Books for kids, teens, & those who are young at heart
Between family times these last few weeks and deadlines for my freelance writing, I’ve been too busy to write. But I’m back at it this morning with some edits on my WIP, getting it ready to submit to Pitch Wars. Wish me luck!
My actual work space this morning. What are you up to on this hump day?
There are certain movies that when I’m flipping through the channels and happen upon them, I just have to watch (at least for a few minutes). They’re not in any certain genre; some of them are award winners; others of them are, well, not. I’m not an old-movie buff, so they’re all from my lifetime.
Some of them are just good movies. You know the kind, the ones that make you feel something deep in your soul. Others remind me of a certain time in my life, a movie time capsule of sorts. They make me laugh or cry, or both! I like to call them my personal classics. Here they are in no particular order:
What movies would be on your list?
#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (June is all about movies), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. Be sure to check out Kai’s and Mary’s posts this month. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs or on your social media page. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.
I’ve started running again. Slowly, slowly, slowly. It’s not so much that I’m running slowly, but that I’m easing my way back into a regular running routine. I run a couple of miles once a week. I’d like to sneak in a second day of running on a regular basis…we’ll see if that happens!
The thing that’s different about my running this time is my approach. In the past, I’ve always run with a specific goal in mind. As a kid, I competed at the kid’s track meets in the summer. In high school, I ran for the track team, again for competition. In college and beyond, I ran ran to stay in shape for soccer or to train for a specific race.
Honestly, though, I never really like running in and of itself. When I’ve tried to do it without a 5K to train for or a competitive edge involved, it was kind of a slog. And even when in training, it was something I did because I had to do it to succeed in whatever goal was the end game. I’ve always preferred exercise in the form of a team sport.
But now, post two children and with some extra pounds on these old bones, I’m running with no specific mileage or time goals in mind. I’m not training for anything or looking to compete. I just go out and run.
I run in the scenic downtown area while The Boy has dance class. Sometimes I run around the green. Other times I head to the little wooded area behind the library and the harbor. If I feel like checking out the boats or the baby geese, I do. If I don’t feel like running up a hill, I walk. I don’t keep track of how far I run or how long. It’s very low-key and low pressure. It’s almost meditative.
As someone who grew up playing many competitive sports and who continued that into adulthood, it’s very strange to exercise this way. The only other time I’ve exercised like this was when I did yoga, which I mostly did while I was pregnant so there was a necessity to the low-key manner.
And you know what? I kind of love running this way. It’s liberating. There’s nothing at stake; there’s only gain. I win by running. Period. And it gives me some much-needed alone time. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure this out!
Have you ever gained a new perspective on an old thing?
Poetry is one of the first types of literature we are exposed to as children. We hear it in songs, in rhyming pictures books, and even in the non-rhyming picture books whose cadence and structure are similar to poetry. One of The Boy’s favorite things to do is pick words (some nonsense ones) and rhyme them. He enjoys doing this activity for what can be an annoyingly long length of time!
One of the first ways young people express themselves both verbally and in written form is through poetry. I think this is because it has an interesting blend of structure and room for creativity and riffing. You can rhyme, but you don’t have to. You can create a haiku (very short and structured) or you can do a free verse poem (pretty much no “rules”). It’s almost instinctual for kids to play with poetry.
Back when I was in college, I applied for an award and one of the questions we had to answer was if you could create a class to be included in the English curriculum, what would it be. In one of my classes from the previous semester, each student had the opportunity to bring in one piece of writing that spoke to us, and almost every single person in the class (a small one of less than 20 students) brought in song lyrics. So I thought it would be cool to have a class called “Song Lyrics as Poetry.” One of my professors who was on the awards committee loved the idea so much, she taught songs lyrics as poems in one of her literature classes.
As an adult, I find myself dabbling in poetry for fun. I included a couple of ballad-style ones in Elixir Bound, I’ve written poems for my kids, and I ink the occasional poem for kids’ magazines. When I used to keep the magnetic poetry (check out this link for some examples) up on my refrigerator, people (of all ages) couldn’t help themselves and would come up with all sorts of poetry fun.
