by Roseanna White | Aug 14, 2012 | Uncategorized
It’s August 14. That means that at 12:10 p.m., I will officially be a thirty-something instead of a twenty-something. Two years ago I was a bit shocked to realize I was “late twenties” instead of “mid-twenties.” So you can imagine my surprise at this one, LOL.
But after considerable consideration, I have decided that I’m not going to stay at 29. Nope. I’m 30, and I’m going to own it. I’m going to make it awesome.
I mean, 29 was pretty great.
LFY Annapolis came out, I got to see
Jewel of Persia and
A Stray Drop of Blood appear and hold steady on the Amazon genre best-seller list. I sold my first trilogy, the Culper Ring Series, to Harvest House.
So how much better might 30 be?
Ring of Secrets will be out this coming year, and
Whispers from the Shadows too! My daughter will be going into second grade, and my little guy will be dipping his toes in the home school pool too. And to top it all off, 30 marks the year when I’ll have spent half my life loving my honey, who I started dating at 15.
So naturally, we must celebrate this tumbling into a new decade with chocolate.
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| Chocolate Orange Cream Cake – one of my favorite recipes =) |
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And with these guys…
And with food that I’m not cooking. 😉 Oh! And we’re also celebrating a milestone of Facebook followers for WhiteFire, so there’ll be a giveaway today! If you haven’t entered yet for the winner’s choice of WhiteFire e-book, you better hop over there before I do the drawing!
So grab a slice of that delicious cake, a tall glass of iced coffee, and enjoy the day with me! Let’s live it up!
by Roseanna White | Aug 13, 2012 | Word of the Week
The other day I was looking up “war zone,” and in so doing came across some interesting tidbits on zone. =)
The noun dates to the late fourteenth century, coming directly from the Latin zona, which means “a geographical belt, celestial zone.” The Latin in turn comes from the Greek zone, which was the word for “belt.” Originally this was used solely to talk of the five great divisions on the surface of the earth–the torrid, temperate, and frigid areas, separated by the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Arctic and Antarctic circles.
It wasn’t until 1822 that zone was applied to any set region–so I could be pretty sure “war zone” wasn’t around yet in 1814, LOL. It was applied to sports in 1927.
Then we have the verb sense coming into play. “Zoning” land for a purpose dates from 1912.
Not to be confused with the oh-so-modern sense of “zone out.” This verb is from the 1980s, a back-formation of the adjective “zoned” that’s related to drug use, taken from the word ozone. I guess it implies that someone’s really high, which I’d never paused to consider. That use is from the 1960s. (Surprise, surprise, LOL.)
So there you go. Some really ancient uses, and some incredibly modern ones. =)
by Roseanna White | Aug 9, 2012 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
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| A Favor by Edmund Blair Leighton |
I’ve always liked August. It holds my birthday, after all, and has traditionally had lots of other fun things going on. But on the other hand, it’s the end of summer. The start of school. For any household with kids, August signals a change in seasons, even though the heat of summer’s still upon us.
This year, when the page in the calendar flipped, it kinda got to me. I looked down at the project that had been my primary goal, and I see that it’s not all that far along. And that feeling of failure swamped me. That feeling of What have I been doing? How have I wasted my time?
Then I remember that I haven’t been twiddling my thumbs. I’ve been editing a lot, which is great and necessary. I wrote a novella that I’m excited to get to use for promotion between the first two books of the Culper Ring Series. And I got a good chunk done on another project.
A project that got stalled, perhaps even nixed for good. Which thought still brings me a pang.
I’m a writer–I know rejection well. I’ve had to put aside countless projects over the years. But for some reason, this one still gets me down now and then. Primarily, I think, because it’s intertwined with a couple other projects in my mind, which have also been stalled. Put on hold. Which they’ve been on so long that they’ve gone from “paused” to “stop.”
I’m not sure I can really explain this echoey sigh that fills me when I think about these things lately. I can see where the way things have fallen out is without doubt for the best. I can see that the Lord has His plan in it and have to nod at the wisdom.
But still there’s just this sense of loss. Lost dreams. Lost time spent on them when I could have been working on the project that’s a sure thing.
I have to trust there, though, too, don’t I? Trust that that time spent was for a purpose too. That it wasn’t wasted.
The funny thing is that I have no problem looking at the years spent on that pile of books in my computer that are unpublished and give them a thumb’s up. Because I learned from them, because they made me who I am, because I still hope that some of them will have their day. So why can’t I look at the month and a half spent on these projects the same way?
