Lydia Schoch

Photo by Felipe Micaroni Lalli.

I keep getting hits from people searching for phrases like:

how families are destroyed due to t.v., phones, and internet.

Who else remembers life before the Internet?

Long distance phone calls were extremely expensive. You only made them on very special occasions, and even then you didn’t talk for a long time.

Packages and letters took days to arrive, and sometimes longer than that if you sent them out over the holidays or your handwriting wasn’t legible enough. You also had to pay not only for the stamps but for the paper, postcards,  or greeting cards on which to write your messages as well. There was no such thing as jotting off a quick note.

It was extremely difficult to disprove urban legends. Another kid once terrified me with stories about how a friend of a friend conjured up Bloody Mary. I was old enough to be skeptical of it but still barely young enough to wonder if it might have actually happened once or twice in the past.

Facts were hard to come by. You had to physically go to the library to look up statistics, dates, names, or places unless you  were lucky enough to have a relatively modern set of encyclopedias in your home. I remember making lists of things I wondered about ahead of time in anticipation of having some of those questions answered at our next visit to the local library.

People were easy to misplace. If they changed their last name or moved away, you might never get in contact with them again.

It was quiet. Lonely. Boring. Tedious. Isolated.

I don’t miss that world at all. The one we have now is so much more connected. I can email my parents every single day of the week if I came up with a new question or story for them, and it wouldn’t cost any of us a single penny. I can send a funny joke to my nephew or coo over the newest baby in the extended family for the same price.

This is a good thing.

Technology doesn’t drive families apart. It keeps them together.

I wonder how long it will take the technophobes to realize that.

Photo by Ws47.

A funny thing happened to me over the holidays.

Some of the adult members of my family went on a hike. The trail was roughly a mile long and a little rocky. (Think something slightly rougher than the picture on the left, although we were not on Tuckerman Trail).

My parents and spouse dropped out about halfway through it. Youngest brother and I kept going.

He’s in fantastic shape. I’m in decent shape. It wasn’t hard as long as you paid attention to where you placed your feet when the rocks grew slippery.

The trail began to get a little tougher. I started to use my hands to steady myself. There was a steep drop-off on the left side of the trail, and I preferred not to see how far down it went.

The rocks were getting bigger. I was hot and thirsty.

Youngest brother looked up and pointed at the top of the mountain. It looks like the kind of trail that requires legitimate hiking boots and a big bottle of water.

“I think that’s where we’re headed!”

He sounded cheerful.

Why, oh why did he sound cheerful? I thought it was supposed to be a class 2 trail.

“Are you sure?”

“Kind of.”

“Um…I think I’m going to head back now.” He was okay finishing it alone, so that’s exactly what I did. After he finished it, he walked back and found me and our mom waiting for him.

“You almost made it to the end!”

“Wait, seriously?”

“Yeah, you were like 90% finished.” He actually went on and completed another short hike further up the mountain before walking back because this trail ended so quickly.

Well, shoot. If I had known that, I would have kept walking.

I wonder how often in life we all give up right before the tough stuff ends?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

So You Want a Rationalist Girlfriend. This was so creative. I’d love to do something like this with statistics one of these days, I just need to think of a topic. (And convince my followers to fill out a survey. Ha!)

Why I Despise the Hipster Aesthetic. My feelings about this topic definitely aren’t as visceral as the ones the author describes, but I am irritated by people who thinks it’s fun to go “slumming.”

A Fleeting Glimpse via 4BethCarpenter. You all know how I like to harrumph my way through this time of year, but even I have to admit that this is a beautiful sight.

End of the Year 2014 Survey via K8Tilton. Kate Tilton is one of the many engaging authors I’ve met on Twitter. Right now she’s asking anyone who has ever visited her site to fill out a short, anonymous survey about your thoughts on what she can do to improve it. I’ve filled out the survey. Will you?

