by Roseanna White | Jun 25, 2018 | Word of the Week
I love that
www.etymonline.com has a list of trending words. Sometimes I click on them solely out of curiosity…like when I saw
circus on there today.
Last May my family journeyed to Charleston, WV to attend one of the final shows of the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and it was frankly amazing. So amazing that we really wished we’d given it a try way earlier so we could have attended more and caught all their different shows. Up until then, I’d never gone to a circus, be it large or small, though a tiny little one set up once on my high school’s grounds. I saw the elephants from the road, but we had something else going on that weekend and I couldn’t go. Kinda wish I had.
But anyway! Did you ever notice that circus looks an awful lot like circle? And circumference? And all those other circ- words that denote something round? This isn’t a coincidence. The word comes directly from Latin, where it meant “a ring, a circular line.” It was used in Ancient Rome for the open-roofed enclosures used for races and so on. The Latin word had been borrowed from the Ancient Greek kirkos, which meant the same thing.
In the early 1700s, the word was applied in English to buildings arranged in a circular pattern, hence Picadilly Circus, and also to a ring road. By the end of the 1700s, it had also been applied to the arenas used to showcase feats of horsemanship, acrobatics, etc.–but at first, it was just for the tent. It took about 40 years for it to come to mean the company or traveling show itself by 1838 or so. Another twenty years, and it had taken on the metaphorical sense of “a lively uproar, a hubbub.” And finally, during WWI, it was used to describe a squadron of aircraft.
Have you ever gone to a circus? What did you think of it?
by Roseanna White | Jun 21, 2018 | Thoughtful Thursdays
Over the weekend, my husband and I took a drive to meet up with some good friends for a dinner, halfway between where we live. We’ve been trying to do this somewhat regularly, and it’s inevitably a wonderful evening.
This time, we realized that it’s been 18 years since we all met and became friends–our first week of college. That’s half our lives. And after being a bit staggered at that, we took a few minutes to laugh and just be glad that we’re still friends. That even though sometimes a year has gone by without us getting together, as soon as we’re back in each other’s company, it’s like it’s only been a few weeks.
I know most of us have friends like that. The kind that can just pick up where we left off. The kind with a firm, solid foundation that time can only temper, not crack.
It’s especially wonderful to know that these friends are those kinds of friends, because we’d talked about it in our college days. In those first few years, as we began losing touch with high school friends and realized that, sadly, some were just “high school friends,” we expressed our desire to be more than just “college friends.” And we are.
Certainly, I still have friends I love from my earlier days, from childhood. We too can get together and it feels like it hasn’t been as long as it’s been. But let’s face it: we all also have friends for a season. Or friends in particular circumstances. We have work friends that don’t translate into best friends. Or maybe we have church friends that we never see out of church. I have writing friends that I only ever talk to online now and then, occasionally meet at a conference–we get along, we have a great time, but that’s all it is.
But then there are the ones that transcend the type or circumstance, right? Stephanie began as a writing friend, a critique partner, but we certainly talk about more than writing now. We talk about everything. It was strange, eight or nine years ago, to realize that this young woman I’d only ever met once, who I emailed every day, had become my best friend. And yet now, all these years later, it’s a given part of our lives–that our best friend lives a thousand miles away, we only see each other in person once a year, but we can still be there, daily most of the time, through the wonders of the internet.
There are still Martin and Kimberly, with whom we can have conversations filled with depth and laughter and insight, the silly and the profound. We can know that whether it’s been a month or a year, we’ll pick up where we left off.
I’m so grateful that God brings people into our lives as we need them. Some for a season. Some for a particular reason. Some forever. I pray that I can be the kind of friend each of
my friends need–again, sometimes just in glimpses, sometimes steadily and forever.
Do you have any friendships that you were surprised to find had deepened beyond the season or type? Or one that has persevered for decades? How did you and your best friend come to be best friends?
by Roseanna White | Jun 20, 2018 | Cover Designs
Sometimes authors come to me with very little idea of what they envision for their cover…and other times, they know exactly what they want. Now, knowing exactly what they want can occasionally be difficult, if that “what” is complicated. 😉 But other times, it makes it oh so easy to deliver a cover they love, quickly.
Pepper Basham has come to me several times with a very clear, very doable idea of what her next cover should be–she’s done several herself, and she has a great eye for what works. Occasionally she just needs me to handle some of the details.
Such was the case for her WWII novella, Facade.
She knew exactly what she wanted. This model…
…over this background.
Pretty simple. So arranging that and sizing it correctly, we have this.
Not bad from the get-go, right? But Pepper hired me to punch it up a notch, so I figured I’d get punching. 😉 A quick one-two. First, I traded out that blue sky for something a little more interesting–a bit of sunset, golden flare.
