On Thursday, my co-podcaster, Shaun, and husband guy, takes over the blog.
He’s adorable. I hope you’ll read what he says even if he does occasionally sound like a surfer dude from the 1990sor Captain Pontification.And no, we don’t always agree. 🙂
The Shaun
Happy New Year
Can you believe that another year has passed us by? Holy crap, whenever the end of the year gets here it always seems like it went by so fast! At least, to me it does.
It has been yet another tumultuous year, a roller coaster ride, some may say. But all in all, it has been a good year. I can say this with certainty because if you are reading this, you are still alive and breathing, and that makes it a good year for you. It might not have been the smoothest but we survived it, together.
Together.
Eight letters of great importance.
Without each other working together in some form or fashion, none of us would have made it. None of us will make it without one another. I know a lot of you are probably thinking about the others, you know, on the “other side of the aisle” and thinking that things would be a lot easier without them, but I have to disagree.
We never agree with each other on every aspect of life, and that is what makes it work. Any group, from the smallest neighborhood association to all of humanity, is ineffective if all of its members are aligned in their thinking. Heck, even a simple relationship is more dynamic if the people involved aren’t always agreeable with each other.
The trick, I think, is to be patient and openminded enough to listen to the other side. Listen and truly hear what they have to say. Take a while to digest the information that they have given you and then let them do the same with your ideas. This is how we are able to separate the best, most logical, ideas from the chaff.
Take these brilliant kernels, mix them with lots of love and understanding and the result is, frankly, the continuation of the human species!
I wish you all a very happy and prosperous New Year and remember that in order to survive and be happy, you must always, Love Your way Through It!
Peace,
Shaun
My little, creepy book baby is out in the world because who doesn’t want sad, quirky, horror with some romantic bits for the holiday season?
On Thursday, my co-podcaster, Shaun, and husband guy, takes over the blog.
He’s adorable. I hope you’ll read what he says even if he does occasionally sound like a surfer dude from the 1990sor Captain Pontification.And no, we don’t always agree. 🙂
Here’s Shaun
If I was to ask you what your favorite place in your residence is, what would be the reply? I am sure that the answers would vary greatly, but I am also sure that many of you would answer the same as I would.
Bed!
I love, I mean absolutely love, my life! Because of this love of my life, I strive to utilize every waking moment to its fullest. However, there is nothing more relaxing than lying down in bed and going to sleep in complete comfort. Especially if you have the warm body of your beloved cuddled up next to you.
Beds are special. Think about what happens in a bed; love is made; life is created; books are read; movies watched; dreams and nightmares take shape and sometimes unfold into reality; and our brains go to places not normally seen out of bed. Not all bed experiences are positive, but we can damn sure try and make them that way.
Early humans apparently slept on piles of leaves, grasses, and even ash, all designed with the idea of comfort and critter control in mind. We have evolved just a bit in our technology and design and now some of us have beds that are so comfortable that they can even self-adjust and regulate while we sleep.
That is a beautiful thing!
Take a journey with me here.
Imagine your significant other, smelling like holy hell, reaching down to grab your hand as you sit in your animal hide nightgown in front of the fire. “Would you accompany me to bed, my lovely?”
You look up with your soot smudged face. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure my darling.”
Walking into your shared shallow cave, you look down at the bed. “You haven’t changed out these leaves in weeks and the ash needs replenishing!”
“Aw, geez. Come on I will do it tomorrow at first light. Just lie down with me, baby.”
Never have you been able to stay mad at your partner, so of course, you lie down. They also lie down and snuggle up with you from behind, trying to stay warm as the fire wanes and the temperature drops.
You fall asleep but wake up shortly thereafter. Even through your animal hide nightgown you can feel something poking you in the small of your back. Angrily you swipe behind you, trying to hit the offender. “I am too tired for any shenanigans!”
You can feel your mate rustling around behind you, reaching over your shoulder and groggily replying, “Sorry, love. I was sound asleep. But this stick must have been buried in the leaves and was poking you in the back.”
