Entries from October 2008 ↓

Some Christians get really up tight about Halloween. I don’t understand this.

This morning, I discovered that San Antonio spends the most money on Halloween in America (tied with Austin and Charlotte, NC).

Probably that’s because the day of the dead is very big around here.

My family loves Halloween. Not harvest. Not some Christianized version of trick or treat. We love Halloween itself. My kids love to dress up. They love wonderful spooky stories with ghosts and skeletons and zombies and scarecrows.

My four-year-old son just discovered the Goosebumps videos. Should I feel bad that he and my daughter love them? I don’t. They are Grimm’s fairy tales for the 21st century. Do they have monsters? Sure. Just like Rapunzel has the monstrous witch. Just like Hansel and Gretel has the monstrous step-mother and the monstrous witch. Just like the Ginger Bread Man runs runs as fast as he can but always gets eaten by the monstrous fox.

My son loves the movies because they make him feel brave. (He doesn’t get nightmares, but we are careful to watch for that sort of thing.)

Why do my kids love these movies? Why does my son check out Halloween books every time we go to the library? Why does he ask me to tell the story of the zombie, the skeleton, and the scarecrow who live in the church graveyard?

All stories of death and pain–even the ones that end badly–contain the hope of redemption. They are tales of warning about how the world could be. Sometimes they are tales that reassure us we are not alone in our fears and sufferings.

Don’t get me wrong. Halloween. Scary movies. Zombies and gore and vampires in the night are not for everyone. For some, people fear leads to more fear.

For others, books and stories of fear help us purge the darkness that is inside us. Or else, they just give us permission to tell stories with the most wonderful monsters and the most imaginative, magical conflicts.

Over the past year, we have probably read every Halloween book in existence. Here are some of our all time favorites in no particular order.

1. The Grandmas Trick-or-Treat is perfect for my generation with our competitive grandparent “problem.” Kids who spend lots of time with both sets of grandmothers will love this.
2. How Spider Saved Halloween was my favorite as a kid. My kids like it too.
3. The Hallo-wiener this book is just hilarious. A wiener dog’s mother gives him a lame costume, but he still manages to save the day from the bully trick-or-treaters.
4. One Halloween Night is one that my kids adore. My son has checked this book out from the library time after time after time. It is wonderfully magical, with a good moral against bullies and tricksters.
5. Six Creepy Sheep is one of the funnest rhyming books. (Funnest?)
6. Skeleton Hiccups is about as hilarious as it sounds.
7. The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything is practically a classic. Like many of these other books, it teaches kids to be brave. But it also gives them permission to allow themselves to get a little spooked sometimes!
8. Bats at the Beach isn’t really a Halloween book per se, but the illustrations are so wonderful. And if you’re nervous about Halloween, books about bats and spiders and other creepy crawlies can be a good way to sidestep the issue.
9. Bats! Creatures of the Night is the best bat book I’ve read. Believe me, I’ve read a lot of them. This one is not too long, and it has both good illustrations and fascinating details.
10. The Witch’s Child is probably my favorite Halloween fairy tale. An evil witch. A lifeless scarecrow doll. A field full of children who have been turned into thorn bushes. And a little girl who discovers the life-giving power of love. OK, that makes it sound cheesy, but it’s cool.

Z is for Zombie and The House of Boo both get honorable mentions as two of my favorite children’s Halloween books. The kids like these as well, but they will be on the edge of too scary for some.

Happy Halloween!

Feel free to browse the archives here. (May I recommend the poetry?) Or just come back next month. I’m pulling back from this blog, twitter, facebook, and other social media to get my head on straight.

Special thanks to Tall Skinny Kiwi for inspiring me to take the leap.

Since HighCallingBlogs.com is part of my day job, I will still be posting there–book reviews and other things.

HighCallingBlogs.com and Robert Hruzek of MiddleZoneMusings.com are joining forces again to talk about what we’ve learned from stress. (The project is still open, just visit that link if you want to participate.)

Here’s what I’ve learned. I’m totally stressed out right now. Maybe there’s a lesson on the other side–at least that’s my hope.

