Good day, my friends! Thanks so much for sticking with me through this week of re-calibration and preparation for the coming spell of homeschooling. I do promise to get back into the writing soon; the plan is to go quiet on Jean Lee’s World for a few days so I can work on some flash and short fiction for my university’s journal (sharing here for feedback, of course), and then also write up a few lesson plan samples (ibid).
(Yup, I do actually write when life allows! You can see some short WIPS of mine on my Free Fiction page. I’ve also got a novel, novella, and some serialized fantasy, if you’re so inclined, and most of it’s free on Kindle Unlimited. Click here to check’em out!)
For those visiting my site for all the homeschooling stuff–welcome! Please don’t forget to take care of your own creative sparks to stay sane. I’ve been writing on this site for 5 years now, and I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to create and communicate in order to maintain one’s mental health. Please also check out some of those wonderful folks who follow my blog or have been interviewed here. You’re going to meet beautiful songwriters, poets, authors, and photographers on both sides of the globe. xxxxx
So, let’s finish the week strong with more resources dear friend and fellow indie author Anne Clare called to my attention. As a teacher and mother of three kids under the age of ten, Anne knows all too well how tough it is to keep kids engaged while also getting her own work done. After I shared my post yesterday of online and hands on activities, Anne emailed me a whole bunch of stuff she’s found in her own hunt for things to do with her kids. Her hunt was super successful, as you’ll soon see!
Extra Science Stuff
Mystery Science: Oodles of lessons and materials! A portion of it’s for free; if you help spread the word about the site, you level up on your access level.
Real Wild: A Youtube channel featuring some killer wildlife videos, including the late great Steve Irwin.
Steve Spangler Science: tons of experiments perfect for the home setting, especially for sensory kiddos!
Extra Reading Stuff
Scholastic has created a Learn at Home site with an amazing mix of reading, video, and hands-on activity all organized by theme, time frame, and age group. HUZZAH!
Extra Geography Stuff
Anybody else remember the PBS ’90s gem known as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? What had started as an ancient PC game with a pile of floppy disks transformed into books, more games, cartoons, and of course this game show focused on history and geography. I learned a lot from this show as a kid, and there are a bunch of episodes on YouTube.
More recently Google Earth has created a free online game to let your homebound gumshoes chase Carmen Sandiego all over the globe. Click here for more info!
More Art Stuff
Create Art with Me: This site is jam-packed with age-appropriate projects. Drawing, watercolor, painting, pastels, foils, charcoal–if you can create with it, it’s on here!
Crafts by Courtney: A really cool mix of projects for grown-ups and kids alike.
Fun-A-Day: Cool Crafts for the little Jedi–and Sith–in your household.
Pinterested Parent: More fun artsy ideas, such as this salt watercolor project, to keep kids occupied without busting your wallet.
Picklebums: When it comes to projects for multiple ages, simple is always best, such as this squish painting activity.
Easy Peasy and Fun: This one requires a membership if you want the printables, but browsing its crafts may give you ideas for adapting with your own materials.
Artful Parent: Creativity abounds on this site! I particularly love the focus on sensory kiddos.
What a treasure trove of ideas! I’m excited to show these to my three little Bs and see what strikes their fancy before we head off to the craft store after lunch. So long as we avoid the cart races down the aisles, we should be okay. Enjoy your own explore here, and remember–we’re in this together! xxxxx
“Do you need anything else?” Biff’s teacher gestures to the table behind her. Bins of crayons, markers, chalk, and scrap paper abound.
I clutch the two black totes she gave me like they were my own kids, who are…well, damn, one’s screaming. In comes Bash from the playground. “I broke my kneeeeeeee!” Blondie follows him, waving her arms and sound way too much like me for her own good. “Calm down, you just skinned it!”
I blow a lock of hair out of my eyes, take one box of chalk from Biff, and tell him to empty his arms of markers back into the bin. “I just gotta plan with the mindset that this is how it’s going to be until June,” I say to the teacher.
Today I went through the boys’ packets–mainly math sheets and some reading activities. A few writing prompts with notebooks to write in. A yoga pamphlet. Some ideas for physical activities. A links to a dozen or so websites/databases for the kids to read and play games on. Aaaaaaand that’s about it.
Uffdah.