Out of the corner of your eye you can see the stick flying out of the cave, making sparks fly as it lands in the embers of the smoldering fire.
“Oh, bummer,” you sadly reply as your bed partner resumes his cave shaking snoring.
So you see, even with the technologically advanced sleeping surfaces that we have now, mistakes can be made and sleep can be interrupted. That is why I never bring sticks to bed!
Hey! I know that was stupid but at least you know how good you have it.
Just remember, always extinguish your open fire before sleeping, never bring sticks to bed, a liberal sprinkling of ash will keep the bugs out and always Love Your Way Through It!
Peace and sweet dreams,
Shaun
NEW BOOK OUT!
It’s super fun. An adult paranormal/mystery/romance/horror blend. Think Charlaine Harris but without all the vampires. Instead there are shifters and dragon grandmothers and evil police chiefs and potential necromancers and the occasional zombie and a sexy skunk.
Be ready to resurrect your love of the paranormal in the first novel in the Alisa Thea series—the books that give new meaning to quirky paranormal.
Alisa Thea is barely scraping by as a landscaper in small-town Bar Harbor. She can’t touch people with her bare skin without seeing their deaths and passing out, which limits her job and friendship opportunities. It also doesn’t give much of a possibility for a love life, nor does her overbearing stepfather, the town’s sheriff. Then along comes an opportunity at a local campground where she thinks her need for a home and job are finally solved . . .
But the campground and its quirky residents have secrets of their own: the upper level is full of paranormals. And when some horrifying murders hit the campground—along with a potential boyfriend from her past who may be involved—Alisa starts to wonder if living in a campground of paranormals will end up in her own death.
Join New York Times and internationally best[selling author Carrie Jones in the first book of the Alisa Thea Series as it combines the excitement of a thriller with the first-hand immediacy and quirky heroines that Jones is known for.
It’s fun. It’s weird. It’s kind of like Charlaine Harris, but a little bit more achy and weird.
Almost Dead Series – Meet Alissa Thea, a sexy skunk, a haunted campground and a lot of quirky
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
On Thursday, my co-podcaster, Shaun, and husband guy, takes over the blog.
He’s adorable. I hope you’ll read what he says even if he does occasionally sound like a surfer dude from the 1990sor Captain Pontification. And no, we don’t always agree. 🙂
Today is one of those days where I can’t really think of anything to write! I was however, thinking of a game that would involve me thinking of a substantial number of thoughts that fit a certain rough description.
This rough description is WTF? It’s a game, only I have to think of all of the statements and/or questions. But, that’s alright, I am up to the challenge! Maybe. Where the “game” part come sin, I have no idea. Maybe I will figure it out, maybe I won’t.
Here we go.
You have a sore throat, a cough, maybe a fever and definitely a runny nose. You go to get a COVID test. You swab one nostril and pull it out. You make the huge mistake of looking at said swab and you are like, “You expect me to put that in my other nostril? WTF?”
You are doing a load of laundry. Something that you have been doing since you were thirteen when your mother told you that if you didn’t do your own laundry from now on you would not have clean clothes and after the seventh, and consecutive, item of clothing that you have had to turn right side out, you are like, “WTF?”
You look at your significant other when they don’t know you are looking at them so that you can really stare and study and you think to yourself, “How did I even get to this place? How on earth could I ever get so lucky? WTF?”
You are hanging with your just barely a teenager and they tell you that they have secretly known about the mechanics of sex for a few years now and you turn your head and silently mouth, “Holy crap, they are normal! WTF?”
Just so you know, I was strongly shut down on the birds and the bees talk a couple years ago. Now I know why.
I don’t know really. I find so many things about life, both huge and miniscule, amazing. It’s even amazingly confusing!
Sometimes the bad seems good and sometimes the good seems bad. Sometimes the bad seems amazingly bad and sometimes the good seems amazingly good.
Sometimes it is good to realize that you are very lucky just to be here, living life, and able to tell the good from the bad!
Able to turn bad to good and able to make good better!