Reflections on Two Years of Marriage via juijonathan. Every January on Reddit there are a few posters who share all kinds of statistics about the frequency and type(s) of sex they had with their spouse over the last year. (Have no fear, relatives who lurk on this blog. I will never, ever share that kind of information here. 😉 ) This guy took that concept and stretched it a little further. Instead of talking about his sex life, he records all kinds of statistics and anecdotes about life with his wife so that their future – and currently completely hypothetical – child will know what mom and dad’s lives were like before he or she existed.

From The Prodigal Prince: Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Dynasty:

Shortly after the wedding, Oral called Richard and Patti into his study, sat down in an armchair by the fire, and began to cry. Oral said he’d had a dream: If either of them backslid—the term for leading an unchristian life, especially one outside Oral’s domain—they’d be killed in a plane crash.

“It never occurred to us that maybe it wasn’t God who had spoken,” writes Patti, “but Oral trying to manipulate us to protect the ministry.”

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole is  good example of one of my favourite types of nonfiction: stories about unusual medical conditions and how they affect the lives of the people who are diagnosed with them. One of the reasons why I enjoy this genre so much is that it reminds me of when I used to read my mother’s textbooks when she was in nursing school. They fascinated me even though I was too young to understand everything mom was learning from them.

This particular book is about neurological disorders. Sometimes a tumour can cause drastic changes in someone’s personality, although I’ll leave it up to my readers to discover whether the personalities of the patient in that section was changed for the better or for the worse. 😉

It’s difficult to say much more about it without giving away spoilers, but I’d heartily recommend it to anyone who is fascinated by how the mind works.

What have you been reading?

My next book, Waiting for Earl to Die and other stories, will be coming out on January 28.

I’ll share more details on the official publication date, but you will be able to purchase it through Kobo. The cover will be revealed in the very near future.

Today I thought I’d discuss how I originally came up with the ideas for a few of the stories in this anthology. I’ll also be sharing brief summaries of the tales in question.

The Genealogist

Maryanne’s adjustment to the afterlife has been surprisingly rocky. All she wanted was a period of quiet contemplation until her loved ones forget her and she’s freed to move on to an unknown future. Unfortunately the living aren’t cooperating, and their interference only seems to be growing worse over time. 

I’m related to several amateur genealogists who have uncovered many legends about our ancestors.

Every time I hear an unsavoury one, though, I wonder what that particular ancestor would say if he or she knew that people were still remembering certain facts about him or her a few hundred years later. It’s fascinating from a historical perspective, but it also makes me wonder what future genealogists will say about me.

The Cure

Life-threatening allergies used to be something you learned to live with. Jerome has seen how serious they can be, though, and is ready to do absolutely anything to blot his allergies out of existence. The question is, will it work?

Allergies are rampant in my immediate and extended family. Some of them are mild, while others are not. This tale is the result of me daydreaming about what it would be like to have a permanent cure for all of them.

Waiting for Earl to Die

Carl loves everything about his new neighbourhood except his deathly ill, cantankerous neighbour, Earl. They say that only the good die young. In this case, Carl can’t help but to agree with that rule. Now all he has to do is wait for nature to take its course. 

Old places can hold a lot of secrets. My parents moved into a beautiful, old house when I was teenager. It was built around the turn of the twentieth century and had a lot of charm if you overlooked how dark its rooms could be in wintertime.  I loosely based Earl’s home on the one I finished growing up in.

Everything else is entirely made up. I don’t wish death on anyone.

You are the only person who is in charge of how you feel about yourself. Nobody else can possibly do that. You get to decide if you believe you are beautiful or not, and nobody can take it away from you. If someone suggests that you aren’t beautiful, you can consider how sad it is that they have such a limited view of beauty. You can consider how unfortunate it is that they have such an exaggerated sense of self-importance that they think you should care about what they think. You can also choose to realize that it has nothing at all to do with your beauty and everything to do with their limitations.

–  Ragen Chastain

Last year I shared a list of every novel I’d read in 2013 that wasn’t one of my assignments for the reviewing site I write for under a pseudonym. (This list would be four times bigger if I could tell you about all of those books!)

I thought I’d do the same thing this year. This time I’ll group them by genre.

