It’s December 21st. Happy Solstice everyone!
Winter solstice – the longest night of the year, marking the beginning of the planet’s slow tilt and turn toward spring’s days of increased light.
The changing of the seasons has been revered throughout the ages in ancient civilizations, indigenous cultures and various religions. Celebrations included feasting, gathering with loved ones and gift giving and were the origins of our modern traditions at this time of the year.
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I’ve had to cull my collection of books. It is a cringe-worthy task for book lovers but it has been ten years since the last round.
Maybe my age and thoughts of downsizing spurred me to get this done. Or it may have been the COVID 19 virus invasion. My sisters and I have been known to clean house when stressed or anxious.
Teetering between feeling vulnerable one moment and invincible the next is my experience of these worrying times. What was barely imaginable a couple of months ago is embraced as routine today. What a gift social media is right now. It’s beautiful to see the inspiring, loving and joyful ways folks are supporting each other. Not to mention the miracle of virtual get-togethers taking place. A couple of friends and I created a three-woman book club for ourselves.
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There’s nothing better than lying on a warm beach with a good book and your bathing suit on. A rare treat in the midst of a cold Canadian winter. I just returned from Cuba where we had days filled with sunshine, crystal clear waters and some of the best reading I’ve done in a long time.
To have that kind of time and space for reading was something I wasn’t even sure I could manage anymore. There’s alwasy so much that needs to be done at home, my days of reading for hours seemed long ago. At night, I’d be a few pages in and falling asleep.
And I couldn’t imagine a week of vacation without some writing in there, but I didn’t want to bring a laptop. So I took my fountain pen, my spiral-bound notebook and Sarah Selecky’s deck of writing prompts and Robert Olen Butler’s book on writing: From where you Dream.
But my biggest writing lesson was falling back in love with reading. Here’s my reading list and how I saw these novel’s from a writer’s perspective, in the order I read them:
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It is hard to believe, but another decade is ending in 16 sleeps!
Glancing back over the last 3, 650 days, I wonder what the hell I have been doing with my life? How did ten years just disappear in a blink?
Sure, as a mother, I’ve raised three wonderful children and sent them off to University: one is married and has a job, one is almost married and has a job, and my baby is currently wading through a whole bunch of biomedical science jargon that I can’t even begin to understand and always has a summer job. Obviously, education and jobs are important in this household. All three kids are smarter and more respectful than their mother and can handle the world without me. What more can a mom ask for? Seriously, that means I did my job as a mother.
But, as a writer… hmmm, that is a completely different story.
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Beginnings and endings are arguably the most important and memorable parts of our reading journeys. “How does it end?” is a familiar question when sharing what you’ve read or recommending a book to a friend.
In an effort to hone my writing skills, I’ve been paying closer attention to what I’m reading; studying what I love about an author’s style, thus inspiring my own writing. Readers are frequently able to anticipate twists and turns and to occasionally predict the ending, but primarily, we are willing participants in the suspension of belief and enjoy being taken on an adventure. We take the storytelling at face value and enjoy every moment without ‘reading’ too much in to it.
Admiring an author’s style and thoroughly enjoying the story only to be let down by the ending is disappointing. The relationship between writer and reader is symbiotic and there’s a sort of mutual trust that what has been promised will be delivered. Read more
As writers, we love to read good books. We appreciate them, we celebrate them, we admire them, we lose ourselves in them. Why, then, does reading a good book sometimes cause our writing insecurities to rear their ugly little heads?
One of my writing acquaintances recently complained that while she was loving a book she was reading, at the same time she was finding it discouraging. Why? She elaborated, saying it made her feel like she could never write something that great and so why the hell was she even trying.
As writers, our job is to create stories. Unique stories. It doesn’t matter whether they take shape inside poems, short stories or novels, because either way, we are still developing distinctive characters and a plotline. We are telling a story from beginning to end. The question is, how do you come up with the uniqueness of the story, when there are already billions of stories in existence. How will your story stand out from the rest? It may not be that unique after all. Or is it? Read more
By Tracey Richardson
This summer has been hard on my nerves. And I don’t think I’m alone.
Global tragedies have abounded, starting with the shooting deaths of 49 people at a gay club in Orlando in June. In early July, five Dallas police officers were assassinated by a gunman who wanted to avenge a couple of high profile police shootings of black men in the United States. A week after that, it was the vehicular rampage in Nice, France, that killed almost 100 people. On the immediate heels of that tragedy came a bloody coup d’etat attempt in Turkey. Read more