Able to make the best of the bad and the very bestest out of the good!
Cause I will tell you one thing people, you can’t help the hand that you were dealt, but you sure as hell can take a chance to make that hand better!
Remember to ALWAYS – LOVE YOUR WAY THROUGH IT!
Peace,
Shaun
The Places We Hide by Carrie Jones (That’s me. If you click the image, it will bring you to the Amazon page!)
The third book in Rosie and Seamus’s story of adventure, mystery, and death is here!
Sometimes the treasure is not worth the hunt . . . .
When a little boy goes missing on a large Maine island, the community is horrified especially almost-lovers Rosie Jones and Sergeant Seamus Kelley. The duo’s dealt with two gruesome serial killers during their short time together and are finally ready to focus on their romance despite their past history of murders and torment.
Things seem like they’ve gone terribly wrong. Again. Rosie wakes up in the middle of the woods. Is she sleepwalking or is something more sinister going on?
What at first seems like a fun treasure hunt soon turns into something much more terrifying . . . and they learn that things are not yet safe on their island or in their world. If they want to keep more people from going missing, Rosie and Seamus have to crack the puzzle before it’s too late.
To buy it, click here, and let me know! I might send you something!
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
So, at dinner last night, Carrie introduced me to this little crumb of life coach theory. She asked me what my three favorite things were to do when I was eight years old.
I looked at her like she had three heads and asked her how she expected me to remember such information at my age.
Of course, she hates it when I deflect her questions with another question in an effort to stall or just change the subject, but I hate having to think about myself in an introspective way.
However, she was dead set on me answering this question and not letting me get away with my techniques of conversational derailing. I answered her. I answered her because I pretty much knew the answer and I love her and didn’t want to disappoint her yet again.
My answer was that I loved to read, run around in the woods collecting forest creatures that have no business being pets for the sole purpose of making them pets, and I loved to fish.
Carrie was not surprised by my answers and went on to tell me that these things are what I am supposed to be doing now. These things are what would make me happy if I was able to just do them for the majority of, or a good portion of, my adult life. She, as always, is right.
Nothing would make me happier than to be able to run around in the woods looking for Bigfoot or to be fishing all of the time. Reading can be accomplished on the days when the weather is not conducive to outdoor activities.
But how can this be possible as an adult I asked her. Her response was that the things we loved to do most often when we are of a semi-independent childhood age are what we should do all of our lives to maintain our best lifestyle. The lifestyle that makes us the most happy and content.
I looked at her with a face that she knew meant, “this is impossible, woman.” I have too many responsibilities to ever be able to do that. Knowing me as well as she does, she went on to explain that this is indeed the trap. The responsibility trap that keeps a majority of us from doing what we really want. The trap of social expectations!
We don’t really have to live to make as much money as we can. We don’t really have to live to live up to someone else’s expectations. What we should be doing is living to live the best life that we can, for us.
I REALLY need to start doing the things that I love to do! I need to take my own beautiful and loving wife’s advice and start doing more of what makes me the happiest. So does she.
Don’t waste your life away not doing the things that you love people!
And as you do those things, remember to always Love Your Way Through It!
Shaun
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
On Thursday, my co-podcaster, Shaun, and husband guy, takes over the blog.
He’s adorable. I hope you’ll read what he says even if he does occasionally sound like a surfer dude from the 1990s.
There is more than one way to skin a cat.
I actually uttered this phrase this morning to Carrie, who cringed, and I have not yet been able to stop thinking about it. I mean, obviously, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Heck, there is more than one way to skin anything, but who ever wanted to really skin a cat? They can be so incredibly soft and warm but at best you could probably get a small pair of mittens out of one. So not worth it! I truly wouldn’t advocate for skinning your, or even your neighbor’s extremely annoying, domestic feline!
Back to the question at hand: where did this phrase come from and what exactly does it mean?