Poetry is a universal language we can all explore and play around with, even if we don’t consider ourselves poets!
#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (April is all about poetry), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. Be sure to check out Kai’s and Mary’s posts this month. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.
I guess I was born a feminist. When I say “feminist,” I mean someone who believes women should have equal rights to men (for further discussion on this, see my post “Females in YA: Part 9 Feminism”). What girl isn’t born a feminist? And for that matter, what boy isn’t? I have a hard time believing a boy could be born and suddenly think, “I am a far superior being than any girl and deserve to be treated as such.”
But then we (both girls and boys) are exposed to our parents’ ideas, beliefs, and prejudices; and then our peers’ ideas, beliefs, and prejudices (and by extension their parents’ I/B/P); and societies’ I/B/P. So somewhere along the way, many of us become non-feminists. Or maybe we stop thinking that feminism is still important or relevant.
I think this was me in middle and high school: though I never stopped believing women deserve equal rights to men, I just didn’t see the need for feminism anymore. Admittedly I fell into the trap of thinking being a feminist meant I had to be a radicalized bra-burning, man-hating woman. And I also believed I was being treated equal to my male peers.
Here’s the thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older: It was an earlier push for equal rights that granted me the ability to be apathetic about it. I grew up playing sports in a post Roe v. Wade world and post Title IX era, which states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
That created an environment where my fellow female athletes and I were often celebrated along with our male counterparts because we were just as successful, or even more successful. We were treated with respect and won awards and accolades. We wore our own letter jackets, not our boyfriends’. Not to say we never heard the comments about “playing like a girl” or where our “place” in the world was, but I always felt those comments were from people of an older generation who had no clue. They were antiquated ideas, outdated. Or so I believed at the time.
As I’ve gotten older and my horizons have expanded beyond my (maybe progressive) hometown, I’ve seen a bigger picture of how women are being treated in the U.S. and the world. It’s not a pretty picture. I’ve also been educating myself about the gender pay gap (see “There’s A Gender Pay Gap At Every Age, And It Only Gets Worse As Workers Get Older” by Shane Ferro), sexism in the tech industry and Hollywood (see “Why are women leaving the tech industry in droves” by Tracey Lien and “The Women of Hollywood Speak Out” by Maureen Dowd), and the cost of staying home to raise children (see “When Being A Stay-At-Home Mom Isn’t a Choice” by Jillian Berman).
I see the assault on a woman’s right to make choices about her own body and the rampant and disgusting sexism in this year’s presidential election, and the importance of feminism is more obvious to me than ever before. I have a desire to be more outspoken in my mindset of being a feminist. I sometimes feel alone in this because sexism isn’t rampant in my everyday life and in the live’s of many of the people I know, and there isn’t necessarily an immediate need for us to rise up and demand equal rights. I’m lucky to live in a place where my rights as a woman are protected…for now.
It’s that “for now” that gives me pause and drives me to a greater call. I want the next generation of women to feel secure in their rights and that they are considered equal to men. I want them to feel this way their whole lives, not have a sense that their worth erodes as they get older, which is something I have begun to feel and I’m only in my mid-thirties.
Feminism is a topic I have many, many thoughts on, far too many for one blog post. I know, too, that it’s a divisive topic. I’ll be revisiting it throughout the month here on the blog. Coming up soon, look for a post about how my first novel ELIXIR BOUND ended up having many feminist viewpoints in it, initially without a lot of intention on my part.
#InkRipples is a monthly meme created by Katie L. Carroll, Mary Waibel, and Kai Strand. We pick a topic (March is all about feminism), drop a ripple in the inkwell (i.e. write about it on our blogs), and see where the conversation goes. Be sure to check out Kai’s and Mary’s posts this month. We’d love to have you join in the conversation on your own blogs. Full details and each month’s topic can be found on my #InkRipples page.
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