I’m really not sure, but it’s something I’ve been giving to the Lord again and again. And again, and again, I have to remind myself that I haven’t failed. That I’m doing just fine, thank you very much, on my primary project.
With mere weeks left in my “free” time this summer–or at least before the home school year starts–I can’t help but number my days and try to figure out how to catch up with where I wanted to be. But the real task here isn’t to write a chapter a day and edit two books for WhiteFire. The real task is to lay these stalled dreams on the alter and trust. Trust that lost dreams and lost time and lost motivation are all part of God’s plan for me to find something better. To find His path for me. To find Him in new ways.
It’s hard, when those echoey sighs billow through me. But then . . . trust always is.
by Roseanna White | Aug 8, 2012 | Remember When Wednesdays, Uncategorized
A friend contacted me yesterday to ask if I would consider digging into the traditions of the garter-toss and bouquet toss at weddings for one of my posts. Well, ask and ye shall receive!
The garter-toss is a remnant from days of old. Back in the medieval and Elizabethan eras, no one just assumed that the bride and groom would retire to their room and consummate the marriage. No, no, they wanted proof–or at least a semblance of it. Back in those days, the wedding guests would accompany the bridal couple to the bed chamber. Taking the garter was considered “proof.” It was also considered luck. So things sometimes got out of hand with guests trying to derobe the bride so they could get at those lucky undergarments . . .
Yeah, that’s when the “toss” came in, LOL. Brides and grooms understandably wanted to distract those over-eager guests, so the groom would remove the garter and toss it to get people away from his poor bride. Kinda like tossing a steak at the snarling guard dogs… 😉
Over the centuries, that tradition has held on, though it’s been moved to the reception when seeing the couple to their bedroom went out of style. Funny the things that stick, isn’t it?
The bouquet-toss is rooted in a similar idea. Brides in Merry Old England (by which I mean OLD England), would carry bunches of aromatic herbs (think garlic) to fend off evil spirits (a common thread in many Celtic and Anglo traditions). These were eventually replaced with flowers as a symbol of happiness. And if the bride was so stinkin’ happy, well the guests wanted a piece of it too! They would try to snatch a piece of the bride’s gown or flowers for luck.
Go figure, the women weren’t too crazy about having their wedding dress torn to shreds (I don’t understand it…), so the bouquet-toss came about, much like the garter-toss did–to get people away from her, LOL.
So these two tossing traditions are both ways of sharing the good luck of the bridal couple with the guests without offending modesty or ruining the gown, and both have since come to the mean that the lucky recipient would be the next to wed. (Which is, of course, the best fortune anyone could have. *grins*)
And hey, if anyone else has questions about words or history that you’d like me to research for you, it saves me some brainstorming, so I’m all ears!
by Roseanna White | Aug 6, 2012 | Word of the Week
From time immemorial–or at least since the rise of pencil and pen and paper–people have been scribbling nonsensical pictures onto the page when they’re thinking. We call it doodling. But apparently we’ve only been calling it that since 1935. I had no idea it was that new a word! I figured it wasn’t old, but I would have guessed a bit older than that!
There’s a fun quote here from a play of the era:
LONGFELLOW: That’s a name we made up back home for people who make
foolish designs on paper when they’re thinking. It’s called doodling.
Almost everybody’s a doodler. Did you ever see a scratch pad in a
telephone booth? People draw the most idiotic pictures when they’re
thinking. Dr. Von Holler, here, could probably think up a long name for
it, because he doodles all the time. [“Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,”
screenplay by Robert Riskin, 1936; based on “Opera Hat,” serialized in
“American Magazine” beginning May 1935, by Clarence Aldington Kelland]
And yet we see the word (not with the “draw aimlessly” meaning) way before that, right? It’s derived from dawdle, it seems, and has a meaning of “fritter away time.”
But in the 1600s it meant “a simple fellow.” It was, in fact, a derogatory term thought to have a, um, rather crude connection. Let’s just say it was extracted from “cock-a-doodle-do” as a euphemism for one of the other words in that sound effect… Yeah, see? Crude. So the British really weren’t being nice when they came up with “Yankee Doodle.”
At any rate, when my 1814 heroine has drawn absentmindedly upon paper, “doodle” is not a word I can use to describe it. 😉
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.