by Roseanna White | Jul 3, 2014 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
A couple weeks ago, my hubby showed me a video of a truck driving along a street. From the open fields on the other side of it, I’d guess it to be in the Midwest. Truck’s just driving along, when wham! A fork of lightning comes searing down and hits the truck. Not the telephone poles, not the building that the security cam is attached to. Not the highest point in the area. The truck.
The people were fine. The truck…not so much.
As I watched that video, it hit a nerve. I used to be terrified of lightning, of storms. So sure that it was going to strike my house, catch it on fire (the real phobia), and devour me. I was known a time or two to go hide under the blankets when a thunderstorm rolled through. I knew that those blankets wouldn’t keep me safe. But they provided a barrier. Insulation. Comfort.
Even today, when the phobia has been forgotten and I enjoy a good rousing summer storm, some of the old instincts are still there. A couple times recently I’ve been driving home during a storm severe enough to send my phone chirping with tornado or flash flood warnings. A couple times, I’ve been watching the clouds for swirling motion or lightning when I pass through the forests along my road and hit the open stretch where the farm fields take over.
And each time, I can’t help the feeling of vulnerability that hits me when I’m out in the open like that, in a metal cage of a car, with the storm clouds overhead. I’d blame it on the video, but the experience actually came first, LOL. I feel exposed. In danger. I press a little firmer on the gas pedal and head for the tree line. It feels safer there.
But it isn’t. I know that. Well I remember the lessons as a child that say that in a thunderstorm, do not take shelter under a tree–trees are the things most often struck by lightning, and you could be putting yourself in danger by being under them when branches snap off from the surge of electricity. I know it–but it’s counter-intuitive.
It feels safe. It feels better.
But that feeling is a lie. And the truth is, we can’t totally predict what lightning will do, where it will strike. It’s a force of nature. Not always the highest point. Not always the metal.
It’s got a life of its own, it seems. One a lot like life. Troubles don’t strike where we expect them to either. Stress and controversy and attacks don’t always come from the likely source. But come they do. And they leave us smoking and sizzling a lot of times, wondering where that came from.
It’s human nature to seek shelter in the things that feel safe. In our friends. In our family. In a good book. A warm blanket. In food. In a crowd. In our anger.
But those are just the trees. They provide a feeling of shelter…but they’re not.
Shelter is in the shadow of His wings. But here’s the thing–it might not always feel like it. Because to go before God, we have to lay our souls bare. We have to make ourselves vulnerable. We have to go before Him on the plain, where there’s nothing else to overshadow us and distract from us…and that’s scary. We’re afraid it’ll hurt. We’re afraid of what it will cost us.
We’re afraid His lightning will strike us…or at least that His light will make us too aware of our failings.
We serve a God who sends the wind forth from His treasuries. Who makes lightning for the rain. Who makes the earth tremble and the seas to swell. We serve a God who puts His finger on the smallest amoeba. Who strokes the wing of a butterfly. Who cares about our every little worry.
His infinity stretches both to the vast and the infinitesimal. To the storm and the slightest breeze. The lightning and the lightning bug.
He is our shelter, and it isn’t deceptive like that forest I want to hurry to in a storm. He’s true. And though our feelings might make us hesitate, though that shadowy whisper might say it will be too hard, too painful, we’re called to trust in Him. Yes, He might ask something hard of us. But we can trust it will be for our good.
We can trust that He is in control. That he knows where every bolt of lightning will land. And that He can tell us when to seek the fields and when the trees. When to stop and when to go. He has it all in His hand.
And He has us there too. Whether we feel it or not.
by Roseanna White | Jul 2, 2014 | Uncategorized
I’m baaaaaaaaack! And oh, how awesome it is to have The Lost Heiress turned in and be free to catch up on other things. =)
One of which is my opinion on the wrap-up of AMC’s first season of
Turn. I was a couple weeks behind on watching due to the hockey finals and traveling…and for a few weeks there I really wasn’t sure what I could say anyway. I didn’t know how to put my finger on why the show was bugging me, other than the rather blatant ignoring of actual history (which I recognize most viewers wouldn’t even recognize, having not studied it as I did for
Ring of Secrets).
Then they helped me out by making it very clear–adultery ain’t cool, man. Especially when it’s (a) not accurate to history, (b) unnecessary, and (c) used to try to appeal to the viewers.
In a previous post after the first episode, I’d noted (with no complaints) some of the ways the show was fictionalizing history. And I’m quite obviously FINE with fictionalizing history, LOL. At first, I thought they were doing a grand job of doing so, too. They were putting key players together who really weren’t in reality, but that was okay. It was the for the sake of tension, and I really liked how they played off each other.