See, here’s the big challenge with this homeschooling thing for parents like me: we’re told to be careful with how much screen time kids get, but now with this self-quarantine and online schooling, it seems that kids need to be online a LOT. Plus this is working on the assumption that there’s enough screens to go around. I sure don’t have that amount of tech in my house, and I’m assuming other folks are in the same situation. I’m also going to assume that other folks don’t want to dump their kids in front of screens for hours at a time.
Balance. We have got to find the balance, people. But how?
To me, the key is switching up between screen time and hands-on time as we work through our day.
As you can see, I’ve got note cards for every part of the day, including a few Biff and Bash additions like “Social Skills” and “Free Choice.” I was surprised to see how excited they were by a board to organize our school day schedule, as well as work binders I made for them featuring dragons, Wall-E, and the Enterprise. My goal for the binders is to hold their work in reading, writing, math, Bible study, geography, and science. Other projects like art and music (Bash insists we have music–fine by me!) will go…elsewhere? We’ll see. 🙂
The key, as far as I see, is having a few online resources as well as a few hands-on activities for all the major subjects. To stave off the cabin fever–
–we can also take a daily virtual field trip. It won’t be quite like Miss Frizzle’s Magic School Bus, but it’s a start!
Bible Study
Faith if very important to my family, so I want to make sure we take time every day studying a few Bible stories and remembering how there is no darkness that can douse God’s love for us. This is an excellent edition to use with kids, as it’s got oodles of illustrations and some questions for discussion to get kiddos talking.
Since I was raised on flannelgraphs and puppets, I didn’t really think there was much need for online Bible Study stuff; when in doubt, go with Veggie Tales, I guess?
Reading
Thank heaven the kids like getting books as presents! We’ve oodles of books all around the house; the key is to get the kids reading things they’ve not tried before. For Biff and Bash, this includes series like The Magic Tree Houseor Stick Cat. Blondie has some required reading to do for school, but I’ve also gotten her to try new things from the library before it shut down, such as The Menagerie.
When it comes to reading aloud, I know I mentioned Diana Wynne Jones (Eight Days of Luke feels veeeery promising with this lot), but I may start with something a tad shorter that’s still fun–Bunnicula, perhaps, or Basil of Baker Street. I might let them vote to see which they’ll pick!
Writing
Storytelling is NOT an issue with any of the three Bs. Penmanship, however, is another matter. It’s vital I get all three kids to work on their handwriting every day. Copying seems like easiest strategy, but what to make them copy?
Books like 5,000 Awesome Facts or Weird but True are PACKED with a wide variety of information that’s bound to strike any kid’s fancy. The key is to look at pages with tinier print, as those’ll be the pages impatient little eyes may skip. Our book, for instance has 75 facts about cats listed in 11-point font on two pages. I know I can pull some facts from that Blondie and the others likely glossed over.
When it comes to writing stories…well, I think I can let them cover that. 🙂 I may even spur Blondie into signing up for Camp NaNoWriMo for Young Writers this April. Hmmm, maybe I could join her…
Art
Oh boy. Gotta be honest–art’s never really been my thing. I’d be cool if they just played with Legos every day at this time using this BINGO sheet of challenges.
That’s not fair, though, not when Bash loves to draw pictures and Blondie loves to draw comics. It’s Biff that needs a little push.
“Can we get paint?” he asks. Hmmm. Well, I suppose we could try a few basic painting projects from the craft store. We could also use paper here at home to try making animals with this Origami site. Plus websites like We Are Teachers are full of creative activities that can help art cross into multiple subjects. I know I’ll be digging into this more over the weekend!
Math
This one doesn’t worry me too much, even though I loathe math. Biff and Bash’s teachers sent home lots of worksheets for the boys, and Blondie’s got her own math textbook to use over the coming weeks. When it comes to age-appropriate math games, ABCya has oodles of math as well as reading games for the kiddos to choose from. Blondie always loves a chance to play Prodigy, too! It’s a pretty neat role-playing game that challenges kids with math problems as they venture off on magical quests. Sure, they want you to buy in, but the free version’s great, too!
I shouldn’t forget friend Anne Clare‘s recommendation of games, too. Many card and board games utilize mathematical thinking, and they force kiddos to work on some social skills, too, which is ALWAYS a plus with my hoodlums. If you have any favorite games, be sure to share them in the comments below!
