by Roseanna White | Jul 6, 2015 | Word of the Week
My son is 7. Which means he’s obsessed with dinosaurs. Which means that he was in 7-year-old heaven when the new Jurassic World movie came out. Given that he has a really great grasp of “it’s just a movie using robots and special effect”–we watched behind the scenes on the original, because he wanted to know how they made the T-Rex–we took him to the theaters to see it.
Now, “every day is velociraptor day!” around here. Rowyn has “practiced a really long time” to perfect what he calls his “raptor run.” And his raptor hiss. And his raptor…everything. So naturally, he has made me look up all this stuff many, many times too. 😉
Most recently he was wondering which word came first–velociraptor or raptor as applied to eagles, hawks, falcons, etc.
As it turns out, raptor is straight from the Latin word of the same spelling, a noun form of the verb rapere–to steal. So it’s quite literally “a thief.” The word entered the English language round about 1600. It wasn’t, however, applied to the class of birds until 1873.
The first fossil of a velociraptor was discovered in 1923 and named in 1924; it was called “speed thief” (velocity + raptor) because scientists believed it was a very swift, if small, carnivore.
by Roseanna White | Jul 2, 2015 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
It’s nearly Independence Day here and America–a time to celebrate all we’ve fought to achieve. Freedom. Independence. The American Dream.
And it’s been a week, hasn’t it? A week of big decisions for our country with far-reaching implications. A week where all the Supreme Court justices wrote an opinion about their verdict on same-sex marriage–quite a rarity, that–and all affirmed a very important principle: that this decision could not interfere with freedom of speech and religion on the part of churches with a moral objection to said decision.
That was the silver lining. But it’s a silver lining that will mean nothing if we don’t exercise it. Far too often people trample the rights granted to us by the law, and we have to fight back…or we lose them.
But it applies to far more than whether we think same-sex marriage wrong. It applies to absolutely everything we believe, and everything we’re willing–or not–to take a stand for. It should make us ask a very important question: if the terror and persecution Isis is bludgeoning the other side of the world with makes its way here, what do we do? If our government continues to press its heel into the spine of religion, what do we do? If leaders continue to tell us we have to change our core beliefs, what do we do?
All too often, I think we ask, “What can we do?”
So we sit. And we flip away from the news channel when it reports yet another mass-beheading in Africa or the Middle East–after all, we’re so far away…what can we do?
We just shake our head when we learn of another Bible study shut down or Christian organization wrongly pursued by the IRS. After all, it’s just one too-noisy group…what can we really do?
We tell ourselves that if it comes down to it, we’ll take a stand. We’ll fight for what’s right. We won’t let terror rule our lives or dictate to us. But…what can we do?
In pre-WWII Germany, there were plenty of people who saw where the tide was turning. They saw the dangers coming their way. There was one man, a pastor, who wanted to make sure his people, his country, didn’t give in to this evil he felt surging–this evil that would annihilate the Jews if it could, and who was turning on Christianity too. He formed a group of fellow believers. People who claimed they would go to prison–or a concentration camp, as the case may be–rather than go silently along with the atrocities. He formed a group 10,000 strong, all pledging to stand firm.
Do you know how many followed through? Spoke up, spoke out? Went to prison for their beliefs? Three. Three. This pastor and two others.
Three.
It brings the story of Lot to mind, doesn’t it? And Abraham pleading, “Oh, Lord, if there be but ten righteous men, will you spare them?”
But they just sat there. Because they were afraid.
I know that analogies involving Hitler are over-done, but I’m not really looking right now at that one evil man. I’m looking at a nation that let him have power, that went silently along with him. I’m not concerned with him–I’m concerned with them. And I’m concerned with us. Because we all say we’re committed to standing against atrocities–but when it comes down to it, are we?
The numbers of martyred Christians and Jews in the last two years is absolutely staggering–yet we sit silently by, here on the other side of the world. We pray for them–which I would never belittle…but only when we think about it
The world is a scary place right now. It really is. And when a situation gets this explosive, two things can happen: either the bad guys continue to wage their war of terror and everyone else just lets them, for fear of getting killed…or people stand up, good fighting evil, and revival sweeps the globe.
We have missionary friends poised to move to Bulgaria. Their goal, on past missions trips there, was to bring faith to a people too long stripped of it by communism. When they first went to Bulgaria, they were among the first to do so after communism fell, and they found a people desperately thirsty for the Word of God. Now these same people are in an amazing position–they are poised on the very edge of east and west, with refugees fleeing Isis encamped about them. They are in position to minister themselves.
These friends recently went to a conference of like-minded ministries, and they spoke to countless people all saying the same thing: for decades we ministered to Eastern Europe, and now Eastern Europe is in a position to minister to the Middle East.
Revival is waiting. But if it sweeps across the globe, will it come here too? Or will we shut it out, flip the channel, because we don’t want to hear about the horrors it has to fight against? Will we sit by while our freedoms to gather, to worship, to speak out are slowly whittled away?
We need to stop asking “What can we do?” and just stand. Vocally, firmly, without fear. Don’t just give money or say a prayer once every week or two. Commit this daily to prayer. Earnestly seek God on what you can do. And then, hardest of all–be willing to do it.
by Roseanna White | Jul 1, 2015 | Uncategorized
I recently joined a fun site called 99 Designs, where the customer posts a design job to be done, and then designers can submit options. It’s like a contest–dangerous for this competitive girl, LOL, but thus far it’s been fun. There are all sorts of categories, but I’ve been focusing, of course, on book covers.
