“A Spark of Heavenly Fire” Embodies the Essence of Christmas

December 9, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Washington Irving wrote: “There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.” As I read these words several years ago, I could see her, a drab woman, defeated by life, dragging herself through her days in the normal world, but in an abnormal world of strife and danger, she would come alive and inspire others. And so Kate Cummings, the hero of my novel A Spark of Heavenly Fire was born. But born into what world?

I didn’t want to write a book about war, which is a common setting for such a character-driven story, so I created the red death, an unstoppable, bio-engineered disease that ravages Colorado. Martial law is declared, rationing is put into effect, and the entire state is quarantined. During this time when so many are dying, Kate comes alive and gradually pulls others into her sphere of kindness and generosity. First enters Dee Allenby, another woman defeated by normal life, then enter the homeless — the group hardest hit by the militated restrictions. Finally, enters Greg Pullman, a movie-star-handsome reporter who is determined to find out who created the red death and why they did it.

Kate and her friends build a new world, a new normal, to help one another survive, but other characters, such as Jeremy King, a world-class actor who gets caught in the quarantine, and Pippi O’Brien, a local weather girl, think of only of their own survival, and they are determined to leave the state even if it kills them.

The world of the red death brings out the worst in some characters while bringing out the best in others. Most of all, the prism of death and survival reflects what each values most. Kate values love. Dee values purpose. Greg values truth. Jeremy values freedom. Pippi, who values nothing, learns to value herself.

Though this book has been classified by some readers as a thriller — and there are plenty of thrills and lots of danger — A Spark of Heavenly Fire is fundamentally a Christmas book. The story begins on December 2, builds to a climax on Christmas, and ends with renewal in the Spring. There are no Santas, no elves, no shopping malls or presents, nothing that resembles a Christmas card holiday, but the story — especially Kate’s story — embodies the essence of Christmas: generosity of spirit.

(Why does A Spark of Heavenly Fire begin on December 2 instead of December 1? Glad you asked that. All through the writing of the book, I kept thinking: if only people could get through the first fifty pages, I know they will like this book. So finally came my duh moment. Get rid of the first fifty pages!! With all the deletions and rewriting, I couldn’t make the story start on December 1 as I’d originally intended, but that’s okay since it didn’t end on December 25 as I had hoped. The story overgrew it’s bounds, but the symbolism still held since it ends around Easter.)

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Heavenly-Fire-Pat-Bertram/dp/1935171232/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_4

Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1842 (You can download the book in any ebook format, including a format for palm held reading devices!! Even better, you can download 30% absolutely free to see if you like the story.)

Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/spark-of-heavenly-fire-pat-bertram/1100632312?ean=9781935171232&itm=2&usri=pat+bertram

Posted in books, fiction, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Grief: Counting the Days, Weeks, Months

December 8, 2011 — Pat Bertram

When you first lose a significant person in your life, one whose death rocks your world to its very foundations so nothing will ever be the same, it’s as if your internal clocks reset themselves.

At first, you count the hours you’ve lived since he died, then, after you’ve survived twenty-four or forty-eight interminable hours, you being counting the days. Eventually you move on to counting weeks, months, years, and even decades. To the uninitiated, this counting seems as if you’re dwelling on the past, constantly reminding yourself of your sorrow. But the truth is, it’s a recognition of life — your new life, the one that was born the day he died. It also tells your fellow travelers where you are on this terrible journey in the same way your age tells people where you are in life’s journey.

When I talk about Saturday, my sadder day, and mention how many sad Saturdays I’ve survived, it’s not the number that makes me sad. Nor is it the day that makes me sad.  It is the onset of sadness that makes me realize what day it is. The sadness is a subconscious, visceral reminder that I once loved, once was loved, once shared my life. Since I now count my grief by months, I often have to check my calendar to find out how many Saturdays I have mourned/celebrated that shared life. The number is merely a street sign, the name of a crossroad so others know where I am in relation to my grief. I don’t need the number. I know where I am — I can feel it.