Geography
The boys have always loved studying atlases, so for Christmas I gave them 50 Cities of the U.S.A.It shares all sorts of neato trivia about major cities across the country. I hope to give the kids turns in picking cities for us to talk about. I may even put Blondie to work on her computer and have her make slideshows sharing even more information about the cities. (Heck, I may have her do that for ALL the subjects. Co-Teacher Blondie to the rescue!) National Geographic also has an amazing database of educational resources I’m sure to dig into as well so we can learn more about the habitats we experience on our virtual field trips.
SCIENCE?!
I DIDN’T HAVE SCIENCE ON MY PREVIOUS SCHEDULE!!! Well, bullocks. At least I managed to get it on the card schedule. 🙂 Thank goodness We Are Teachers comes to my aid again with podcasts the kids can listen to (no screen required!). Milwaukee with Kids has a great article on science experiments one can do at home with items you actually have in your house as opposed to, you know, oodles of plaster or skin-melting chemicals. Some of you have recommended utilizing the outdoors, and I agree! Gardening can be a lovely way to learn some important science lessons, as can activities like riding a bike, playing ball, or blowing bubbles. The birds and other critters are returning to our neighborhood, too, so hopefully we can do some sketches and discussions on Wisconsin flora and fauna. When all else fails, there’s always Bill Nye the Science Guy or Weird but True‘s website of shorty shorts!
Virtual Field Trips
Okay, so, I sort of went down the Rabbit Hole with this one. Initially I wanted to do all the virtual tours I found in these articles–
–but then I realized that the self-exploring in this 360 degree style wasn’t a great fit for Biff and Bash. Blondie might like it, sure, and if you have older kids I bet they’d love exploring the Louvre or Smithsonian this way. But with our house of limited screens and quick-tempered kids, I don’t want to risk losing a computer I need for teaching to their arguments over who gets to push buttons.
So.
Time to find a more video-style field trip.
The Smithsonian has a YouTube channel–that’s a start!
There are awesome videos put together by The Nature Conservancy, too. I know I’ll be using some of these to send my kids off exploring new habitats across the globe!
We can’t forget outer space, of course, not with my boys. Why not take the kiddos to Mars with Access Mars? Or swing by Discovery Education to check out their virtual field trips on engineering?
WHEW! I think we’ve covered a lot today! Now I must be off to prep tonight’s online class for the university. Stay healthy and safe wherever you are, and take heart–we’re all in this together. xxxxxxx
Hello! I am Blondie, as you might know already. Right now I’m writing a book called An Expert’s Book On Dragons. It has all the information you need when you go out dragon watching! It includes facts and drawings of dragons you need to look for! Included on this blog post is pictures of the cover, introduction, and first dragon in the book!
This is the words of the introduction and first dragon:
INTRODUCTION
So, people who are reading this book, I, the author, will pose as Firewing, a fire type dragon that ”wrote” this book. Inside this , there will be facts about the dragons,their habitats, and their tracks!
Enjoy!
Firewing (and yes, I am a dragon that can write)
SHARK DRAGON
A shark dragon can spread up to a mile in length, and up to half a mile in width; one of the largest dragons. It can swim in water swiftly. It has webbed feet and 2 fins to help it swim. It lives near the U.S.A., China, and Japan. It has tracks like a duck, but WAY larger.
FIREWING FACT
Did you know that shark dragons are omnivores?
FUN FACTS:
-Shark dragons are often mistaken for giant sharks near California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Florida, and other seaside states.
-Shark dragons only eat once a month.
-Shark dragons never eat humans. they normally eat fish and plants and other stuff.
-Shark dragons can talk.
-If you save a shark dragon’s life, it will devote it to you and you can tame it.
I have made one other new book and I will update you on that soon! I hope you like this blog post!
Sincerely,
Blondie:)
My daughter was so excited to share this post with you! This ol’ mom’s heart is all squishy with love’n’pride. 🙂 Now, let’s see if I can jump back into my own story and nudge protagonist Chloe to reveal truly matters to her. I hope you’ll join me!
Blondie zips her Mega Man sweatshirt and pulls its puffy hood up over her long, tangled hair. It’s a Friday night. Daddy’s home. Biff and Bash are racing each other to see who’s going to need stitches first. I ain’t stickin’ around for that.
I’m going to take my daughter out for her birthday.