For me it came from the mouth of my grandfather who was a very learned and eloquent phraseoligist. I don’t remember if I ever had to ask him what it meant or if I just instinctively, via the amazing trait of human contextually based inference, knew what it meant. It means that there is more than one way to get things accomplished for those of you who may have never heard this wonderful saying.
I have done some online research, because we all know that the internet is always correct and accurate, and I think I have come up with the earliest known mention of this phrase at least in print. In 1840, American humorist Seba Smith indicated as much in her short story The Money Diggers when she wrote: “As it is said, ‘There are more ways than one to skin a cat,’ so are there more ways than one of digging for money.”
However, for at least two hundred years prior to Smith publishing her short story, people had sayings that revolved around animals and referred to the fact that there is more than one way to accomplish just about anything. Apparently dogs were the main target for such atrocious dribble and it wasn’t until the 1800s that our other furry companion, the house cat, came under fire.
And you know what? There is more than one way to get something done and I have indeed just created another way to get you to read my Thursday post. I wanted to tell you that this Friday evening, on our live podcast at 7, Carrie and I are going to be talking about phrases, old or young, common or uncommon, and what they mean and where they may have originated from.
Please join us if you want to have a laugh and probably learn something. Even better, if you have a strange or unusual saying that you would like to share so that we can research it, please do so here on this blog or on Carrie’s Facebook page.
The Dude Goodfeather Series – YA mystery by NYT bestseller Carrie Jones
TO TELL US YOUR BRAVE STORY JUST EMAIL BELOW.
BE A PART OF OUR MISSION!
Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.
Want to be part of the team? Send us a quick (or long) email and we’ll read it here and on our YouTube channel.
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
On Thursday, my co-podcaster, Shaun, and husband guy, takes over the blog.
He’s adorable. I hope you’ll read what he says even if he does occasionally sound like a surfer dude from the 1990s.
HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED
So, last night Carrie and I went to a friend’s house for a small gathering of fully vaccinated people who had also lived through their two week of after vaccination period. It was fun!
On the drive there we both expressed to each other that while we were looking forward to it, we were both also a little nervous. We have literally not interacted, in person, with any other adults in fourteen months. The exceptions to this are four occasions when we sat on our front porch and one of our friends visited with us from ground level or six feet apart and fully masked.
Like I said, last night was fun. It was great to see people that we hadn’t seen in person or even talked to in fourteen months. Friends! People who you can open up with, feel safe communicating your feelings with and who are understanding and supportive in most cases. One of the highlights of my evening, and I think Carrie’s as well, was when one married couple told us that they listen to our newish live podcast, Loving The Strange.
The best part about them telling us this is that they did it independently of each other. I was playing in our friendly poker game and the husband was sitting to my left, also playing.
One of the first things he said to me was, “I have been listening to yours and Carrie’s podcast and it has been cracking me up. I laugh so hard!”
I had no idea that he listened to our podcast.
Meanwhile, Carrie was socializing with non-poker playing people and this man’s wife told her that they listen to our podcast and love it. How cool is that!
For us, it was super duper cool! I mean we go into that podcast every Friday night at 7 with a bit of trepidation and nervousness.
What if nobody shows up? What if we suck? What if we say something wrong and hurt or anger someone?
Even though it is one of the favorite parts of my week, there are still concerns. We do it for fun; we do it for the entertainment of ourselves and others, but we really do want people to enjoy it.
In fact, we want people to LOVE it! If we can make you laugh or just entertain you with our own stupidity for an hour, we consider ourselves to be successful.
I have gotten a little bit off track here because I was intending for this blog to be about the amazing benefits of friends. I will try and get back on track, I apologize.
Remember, not only are friends great to have, but it is also great to be a friend! I have said this before in my blogs and I will say it again. You never know when one little thing, which you may think is silly or stupid, will have a profound effect on somebody’s moment or life.
Just this morning Carrie posted her usual inspirational Facebook post, which are always accompanied by a photo of one or more of our animals, and she got a really incredible response. A local woman who is one of her Facebook friends and an acquaintance in real life said to her something to this effect. Thank you for your post this morning, it has motivated me to make a change that I have been thinking about and putting off for a long time!
