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by Roseanna White | Jan 27, 2014 | Word of the Week
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| Patent diagram of the first escalator (“revolving stairs”) – 1859 |
This one got me. I admit it. I looked it up during edits on a WhiteFire book because I wasn’t sure it was quite early enough in the sense used. And what do I find? A surprise!
Escalate is new. Darn new. As in, from 1922–and that’s in the literal sense. It’s actually a back-formation of escalator (from 1900). Before that, the verb had been escalade. Not so different a word, right? Except that escalade has exactly one meaning: “to use ladders to scale a fortified wall.” Yeah, um…not how I use escalate!
So what of that meaning? The “to raise,” or “to intensify” meaning? Well…that didn’t come around until the Cold War! 1959 to be exact. I had no idea it was so new!
by Roseanna White | Jan 23, 2014 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
I’ve been writing for a long time. As in, a long time. I finished my first novel at age 13. My second at 16. Then six more by the time I was 21. That’s a lot of words on the page. A lot of plot. A lot of characters to come to love. And I always had the goal of getting published. Putting those stories into the world.
That means criticism.
Now, no matter what you do in life, you’re going to come up against criticism. But me…I wasn’t so good at taking it, and I can admit that now that I’m old (ahem) and wise (cough, cough). 😉 Even when it was a simple matter of needing to trim a few scenes, I couldn’t do it. I was too attached. I loved every word. I mean, if I read through something all on my own and saw a mistake or a way to make a sentence sound better, sure. I’d change it. But on someone else’s advice?
Nuh uh. No way.
Yeah…I had some work to do, LOL. I formed a critique group, and that helped so much. My internal protests to every suggestion quickly shrank from a day to a minute to a few seconds’ debate. I learned to measure and weigh advice.
I learned to adopt a distance between me and my work. To realize that my book wasn’t me. An attack on something I created (not that my critique partners attacked! But looking forward here to reviews…) was not an attack on my person.
Distance. It’s the friend of a writer. It’s the friend of everyone when it comes to these situations. It’s so easy to take things personally, but what does that lead to? Hurt feelings. Offense. Division. It happens in friendships, families, churches.
Lately, I’ve thought that I have distance pretty well down. Mastered. I invest my heart in my books while I write them, then I put them down. I walk away. And I approach all else about them with what I figured was healthy detachment. Changes to a book? In my whole direction? In what project I’m working on? I can do that. Why not. No problem.
But here’s the thing…when one has “mastered” distance, sometimes it masters you. Sometimes you look at everything with that lens. Sometimes you stop investing altogether. And that can’t be good. Because hope, faith, and detachment are a strange combination. And when that last one has the upper hand, you don’t always even realize if the other two have faded.
In this balancing act we call life, it seems like something or another is always out of whack, doesn’t it? We always have work to do. Right now, part of mine is in finding this particular equilibrium. In making sure that keeping a distance from my work doesn’t turn into keeping a distance from faith that God’s working through it.
I definitely need some space between me and the things of my hands. But between me and the work God’s doing in me–no. That I need to embrace fully. That I need to hold close. That I need to be protective of. So that I can still hope…not in a particular outcome, but in the One who’s controlling it.
by Roseanna White | Jan 20, 2014 | Word of the Week
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| A Roman Calendar |
When I’m writing or editing historicals, much of my word nit-picking relies on gut and ear. If something feels too new or sounds too new (as in, I don’t remember reading it in works of the period), I look it up. Which is how I came to look up date last week.
Date obviously has a long history…in some senses. Ignoring the fruit called a date, which has been around forever, let’s look at the noun and verb that both have to do with noting the day. These have been around since the 14th century, directly from the Latin datum. From which also comes data, apparently. Which makes sense, but I don’t think I ever thought of it, LOL.
This primary meaning gradually evolved to mean “appointment.” But it took several hundred years for that appointment to gain a romantic sense–as in, not until the 1890s, five or so years after it came to mean “liaison.” But this was still just the actual meeting. Calling a person your date didn’t come about until 1925.
And to round it all out, “date” was also used to call something old-fashioned or out-of-date (her clothes date her) in 1895. So many meanings! Some so very old, some so relatively new.
Quick side note! I just added a page to my website featuring the book covers I’ve designed. I didn’t realize how many there were! LOL. If you’d like to check them out–or if you have a project you’d like me to consider taking on–do swing over to http://www.roseannawhite.com/wordpress/designs and take a look at my gallery. I’d love to hear which is your favorite. 😉
by Roseanna White | Jan 16, 2014 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
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| by Jean-François Millet Angelus, 1859 |
Prayer.
It’s one of those things that believers know we need. It’s communion. It’s supplication. It’s worship.
It’s crucial. Vital.
And hard for me to find the time to engage in.
That sounds awful, and is awful. But it’s true, and I suspect I’m not the only busy parent who encounters this. I can find time every day to read my Bible, because whenever a little one comes up and interrupts me, it’s just a matter of finding my place again and continuing. But when prayer is interrupted (which it always is), it’s a little harder to get back to.
Sometimes I journal my prayers, and that works well…until I can’t find a pen or misplace my notebook. Which happens, LOL.
But one of my resolutions this year was to spend more time in prayer. And so, each day, I’m trying.
Usually, it looks like this. The kids run out of the room on some search, and I whisper to the Lord the thoughts weighing on my mind. It lasts about half a minute, before the little ones come tearing back in. Or I’m in the shower. Shower has become prayer time. It’s the only solid 15 minutes I have in a day without guaranteed interruptions, so I’ve made a concerted effort to use it for that God time.
And mostly, I’m trying to listen. You know those times you get that feeling? I’m making a conscious decision to heed those.
Like last week, when I got that feeling that I should fill up the water jugs. We have a well, so no electricity = no water. It was supposed to be colder than it had been in 20 years, and windy. So I filled up the jugs. And I prayed the Lord would keep us warm. And I knew–knew–we’d lose power.
It went out at 3 a.m. and didn’t come back on until twelve hours later. The house had dropped down to just under 50 degrees, but we had water. And we kept warm enough. And I thanked God for that warning whisper.
I’ve also found myself praying very pointedly lately. Like, when praying for a new opportunity, being very specific in what I hope for and when I hope for it. These prayers always feel a little strange to me, and I tend to hedge them with, “You know…maybe…if this is Your will…” But they also feel right. And they keep proving themselves. Twice now in the last couple weeks these very-specific prayers have yielded very-specific, very quick results.
When I think of prayer, I often think of Jewel of Persia. My heroine had a prayer life I aspire to, yet which feels very out of reach to me. She, after all, had servants to help her out, LOL. But though I can’t feasibly spend hours on my knees before the Lord, I can give Him my all. I can trust Him fully to deliver what’s best for me. And yes, I can listen.
And when I listen…well, I won’t say nothing ever catches me by surprise. But a lot less has lately. Good news and bad have been more a “Okay…yep…that’s what God was saying, all right” than a “Wha????”
I’ve got a lot of growing to do here yet. A lot. But I love these lessons. I love crawling up into the lap of my God and knowing He’s holding me tight. I love pausing, stopping, and getting that feeling. I love knowing it’s my heavenly Father, guiding me through my every day.
I love having prayer in my life. And I’m so, so grateful that my Lord loves it too.
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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. 