Monthly Archives: February 2025

What is good writing, really?

DAY NINE.

I wrote earlier about participating in a Writing Battle, suggesting that I might post that short story in support of the accountability I am seeking in this exercise. As it turns out, the rules do prohibit that. I characterize myself generally as a rule-follower, for a few reasons. The reason most people don’t know about? A theory, tested and supported over years.

Anarchists (to a greater or lesser degree) by definition defy all rules and thus, society tends to dismiss them or compartmentalize them away from credibility or acceptance. However, when a rule-follower challenges or breaks a rule, people snap to attention. Disrupting the status quo selectively can be a strategic tool for change. Without the identity of breaking-rules-because-I-can, the rule-follower often wields greater power simply by being taken more seriously.

In this instance, I see no compelling reason to break the Writing Battle’s rule, so know that I will post that story when the full Battle is complete and I have permission to do so. However, I’ve been faced with an interesting, additional challenge from the Writing Battle. As participants, we also serve as judges in “story duels.” We are provided two stories, from a different genre than the writing prompt we followed, and are tasked with giving thoughtful feedback to both and selecting a “winner” between the two.

This is hard!

I had no idea how hard this would be.

It doesn’t help that the genre I am “judging” is probably one of my least favorite types of literature or storytelling. I will read anything, and do (I’ve only ever stopped and thrown away, literally trashed, one book in my entire life – it was so badly written as to be virtually unreadable). I exist as a reader with virtually no standards, seeking to enjoy the telling of a story in many forms. Now I find myself forced to choose the better story – or really, the better writing (because the writing uplifts or suppresses the story it seeks to tell).

So, what is good writing? It feels like a specific offshoot of the often-asked question, what is art? Is it something that makes you feel? Is it transporting the reader effectively into another time, world, experience? Must it be impossible to put down, or can it be so powerful as to require breaks in order to process?

I don’t know. If I knew that, I guess I would actually and officially be a writer.

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Little Chef

DAY EIGHT.

I love food.

My husband is not shy about it. He tells people all the time – when we first started dating, he was amazed because if we went to out to eat at a proper restaurant, there was no salad lightly supplemented with anemic grilled chicken across the table. I ordered a full meal and ate every bite. Steak. Giant burgers. Ribs. With whatever potato the restaurant would conjure up for me. He was drawn by the smiling girl who stood out in the crowd. He stayed for the girl who could ice skate and who polished off dinner (and dessert) with joy.

I have absolutely no standards. I love a creative, chef-designed, miniscule-portioned foodie experience. I love McDonald’s. I think the only food I truly rejected was the White Castle cheeseburger experience in Hopkins, Minnesota, in the late 90s. From what I understand, no one really blamed me for that one.

Throughout my years shepherding a family across all corners, I cooked. Every day. I invented ways to transform ordinary foods into car-friendly versions for backseat eating on the way to practice. I shoveled full hot meals into takeaway containers and drove kids and dinner over to Triple Play, where we pulled up four chairs and snuck in family dinners without a hot dog in sight (because we ate plenty of those, too). But I didn’t take very many culinary risks. The sheer caloric need of growing children, then teenagers, prevented me from “trying” nearly as much as I would like – I needed slam dunks!

Then those teenagers drove off to college, one after the other. Suddenly, it was whole new world. If I tried something, and it didn’t land, the fallout was a couple of PB&Js for two low maintenance (and low caloric-need) adults. I have hugely enjoyed this period of cooking. The fact that it has coincided with a decided decline in quality (both food and service) of the average dining-out experience increases its value even more. It’s a thing of joy to contemplate each week’s menu – what repeat favorites to include, what interesting recipes to try.

But I’ll be honest – cold, gray, rainy weather brings me right back to the familiar. Comfort food is a real thing. Any fan of the wonderful film Ratatouille will agree. And, after several stunning days of false spring, during which I had the top back on the Bronco everywhere I went to soak up some of my beloved sun, yesterday’s front dropped us squarely back to winter. So tonight, it’s one of my favorite recipes to bring warmth, comfort, heft, satiation. Italian Sausage Tortellini soup, with crusty baguettes to mop up the leftover broth.