One of the first contests I entered was for a middle grade fantasy called Del Ryder and the Crystal Seed. In the story, a modern girl of about 11 years old stumbles through a portal into another world–a world where the trees are sentient and glow with an inner life. I at first decided to forgo this one–I had absolutely no history of designing fantasy covers for kids…but it kept niggling. And while I hadn’t designed one before, I certainly see plenty of middle grade books these days! So I know what appeals to the readership. And then…then I found this image that was just begging to be used.
Isn’t that FUN? At first I didn’t know what to do with it, but then I woke up one morning seeing a tween girl peering into that circle, a glow in the middle of it, and I thought, This could work.
First I tried it with a random girl from Shutterstock. I took this girl in the yellow shirt and tweaked her a bit.
It ended up looking okay, and I submitted it, but she wasn’t quite right and didn’t fit perfectly. Already I had a plan, though. A plan that was confirmed when the author commented on the submission asking for a girl wearing long pants instead of shorts. My plan just had to wait another hour or two…for Xoe to wake up. 😉
See, ever since my niece posed for a book cover for us back in 2011, Xoe has been asking the same question: “When do I get to be on a book cover you design, Mommy?” But I could only reply with, “When someone has a character who looks like you, sweetie.” I just didn’t know when that could be, since WhiteFire doesn’t do kids’ books.
But I knew the time had come. The title character in Del Ryder and the Crystal Seed, this middle grade book, is an 11-year-old girl. Kinda tomboyish, brown hair. Now, Xoe isn’t 11, but another of my nieces will be in a week, and she and Xoe, standing side by side and from behind, look enough alike that I knew she could pass.
So after I’d given Xoe time to wake up, I went stealthily into her room, picked out a simple outfit of a fitted T and dark jeans, tossed them into the bathroom, and said, “Hey, sweetie, put those clothes on and then model for me. I need you for a book cover!”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen her get dressed so fast. 😉
Now, given the position I wanted her in, I put her in our living room, against an outcropping of white wall that she could put her hand on much like a tree trunk. I took a variety in similar positions–and Rowyn took a few too. Honestly, I would have used his if he had managed to get a full-length one–that kid’s got some talent with a camera!
I decided to go with this one.
Of course, this was a photograph, and she was going onto an illustrated background, so I had some work to do.
But Photoshop had my back. I applied an Oil Painting filter, and then a surface blur, and suddenly my little girl looked illustrated too. =) Of course, then I still had some color changing. I darkened her hair to look browner.
I really like this. =) You’re also seeing a glow I added to the circle, which was quite simply an off-white circle that was blurred quite a lot and whose opacity was turned down to give it that hazy-glow effect.
Now–the title. I’d downloaded a great fantasy font a while ago and was just waiting for the chance to use it. It’s called Jupiter Ascending (after the movie, though I had no idea it was a movie at the time, LOL). I used that, added a nice drop-shadow, and then arched it to match the bend of the tree.
As someone with a lot of kids’ books in the house, I knew how I wanted to format this title. The Del Ryder part would be larger than the rest, so that in subsequent books we could leave it as-is and just change the part following and the… I also wanted that “and the” to be in a different font that was cursive but still easy to read for those not learning cursive anymore (let’s not get me started on that…). I chose the public domain Lobster for that part, and voila. The title.
Plugging that in, we get…
Leaving room, of course, for the author’s name…
I wanted a fun divider between title and name, something I could use on the spine and back too. I’d already downloaded a gazillion styles of flourishes, so I went hunting and came up with one I thought would totally work for this:
I thought this appealed to the “Crystal Seed” idea, what with that diamond shape hanging down, plus it was slightly curved, which fit my overall design. I popped it in.
The author really liked this, so Xoe and I were quite stoked. =) Of course, this was a full-cover design. On the spine he wanted a tree as a kind of series badge, and I carried over the other elements as well. I loved that the circle of the tree gave me a perfect place to write back-cover copy!
The author, Matt, quite liked this but asked if we could see the shirt in different colors. Which was very easy to do…
He decided on blue…which gave us the final!
But of course, this being a contest, that wasn’t the end of the process here. Xoe kept asking me how we were doing, very excited when we were named a finalist. Then over-the-moon when Matt sent a message letting us know he’d made his final choice and was going with this design. =) I only later went to his website and realized he’s a pastor as well as an author–pretty funny that the first win I had on a site with all sorts of projects ended up being a Christian author, just like I’m accustomed to working with.
We ordered a paperback the day it became available on Amazon, and Xoe’s reading it now–a very happy cover model indeed. 😉
by Roseanna White | Jun 29, 2015 | Word of the Week
Scalawag is one of those words that we think of as being a very old-fashioned insult–and it is…but it’s not quite as old as some might think.
Meaning “disreputable fellow,” scalawag only dates from 1848. It originated in American union jargon, and though where it came from isn’t quite clear, it’s thought that it may have been borrowed from the Scotch scallag–a farm hand or rustic. Scallag, in turn, is derived from Scalloway, one of the islands with Shetland ponies, which were deemed undersized and worthless–so to call someone a scallag, and then a scalawag, was to insult their worth. During the Civil War, Southererns used the term as an insult against white, Southern-born men who were not Confederates.
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.