Life is a lot simpler than most of us make it.
If you think about that for long enough, I bet you'll come up with what to do about that. :-)
More in a bit,
Janny
Friday, May 25, 2012
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Another Thing I Know. :-)
I am not St. Francis.
I may be a combination of a Proverbs 31 woman and the Little Red Hen, however.
"She planteth, she watereth, she weedeth...she gathereth strawberries from the garden to provide good fruits of the earth for her family."
Not, however, "to feed Brother Rabbit and Sister Squirrel."
Just sayin'.
A pint has already been picked. Strawberry shortcake is on the horizon!
More later,
Janny
I may be a combination of a Proverbs 31 woman and the Little Red Hen, however.
"She planteth, she watereth, she weedeth...she gathereth strawberries from the garden to provide good fruits of the earth for her family."
Not, however, "to feed Brother Rabbit and Sister Squirrel."
Just sayin'.
A pint has already been picked. Strawberry shortcake is on the horizon!
More later,
Janny
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Things I Know. First of Many.
I have these pithy thoughts that are sitting patiently at the back of my brain, waiting to be said out loud...some of which people like, some of which people hate.
But, hey, at least they're all mine. :-)
I was thinking of putting them up on Facebook...
...but Facebook isn't the best forum for this kind of thing, either.
So here they will be, for better or worse. In my sandbox, where I get to make the rules. :-)
They'll come along in no particular order. Except for the first one, which is foundational.
And that first one is...
Your belief of/in, or failure to believe of/in, something does not affect whether it's true.
Or, put another way...
There is such a thing as a "fact."
There is such a thing as truth.
Truth and facts are not flexible, either.
They're not dependent on what you think about them.
Your individual little brain is not the ultimate determinant of anything's validity, and your feelings certainly aren't.
Things aren't "true for you" and "not true for someone else." If something's true, it's true.
If you have gradations and shades of "truth," you don't have truth in the first place. You have opinion.
Opinion is great. Just don't mistake it for a solid foundation of fact.
You need to do more research, dig deeper, and find out whether your opinion is based on truth at all, or if it's nothing more than feeling.
One of these bases for action and belief is reliable. The other is not.
You can find this out, if you're brave enough to do so.
Some things to which this applies:
God.
Satan.
Ultimate good, and ultimate evil...and the difference.
Ultimate right, and ultimate wrong. And that they both do, in fact, exist.
All of these things are realities. Kind of like gravity.
You don't have to believe in gravity if you don't want to. You can spend your whole life not believing that gravity is real.
Just don't step out of any tenth-floor windows to defy it. You'll find out that, once you hit the sidewalk, your "belief" in gravity or "non-belief" in it won't determine whether you go splat at the end.
There are lots of other realities in the world, of course.
But the ones mentioned above are pretty much foundational.
You get your head wrapped around the concept that there is truth in the universe, and that it makes sense... and you'll be virtually unstoppable.
You spend too much time with your head wrapped around "relative truth" and trying to determine in every single instance of life what's "true" for you...and you'll die of exhaustion, confusion, and overwhelm before you accomplish anything of value.
Don't make the wrong choice.
And yes, there is a wrong one. Just like there's a right one.
You can absolutely, positively bank on it.
Let's be careful out there.
But let's be smart, too.
And the #1 step in being smart is in realizing that we are not the bosses here. Humanity is wonderful. Complex. Intelligent (at times). Funny. Tragic. Sometimes nasty, sometimes heartbreakingly tender.
But we ain't "all that and a bag of chips."
We aren't, ultimately, in charge of anything.
There's Someone Else ultimately in charge here. He's way bigger, smarter, and more powerful than all of us put together.
You don't have to believe in Him, either.
(Although you may not wish to gamble against going splat for all eternity on that notion. Just sayin'.)
Fortunately, it also doesn't affect that He believes in you...and has done (and will continue, all your life, to do) everything He can to make sure you don't go splat for all eternity.
There's a smart choice here. By now, I suspect you know what it is. :-)
So wrap your brain and heart around this for awhile...
There's more to come.
Thoughts?
Janny
But, hey, at least they're all mine. :-)
I was thinking of putting them up on Facebook...
...but Facebook isn't the best forum for this kind of thing, either.