Doing Too Much Causes Stress

And maybe you’re like me. You can see midlife coming, so you try to cram in all of your big dreams while you can. Write a novel about zombies. Write more and more poetry and submit it for rejection from your favorite lit mags. Write blogs and comments and social media stuff. Write another series of skits for my church.

And forget about what people want to read. I mean, who cares about the reader, right?

And forget about why I’m writing at all.

And forget about who I’m writing for and working for–the big editor in the sky.

Hang in there with me on this next part. It comes back around to stress.

Stress Causes Self Doubt

My pastor and I talked about some skits I wrote last night for a church event next month. He was wondering if the production we had planned was right for the church. I’ve wondered that myself. Some people have said, “God told me to be part of this production.” It’s hard to argue with statements like that.

And I asked him if that kind of comment made sense to him. “I don’t know about you,” I said, “but God doesn’t tell me stuff like that.”

This is a recurring puzzlement for me. Lots of Christians hear from God, and I don’t know what they mean when they say, “God spoke to me.” Too often, I don’t feel like God speaks to me at all. I mean, I have a Bible. I hear from Christian friends and pastors. But there aren’t any burning bushes in my backyard. There’s no handwriting on my wall. God and I don’t wrestle in the wilderness.

These are the kinds of thoughts and doubts I have when I’m totally stressed, you see.

Stress Makes Me Impatient

So this morning, I figured I should stop writing, writing, writing (and here I am writing) and spend some time in study. We’re teaching the seventh and eighth graders Experiencing God right now at our church, so I opened up the book and read yesterday’s lesson a day late.

Here is this week’s memory verse: “He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.”

Ouch.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hear these words of Jesus from John as some kind of condemnation that I do not belong to God. But rather that I need to stop doubting that I hear from God just because I’m stressed out. Instead, when I’m stressed out, I need to get to the root of my stress.

Doing Too Much Causes Stress

What? I already used that subheadline? Well, read it again. It’s important. Toward the end of this morning’s lesson, I underlined this sentence, “Don’t try to skip over the relationship to get on with doing.”

Ouch again.

When I skip relationships in order to do more stuff, geuss where that leads? Stress.

What have I learned from stress?

Slow down.

Do less.

Wait.

Listen.

Stop and smell the relationships.

Spent a little bit of time working with Disqus and Lijit today to learn how to best help the members of HighCallingBlogs.com. Did you realize we have more than 200 bloggers in that network now? Seriously.

So, I’m curious what you all think of the two new bits I added today.

First, and cooliest is

LIJIT

Besides cleaning up the sidebars, I worked with the wonderful people of Lijit.com to test a network search for all of highcallingblogs.com. On my blog it replaces the search field. On other blogs, there is a special widget. (L. L. Barkat already installed the Lijit wijit over at Seedlings in Stone even though she just got back from Paris.)

I met the Lijit people at Blogworld and Godblog in Las Vegas, and they were wonderful to work with. I cannot speak highly enough of my experiences with them. Absolutely incredible. And their service is already being used by b5media. So after I’ve made my list of justifications for their product, I can always just say, “Well, if it’s good enough for b5media…”

Second, and still cool but without the added benefit of Lijit’s shockingly wonderful customer service, is

DISQUS

The verdict is still out on Disqus, but it looks very promising. So, let’s give it a try this weekend to see if you like it. Here’s what I’d like you to do. Leave a comment here telling me if you think I should keep wearing lederhosen or not. When you do, see what you think of the disqus plugin.

I’m a week late on the CSFF blog tour. Maybe that counts me out, but I figure better late than never. In my defense, I feel spread too thin lately. Gandalf and I talked about it at Blogworld. I told him, “I feel stressed, Gandalf. Stretched thin. Like butter, spread over too much bread.” Then we went and shot off some fireworks in front of Treasure Island.

But enough apologizing. Special thanks to Randy Ingermanson for helping me remember what I’d forgotten this morning with his post about Jeff.