I used to worry that I was putting myself in a bad light by all this talk of grief, that I might seem weak or even pathetic, but the more clearly I see this journey for what it is — not just resetting your internal clock but resetting your life — the more I understand the importance of showing the truth.

We live in a civilization that reveres positive thinking and positive thinkers. We admire people who bear their sorrow with a smile, who swallow their tears and talk brightly of their future. Perhaps they are admirable, perhaps they are in denial, perhaps it is their nature. But it puts an intolerable burden on those who have to push their grief deeper inside so that no one faults them for it.

We need people to show us a way to grieve, to show us their pain and their healing; otherwise, how are we to know what is the truth of grief? So often, the bereft feel they are crazy because they’ve never seen/read/heard of anyone who experienced such symptoms as theirs. We’re so ingrained into believing that Kubler Ross’s stages are the blueprint for grief, that anything else is abnormal. But in my experience (talking to others who have lost their mates), her stages are mere blips in the spectrum of grief. Other stages are much more prevalent: physical pain (not just emotional), bewilderment, yearning, seeking. And counting.

Counting isn’t really a stage. It’s more that we are aware of the ticking of our internal clocks, the clocks that were reset on the day he died.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , . 12 Comments »

Growing into the Woman I Am to Become

December 7, 2011 — Pat Bertram

In a previous post, Maiden/Mother/Crone — The Mythic Stages of a Woman’s Life, I talked about living my mother stage first. I was the oldest girl in a large family, and by the time I was five, I could cook simple meals, clean house, do laundry, feed babies their bottles, and change diapers. By the time I was eighteen, I’d changed more diapers than most women do in a lifetime.  Then, in my middle years, I reached the crone stage. Crones care for the dying and are spiritual midwives at the end of life, the link in the cycle of death and rebirth. A few years after I met the man with whom I would spend the middle third of my life, his health took a turn for the worse. I wasn’t much of a healer, but I was a stayer — I stayed with him until he died. I also helped out when my mother died. I’m now staying with my 95-year-old father, helping him to be as independent as he can be during his final years.

When this part of my life’s journey, this crone stage, has played itself out, the only stage left for me is maidenhood. According to Lisa Levart, author of Goddess on Earth, the maiden aspect of the Goddess is symbolic of new beginnings, youthful enthusiasm, independence, and a time when a girl is growing into the woman she is to become.

Who is this woman I will become? I already know she will be patient. I know she will be forward-looking, leaving all her “if only”s behind. I hope she will be bold and adventurous, able to embrace new beginnings, youthful enthusiasm, and independence. Most of all, I hope she will be spontaneous.

Life with someone who is chronically ill destroys your spontaneity. You have to be practical, and you have to plan, taking his limitations into consideration.  You can try to take time for yourself, but so often the constraints of his illness rule your life.

Two or three years before my life mate/soul mate died, he told me he regretted that he killed my spontaneity. He loved that I had been so spontaneous, and it saddened him that I became captive of the regimens he needed to follow to keep himself as healthy as possible. This declaration surprised me because I had never considered myself particularly spontaneous. To be honest, before I met him, I’d always been a bit careful — not timid, but not carefree, either. Meeting him brought such a surge of energy into my life (he was radiant, back then, glowing with health and happiness) that I felt emboldened to try new things. I’d never seen the point of life (though I spent my youth searching for meaning), and I never really felt comfortable in the world. After I met him, I thought that if he were in the world, it must be a wondrous place. (This was before we ever got together, before either of us realized there was an “us.”) His radiance, faded and ragged though it may have been at the end, still lit my life, and now that he is dead, so is the light. And once again I’m searching for meaning.

To honor him and the life we shared (and to honor myself), I plan to be more spontaneous. (Did you smile at that wording? So did I. Old habits are hard to break.)

Spontaneous, bold, adventurous, enthusiastic, and independent. I can hardly wait to grow into this woman I intend to become. (But what will become of that woman I become? Will she be too old to make a difference? Ah, but those are questions for another day.)