So here they will be, for better or worse. In my sandbox, where I get to make the rules. :-)
They'll come along in no particular order. Except for the first one, which is foundational.
And that first one is...
Your belief of/in, or failure to believe of/in, something does not affect whether it's true.
Or, put another way...
There is such a thing as a "fact."
There is such a thing as truth.
Truth and facts are not flexible, either.
They're not dependent on what you think about them.
Your individual little brain is not the ultimate determinant of anything's validity, and your feelings certainly aren't.
Things aren't "true for you" and "not true for someone else." If something's true, it's true.
If you have gradations and shades of "truth," you don't have truth in the first place. You have opinion.
Opinion is great. Just don't mistake it for a solid foundation of fact.
You need to do more research, dig deeper, and find out whether your opinion is based on truth at all, or if it's nothing more than feeling.
One of these bases for action and belief is reliable. The other is not.
You can find this out, if you're brave enough to do so.
Some things to which this applies:
God.
Satan.
Ultimate good, and ultimate evil...and the difference.
Ultimate right, and ultimate wrong. And that they both do, in fact, exist.
All of these things are realities. Kind of like gravity.
You don't have to believe in gravity if you don't want to. You can spend your whole life not believing that gravity is real.
Just don't step out of any tenth-floor windows to defy it. You'll find out that, once you hit the sidewalk, your "belief" in gravity or "non-belief" in it won't determine whether you go splat at the end.
There are lots of other realities in the world, of course.
But the ones mentioned above are pretty much foundational.
You get your head wrapped around the concept that there is truth in the universe, and that it makes sense... and you'll be virtually unstoppable.
You spend too much time with your head wrapped around "relative truth" and trying to determine in every single instance of life what's "true" for you...and you'll die of exhaustion, confusion, and overwhelm before you accomplish anything of value.
Don't make the wrong choice.
And yes, there is a wrong one. Just like there's a right one.
You can absolutely, positively bank on it.
Let's be careful out there.
But let's be smart, too.
And the #1 step in being smart is in realizing that we are not the bosses here. Humanity is wonderful. Complex. Intelligent (at times). Funny. Tragic. Sometimes nasty, sometimes heartbreakingly tender.
But we ain't "all that and a bag of chips."
We aren't, ultimately, in charge of anything.
There's Someone Else ultimately in charge here. He's way bigger, smarter, and more powerful than all of us put together.
You don't have to believe in Him, either.
(Although you may not wish to gamble against going splat for all eternity on that notion. Just sayin'.)
Fortunately, it also doesn't affect that He believes in you...and has done (and will continue, all your life, to do) everything He can to make sure you don't go splat for all eternity.
There's a smart choice here. By now, I suspect you know what it is. :-)
So wrap your brain and heart around this for awhile...
There's more to come.
Thoughts?
Janny
Saturday, May 05, 2012
Climbing the Ladder of Success...Braced on the Wrong Building?
It wasn't a banner end of the week around CFWC place.
Got a royalty statement recently that was...well...shall we say...less than what I'd hoped for.
The day after one of my freelance contracts dumped me for greener pastures. (Yes, they did pay me, and yes, they didn't damn me with faint praise--but it was a sudden, unexpected "dump" and left me without one of my key income producers of late.)
So instead of "flush with success," I was having one of those times when the writing just feels...flushed.
(You know what I mean.)
BUT...in steps my husband, knight in shining armor, light of my life, yatta, yatta. Smiles at me and says, "You're a working writer."
To which I said, quite suddenly, "I'm sick of being a working writer--I want to be a sitting-back-and-collecting-royalties-writer!"
Uh, yup.
Isn't it a kick when you finally discover your true calling!
Now, how can I make that jump? Preferably yesterday?
(sigh)
Janny
Got a royalty statement recently that was...well...shall we say...less than what I'd hoped for.
The day after one of my freelance contracts dumped me for greener pastures. (Yes, they did pay me, and yes, they didn't damn me with faint praise--but it was a sudden, unexpected "dump" and left me without one of my key income producers of late.)
So instead of "flush with success," I was having one of those times when the writing just feels...flushed.
(You know what I mean.)
BUT...in steps my husband, knight in shining armor, light of my life, yatta, yatta. Smiles at me and says, "You're a working writer."