This month, we’re talking about Marcher Lord Press an ambitious, creative project from Jeff Gerke. He’s been around for awhile, working as an editor for Multnomah (now a division of Waterbrook and Random House), Strang (where he helped launch the Realms imprint), and NavPress (one of my personal favorites). These days, he does freelance writing and editing based out of his main site Where the Map Ends. If anyone can pull this off, Jeff is the man.

But the proof is in the pudding. Whatever that means. So, I had hoped to do a quick Page One (and Two) Review of the first scifi book from Marcher Lord Press, The Personifid Invasion. Unfortunately, there are no excerpts of this book available online. (Jeff, can you hook us up on this?)

You can read the editor’s description on Jeff’s site and the amazon.com page.

You can live forever in your new artificial body…but are you alone in it? In the future, you can transfer your consciousness insot an artificial body–known as a personifid–and cheat death indefinitely. But human beings aren’t the only ones who want those bodies–Interterrestrials have found that personifids will house them very well, too. Ashley is trapped in San Edhem, a city where Interterrestrials and humans struggle for control of the personifids. Can her siblings, Aphra and Antha, rescue her before she is lost to them forever? ** R. E. Bartlett lives in the North Island of New Zealand in a dairy-farming region. She is the author of “The Personifid Project” and several unpublished Christian novels. Her speculative stories are characterized by humor, realistic dialogue, and engaging fantastic worlds. ** Category: Christian science fiction

Thankfully, Christianbook.com has made the beginning of The Personifid Project available here. So we’ll look at that and assume Bartlett’s second book is comparable or better. So, go read the first two pages quickly and come back.

Done? Good.

Let’s talk about what her first book does well in the opening pages.

1) It begins in medias res, in the middle of things, with the standard reliable trick of a chase scene. We are quickly introduced to three characters: Aphra and Michael are chasing Ryan. We understand their motivation to find Ryan quickly, and we have the added weirdness of the crowd that parts easily for them.

2) The surprise comes on page two. Aphra talks to a dog, which bites her and gets “deactivated.” As a fan of scifi (and dogs), this peaks my interest. This is where the book hooks me to read more. At this point also, the narrative locks into a pretty good rhythm of dialogue, action, and ideas. Ideas are always important in scifi.

3) Here’s a specific example of ideas expressed succinctly and naturally through dialogue.

Aphra pushed the dog over in one swift movement. It toppled stiffly and fell with a soft thunk. Then she got up and carefully felt her arm, looking for any sign of blood showing through her sleeve. “Why did Ryan do that?”

“It’s a fear game,” Michael said. “You like those.”

“Not when it hurts!”

Michael’s comment that “It’s a fear game” is perfect scifi world building. It tells us just enough to want to know what he means. We understand the big picture, but not the fun scifi details. Even better, this bit of dialog raises the stakes from a playful chase to something with a bit more teeth. If pain and fear are involved, I’m a lot more interested because explosions probably aren’t far behind.

I like explosions.

Any hiccups caused by the narrative description (with pretty complex sentences and lots of dependent clauses) are not a problem for me as a reader–because I’m very interested in the world Bartlett is building and the dialog she is using to build that world.

These are voices I want to hear from. And they are in a world I want to learn about. Kudos to Jeff Gerke and Marcher Lord Press for giving Bartlett another platform to continue publishing about this world.

From a reader’s standpoint, I’m always glad to see good ideas finding an audience. From a practical standpoint, it’s fun to look out into the wild frontier of publishing and watch Jeff come out with guns blazing.

Here are the other folks who participated last week…

Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Kathy Brasby
Jackie Castle
Valerie Comer
Karri Compton
Courtney
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Janey DeMeo
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Kameron M. Franklin
Andrea Graham
Todd Michael Greene
Katie Hart
Timothy Hicks
Joleen Howell
Jason Joyner
Kait
Mike Lynch
Terri Main
Margaret
Shannon McNear
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
John W. Otte
Steve Rice
Ashley Rutherford
Hanna Sandvig
Mirtika or Mir’s Here
Greg Slade
James Somers
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Laura Williams
Timothy Wise
Tina Kulesa
Jason Waguespac