Lemonade

Even here in California's Central Coast, it's been a bit toasty. Not nearly as bad as many other areas of the country, so I'm not complaining. But I am aware of the importance of drinking enough fluids when it's warm. And there's only so much tea, iced and otherwise, I can drink before I'm jittering on the ceiling. Water here is good, although not as soft as it is in the winter (summer = well water = higher mineral content; winter = rain runoff/surface water = softer). So as I was staring at a packet of Crystal Lite lemonade - artificial everything - I got a sudden longing for real lemonade. Or some approximation.

Real lemonade is made with real lemons. Freshly squeezed. Alas, not in the larder nor on the tree (we have a ginormous grapefruit tree, but no lemons). However, I do have bottled lemon juice, a halfway measure that has the advantage of being available.

Lemonade: In a quart-sized leftover pasta sauce jar, put 1/4 c juice. Fill with water. Shake. Add sweetening of your choice, starting with 1 T and tasting before adding more. Shake again.

That's all. That's it. Took about as long as mixing up the powdered artificial-everything. Way cheaper than bottled stuff. Refreshing and exactly the right sweetness. Screw the jar lid back on and you can carry it around - I drink it right from the bottle. On a hot day, I'll go through 1 or 2 of these, which is why not being overly sweetened is a good thing.

GUEST BLOG: Kyell Gold on Writing From The Heart

I had to become someone else to write the things that were important to me.

Let me back up a little. You’ll hear this phrase, “write from the heart,” a fair amount as you navigate the world of writing advice. When I suggested the topic to Deborah, she immediately pointed me to a podcast in which Betsy Wollheim of DAW spent fifteen minutes giving just that advice. So I want to talk a little about why it’s important, why many people don’t do it, and how you can.

Writing from the heart is scary. It means exposing yourself to the world. In a way, it’s like having an intimate conversation with hundreds or thousands or (if you’re lucky) millions of strangers. It’s talking about the pain of breaking up, the fear of not having enough to eat, the loneliness of losing a parent, the depressing reality of falling short. It’s talking about falling in love, about the joy of discovery, about those words your mother said when you were six that you carried with you all your life. It can mean describing your journey from realizing you’re different to realizing that that’s okay.

If this scares you or disturbs you (in an emotional sense rather than a horror sense), that’s good. Tap into a place where you’re not comfortable: those are the raw places from which powerful writing comes. You guard them because they are important to you. And when they are important to you, that passion comes across in your writing. When you put yourself on the page, the reader can feel that, because your characters reactions feel authentic.

Here's how I did it: I’d been more and more openly gay for about a decade when I moved in with my then-boyfriend (now husband), but I still kept it private from my co-workers and other casual friends until I got a better sense of how it would be received. What was fueling my writing then was the urge to show gay characters falling in love, the way I was falling in love.  And I wanted to write them in the aesthetic I was discovering, using animal-people to represent character archetypes.

This was important to me, but it was also scary, not just because of having employers who knew, even then, how to use search engines, but also because I would be writing intimate emotional details. Hidden behind other characters, yes, but it would be exposing who I am in ways I didn’t even do with people I’d worked beside for years.

So I created a new identity. I wrote stories, then a novel, then another novel.( Read more... )

A New YA From Sherwood Smith

Once upon a time, I was just a writer. Just a writer being more than I could possibly hope to well. But I persisted, churning out story after story, listening hard to critiques, honing my critical as well as my creative skills. Being in a writers workshop gave me ample opportunity to read other people's work with those same critical skills. I learned from feedback and from feedback-on-feedback what was helpful and what was infuriating. Eventually, I got to work with professional editors. I learned the difference between workshop-critique-feedback and editorial revision requests. More time passed, like decades, and I got to sit in the editor's chair. Four anthologies later, I also dipped my toe into book editing and related cooperations. (I say "cooperation" because good editing, proofreading, beta reading, copy editing, you name it, is aimed at helping the author make the story the best it can be according to that author's vision.)

There is a special thrill in seeing your own name (or one that means you) on a printed story. Or holding a copy of a book in your hands and thinking, "I wrote it!" There is also a particular delight in playing a small role in midwifing a story. So I get to brag a little. I worked on this. It doesn't matter exactly what I did, only that I got a peek at its evolution.

So here's the blurb: In this sequel to The Spy Princess, Lilah, newly made a princess, teams up with Atan, the hidden princess of the oldest country in the world, Sartor. The girls set out to free Sartor from a century of enchantment.

Capture, escape, a forest beyond time, ancient beings, civilizations secreted in caves, and a deadly enemy await the girls. Atan knows that if she survives, the challenges facing a fifteen-year-old queen are only beginning.


You don't have to have read The Spy Princess -- I hadn't -- but Sartor may make you run out and get it. Sartor stands nicely on its own.

One of the things I most loved about this story is how resourceful the young characters are. They're not short adults or super-kids. They have limitations, both of physical strength and social privilege. But they're smart and determined. And loyal to one another. We should all have such friends and such companions-to-adventure.