I discovered this recipe many years ago, when we were all bringing soup for teacher appreciation at my kids’ first elementary school. I didn’t grow up with soup unless you count Campbell’s, but I wanted to deliver something homemade, special. Somewhere on the still-limited internet, I came across a recipe that I tailored based on some things I had on hand.

It was a HIT. Especially with male staff, who actually sought me out to tell me that it felt like a real meal. So, I say bless the lovely person who put the basis of that recipe on the worldwide web so many years ago, because I can’t even count the times I’ve made that soup since. It remains my father’s favorite thing I make (and was his requested meal for his 80th birthday in November).

I hope everyone has a homerun, works-every-time, ultimate-comfort-food recipe. Like Remy, the Little Chef in Ratatouille. Just in case someone doesn’t, I recommend giving this one a try.

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See you in a few!

DAY FIVE.

DAY SIX.

DAY SEVEN.

I like to start things off optimistically and with a bang. So, I’ve entered a Writing Battle, in which I will spend three days writing a short story using a genre, setting, and character that I draw. Once I’ve completed it I will post it here – I think? Am I allowed?

Until then…

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Anticipation, Almost Fulfilled

DAY FOUR

The email I’ve been waiting for finally arrived. A very long tracking number assures me that my new passport is winging its way to me, destined to land in the mailbox in two days.

My childhood passport remains one of my treasured possessions. Although it hides away in a box at present, I’ve never had the nonchalance to toss it. A yellow-tinged photo of small, blond me looks seriously at the camera (because you aren’t supposed to smile, they say). In advance of my family’s move to Clermont-Ferrand, France, we children obtained our first passports, which felt important and official. The excitement of the passport was second only to the Walkman and choice of cassette tape my dad purchased for each of us. I won’t call it a bribe, rather a bit of an advanced apology. Moving to France in the 1980s, with little time for language preparation and in the middle of our school years, stretched us all in ways only fellow pre-internet expats can understand (and the re-entry into American culture at an awkward age was … bumpy).

But, the passport. That gold-stamped blue cover started out with crisp, watermarked blue pages promising adventures to come. I credit my amazing parents for the filling up those pages during our tenure in France. Back then, each country still stamped your passport with every border crossing. A quick flip of those pages marks a series of memories that changed my life forever. Our time both living in and traveling across Europe taught me adaptability. Grit. French. Curiosity. Appreciation of the new and deep appreciation for the familiar on the rare occasion we encountered it (a glass of ice with a Pepsi or Coke, for one). I could (and perhaps will) write novels about our experiences living in France. Those memories and life lessons live in invisible ink behind multilingual stamps across those passport pages.

After returning to the States, I took many opportunities to travel abroad. My most recent trip out of the country found me meeting up with my mother in an apartment in Paris, in celebration of a milestone birthday (I should write about my dad, having recently watched the film Taken, sternly warning me about strangers as I navigated alone from the airport to the apartment, despite my being well out of desired age range for human trafficking). After that hallmark trip, life did as it often does and overtook plans, dreams, and TIME.

Last fall, out of the blue, my mom and I decided it was time for another trip abroad. It has been too long, we decided. We’d been to New York a few times together, and she traveled periodically to Europe and Israel with my dad or others. But she and I, together in Europe? Too long.

When I say too long, I mean actually too long. I’ve obviously had several passport renewals since my first. As I started thinking through where I’d stashed my passport since our last move, I realized that the hallmark trip to Paris was 12 years ago. Twelve years! And I had renewed it a few years before that. With that passage of time, my passport was clearly expired. By years.

I needed a moment to grieve the fact that I had been living restricted from the ability to pursue an adventure abroad, albeit unknowingly. How could I have let that happen? It was a reality check for me. I love adventure. My heart yearns toward ocean waves as though I’d been a sailor on the high seas in some other life. Trains lull me into daydreams of what I might find a few miles down the track. In my children’s younger years, when storms would come near and the sky was “going green,” we would jump in the car (which they affectionately called the “Mommy 5” – my Stormchasers fans will understand) to see how close we could get. It’s not that I missed out on travel I should have done. It’s that I missed out on maintaining the option to, whether exercised or not.