Posted in culture, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Introducing Joylene Nowell Butler, author of “Dead Witness” and “Broken But Not Dead”

December 6, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Someone left a comment on my blog the other day, then apologized for intruding where he didn’t belong. This worried me. I wondered what I had done to make anyone feel unwelcome. Then it occurred to me that I have made so many friends here that perhaps it seems like a private blog. When you talk about the important things in life (writing, grief, life itself) you connect quickly, even though the commenters might live in such mythical places as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Georgia (USA).

Joylene Nowell Butler was one such commenter who has now become a friend. We have never met, might never meet (though I would like to), but the connection is very real. She eased a terrible time in my life with her wisdom and sympathy, with her steadfast presence. I’m ashamed to admit, I am remiss about returning the favor and visiting her blog, A Moment At A Time On Cluculz Lake, though I intend to get over there more frequently. She has insightful posts, wonderful guests, and gorgeous photos of Cluculz Lake in Canada.

Joylene is the author of suspense thrillers Dead Witness and Broken But Not Dead. In honor of our friendship and the publication of her second book, I am gifting her with a mini blog tour.

I am interviewing her today on another of my blogs. Click here to find the interview: Pat Bertram Introduces . . . Joylene Nowell Butler, Author of “Broken but not Dead.” I always enjoy hearing (seeing) how other authors view writing and the writing life. Don’t you?

Click here to read an excerpt from: “Broken but not Dead” by Joylene Nowell Butler

More than three years ago, I posted an invitation to interview characters, and she was one of the few who took me up on my offer. It impressed the heck out of me! (That was how and where we met.) Here is that interview: Pat Bertram Introduces . . . Valerie McCormick, Hero of “Dead Witness” by Joylene Nowell Butler

Click here to read an excerpt from: “Dead Witness” by Joylene Nowell Butler

Thank you for everything, Joylene. I hope you have a fantastic New Year, filled with hope and peace and many wonders.

Posted in blogging, life, writing. Tags: , , , . 13 Comments »

The Awesome and Awesomely Terrible State of Grief

December 5, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Whenever I hear that one of my sisters (or brothers) in sorrow is being cajoled into taking drugs to overcome her grief, I want to lash out, and this is how I lash out — I write a blog about it.

Grief is not a medical disorder. If the bereft has sunk into a severe depression, if she can’t sleep, if she is suffering symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, perhaps pharmacopeia can help. But if the bereft is taking care of herself and her family, if she is connecting to people in a real way (or as real as is possible considering how isolating grief is), if she is not endangering herself or anyone else, then the last thing she needs is to be badgered into solving her problems by taking a pill.

Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is not an abnormality that needs to be corrected. Daily bursts of grief during the first two years are normal. In fact, for many bereft, the second year is worse than the first. The original shock of losing the most significant person in your life and the shock of confronting death on a visceral level do not begin to wane until after the first year. As that protective shroud begins to unwind, the truth is shown in all its stark horror. He is dead, and there is nothing you can do about it. Of course, you knew that, but during the second year, the knowledge seeps into your soul, and you feel the truth of it.

All during my first year of grief, I kept listening for the phone, hoping he would call and tell me I could come home, that he forgave me for whatever it was I did that made him reject me. I do not know where that thought came from. I never did anything (except small inconsideratenesses) for which I needed forgiveness. And he didn’t reject me. He died. But somehow, that is the way my mind made sense of the situation.

About fourteen months into my grief, the truth sunk in that he will never call to tell me I can come home. This set off an upsurge of grief that stayed with me for weeks. Now I’ve regained my equilibrium, but I still have bursts of grief every day. Sometimes they last seconds, sometimes they last minutes, sometimes they last longer. This is normal. Truly. (Not having bursts of grief everyday is normal, too, but that is not the issue here.)

All grief is not the same. I lost my brother and my mother a few years ago. I was sad at their deaths, but felt no great life-altering grief. Then my life mate/soul mate died, and his death caused such a soul quake that I am still reeling from the effects. (Recently, another layer of the shroud has unwound, and I can think more clearly now than I have for many years. I must have been more numb during the last years of his dying than I thought I’d been.)