How cool is that? Remember that not everything that you say to people will be anything other than normal conversation. However, it is those one out of a hundred comments that really touch someone that can make all the difference in the world! Also remember to listen to us on Friday nights at 7 for Loving The Strange and always Love Your Way Through It!
Peace,
Shaun
You should totally like and subscribe to us somewhere because it’s cool to be kind.
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
We don’t need to be in love or to even feel love in order to make another feel loved or cared about, we simply need to remember that the most powerful love is the love that we give to another, without expectation of obligation or return.
This morning I realized that it has been exactly one year since we traveled as a family.
This week is a school break week here in Maine and last year at this time Carrie, myself and our youngest daughter, Kittiey, drove to Georgia to see our oldest daughter, Emily, who was in the Army and stationed at Ft. Benning at the time.
After spending a couple of days with Emily we drove to Florida to spend the remainder of our vacation and see my family.
Shortly after returning from that trip, Carrie and I managed to spend a weekend in Portland Maine for her birthday. Since then, none of the three of us (Emily is currently isolated at Tuck University getting her MBA.) have traveled more than forty miles away from our house.
Both of those trips out of the house were for specialized dentist appointments and other than those joyous trips to the dentist, none of us has gone more than twenty miles away from the house and all of these trips are for curbside grocery pickup at the nearest Walmart. Curse you for this involuntary hermitic existence COVID-19!
While it may seem as though I am complaining, and I am a little bit because we all love to travel and see new people and places, complaining is not what this blog is about.
It is about love, the miraculous fact that while we are in constant contact with each other (Kittiey is 100 percent remote learning), we all still love each other and nothing has drastically changed in how we feel about each other, unless it is a deeper understanding of patience.
To me, that is a testament to the power of love!
After all, love is the mother of all things good; kindness, empathy, compassion and understanding. Honestly, I am a little surprised by our success in continued friendship through this last year and I am supremely happy about the results!
For those of you who may have suffered far more than anyone should ever have to, I offer my greatest condolences and wishes for better times.
Even without COVID-19 the world faces a myriad of disasters every day and somehow humans have always managed to survive the unthinkable forces working against us.
Why?
Because we are capable of loving one another.
We are capable of being compassionate and empathetic to one another. We are capable of respecting one another.
We don’t need to be in love or to even feel love in order to make another feel loved or cared about, we simply need to remember that the most powerful love is the love that we give to another, without expectation of obligation or return.
We must simply remember and realize that love is the greatest gift and the greatest investment! Always, love your way through it.
Shaun
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
Oh, writer’s block, why dost thou come to me every Thursday afternoon when I am in desperate need of an idea for this blog?
Even though I start to think about what I am going to write a day or two ahead of Thursday sometimes it seems utterly pointless.
How do you professionals do it I wonder? Carrie never seems to have writer’s block! Of course, she is working on so many different projects at once, hers and others, that I think moving from one project to another gives her not only a respite from any one project but also allows her brain to roam freely about and not be locked into that dead zone of no new ideas.
Me? I just try to think of anything I can that is not related in any way to the subject matter at hand. Get it? At hand … writing, typing, it is a hand joke and in no way meant to be a sexual inuendo.
Even after all of this rambling, I’m still stuck so I’ll take a mental break and see what happens if I just think of the first thing that comes to mind and randomly type what I’m thinking.
So, I was probably somewhere between the ages of two and three, I theorize this because I remember I was very young and I also remember that my mom and dad were already divorced and that happened when I was two. These memories are almost fifty years old, so Mom, if you read this, don’t hold me to it.
My mom will never read this, no worries! I’m more worried about Carrie and the hand joke, honestly.
There I was, an outstanding Saturday morning and son number one, the only son for another ten or eleven years, had arisen early and sat himself on the living room floor to watch Saturday morning cartoons. Remember those? The good ones, the basic ones, the ones which don’t get any attention in the modern world.