With that in mind, although the trip this year is just my mom and me, I asked my husband to renew his passport as well. Is it likely we are headed out of the country together any time soon? No. Do I want that option available? I do. He immediately agreed, understanding my slightly zany reasoning, as he usually does. We spent the last morning of 2024 at the passport office (yes, New Year’s Eve … you take the appointment you can get). Since then, I have been living with anticipation.

The very long tracking number assures me that my new passport is winging its way to me, destined to land in the mailbox in two days. So now, for two days, I live with anticipation, almost fulfilled.

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Slow Dancing in a Burning Room

DAY THREE

A DAY.

Easy drive into town. Auto insurance quotes by (CarPlay) phone and text en route. Free downtown parking (joy!) in a low clearance garage with impossibly tight turns (stressful!). Lunch meeting with a former colleague, talking all things fundraising and non-profits and a rapidly changing world. Brisk cross-town walk under (sunny, cloudless) blue skies to a reserved shared learning space at the beautiful central branch of the public library. Virtual meetings ranging from chart of account changes (left brain) to film festival prep (right brain). Slower retracing of cross-town steps to a historic hotel, FaceTiming with adult child #2 along the way. Digital commiseration about the Luka trade (RIP Mavs) between adult child #2 and adult child #1, currently in management at said historic hotel. Tall jokes (always tall jokes) about adult child #1 by his colleague. Successful (harrowing) navigation back out of the garage and into the (choppy, aggressive) flow of traffic. The dreaded thunk of a sideswiping car (little Mercedes G-something) changing lanes without looking. Winding paths through a side street and parking lot for the inevitable taking of photos (Bronco for the win), exchanging of insurance and contact information, empathy (a student driver). Position re-assumed (headed home) with the top back and carrying hope that the damage is truly as it appears (virtually nothing). Satellite radio (all the way up) and wild wind speeding the miles along. Driveway examination by flashlight of the (virtually non-visible) potential damage in the early twilight. Spicy (garlicky, citrusy) red beans and rice mopped up with sourdough. Delayed response emerging (slight but discernible).

“Alexa, play John Mayer.”

The man knows (mine and Mayer).

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Three A.M.

DAY TWO

When we relocated to our current home full-time earlier this year, having spent the better part of two years living my dream on a barrier island, I set my mind to focus on those things that make this place special. To run toward something feels far better than being pulled away from something else, so I set my feet to running.

It took only a few days to rediscover one of the great joys of living here. The sky. The back of our home faces northwest, an open sky over water which might as well be a painter’s canvas. Endless photos of sunsets crowd my camera roll, each spectacular and somehow completely different than the day before. Inside the house, large windows and oversized sliding doors showcase the sky as one would feature framed art on a gallery wall. Having lived without that wide open view most of my adult life, it still astounds me – demands that I stop, and look, and wonder. We watch the sun move left across our view of the sky toward the winter solstice, retracing its path to the right as summer solstice approaches. So, I ran toward that beautiful early evening experience.

The changing art of the sunset sky has indeed lived up to my recollections and its reputation. What I did not expect, and apparently failed to recognize when we first moved here, was the magic of the stars. I live mere minutes from a Dark Sky area and experience only a little light pollution from a nearby dam. Early into our return, after the last light finally disappeared from the west, we found ourselves lulled into lethargy by a pleasant breeze, resonant background music, and the luxury of time to linger. Quiet conversation about nothing in particular turned minutes into an hour. We happened to look up and out and oh, my. As the sky embraced full darkness under a new moon, the stars emerged to match every trite and cliched description – pinpoints of light in the sky, glittering diamonds, on and on. It turns out these are cliches because they are true.

Not only do these stars populate the night sky when the sun finally sleeps … an entirely separate collection journeys brightly across the sky in the early morning, fading as the rising rays in the east overpower them. To fully experience the magic of the dark sky is to wake early, bringing coffee and a blanket outside to view Orion chasing Taurus the Bull, the dawn keeping us from knowing if he ever caught him. Then again, at night, finding the distinctive Scorpio eluding the arrow of Sagittarius. The brightness of Vega and Sirius, Venus and Jupiter. The smudge of the Pleiades, revealed to be a cluster of many stars by simple binoculars. And then, to realize that all of these stars, their identities created so many years ago, never stop moving. Their circular march is easily observed by morning and evening study…except that as the days and the months change, so do the paths we see. As seasons turn, a whole new group of these celestial markers emerges.