Grief is not just a state of sadness. Grief is a regulator, rewiring our brains to accept the enormity of life and death. Grief is a prism, focusing our attention on the big picture, forcing us to ask the important questions of why we are here, where we are going, and how we connect with each other and the universe. Grief is a teacher, helping us to grow, to become more than we ever thought possible. (At least I think it does — I am not yet the person I hope to be.) Grief is also a gift, perhaps even a privilege. Not everyone has the opportunity (or the ability) to connect so deeply with another person that the death of that person changes the whole universe.

I make grief sound like a good thing, don’t I? And maybe it is. Why do all good things have to be happy things? Given a choice, of course, I’d rather him than having to deal with the pain of his absence, but it’s only by feeling the pain and processing it that I can see what it does and how it works. Sometimes I think my whole life has led to this very moment, to this place where I can separate the myriad feelings of grief and translate them, to explain the truth of this awesome and awesomely terrible state.

This normal state.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , . 10 Comments »

Make Every Character Count by Dave Ebright

December 4, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Tonight I’m posting an article by an author friend of mine. I don’t know where I met him — perhaps here on this blog — but now we’re connected at various sites. He’s quite a character, this Dave Ebright, and he penned an award-winning pirate story for young adults called Bad Latitude. (Even the title cracks me up.) Dave’s second YA novel, Reckless Endeavor is on its way to me right now, probably spending the night in a lonely USPS outpost somewhere. I can hardly wait to read it! Adventure, the haunted town of St Augustine, and dead pirates. What’s not to like?  Here is what Dave has to say:

I was participating the other night on Pat’s forum at GATHER, No Whine, Just Champagne (which is a very worthwhile place to hang out & chat about the craft of writing on Thursday nights at 9PM EST — not a paid commercial message) & made a comment that got me in deep trouble with my friend & our awesome moderator. So here I am, making amends & torturing Pat’s readers with … gulp … an opinion. Here’s how it all started (unedited):

(ME) “I actually wrote a blog post on a writerly topic about making every character count — then I realized — Who the heck am I to be writing something about writing? — so I deleted it.

(PAT) “Um . . . Dave? What are you talking about? Why shouldn’t you write about a writerly topic? If you’ve seen half the crap out there about writing that I have, you’d understand that you have more right than most. Did you save any of the post about making every character count? If not, can you rewrite it? I’d love to post it on my blog if you don’t want to post it on yours.

So, here is my writerly blog post.

_________________________________________________________________________

Make Every Character Count by Dave Ebright:

Google the phrase “Make every word count.” Writers & teachers use it repeatedly in articles, on blogs, in classrooms & as part of ‘how to’ seminars. Great advice but there could be a Part B which should read – make every character count.

Recently, while reading a bestseller’s novel, the need for another form of economy in writing all but screamed from the pages. The book contained so many characters it needed an accompanying playbill for reference. It was difficult to follow & by the mid-point, the slog was on. The plot faltered, confusion set in & my interest waned.

I have written two books, both part of a YA series, with another on the way. As most writers discover (& hopefully strive for), the writing improves from one effort to the next. Word economy can be one result, as well as the decision-making. There are twenty-four characters in my first book. Five of them make only minor contributions to the story. The second book has but fifteen & all play vital roles, affecting the action, enhancing the humor or taking center stage for relevant scenes. Limiting the number of characters was intentional, the result of lessons learned, but I was determined that every character would serve a purpose.

Now forget the “writerly” approach, I’m not comfortable with it anyway. Try this.

The characters are part of your book’s team. You want to pick the best players to participate. You coach & develop them via edits & rewrites to become interesting, memorable, funny or evil. Since it’s your team (book), you decide on who gets the playing (plot) time. Anyone given the privilege to make your team has to contribute or they’re benched, or jettisoned to the bilge of a pirate ship. Whew! Now that sounds more like me.

Writing for only four years hardly qualifies me as an expert but as an avid reader who happens to write, character fillers performing busy work are distractions. Sure, make every word count, but take the same approach with your characters.