Well, son number one decided he was hungry and went to explore the refrigerator. Hmmm, not much in here for an inexperienced chef to prepare, but wait! What was that? In the blue wrapper, the most divine of sweet snacks. Why were they in the refrigerator? Mom, don’t you know that if you refrigerate Oreos if is almost impossible to separate the chocolate wafer from the cream without breaking the wafer. Dammit woman, who does this?
I was not allowed to eat cookies without permission. Peanut butter and bread, maybe I could have gotten away with that, but who thinks about lowly peanut butter and bread when you have a package of Oreos sitting in front of you?
I was starving and apparently Mother needed her sleep so much that she could not possibly awaken and feed her starving toddler so I had to take matters into my own hands! Besides, she wouldn’t, couldn’t, possibly notice if I only took two or three Oreos and closed up the package exactly as I found it. Problem solved! Let’s take three because it’s harder to recognize an odd number missing than an even number. I thought.
Let me tell you, there is nothing better than watching the coyote lose at his own game over and over again while munching on Oreos. Little did I know that anvil was soon to be falling on my head.
As I sat on the floor, munching Oreos, I remember thinking that I really wanted to be a part of the excitement taking place on the screen in front of me. I know! I thought. I can just jump through the television screen and I will be magically transported to the world of coyote’s and road runners, Bugs Bunny, and Yosemite Sam!
I stood up, ready to leap. But wait, something was wrong with that theory. I touched the screen of the television, hard glass. No, this couldn’t be right. Glass cut you and I did not want to be cut.
Phew, close call!
I was brilliant, but all of that thinking had made me hungry again. Mom would not notice if I took just another couple Oreos, I wondered. Would she? Nah, never!
By my fifth trip back to the refrigerator, I knew that I was just as screwed now as if I had tried to jump through the screen of our television. Why did I have to be such a hungry kid? Why wouldn’t my mother wake up and feed me healthy and nutritious food like a good parent and prevent me from being a thief who is surely going to get caught?
I sat back down in front of the television to watch more cartoons and await my inevitable demise. For some reason the cartoons weren’t as joyous and funny as they had been just a short time ago.
Finally, Mommy made an appearance and we exchanged our morning pleasantries. Everything seemed fine. Somehow she has not noticed my chocolate wafer lipstick!
She asked if I wanted some breakfast and I immediately answer no and that I was not hungry. I was. I was always hungry, but she couldn’t enter that refrigerator under any circumstances! I heard her piddling around in the kitchen for a while and things were going great. I was going to get away with this.
I felt a presence behind me and I turned my head to see my mother’s leg, so I looked up. She was scowling.
My heart exploded into a red, dusty cloud of terror.
She asked the question.
Did I eat any Oreos this morning?
I immediately replied with the most truthful answer I could think of under such tremendous pressure.
No.
I do not remember what happened after that. My mother was a calm and loving mother who would occasionally lose her temper with me but had two huge sticking points when it came to child rearing—lying and losing one’s temper.
I can only assume that was my first taste of my most often suffered punishment. Time in my bedroom, sitting on my bed, alone, to think about my crimes. She was a time tyrant when it came to timeouts and they were always long! I mean, an hour is an eternity to anyone less than ten right?
So, there you go, now I am ready to write a blog and I have a fantastic idea. Unfortunately, I have used up my allotted space in the world of internet writing and it
will have to wait until next week. Hopefully, if you happened to have been stricken by writer’s block when you embarked on this reading journey that it is now gone and long forgotten. Go write something, anything, the good words will come to you.
Peace!
Shaun
Let me tell you all that Shaun still sneaks Oreos. Only now he does it at night when he lets Sparty out into the backyard and he doesn’t get time-out for his crime. I just buy more Oreos and pretend like I haven’t noticed.
xo
Carrie
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
The Dude Goodfeather Series – YA mystery by NYT bestseller Carrie Jones
TO TELL US YOUR BRAVE STORY JUST EMAIL BELOW.
