An authors collage

I wanted to show you, because, hey, I'm in it. But the coolest thing is someone I know, who graduated a year ago from my daughter's college, is there, too.

Congratulations, Zak, on your forthcoming short story in Relief! I can't wait to read it.

How does this strike you?

You can help me, if there's help to be had, by giving your honest appraisal of the following title, subtitle, and brief book description ("handle").

DEEP WATER, BRIGHT MERCY:

LOVING AND BEING LOVED DESPITE GETTING IT WRONG

A story of confronting ultimate questions, by a fisherman-preacher's daughter who scrambled to avoid seeing ugliness in herself and beauty in people who didn’t fit her religious ideals.


Please let me know what you think, by commenting or emailing me at deannahershiser[at]gmail.com.

Be brutal. Really. Better you than them.

Plus, if I ever sell it, I'm inviting you all over for one of these apiece:

Messing about

It’s 5:04 a.m., and I’m working on a blog post. Shameful! I oughtn’t forsake my “real” writing. Yet I sit, paused to a degree, and at the moment I’m thinking this stretch for reflection is necessary – it may ultimately assist whatever it is I’m doing.

Twelve hours ago my gaze caught sunlit hills above Leaburg Reservoir. I grasped a fishing pole’s handle, its tip aimed skyward while the line met water that rippled under a welcome breeze and thunked the metal boat’s bottom. My bottom was growing a bit weary from contact with the wooden bench near the bow, but I didn’t mind one bit. Every so often I glanced at Dad in the stern.

In his favorite element, my father rechecked the aft anchor and asked me for the hundredth time, “Is your anchor holding up there?”

“I think so,” I said, peering over prow and seeing far below outlines of logs and wavy moss. The small, bell-shaped forward anchor’s rope followed it dutifully straight down.

“Let out some more rope,” Dad said, and I did, feeding damp line past the cleat, until it bowed beneath the surface and our little vessel aligned itself properly. We were sideward to the current, casting our weighted fishing lines downstream toward the dam.

I marveled. I hadn’t been out fishing like this for probably – whoa – 35 years. But side by side with Dad, as he reminded me, “Reel in, now, just two turns,” I felt as if our previous excursion had only been last week.

Likely the main difference – besides my wrist growing tired immediately when I turned the reel’s handle in great hope of a great fish, only to realize I was snagged on a rock – was that my thoughts drifted often to the book I’ve been reading in preparation to send off (yet another) book proposal. I’m way early in this latest process, trolling, perhaps, for the most logical ideas about presentation of what I wish to say to the reading world.

The book, by the way, is Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write, by Elizabeth Lyon (from my town!), and it’s full of the sort of instruction I should have shelled out cash for months ago. After only beginning to read it this week, I already grasp a little better the mindset I need to acquire if I ever hope to offer a bookseller my product and watch his or her eyes brighten while perusing the cover.

Last evening, after Dad switched my waterlogged worm for a ball of bright orange goo he called wonder bait, I felt a tentative tug. Then my pole’s tip trembled, and I reeled in, moving the tip toward Dad. “I’ve got one!”

“Good going, kid,” he said, slipping the net beneath a silvery, shimmering rainbow trout and lifting it into the boat.

I beamed. Later I paraded my stiff fish before Tim at home, took it out back with a Cutco knife, and cleaned it, tossing the head to Westley who sniffed it and gave me a look like, “You want me to do what with this thing?”

Guest blogging

A post I wrote for Relief's blog is up here.

It's about me getting rejected and learning some behind-the-scenes publishing stuff and, more recently, reading for Relief.

Magic bullet boredom

boredom (bôr΄dəm), n. a bored condition; weariness caused by dull, tiresome people or events, ennui. –Syn. tedium.

Of all the headlines I’ve recently scanned, the prizewinner for dumb in my book went something like this: “Tips to prevent school children’s forgetfulness: ways to keep lesson material at hand all summer.”

A sincere educational soul, no doubt, wishes to help a child remember three plus four and what is a verb for that first week in September. The article’s author probably also thinks, “Ah, yes, give the kiddies school lessons to do a couple times a week, perhaps whenever they start moaning that they're bored. Two problems solved!”

As early-morning writing becomes further ingrained in this fortysomething’s daily routine, I recognize two types of boredom featuring in most years of my life. One I’m finding I welcome with open arms after decades spent waiting for it to arrive. The other helped me become a writer in the first place. And schoolwork at any time of year never relieved them.

As is well known by anyone following this blog for a while, I hated school. Learning, let me make clear, I always enjoyed (and so there were days and teachers at school I really liked – my hatred was in a general sense). School restricted and constricted me, and so partly for that reason I homeschooled my kids, but you know what? While the two of them got to follow schedules more attuned to their personalities and learning styles than I did, my children each found themselves restricted by limitations. Victoria, for example, had to live in a bedroom with weird orange carpet. I’d no clue how much the 60s-style shaggish stuff, reminiscent of rotten orange peel, chafed her refined artistic soul. Only now do I get why she attempted to cover her floor covering with all her toys and drawing papers – I always wanted her to pick up, of course. (Well, now the carpet’s gone, and V. can stand to come visit.)