Then, of course, I had to tweak the model’s coloring and brightness to match.
There was also a little bit of fine-tuning in there. The background image is an original WWII image, so it’s a bit grainy. I put a surface blur on it to smooth it out and then fooled with the highlights a bit to reflect my new sun as well.
One more small touch–an airplane. We added one of those to the top corner, tweaking lighting to make it reflect that sunset.
A little bit of work, but honestly, not a whole lot. This one came together very quickly. I was happy with the overall image, so it was time to turn my attention to the fonts. I figured something art deco would look great, so I chose Fragile, which I’d purchased in a package of fun fonts. I decided to keep it simple and put both the title and author name in the same font, separating them with an art deco bar. Then I just added a bit of a filter to the bottom to make those words pop.
And there’s our front!
For the full cover, I used the same background image as the front, with a paper texture overlay. Added on all the type and logos and author info, and voila! Full cover.
What do you think?
About the Book
A reclusive academic
who would do anything to save her brother.
A reluctant spy
willing to risk his life to save the woman who broke his heart.
Olivia Rakes has the unique gift of observation, which suits her well since she prefers her books over the general populace, but when her brother goes MIA over France, Livy’s unique skills and her determination to save her brother force her into a world of espionage, deceit, danger…and the most frightening of all–romance.
Agent Christopher Dawson has never forgotten his childhood friend, and first love, Livy Rakes, but since she broke his heart, he’s avoided seeing her for years…until the search for his best friend brings them both together in the most unlikely of ways.
In a world where war changes the rules of life and love, can Christopher and Livy work together work together to unveil the mascarade before the enemy catches them?
You can also find Façade in the Timeless Love Novella Collection NOW AVAILABLE! (And whose cover I also designed, LOL)
by Roseanna White | Jun 18, 2018 | Word of the Week
Yesterday was my wedding anniversary–17 years since I first said “I do” to the love of my life. 😀 So naturally, today I thought I’d take a look at the words!
Wed is from Old English weddian, which means “to pledge oneself, vow; to betroth, to marry.” This is similar to other Germanic languages’ words, and while those other languages still reflect the original in their words today, English is a bit unique. While we retained wed in wedding, most often people today don’t say they hope to wed so-and-so–it sounds archaic.
English has instead adopted the French marier as well, giving us two options where other languages have stuck with one. Marry has pretty much the same meaning as wed, and it joined the English language in the 1300s, so it’s certainly been around a while.
Kind of interesting to think, though, of how the two have been assigned certain typical functions, right? Like we never ask for a piece of marriage cake. Nor do we look for our marriage gown. And yet we don’t exchange wedding vows on the day. We’ve come to view wedding as the specific event in which we bind ourselves, and marriage as the ongoing state (there’s the old-fashioned sounded wedlock for that too, but we don’t hear that much anymore, do we?). Which is rather interesting, since its early uses were also just for the ceremony, the initial pledging.
Regardless, I’m looking forward to another year with my husband. If you’re married, in what month is your anniversary? I’d never imagined I would be a June bride–I always wanted a December wedding, but the allure of a beach wedding instead drew me away from all my childhood plans, LOL, and I have no regrets! How about you?
by Roseanna White | Jun 14, 2018 | Thoughtful Thursdays
We set goals.
We work hard.
We sweat.
We cry.
We bleed.
We tumble down exhausted.
We stretch out our hands, willing our fingers to reach that last . . . single . . . inch.
Did we get there?
There. The end goal. The place we want to be.
There. The thing always just out of reach.
There. The place that, when we think we are there, can slip away the moment we’re not looking.
Have you been in that position? Where you think you’ve gained ground, only to lose it? Or where you feel like you’ve fallen just short of your goal?
Have you, on the other hand, been resting long and safe in this There, not stretching for another goal when maybe you should be?
I’ve been giving a lot of thought this last week to my there. My here. Where goals and realities meet and where they clash. What I count a failure and what I count a success, and what’s really within my power to change.
And I keep coming back to one simple truth.
There can be anywhere–but it’s only a success if I’m in the There where He wants me to be, fully reliant on Him. Sometimes, at least for me, success means taking things for granted. Success means slipping into pride. Success means that I begin to think I can instead of He can. In those moments, success in the world can mean failure in the soul.
Thank you, Lord, for reminding me always that while I’m called to do Your work, I’m not called to do it on my own strength, but through Yours. ONLY through Yours.
What is the There that you’re reaching for right now? Is it close? Too far? Are your in a period of straining or a period of rest?
Are you stretching far enough?
And most importantly, are we stretching our hands out only with His?
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.