I never fail to watch and wonder how people learned and understood the journey of the stars as a way to pursue their own journeys. To navigate by a system of moving lights from horizon to horizon. It is a stark reminder that maybe, in our modern age, we don’t always know more – we know differently. We have satellites (which criss-cross the sky, flashing the sun’s reflection, at an increasingly common rate) to activate a GPS to tell us where to go. And yet if you put me on landless water, I would be powerless to find my way by the stars the way our ancestors did.

There exist few things on earth that will humble us into an accurate assessment of our power (and they are generally destructive – hurricanes, fires, and such). For me, the stars serve as a beautiful and kind reminder of the vastness of Creation and my very small place in it. This does not diminish me; rather, it frees me to give up a responsibility and control for which I am not designed or equipped.

With the crescent moon already set and the sky free of clouds, the stars shone brightly at 3 o’clock this morning. I awoke too early with thoughts and concerns demanding I address them. A glimpse outside at those very stars quieted my mind. Their timeless presence and sure paths released me back into sleep, as they have for multitudes before me. I will continue to greet them, morning and night, with joy.

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Write Every Day, Day One

Is there any chance I can actually do this?

In real life, most would characterize me as extremely disciplined. Which I generally am, although not by nature. My true self dreams of sitting in filtered sunlight, reading a not-terribly-highbrow book while snacking on chips and a Diet Coke. Preferably with the ocean’s soundtrack and an onshore breeze. This fact seems to surprise those same people.

I am disciplined not by nature but by necessity. The past three decades required it. I look to the first two years after college, working in a professional setting while maintaining a long-distance relationship that ultimately led to marriage. The early days of supporting my husband’s business, which required me to drive directly from my 9 to 5 job to man the front desk until close (meaning that having dinner to eat in the car required preplanning before leaving the house in the morning, because there was no money to drive through somewhere every day). Having two children under two years old as we stretched again in opening a second business, with a household budget equally stretched, making every moment of naptime or Mother’s Day Out fully productive to keep life running. Menu planning down to each meal of each day in order to successfully navigate everyone’s practices/games/lessons/church activities. Making a “cleaning schedule” for Saturday morning, assigning an exact timeframe to each area of the house and, if I completed that area in a shorter amount of time, giving myself the leftover time to read and snack (a common theme for me).

I wanted it all. A husband pursuing his dream business rather than just doing some job for someone else. Children with a variety of options to develop skills and interests that build brain, body, and spiritual growth. Meals that gave everyone the best chance at good health and happiness. A warm, welcoming, clean home as a place of retreat and rest. A separate business to use creative and strategic skills to financially contribute to the family. A place (emotional and physical) for friends in need to come for peace. An anchor for the family ship in any kind of weather.

Discipline doesn’t help achieve these dreams. These dreams demand it. Discipline says, “If you truly want this, I am the way.” I wanted it. Discipline delivered.

I now occupy a very different reality. With adult children very nearly launched, our household of two ebbs and flows more easily through those dreams. The beautiful outcome of years of discipline is a lightening of its load. With that in mind, I turn to the mirror to see what else lives there – what came before those decades we have moved through. Writing was one such dream, occasionally surfacing across the years but never calling out for its due attention. And here I sit, struggling as new openness and availability battles with a lack of discipline around this particular art and expression.

The primary element – excuse? – that always freezes me into inaction is fear. Why should I write publicly? Isn’t that implying that people should be reading what I am writing? Why would anyone want to read what I write? Even asking that question feels wildly uncomfortable, knowing that it could be perceived as fishing for compliments or affirmation (neither of which is the case). Having grappled with this feeling for years and conveniently finding no good time to come to resolution, I find that good time is now. Do I write because I care what other people think, or because there are words that want to get out and I need a place to put them? Certainly the latter. My husband told me he wishes me to write so that there is a record, in my words, out in the world. A record of what, I ask? Nothing in particular, he says. Just your words. The things you think and say. The air doesn’t hold them; writing does.

So I decide it is time to write. Writing in public, as the internet certainly is, ultimately serves as accountability. If I can learn discipline around things no one loves (cleaning bathrooms?), I can build discipline in this. Starting today.

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