My point is, the more constricted one feels, the more tedious one’s tasks become. When children launch into a school year, whether at home or away, they face a daily amount of time where they’re restricted, bound to complete tasks for their own good. I don’t care how many over-the-summer drills a child has practiced, he or she must transition into their school routine, perhaps remembering educational points, perhaps not, but this jerky process is overall a good thing. It’s equally good, I would argue, to face the boredom entwined in the process – the first type of boredom I mentioned above.

This #1 boredom (usually I call it tedium) is the better type. It tends to springboard me to a positive outcome. The sensation is the same I felt during summer mornings when Mom handed me a trowel and said, “Go weed around the raspberries.” I would sigh. I had plans I’d rather carry out: lounging in my room, for instance (which by the way had a nice wood floor with a neutral throw rug).

But an interesting thing happened out in the yard. Beneath the swaying bushes where sweet-scented berries hung I gradually relaxed and enjoyed the job. It suited me. It felt good to accomplish the task. I just needed the nudge of Mom’s command and the restriction of being under her authority to get to it.

Boredom type #2 dogged me every school year (well, except sixth grade – Mr. Loftis was so cool I fell deeply in love with him). This type of boredom feels very unfair. I mean, here I spent idyllic early years at home with my family, until lofty powers commanded I must do this stupid thing five days a week: go be shut up in a room with 29 other kids my age and only one adult, figure out some inane problems in the first ten minutes, and sit bored out of my skull for the rest of the day while the other kids at best ignored and at worst taunted me.

Books, of course, rescued me in many ways. But boredom really pushed me to write stories. I’d learned to wield that pencil, right? And this writing process put those books on the school library shelves, so I might as well contribute. I wrote because stories sparked in my head like nothing else – they stayed with me on the awkward journey home as I made up whole chapters and retained them to write down the next day.

Finally each long year summer arrived. I skipped home, free. I stretched, ran, breathed, and dreamed, and even weeded the raspberries. My mind needed that release from boredom #2. Though I don’t know for certain, I think summer activities helped me retain my required school learning.

I still ache with tedium, sometimes even anxiety, amid conditions that I feel forced into and just can’t deal with. Thankfully I still have books to tote with me and my writing pad on which to scratch with pen.

I still meet the first type of boredom, as well. When I’m where I want to be, but lazy, I require a nudge to do stuff for my own good. With kids grown, I now can do 4:30 mornings. By my own command I’m restricted in those magic hours from checking email or blogs. Every day I begin wondering how I’ll possibly survive till my shower and breakfast. Nearly every day I think, I don’t know what to write next. But I’m compelled to be in the place that suits me. And it never fails. Somehow raspberry breezes lilt inside my brain. Ideas spark, and I do the task, joyfully.

Just too cool

Parents! You never know what they'll go and do next.

Funny critters

A peek into our home this morning finds me pondering salt and Westley moping and shedding. I'll return to these subjects, but first a view of things that are becoming only memories.

Before she moved out three years ago, Victoria's room looked like this:Her door:Change and transition have simmered since then. Lately my project's been completing the transformation of this corner of our home into my office and exercise space. At last yesterday I happily trotted on my treadmill beside one window, while gazing at sun-dappled trees through the other. This sure beat a staring contest with My Little Ponies.

The only problem in our new set-up belonged to Westley. He found himself stuck in the room with me, and I wasn't going to pause my strides just to let him out, so he wailed for the final five minutes. Adding this discomfort to the stress of my having moved things around in his territory led to what appeared like moping to me (the shedding just happens all summer).

On the Fourth, at one of several get-togethers we attended (social butterflies we), a colleague of Tim's looked at me aghast when I mentioned I prefer watermelon with salt. He appeared further disgusted as I listed quite a few fruits and vegetables on which I sprinkle the iodized mineral. "My uncle did that," he said. "Salted everything. He died of a heart attack at sixty."

Since then I've reviewed my salty habits. Maybe I should change. But what I really ought to have answered, despite recognizing the man's intent to help me, was that I think I'd rather spend 60 good years enjoying salted foods than 80 or more tasteless ones without it.

Anyway, back to the home front. Today I may finally take down Victoria's door decorations that she hasn't already removed. I think I'm ready...I think.

And yes, by the way. As I finished breakfast (yogurt with cantaloupe, banana, and Nutty Rice cereal that tasted fine as it was without added salt), I remembered something from the Fourth and laughed a little. The man who warned me of the folly of saltiness was on his way to a corner of the patio to smoke a cigarette.

We're such funny critters.

Encouraging

The great courage of the creative artist - whether it's a composer, a writer, a painter or whatever - is that he or she is willing to sit down and write that first line of dialog, make that first stroke on the canvas. Even though the artist realizes that by that act he is beginning to destroy the vision he has in his mind. Because the vision you've got for a book is monumental, it flows like water, it's beautiful, it's this, it's that. But to write it, you have to struggle into the real world.

~Robert Campbell