But here’s where they failed. They took the historical figure of Abraham Woodhull, who was in reality a farmer with firm Patriot roots who took great
Joy in pulling the wool over the British’s eyes, and turned him into a character who wasn’t sure what he believed, who was constantly changing his mind, and who had to be bullied into his role in the Culper Ring. Worse, they took a man of strong faith and made him a murderer, an adulterer, and absent any moral compass.
The Abraham Woodhull I read about in Washington’s Spies was a wee bit skittish, had opinions he shared too freely in his letters to Washington, but was a good man. A likeable man. One I cheered for when reading history.
I don’t want to cheer for Turn’s Abe anymore.
Largely because of the adultery. In reality, Abe wasn’t married at the time. In reality, Anna Strong was a decade older than him, never a love interest. And while fiction-writer-Roseanna is all for introducing a made-up romance (ahem), why why WHY did they have to make it result in adultery??
Anna, at least, thought her husband dead. But Abe. Why give him a wife, just to have him cheat on her? And why did the show assume that would make viewers like them? I guess their thought was to appeal to our desire for love. Yes, we can feel sorry for a character who married a girl he didn’t even know for noble reasons and then was still pulled toward his childhood sweetheart. But appealing to our base instincts–the ones that say Feeling is more important than commitment. What you want is more important than what’s right. The pleasurable is more important than the noble.–doesn’t work. A good TV show will portray a character’s failings in a way that makes us want them to be better. In a way that makes us ask ourselves what we’d do if put in such an impossible situation. In a way that makes us see the noble in the ignoble.
I didn’t see that here. Instead, I saw the noble be eclipsed by the ignoble.
And they missed a key ingredient–guilt. People falter, people make mistakes, and I’m all for using that in a fictionalized story (even if it’s a mistake the historical figures didn’t make). But the story would have been richer if Anna and Abe felt some remorse for what they’d done instead of basically flaunting it for all to see. Can you imagine the outrage in a small New England town if he really dueled for her? If she really jumped out of her husband’s boat and ran straight back into his arms?
In my opinion, that plot thread would have served the story much better had they left it at sexual tension. Have the Christmas scene where they almost falter, where Mr. Baker (best character they wrote!) interrupts. Leave that simmering between them, but give Abe a bit of a backbone. Have him care at least a little bit what he does to his family.
And that is, in my humble opinion, the other failure of the show. Abe isn’t driven. Abe has no backbone. Oh, he takes a few risks…but they’re not rooted in conviction.
What I love about the real historical Culper Ring is that they’re all about conviction. They lack skill, they lack professionalism, they lack training–but they definitely, 100% have a deep-down, scared-but-willing belief in what they’re doing. That, even before the adultery schtick, was what I was missing from the show. By all means, have them run scared now and then (the real people did). Have them second-guess whether they should pass something along for fear of getting caught (the real people did). Have them drive Washington slightly mad with their caution (the real people did). But give them the right heart.
The heart was what turned the real people into real, ordinary heroes.
The heart was what made me ask myself Would I be strong enough to do the same?
The heart is what has the potential to make viewers cheer through failures and setbacks and threat and victories.
Don’t strip the characters of it.
Will I watch next season? Probably. Because I really, really, really want them to redeem this story. I want to like the characters, and I want them to eventually tell the story of the Culpers I love. But I gotta say, I’m disappointed. I had high hopes, I was ready to love this show and shout about it to the world. And instead, I spent a lot of episodes sighing and shaking my head.
And now I’m down to a hope for improvement next season.
Fingers crossed that Abe gets a backbone, conviction comes to call, and they find a new character to give a bit of morality to now that they killed off the one who had it before.
by Roseanna White | Jun 18, 2014 | Uncategorized
Have I ever mentioned that trimming words isn’t my favorite pastime? But that’s what I’m doing now, trying to get The Lost Heiress down to size. And as I find it so very easy to get distracted from this task, I’m cutting myself off from all extraneous tasks until I get done what needs doing, LOL.
So I’ll be back when I’ve made some good progress. =) And when come back I do, I’ll have some thoughts on the first season of Turn, and who knows what else!
See y’all later!
by Roseanna White | Jun 16, 2014 | Word of the Week
I’m so, so happy to be all done working on the old house. Finished up all that on Friday, and spent 12 hours yesterday getting this house back in order and putting away all the stuff we moved over! It feels awesome to know that today will be spent at my computer, not cleaning. And much needed–I have two weeks to turn in The Lost Heiress, and much work to do!.