To which I said, quite suddenly, "I'm sick of being a working writer--I want to be a sitting-back-and-collecting-royalties-writer!"
Uh, yup.
Isn't it a kick when you finally discover your true calling!
Now, how can I make that jump? Preferably yesterday?
(sigh)
Janny
Friday, May 04, 2012
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Un-Freaking-Believable...
...the condescending, supercilious responses coming from some so-called Christians to this woman's blog and ACFW list post/preface, which read as follows:
I do believe we have a lot of quality writers in this organization. With
the post below, I'd like to challenge at least a handful of you to seriously
consider branching out to the mainstream (or "crossover" at the very least)
market. Why? Because the standards are generally higher, because it's a way to be recognized in the larger writing world, and though you won't be able to give
a "plan of salvation," you can certainly leave marks of beauty in your work and
whiffs of a hopeful worldview, and our world desperately needs that.
If I were still in ACFW, I would have left it TODAY after seeing some of the responses to this simple statement. It's not pleasant, apparently, to have one's cage rattled with too much of the truth. But there are no words scathing enough for the treatment some ACFW members are giving this woman for speaking aloud the fact that their emperor's been naked for some time. When you simply don't want to face that, you tell someone they're "insulting" you. Yeah. That makes your side right.
That's why I like being a Catholic so much. I don't feel entitled to hold onto so much damned self-righteousness and spiritual superiority that I can wield like a weapon to "keep someone in line." OTOH, these so-called "Christians" are so smug about being "on God's side" that they don't know the truth when it walks up and smacks 'em across the eyes.
Examinations of conscience before the sacrament of Penance are great antidotes for this type of thing. Unfortunately, most of these folks would have no use for THAT, either.
Disgusting.
Janny
If I were still in ACFW, I would have left it TODAY after seeing some of the responses to this simple statement. It's not pleasant, apparently, to have one's cage rattled with too much of the truth. But there are no words scathing enough for the treatment some ACFW members are giving this woman for speaking aloud the fact that their emperor's been naked for some time. When you simply don't want to face that, you tell someone they're "insulting" you. Yeah. That makes your side right.
That's why I like being a Catholic so much. I don't feel entitled to hold onto so much damned self-righteousness and spiritual superiority that I can wield like a weapon to "keep someone in line." OTOH, these so-called "Christians" are so smug about being "on God's side" that they don't know the truth when it walks up and smacks 'em across the eyes.
Examinations of conscience before the sacrament of Penance are great antidotes for this type of thing. Unfortunately, most of these folks would have no use for THAT, either.
Disgusting.
Janny
Monday, April 16, 2012
Oh, Well, That Was A Brief, Shining Moment...
...referring of course to my brief sojourn above #50 in the popularity lists of Desert Breeze/Amazon. How the mighty have fallen! :-P
On another subject entirely, does anyone else HATE this new Blogger interface as much as I do? I've had this blog since 2005 or so, and for the first time, I'm seriously considering moving to another blogging format. Between the almost unintelligible "dashboard" and the inability to make new posts function correctly...
It's enough to make a woman tear out what little hair she has.
Of course, I have no time to tear hair. I have 12+ project files on my Klok time-tracking software, each file representing either an employer/client or other writing-related work.
And while it's true that none of these is what you'd call a "full time gig," together...they make up a formidable set of ways to keep one chained to a keyboard all day long, and as much of the night as I personally wanna give up.
And that's without spending any time on my own fiction writing in a MONTH. Something's gotta give. Let's see if I can come up with a creative way to figure out WHAT.
Thoughts?
Janny
On another subject entirely, does anyone else HATE this new Blogger interface as much as I do? I've had this blog since 2005 or so, and for the first time, I'm seriously considering moving to another blogging format. Between the almost unintelligible "dashboard" and the inability to make new posts function correctly...
It's enough to make a woman tear out what little hair she has.
Of course, I have no time to tear hair. I have 12+ project files on my Klok time-tracking software, each file representing either an employer/client or other writing-related work.
And while it's true that none of these is what you'd call a "full time gig," together...they make up a formidable set of ways to keep one chained to a keyboard all day long, and as much of the night as I personally wanna give up.
And that's without spending any time on my own fiction writing in a MONTH. Something's gotta give. Let's see if I can come up with a creative way to figure out WHAT.
Thoughts?
Janny
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