Science Fiction

Yes, I am aware that the comments on this blog are currently turned off. It is not something I did intentionally, and I am working on getting them turned back on. All of the settings that are related to comments seem to be in order. It’s a mystery, but I’ll update this post once I know what’s going on.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Decisions, Decisions. This so true and so funny.

Confessions of a Former Internet Troll. Wow. That’s all I have to say about this. Wow.

Here is Freedom via SylvesterPoetry. The picture matches this poem perfectly.

How I Defeated the Tolkien Estate via Jacopo_della_Q. You don’t have to be a fan of the Lord of the Rings to find this amusing, but I do suspect that people who love J.R.R. Tolkien’s books will be the most amused of all.

From When Is It Ok to Ask a Disabled Person About Their Disability? via jcahdavis:

I couldn’t help but feel an alliance with this child, this child who knows the difference between questions of good intent and questions of cruel intent, because there is a difference. People with disabilities know this difference. We are well versed in reading between the lines and all but feeling the intent of the asker.

From Medicine and Death:

Working in healthcare, you get to experience first-hand and way too often the difference between keeping someone alive and actually saving their life.

Readers, what are you thoughts on this video?

It feels good to be back in my regular schedule of book recommendation again. Over the holidays I sniffed my way through Saving Simon. It’s the true story of what happened to a donkey named Simon after he suffered years of neglect and abuse.  (If these things bother you, stop reading now!)

The guy who wrote this book is the same person who took Simon in when his previous owners were charged with animal abuse. This poor donkey was a in terrible shape. Simon had several infections and many old, poorly-healed wounds. He was also extremely underweight and malnourished.

Seeing him recover from this physically and emotionally brought tears to my eyes. While I’m not normally the kind of person who likes such sentimental things, this was a beautifully written story.

What have you been reading?

This post was originally shared on March 31, 2014. I will be back in early January with new material.

Photo by Alan Levine.

One of the more interesting discussions that’s been happening on Twitter recently has circled around this question.

Many of the writers and bloggers I follow say controversial subject matter should be kept private because bringing them up has a high probability of alienating potential readers. I understand their concerns, but there are some very good reasons for mentioning these things when it’s appropriate to do so.

Reason #1

It humanizes you. I follow an incredibly wide range of people online, many of whom I strongly disagree with when it comes to politics, religion, or the proper toppings for a pizza. If you gathered them all into the same room, the only things they’d have in common are a shared love of reading and  kind, intelligent personalities.

Yet I like our differences. It’s fascinating to see how two people can believe completely different things and still arrive at the same conclusion or believe the same basic principle but interpret it in opposite ways. What’s even more interesting is to see how strongly the religion, culture, and country you grew up in shape the person you become as an adult. Not everyone responds to similar circumstances in the same way.

Of course there are times and places when it’s completely inappropriate to bring these things up, but honesty is valuable. You can

Reason #2

Some stories require it. Last year I read a young adult novel written by someone who very quietly interjected a lot of symbols and memes from her religion into the plot. The characters were specifically described as people who had grown up with no religious instruction at all, yet they kept saying and doing things that were obviously pulled from this tradition.

Ordinarily I’d have no problem with this. A few of my favourite books were written by people whose were clearly heavily influenced by their faith, but I don’t like being surprised by ideology regardless of whether or not I agree with it.

The sneakiness of this particular novel bothered me even more because it was marketed in a way that completely overlooked its religious undertones.  Had I known what to expect from the beginning I would have enjoyed the second half of it a lot more.

Reason #3

via J.J

The rest of us will (probably) figure it out anyway. It’s extremely difficult to write anything without injecting your values into it somewhere. I’ve read a handful of authors who successfully created well-rounded, believable characters whose beliefs shared little to nothing in common with their creators, but this is a rare talent.

Most of the time story-tellers leave an imprint of their worldview somewhere in the plot. Despite the awesome archetypal villain on your right, this isn’t a bad thing. Your religious beliefs (or lack thereof) and political affiliations are influenced by your experiences, personality, and background.

The choices you’ve made regarding them provide important fodder for past, present, and future stories, and I believe you can acknowledge that without casting judgement on the lives of people who don’t see the world the same way.