Okay – I’m gettin’ back to doin’ what I do best now.

Feel free to chop, edit or delete altogether, Pat – no hard feelings.

I didn’t chop, edit or delete a single word. I was right — this writerly discourse by Dave Ebright deserved a better fate than ending up in the recycle bin. Dave made a good point, one that is often overlooked: make each character count. He made another good point: No Whine, Just Champagne is a great place to hang out on Thursday nights. We’ve been having some wonderful chats about writing and the writing life. Here is a link to the most recent discussion, the one that inspired this post, Maximum Capacity — No Whine, Just Champagne Writing Discussion #170

Posted in How to, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 5 Comments »

Getting a Grip on Grief

December 3, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Today is Saturday, my sadder day. The eighty-eighth one. It’s odd that my body remembers this is the day of the week my life mate/soul mate died. Even when I don’t remember, I wake up sadder than I normally do. (Whatever it is that remembers, though, can’t count. For that, I need a calendar to figure out exactly how many Saturdays he’s been gone.)

Despite the lingering sadness and random bursts of grief, I am healing. Today I casually picked up a glass, and it felt solid in my hand. Or perhaps I mean my hand felt solid on the glass. Seems a small thing, doesn’t it? But it’s a big step that came so quietly, I don’t have any idea when I got a grip.

During the first months after he died, I lost my grip, not just figuratively, but literally. Things often slipped through my fingers for no apparent reason. I simply couldn’t hold on. It seemed as if when I lost the connection with him, I lost the ability to connect with anything. Or maybe grief sapped all my strength. One night, a mug slipped from my hand. My fingers were crooked through the handle, so I don’t know how it happened, but all of a sudden the mug hit the hard tile floor and exploded. Well, actually, the mug shattered, but it sounded like an explosion. It wasn’t an expensive mug, nor did I have a particularly sentimental attachment to it — it was one of two give-aways we’d received from the phone company during a local festival — but I wept as if my heart had broken. Or as if he had died again.

Gathering up the shattered pieces and slivers of the mug, I understood for the first time that as the months and years passed, all our things would break or wear out, and every loss would take me one more step away from our life. This had such a profound affect on me, I made sure I had a good grip on anything breakable before I picked it up. Until tonight.

By such small steps, we heal the ragged wounds where our loved ones were ripped from our lives. By such small steps, we move into a life far from the one we once shared. By such small steps, we get a grip on grief.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , . 5 Comments »

Is There too Much Promotion on Facebook?

December 2, 2011 — Pat Bertram

I got a message from a woman on Facebook the other day asking if I’d be willing to write a post about too much promotion on sites like Facebook. At first, I thought this would be an easy task. I detest all the self-promotion that goes on at the site, especially in the groups.

Some promotion is understandable. Pages, of course, are all about “soft sell” promotion, and so any promotion that goes on there is part of the package.  Mostly I use my fan page for announcements, such as kindle sales, and for discussions. (You can find the current discussion here: Do your characters always act at maximum capacity? Should they?)

What people post on their own profile, of course, is up to them. Self-promotion is sometimes the least offensive thing they post on their profiles. How many times can the same dang too-annoyingly-cute-for-words animal video or cloyingly sweet sentimental photo/saying be shared? Sometimes the same thing shows up in the feed day after day after day after day. . . But I digress.

I thought I did a lot of promoting on my profile, in which case I would be the last person to talk about too much promotion on Facebook, but here is a list of the last twelve things I posted on my Facebook profile:

  • Two posts were about Malcolm’s Book Bits and Notions, a great compendium of links to publishing/writing/book news, which everyone in the industry should subscribe to.
  • Two posts were brags — 1) I just posted my 700th blog post!!! and 2) My blog is ranked 177,350 of all blogs and websites in the United States. People stay an average of 4 minutes. And based on internet averages, ptbertram.wordpress.com is visited more frequently by females who are graduate school educated and browse this site from work. At least according to Alexa.com
  • Two posts were pithy observations: 1) At the grocery store today, I saw a book written by someone I met here on facebook when they were first starting out. An odd commentary of our times when hitting the grocery store endstacks means hitting the big time. 2) I doubled my memory!! Facebook works faster now. I don’t.
  • One was an announcement for my live chat on gather.com: Maximum Capacity — No Whine, Just Champagne… | Gather (Same discussion as on my facebook page, but with different participants, and different comments and conclusions)
  • One was an announcement of an article (written by me) that was published in Angie’s Diary: Rhythm in Writing | Angie’s DIARY
  • One was an announcement of the Second Wind Publishing Short Story contest: Short Story Contest. No Entry Fee!
  • The remaining three were links to my blog posts.

Does any of that constitute promotion? In some respects, all of it does, but it’s not blatant. At least I don’t think it is. Maybe you have a different opinion on the matter.

Nor do I promote in the groups I moderate. I post links to interviews I do with other other authors, I welcome new members to the group, and sometimes I post questions to get people to talk. Mostly what I do as moderator is delete everyone’s promotions. The group decided to ban self-promotion except on Saturday because they were sick of it, but apparently everyone assumes that self-promotion is what everyone else does, not what they themselves do. So they continue to post links to their books, links to reviews of their books, requests to “like” their page, and all the other blatantly self-promoting things that we all do on occasion but hate when anyone else does.  Instead of just turning everyone loose on Saturday, I’ve turned Saturday into a self-promotion extravaganza, which has become a lot of fun, and maybe people sell a few books from it, but still, it’s promoting to other authors. We need to be promoting to readers, not each other. This is a concept many authors don’t seem to get. Nor do they seem to understand that being generous and promoting other authors does not take sales away from themselves. I keep plugging away, though, trying to build a kinder, more giving group, one that is not so deep into self-centered promotion.

So, when the woman asked me to write an aritcle, I thought I knew what to say: that there was too much self-promotion on Facebook. Anything interesting gets buried beneath the constant barrage of “Look at me! Buy my book!” But . . . and here’s the sad truth . . . for some people, this constant self-promotion is catapulting them into star status on Amazon. Just because I think there is too much promotion on Facebook, doesn’t mean that there is too much from other people’s points of view.

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of articles about promoting on Facebook, looking for the magic ingredient that I seem to be missing. The only thing I can see that I am missing is a willingness to constantly and blatantly plug my books. One guy maxed out five profiles and made a fortune.  (Of course, that fortune came from the money he made off his book telling how to max out your profile, but it was still a fortune.) I was near maximum capacity on my profile once, but didn’t want to have to switch solely to a page — I like the interaction on the profile — so I unfriended all the blatant promoters such as the multi-level marketers, the people trying to sell me self-improvement books, people urging me to buy their book that will tell me how to make money on facebook, the people who had maxed out their profiles or were about to, and I was left with about 2,000 friends. I’m trying to make friends with my friends, to see if in the long run that will help sell books. And if it doesn’t? I’ve still gained a lot of online friends.

This has turned out to be a rather lengthy post when in fact all I wanted was to get your opinion. Do you think there is too much promotion on Facebook? What would an acceptable form of promotion be? Do you mind all the promotion? Do you do a bit (or a lot) of promotion yourself? If so, what do you do to promote yourself?

Posted in How to, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 10 Comments »

Short Story Contest. No Entry Fee!

December 1, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Now that you’ve blogged about what you are thankful for and stuffed yourself with Thanksgiving goodies, now that you have finished your NaNoWriMo entry and celebrated your success, now that you have survived your Black Friday shopping and have not yet gotten into the Christmas mood (or have already gotten out of it)…

Think Spring!!

Second Wind Publishing is sponsoring a short story contest. The theme is . . . you guessed it! Spring. Spring and renewal to be exact. Your stories do not have to be light and uplifting (which should be welcome news for all of you writers who pen dark fiction), but they do have to fit the theme. The story should be your own work, no more than 5,000 words, and must not have been published anywhere, not even on your own blog.

There is no entry fee.