What else does a writer give her daughter for her birthday? Her own creative writing handbook, of course!
I see her now, on the verge of 8, and pray I haven’t set the “Cats in the Cradle” prophecy in motion:
As a parent working from home, it’s already a challenge finding those hours when I can teach kid-free, let alone grade papers and handle student questions. Plus, there’s that awful tradition of the American Summer Vacation. What kind of society demands parents handle their own kids all day for three months in a row? Outrageous!
Blondie’s equally annoyed. “I wish school was all year,” she says in the car, half-reading, half-looking out the window. “I never get to see anyone in summer.”
I wince at this truth. Planning play-dates with kids across three different towns sucks. Other parents put their kids in half a dozen leagues and classes every summer. We can’t afford a birthday party for Blondie, let alone soccer club.“At least you can attend summer school in the morning like your brothers this year, and make some new friends.” I silently thank God yet again that the school administration allowed Blondie to sign up for their free summer program even though she’s enrolled elsewhere for the regular school year. With all these kids on our street, she’s bound to connect with somebody, and then all the cross-county play-datingcould stop. What a time-saver!
Blondie winces at this truth. “I guess.”
Wisconsin doesn’t feel like stepping out tonight. Thick grey clouds block any sign of sunlight. The rain is cold, but not hard enough to clean my windshield of some presents dropped by the robins. “You’ll have lots of time to work on your stories this summer, too. And your inventions.” Every story Blondie has written over her 2nd grade year is now piled on my desk. I want to keep them somewhere special. I want to show her in ten years’ time how she loved writing about puppies and dragons going on adventures despite family funerals involving cancer. I want to show her how smart she was with punctuation and grammar at such a young age, how her voice was already taking shape, even then.
For now, I get a shrug. “Can you tell me where we’re going now?”
“Nope.” When I told Blondie we couldn’t afford a party…when those big blue-grey eyes looked down, and her big-girl nod of, That’s okay, Mom, like all the other That’s okay’s when I needed to teach, to write…for once, I just wanted to say:
No, that’s not okay, Kiddo. You and I are gonna have some fun together. No boys, no work. We’re gonna go to a party place with lots of music and lights, and a giant disco ball just like you wanted. We’ll have pizza and roller skate and fall on our butts and laugh. For one night, I want you to be the center of my world.
I wanted to tell her all these things, but Bo and I decided it would be better as a surprise. The girl never expects me to be the one to take her anywhere. I’m hoarding my time like coins in an R2-D2 piggy bank: ten minutes reading here, half an hour editing there. A free hour is like finding a soggy ten on the sidewalk. Two hours? A twenty wedged in a park bench.
But when I got that big-girl nod, I locked myself in my bedroom and pulled the R2-D2 piggy bank out of the closet. The minutes jingled like so many pennies scrimped and pinched from across the years. My daughter’s years.
That’s okay, Mom.
I bring the hammer down.
~*~
“We’re here!” I turn off the engine. Skate World flashes on and off in bright yellow. Clusters of families and teens already line up to enter. “This is gonna be so much fun!” I unbuckle my belt and turn around, ready to take her hand and step out and under disco lights.
Her belt is not unbuckled.
Blondie’s eyes dart between the sign and people, never me. “Oh.” Pause. “I didn’t know we were coming here.”
“Surprise!” The bubbles grow in my voice to counter the confusion rooting within. “I know you had so much fun here last year with your friends, I thought this year we could come together, just you and me. No brothers or anything.” I grin.
She does not. “Oh.” Pause. “Are you skating, too?”
“Of course! I’m gonna fall on my butt a lot, but it’ll be fun!” My voice keeps sliding down exclamation marks. I don’t know how many more are left before the bottom.
“But,” Blondie fidgets with her belt—not the buckle, “that’s just a friend place.”
“I see other kids going in with their moms and dads. We can too!”
“But.” This “but” shakes in the air, left out in the cold, rainy space, “but someone bad might be in there.”
I have no exclamation points to counter this. “Someone bad? Kiddo, what are you talking about? It’s just all kids skating and falling on their butts, just like us.”
“But, but, but—”
“But WHAT?” I snap.
Now, she looks at me. Her tears sparkle beneath the Skate World light. “What if someone laughs at me?” Her mouth trembles, and she sobs with such a fear that I am dumbstruck. “Please don’t be mad!”