But for now, our word of the week. =) Ever wonder at the two different meanings of sentence? On the one hand we have the grammatical meaning of a complete thought. On the other, we have a judgment rendered in court.
Interestingly, they both come from the same root. The Latin sententia means “thought, way of thinking, opinion; judgment, decision,” and also “a thought expressed; aphorism, saying.” This led to meaning “an authoritative saying.” From about 1200 on, it was used in this way, applied to any teaching or doctrine.
In the early 1300s, it began to be applied to court decisions. From there, it took on the connotation in the mid-1300s of “understanding; wisdom; edifying subject matter.” Then it shifted into “the subject matter of a book or speech” at the end of the century. And by the middle of the next century, it narrowed down to that idea of “a complete, grammatical thought.”
Hope everyone has a great Monday!
by Roseanna White | Jun 12, 2014 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
First off, big congrats to the winner of my Fashion Find Challenge!
Angi Griffis
Angi gets to lay claim to all those awesome books, and her entry from Sunday was the one Random.org selected.
Now on with today. Or, er, I guess I’m talking about yesterday, LOL. See, it was a big day for me. Not because I spent the day painting our old house to get it ready for the tenant moving in tomorrow. Not because that earned me blisters all over my hands that even made it hurt to hold my spoon to eat ice cream (but I persevered. Just so you know. I didn’t give up on that chocolate cookies ‘n’ cream!). That was all pretty big. But what really made my day was that my mom finished reading A Soft Breath of Wind and my hubby (whose birthday is today!) finished reading The Lost Heiress.
Now, I’ve had two critique partners and my hubby read A Soft Breath of Wind already, but my mom is the first to read it after I cut a POV that those first readers all agreed was superfluous. And while I haven’t had a chance to drill Mom on whether she ever felt like anything was missing (because I’m not totally sure I put back in some of the details I also deleted that I meant to reinsert, LOL), I figure it must have turned out okay, since Mom declared that this may just be her favorite–which is saying something, because though Mom has always loved all my books, nothing has thus far been able to steal that particular title from A Stray Drop of Blood. I love that its sequel has succeeded!
I talked to my mom on the phone yesterday in the mid-afternoon, at which point she was 86% done. But I didn’t dwell on her finishing up too much, given that I was cleaning upholstery, painting, cleaning the kitchen, painting, trying to unclog the bathroom sink, painting… I had brain power only for “why is this stupid paint not covering?? Why did we not buy good paint?!” (which we then did, and oh the difference it made!) So when I got a message from her on Facebook last night, it was almost a surprise. An “Oh! Right. She was reading…” A very pleasant one.
My hubby David finished The Lost Heiress in the morning before we got to work, and I had totally spaced that–though he’s the first to finish it, and I was pretty anxious for his opinion. When we were getting ready to go to sleep last night, he said, “This is your best version of this book yet.” Keeping in mind that he’s read at least three versions. Perhaps more.
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Diane Kruger is a pretty good match for Brook
photo by Nicolas Genin via Wikimedia |
To which I replied, “Well that’s a good thing, given that it’s the one I sold.” LOL. He went on to add the icing to the cake by saying how I captured such depth, that all my characters were so well portrayed this time. That I really nailed Brook by making her more obviously French (or rather, Monegasque), that Justin is great with the extra moodiness, that Brice was so great this time around, and that giving her a father and taking out her uncles was spot-on for the story.
There’s Joy in hearing something like that–and there’s relief. I can’t speak for all writers, but I can tell you that I’m always anxious when I finish a book, before I hear back from my first readers on what works and what didn’t. My instincts are usually decent with this sort of thing, but I’m too close to really know if “It feels strong” equals “it is strong.”
Sometimes the two halves of a writer’s life–the real world of cleaning and cooking and caring for kids, of remodeling old houses and waiting for test results on a little one’s blood work; and the writer’s world of characters and plot development and deadlines–clash. But sometimes they line up pretty well. June has thus far been a month of hard work. Trimming words from a manuscript, hauling junk from an old house. Yesterday was a day of good report on my two next books and on the progress at the house.
None of it is perfect. I still have cleaning out and moving around to do today in the physical world. I still have some tweaks to make to the manuscripts, some editing, some trimming. But it’s always such a relief to know I’m on the right track!
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. Having successfully launched two homeschool grads, she now spends her time writing fiction, 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, as well as a fantasy series and contemporary mysteries and romances. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.