Making Your story believable
HEAR MY BOOK BABY (AND MORE) ON PATREON
On one of my Patreon sites I read and print chapters of unpublished YA novels. THE LAST GODS and SAINT and now ALMOST DEAD. This is a monthly membership site (Hear the book chapters – $1/month, read them $3-month, plus goodies!). Sometimes I send people art! Art is fun.
On this, my second site, WRITE BETTER NOW, you can do a one-time purchase of a writing class or get two of my books in eBook form or just support our podcast or the dogs. It’s all part of the WRITING CLASS OF AWESOME.
It’s a super fun place to hang out, learn, read, and see my weirdness in its true form.
Hi! I know this is Carrie’s blog and you all look forward so much to hearing from her, but today I have commandeered it and I may do that once in a while because she is such an incredible woman and I don’t want her to be so overworked that her magnificence dulls.
Look! It’s Shaun!
By the way, this is Carrie’s husband. Actually, it should be Carrie’s Husband because that is the actual title I have come to be known by to a good portion of our friends. My birthname is Shaun though, if you didn’t already know, and I am okay with being Carrie’s Husband, because she is that crazy awesome!
But I digress. I am not an author by any means and Carrie asked me to talk about something to do with writing, maybe a prompt. Ugh, my brain hurts already! So, I took a few minutes to mull over what I would have a hard time doing if I was trying to write a book (I have tried and many accolades to you writer folks.) and I came up with so many ideas it is embarrassing. But I got stuck on one and that is, character traits and/or development. Heck, maybe these are two totally different subjects to you, but as I said, writing is not my bailiwick.
I thought, “I have no idea how to give words on a page human traits and make them feel real to people. How would I do that?”
Well, I decided that I would sit down and just think and reminisce about the people in my life who influenced me as a young person and who helped make me who I am today.
My mother and father divorced when I was two years old and I never saw him again until I was nine years old when he came back into my life bearing my two-year-old half-sister. He and my mother eventually got married again, my mother adopted my half-sister. They had another child, my younger brother, and eventually got divorced again when I was in my early twenties.
I never really liked my father nor did I mesh with his viewpoints on life, although as we both matured, we grew into a polite relationship of acceptance. In reality I just gave up on arguing with him and trying to make him see anybody’s point of view other than his own. Within this paragraph, there are hundreds of story possibilities, but I am only telling you this so that I can say that I was raised and influenced mainly by my mother and my grandfather. There were times when my mother and I lived on our own, with roommates (friends of my mother’s), and also with my grandparents.
Thinking about my mother, father and grandfather brings back so many memories, both good and bad, and to replicate their personality traits would be relatively easy because even as my memories seem to fade, memories of them are still strong and vibrant.
So, to make that supremely realistic character I am going to ask you to not think about those people in your life that are so easily remembered, but go beyond them and dig deeper. Think about someone whom you may have forgotten, someone who may not have been in your life long perhaps, but still left an impression, good or bad. We do need both kinds of characters after all.
Just writing this is causing me to remember people that I have forgotten. People who I didn’t otherwise know, but for a brief, chance meeting, but who still left an indelible mark upon me. Such an experience, possibly long forgotten by you, can help you create a character of difference or help you get out of a rut where you feel your characters are not deep enough or possibly seem to similar.
I don’t know if anything that I have written will be useable advice to you, but I can say that I have been thinking about this off and on for about four hours now and I have had a great time. Regardless of whether or not I have helped, I would recommend taking this thought journey! I am not one into yoga or meditation but just sitting quietly and pondering this I have basically run the full gamut of emotions and rejuvenated many memories that had faded from the forefront. Truth be known, my eyes are watery ,but that is just part of the process and sometimes I can be an emotional wimp. If there were no emotions involved, it doesn’t seem like a worthwhile experience whether you are trying to create a better character or you are just reminiscing.
Carrie and I have spoken about character building, in many ways, on our podcast Dogs Are Smarter Than People and I would invite you to listen if you haven’t yet made that journey. There’s a link below.
Thank you taking the time to read my ramblings and may you have a happy and safe 2021!