She must see my face and I can’t lie: part of me is.
I smashed that bank. I brought all those coins and ripped bills of time to exchange for some memories, dammit. I didn’t give up an entire evening of work time to drive through four towns to pull into a parking lot only to have a sobbing child refuse to leave the car over made-up situations about a place she’s only visited once before in her life.
I. I. I.
I take one last look at the flashing lights and laughing kids. Start the engine. Turn around.
“That’s okay, Blondie.”
~*~
Mullen’s is an ice cream parlor on the edge of Watertown’s main drag. I went here with my grandparents after walking the river’s boardwalk to feed ducks. My friends and I often walked here on weekends at the boarding school, eager to trade some cafeteria wages for fried cheese curds and a sundae.
Tonight, it’s just Blondie and me.
Blondie pokes a pink finger through a hole in the brick wall. “Woooow, this place is oooold.” I glare right back at the old biddy with her tidy glass of ice water tisking Blondie’s impertinence and let the waitress show us all the available flavors. Blondie picks two scoops of vanilla with lots of sprinkles, and leads me to the red vinyl seat by the window so she can watch the cars rush by in the rain.
I tell her stories of running through the downpours back to school to make curfew, of the loud screen door always slamming on my little fingers when my own grandmother would get me a treat after an eternal visit to the fabric store. Blondie listens, eats. Smiles.
“Don’t waste your time on something you don’t care about,” Michael Dellert warns as I pour through my old posts on Diana Wynne Jones. My presentation for N– University’s Literary Conference is in just a few days. The theme for 2017 is Lessons Learned–perfect, right? Half of what I do on this site is share lessons I learned from novels. Surely I’ve got SOMETHING to offer a literary conference. I want my colleagues to see that I give a damn about myself as a reader, and as a writer.
I receive notice of the conference schedule: my nonfiction reading is midday. My DWJ presentation is just after Blondie’s school gets out.
Four hours apart. I’m solo with the kids. Bo can’t get out of work. I can’t hire a babysitter for that long when the presentations themselves are barely twenty minutes each. My appeal for a schedule change is denied. If I’m going to do it, I have to do it with the kids, and trust them to not burn the house down.
~*~
I’ve written before about the rare gift that is time for writing, but I don’t think I’ve ever said how bloody hard it’s been to maintain a job while being a full-time parent, let alone a job like college adjunct. Maternity leave, vacation? Those words mean nothing for those paid only $1,700-3,000 for a semester’s worth of class. If you take a break, you are out of the loop for upcoming courses, and Lord knows when you can get another one. I graded student outlines hours after giving birth to my daughter. I hauled myself from the hospital room to a computer lab during the boys’ first day in the world to lead a discussion on critical reading. A term only lasts a few months, and you don’t know if you’re teaching the next term until it starts. As far as stable employment, it’s about as unstable as it gets.
The ability to teach from home made it tolerable, in its way. I could do schoolwork when kids slept. Audio classes only happen once a week, so I scheduled those for when Bo was home, or when the kids were in bed for the night.
But as the kids got older, they needed more of me. And more. And more. And the postpartum depression snicker-snacked through, and creative writing gave my soul strength…at the cost of more time.
Which, until that point, had been for school work. You know, the thing that earns the grocery money around here.
~*~
“Can we go to the library after school?”
“No, Mommy’s got a special presentation for her school today.”
“Let’s go to the park!”
“No, Mommy has to talk to other teachers today.”
“But I don’t wanna go home!”
None of them want to go home. It’s a beautiful day, Blondie just finished her first day of 2nd grade, but Mommy can’t care. She’s got to drive through construction while dodging the books flying in from the back seat because we’re not going to the park, we’re going to fight, we never want to go home….
“Here, watch Dragons,” I give Blondie a kiss on the head as I hop over a pile of wrecked cars to open the DVD player. “When my presentation’s done, I want to hear all about 2nd grade.” Because I do want to know, but that presentation just eats the forefront of all thoughts. Don’t forget to mention this, and note that book, and make this reference to that event, this thing about her father, that quote about Tolkien.
“Snack?” Biff throws himself at the rocking chair where his posse of Blanket, Grandpere, and Mel the Koala await. “Let’s have a snack. Fruit Loops!”
“Can I go outside?” Bash asks as he runs out the screen door.
