.com/32jw66q

But stay tuned. I did say recently that I would offer a contest where you could win a t-shirt. Well, not ALL of you personally. One of you personally, or maybe two.

Post wherein I interview said author

It was less than a year ago I was interviewing Author-with-a-capital-A, Kathi Oram Peterson, about her recent release Angel on Main Street. (Read that review.) Now here she is with another recent release, The Stone Traveler. I should have asked her HOW DO YOU DO IT? But I didn't, so we'll have to make due with the questions I did ask.

And keep in mind that something big is at stake here, the KINDLE. You can win this baby by following Author Kathi's blog tour and commenting on every blog along the way. There is room for repentance if you've missed any of the stops, just go here to find the blog list and play catch up before September 30. (My tour date was yesterday, but I didn't have room to include the interview. Return to my previous day's blog to leave a comment for the contest. AFTER you comment on today's!)


Now here we go...

Tell me about the moment you got the story idea for The Stone Traveler. What inspired it specifically? There really wasn't a single moment. This book was made up of many moments in my life and was inspired by my parents and my son. My parents owned a cabin at Palisades Lake. In the living room of the cabin was a picture of Christ talking to the twelve apostles on the road to Jerusalem. Dad and Mom had served a [church] mission in Cali, Columbia and they were always telling Book of Mormon stories, thus the reason for the grandmother in my book telling Tag, the main character, those stories as well. The inspiration behind Tag, was my son. No, he's not an artist and his father is still here, but my son has had some of the same struggles as Tag. (Tell him to beware of shining stones.)

Is Samuel the Lamanite and his story a particular favorite of yours?* Oh yes. Picture it: he's preaching to the Nephites and is run out of town. And as he's finally on his way home, the Lord asks him to go back and preach to them again. They won't let him into the city, so what does he do? Climbs up on the city walls and preaches. The courage and devotion that would take I can't imagine. (Personal fav, too.)

Besides this one, what's your favorite time travel book? Well, if I can't say The Stone Traveler, how about The Forgotten Warrior (see, another book she's had published!), but I have the feeling you want a book that I haven't written. Well, I've read my share, but my favorite time-travel story was Somewhere in Time the movie with Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour. Yes, I'm a big romantic. (Yeah, that darned penny! I'll never forget it.)

What time period would you most like to travel back to and why? There's so many time periods I find fascinating: Colonial times, Civil War era, and Biblical times. I've been working on a time travel that takes a brother and sister back to the time when Christ was born. The sister finds herself in the belly of a Roman ship, the brother ends up with a shepherd family. The political atmosphere in Rome and Jerusalem were both amazing and scary at that time. I'm so grateful for Mary and Joseph and the great courage they had. The moment in time I'd most like to travel back to would be in the stable after Christ was born...for me that has to be the ultimate moment to witness. (Ahhh...I love that answer.)

Give me a line from your story...no context. This is tough. Asking a writer to do this is like asking a parent to pick her favorite child. Well, maybe not that bad. How about this: Then he walked away, leaving me standing in the garden of Blood Flowers wondering whom I should trust. (That is a very nice child, I mean line. Garden of Blood Flowers sounds just plain facinating, doesn't it? Despite the trust issue.)

Thanks, so much, for the interview, Kathi! I'm off to give the book to my teenage son who is always on the lookout for a good read. My husband read it (he snagged it before me) and enjoyed it. It's definitely a book that can be recommended for the whole wide family.

*If you're unfamiliar with Samuel the Lamanite's awesome story, go HERE to get a free copy of The Book of Mormon. His story starts on page 397.