The contest is open to anyone in the world, 18 or older, though the entry must be written in English. The deadline is December 31, 2011. The best entries will be posted on the Second Wind Contest Blog for everyone to read and comment.

The winning entry will be published in the upcoming Second Wind anthology, Change is in the Wind. This anthology is a collection of stories by the authors of Second Wind, so the winner will be in good company. (Since I’m a Second Wind author, I will be writing a story for the anthology. Well, I will as soon as I figure out what I want to write.) The winner will also receive a coupon from Smashwords.com for an unlimited number of free downloads of the anthology for one month. The coupon can be sent to as many people as you wish during that month. The winner will also be able to purchase an unlimited number of print copies of the anthology at half price plus shipping costs. And the winner will receive a one year free VIP account from Angie’s Diary, the online writing magazine to help you get even more exposure for your writing. ($99.95 value).

So what are you waiting for? Encouragement? Then here it is: you can write a wonderful short story! I know you can! So please send your story as a Word .doc or .docx to secondwindpublishing@gmail.com.

For more information, click here: Second Wind Contest Blog.

Posted in writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Have You Ever Seen a Goose Do Anything Silly?

November 30, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Why is a goose silly? The ancient hieroglyphic for foolish fellow is a goose, so obviously this disparagement of geese goes back to the origins of language. I’ve met a few geese recently, and I have yet to see one do anything silly. They look arrogant (as you can see from the photo I took today). They seem very goal-oriented (when food is in the offing, they hasten to get their share). And they are a bit intolerant of other species of fowl who might also be after that food. But silly? No. In fact, they are very smart and loyal. They fly in a V-formation, which is the most efficient way to travel. The lead geese do the hard work, breaking wind resistance so the geese trailing behind get a bit of rest, and they rotate positions, so none get too tired or too lazy. They also mate for life, which is more than you can say for a lot of humans. So why silly as a goose? Why not silly as a seal? Or silly as a dolphin? Or silly as an otter? All of those creatures are subject to antics, though of course, that might be our human perspective rather than the truth.

Why is an owl wise? Though portraying an owl as wise may be complimentary, it’s every bit as inane as calling a goose silly. What does an owl ever do to make humans perceive it as wise? Perhaps because, except for a few ambiguous hoots, an owl keeps his beak shut. Humans who don’t talk much are often considered wiser than they are, and perhaps they really are wiser than the rest of us. At least they are wise enough to keep their yaps shut so they can’t stick their feet in their mouths. (While we are on the subject — have you ever stuck your foot in your mouth? Perhaps tripped on a faux pas and landed in that awkward position? Not me, but then, I’m not very bendy.)

Why is a dog sick? They aren’t particularly sick now, not when they eat specially formulated foods and are given specially formed treats to keep them satisfied. It used to be that dogs ate what humans didn’t, ate whatever they could scrounge, and such scroungings often made them sick. Hence the expression, which oddly, we still use today though it has no more meaning than silly as a goose or wise as an owl.

Why is a clam happy? Why not? No job. No bills. Sunny days on the beach. What more could a mollusk want? High tide, apparently. Clams can only be dug at low tide, so a clam is especially happy at high tide when they are free of human interference. Happy as a clam is a shortened version of the original simile “happy as a clam at high tide.” Never having seen a clam at either low or high tide, I can’t vouch for its state of mind, can’t even vouch that it has a mind, so I will have to take the clammers word for this.

Why is a berry brown? Chaucer was the first to use this simile, and he used it at least twice: “His palfrey (horse) was as broune as is a bery” and “Brown as a berry, short, and thickly made.” Authors today still use this term, most often to describe suntanned children for some inexplicable reason. Maybe Chaucer’s “bery” was a typo? (Or a quillo if he used a quill pen.) Maybe he meant brown as a bear. Or brown as a wheatberry. There are some brown berries, but were they ever so common as to prompt Chaucer to use the simile multiple times?

The true mystery of all these phrases is not their origin, but the mystery of why we are still mindlessly using these out-dated similes today.

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