“Bash get in here NOW! Fruit Loops and Dragons, come on, dude!” I say as I hoist him up and under one arm while thrusting the door open and I’ve got FUCK ONLY FIFTEEN MINUTES.
Cereal dumped in bowls. Dragons on. “I’ll be in my room. Just…please, sit nicely, and stay inside. We’ll go outside and talk about school stuff when I’m done,” I say as I back-run down the hall, trip into the Mother’s Day flower Blondie had taped to my door. I use tape from one of the fishy Father’s Day pictures to fix it (“We’re hooked on you, Daddy!”) and then frantically press computer buttons. My mic is a go, I’ve got my notes set, T-minus two minutes…
“Mommy I WANT to go outside!” Bash stamps in the doorway.
“Jean, everything okay?”
“Fine!” I say into the mic as I hiss at Bash. “When. Mommy’s. DONE.”
“No. NOW!”
“Bash, I am not doing this now. Go watch Dragons.”
He fights as I close the door. He bangs the door. Kicks the door. Screams into the door.
“Ladies and gentleman, please welcome Jean Lee as the next presenter of–“
Screaming triples. Blondie’s voice pierces: “Mommy, you have to open up! Open up NOW!”
Oh for fuck’s sake–
“Jean, is something wrong?”
“I am so sorry, just one moment while I deal with…” I have no word for what I’m dealing with. I’m too angry, nervous, frustrated–all the things I feel when the boys erupt and try to destroy something a family member’s done for them, or when they lash out at a complete stranger for coming too close. I rip open the door, where all three of them stand with tears streaming down their faces.
“Biff threw a toy at me. And Dragons is done.”
“And I am in my meeting right now, and you’re just going to have to handle it.”
“No I don’t, YOU have to!” Blondie says with all the authority a seven-year-old musters.
And I’m…I’m done. “No. You have to work it out with Biff. Bash, move.” And I close the door in their faces. Lock it.
The banging is downright thunderous. Comments have sprung up in the presentation: Uh oh, someone’s in trouble. Oh those poor little guys! Sounds like someone misses Mommy. Etc.
“Again, I apologize for that delay.” I can barely hear myself above their roar. I carry my books in one hand and the computer with the other into the bathroom, where I close the door.
This professional, literary conference. This chance to showcase research and criticism to colleagues. Me, presenting next to the toilet.
~*~
Twenty minutes later, I open the door. Screaming and fighting: over. Biff plays with cars in the boys’ room. Blondie’s door is shut, but I hear her talking to her “pet puppies.” Bash sits alone, sniffling, rubbing his eyes, legs and floor littered with shreds of construction paper.
When we create characters, we want them to be a person we can reach out, touch, talk with. And they must be more than mere dolls with that scratchy speaker embedded somewhere inside its stuffing that rasps out a limited number of lines. We want to create people who have thoughts and beliefs all their own. We want characters to be.
But how to grow such characters? Sometimes, one quirk is all it takes.
Take my kids, for instance. Bash often lays on his back with his legs crossed in the air. It’s a startling image: my father used to do the same thing all the time. Bash often crosses his legs while sitting, just as my father, grandfather, and uncles all did. It’s a strange habit that, once noticed, reveals a familial connection.
Blondie, my amazing girl: gifted with my memory for words and her father’s humor. A girl of giving heart…and also some of the worst traits of her parents. Like Bo, she does not like to work very hard on something for very long. A task will get a flurry of attention, and then is left to rot into the oblivion. Like me, she is quick in temper and prefers screaming at her brothers rather than talking through the problem. I still struggle with staying calm and not blowing up at them for throwing toys or fighting.
And then, of course, there are the quirks that are unique to each child. Biff, who is no longer constipated, thank the Lord, insists on being Master of Toilet Flushing. The second anyone uses the facilities there comes a frantic, “Can I flush it can I flush it FLUSH IT?!?!?!” He doesn’t throw anything else into the bowl–hell, he doesn’t even stick around to watch the swirling. He just needs to be the one who pulls the handle. My aunt, my husband, and I have all made the grievous mistake of flushing on our own. The tantrum that results is both epic and pathetic, nor will it not stop until someone else uses the toilet so he can FLUSH IT!
Like the food coloring mixed in the water for carnations, singular quirks can influence other traits. Yup, Biff has moments of extreme OCD. He may leave a pile of crashed cars in his wake, but don’t you dare leave any book face down. Blondie will freeze when school work gets hard and gets extremely frustrated when the solutions don’t come via guesswork. Bash loves using found things to tell a story, just as the grandfather he barely knew would do for his sermons. (Though I don’t recall my dad insisting on eating with several forks so every kind of food had its own utensil. That’s just weird, Bash.)
Fictional characters can grow a good deal from a single trait, too. Say what you will about toy-driven movies like The Lego Batman Movie: it took a single character element–in this case, Batman’s ego–to extremes both hilarious and fitting for the story. I wish I could share the entire opening sequence, but this song should give you a fairly rough idea on how Batman views himself:
No one can tell Batman what to do or how to handle the bad guys. He’s the best at everything, and “no one [else] has ever had a good idea. Ever.” It takes getting captured by the Joker and being sent to the Phantom Zone for Batman to see just what kind of jerk he’s been. It’s a change of heart that might seem obvious to adults, but that means kids see the transformation clearly as well.
I recently saw this single-trait strategy work well for Agatha Christie, too.  In Thirteen at Dinner(also known as Lord Edgware Dies, a far more fitting title) we meet Jane Wilkinson, a selfish film actress who wants her husband dead. But since she doesn’t “seem to run to gunmen over here [in England],” she asks Poirot to persuade the Lord Edgware to divorce her so she can marry a duke.
“I think you overrate my persuasive powers, Madame.”
“Oh! but you can surely think of something, M. Poirot.” She leaned forward. Her blue eyes opened wide again. “You’d like me to be happy, wouldn’t you?”
Her voice was soft, low and deliciously seductive.
“I should like everybody to be happy,” said Poirot cautiously.
“Yes, but I wasn’t thinking of everybody. I was thinking of just me.”
“I should say you always do that, Madame.”
He smiled.
“You think I’m selfish?”
“Oh! I did not say so, Madame.”
“I dare say I am. But, you see, I do so hate being unhappy.” (7)
Well of course, someone murders Lord Edgware, and of course, everyone suspects Jane since she’s been talking of nothing else but wanting her husband dead. Of course, clues arise to clear her. Of course, Poirot and Hastings visit the widow:
She looked like an angel about to give vent to thoughts of exquisite holiness. “I’ve been thinking. It all seems so miraculous, if you know what I mean. Here I am–all my troubles over. No tiresome business of divorce…Just my path cleared and all plain sailing…I’ve thought and I’ve thought lately–if Edgware were to die. And there–he’s dead! It’s–it’s almost like an answer to a prayer.”
Poirot cleared his throat.
“I cannot say I look at it quite like that, Madame. Somebody killed your husband.”
She nodded.
“Why, of course.”
“Has it not occurred to you who that someone was?”
She stared at him. “Does it matter? I mean–what’s that to do with it? The Duke and I can be married in about four or five months…”
With difficulty Poirot controlled himself.
“Yes, Madame. I know that. But apart from that has it not occurred to you to ask yourself who killed your husband?”
“No.” She seemed quite surprised by the idea. (49-50)
Selfish to the extreme, I’d say. But this selfishness is both a clue and a red herring because it’s Agatha Christie, and we should all know better by now.
Jane’s obsession with her own life and goals gives readers the impression of someone so self-involved that she doesn’t get how the world works. “Things just go right for me,” she says, and believes it. Other scenes in the story show her lack of knowledge about the law, culture, politics, etc. She comes off as, well, a bit of a bimbo.
Yet by story’s end we learn she’s not dumb at all. Oh, she’s selfish, make no mistake, but she’s not dumb. She found an actress who does impressions and had that actress impersonate her at a dinner party to provide an alibi. In the end, Jane did indeed kill her husband, since the duke did not believe in divorce. Jane wanted that duke; therefore, the present husband had to go. This then means that answering Poirot’s question seems rather silly. Of course she knows who killed her husband: she did.
The book ends with a letter from Jane in prison addressed to Poirot, explaining how she had managed to murder three times and elude detection for so long. Even here, the selfishness shines as brightly as ever:
 “I thought of that all by myself. I think I’m more proud of that than anything else. Everyone always says I haven’t got brains–but I think it needed real brains to think of that…I wonder if you are ever sorry for what you did. After all, I only wanted to be happy in my own way. And if it hadn’t been for me you would never have had anything to do with the case. I never thought you’d be so horribly clever. You didn’t look clever. It’s funny, but I haven’t lost my looks a bit…” (125-6)
It’s so easy to get caught up in the idea of making “complicated” characters, with all sorts of goodness and wickedness and everything in between. And sometimes, complicated works very well, just as several different flowers together make a garden. But a single seed grows, too, in ways both beautiful and unexpected. You’ve but to plant it, care for it, and see.
Time is not my friend this month. Hell, it ain’t even a church acquaintance. It’s more like the medical assistant at the kids’ clinic that I had to call once a week for two months straight due to stitches in and stitches out and sickness and more stitches in and more stitches out: initially helpful, then busily surprised, then downright annoyed I need time made for me yet again.
Good morning!
So yesterday I woke up, struggling to keep my face above the flood of first week student issues, and wondered: What can I possibly blog about this month? I really want to study Agatha Christie’s use of multiple povs in And Then There Were None and how despite being inside everyone’s heads, we still didn’t know the killer until the epilogue. I want to explore the struggle of following God’s Calling in life when all the certainty of that road is thrown asunder by yet another Calling…also, apparently, from God.
But, as said, time is not my friend, not with a literary conference to prep for, school prep for my own kids, my own school to work for, some birthdays to celebrate, and grieve, too.
My mind remained muddled as the boys launched themselves out of bed and right into their sister’s room. Blondie was having a special sleepover at Grandma’s, which meant all her toys were up for grabs. Eventually I lured them out with breakfast and books, especially Truckery Rhymes, our latest acquisition from the library.
Mornings are slow-going here even on school days, so I didn’t think much of their gabbing instead of eating. But then I listened…
Mind you, this isn’t all of it, and of course I wrecked the moment by opening my big mouth. In those minutes, though, I forgot my stress…well most of it. Collaborative story-telling can quickly digress into fighting when Bash won’t say what Biff tells him to. But this moment of imagination shared reminded me what a difference a partner makes.
Writing can be like that.
I still haven’t told many friends, and hardly any family, about the writing life. That lack of “real life” support means more freedom to write about the raw, festering pieces of my past, but also means I can’t count on others to help me in, well, months like this, when time is too beleaguered by “real life” to give any more for our passions.
That’s why I thank God every day for you, Friends, for being here. For sharing how you struggle to balance writing with everything else. How despite it all you still create because you must. Me, too. And that “me, too” ties all the unseen in me with you.
Now sometimes, that sharing goes one step further. Last year Michael Dellert gave me a character and a corner of his fantasy world to make my own. It seems he approves of what I’ve done so far with Middler’s Pride, for he’s asked to co-write a short story starring some of his Droma natives and my pompous–but decent (mostly decent)–Shield Maiden. It promises to be quite an adventure for me, since I’ve never written a story with another writer before.
Like Blondie, I usually do my creating solo.
Blondie & her first epic, “The Wrong Pants.”
Currently she’s got her heart set on making comic books, starting with a special edition collection of Super Mario Brothers stories. Me? I try to write about Mer’s fellow Shield Maidens whenever I can, which hasn’t been more than once a week, if I’m lucky. But I’ll be damned if I give that scrap of time up to despair. If I only get one hour a month to write, then that’s what I get. The light is brighter in me when I write, stronger, happier. To give this up will only darken the way I see the world and myself. My family will not be submitted to that darkness, not again.
Bloodshed aside, summer has not been without illumination. Books are explored, toilets are used without a battle, and friendship continues its tenuous wrappings from one child to the next. They drive each other crazy. They make each other laugh. They lock each other out. They smell each other’s feet. They thrive together. They thrive apart.
And I love it.
Biff of words, Bash of action, Blondie…um, gone at Grandma’s. 🙂
![20171017_083840[1]](https://jeanleesworld.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/20171017_0838401.jpg)
Take my kids, for instance. Bash often lays on his back with his legs crossed in the air. It’s a startling image: my father used to do the same thing all the time. Bash often crosses his legs while sitting, just as my father, grandfather, and uncles all did. It’s a strange habit that, once noticed, reveals a familial connection.
I recently saw this single-trait strategy work well for Agatha Christie, too.  In 
Jean Lee's World 