Dec 25th 2008Your Friendly GoddessesGoddess Classics
Once again we’d like to wish you a joyous holiday season – and to thank each and every one of you for making our time together on Mt. Oly more joyous throughout the year. Your shared hopes and dreams, your wise insights and funny observations, your friendship and camaraderie, have made this a very special place for us all.
Here’s hoping your holidays are safe, happy, and full of love, peace, and good cheer!
Dec 24th 2008Karen HawkinsMy Life As A Plebe
Ok, I’m not really hiding from my inlaws. I’m actually hiding from MY family, but it made a great blog title, so I went with it.
While all of you are engaged in healthy family activities, I’m locked in my office pretending to work. I should be working. I NEED to work. But I’m not. I’m too distracted by allll of those presents under the tree in the living room, especially four that have my name on them and I have NO idea what’s in them.
Not one idea.
To distract my present-fevered mind, and to skip hearing my Aunt Mildred sing the latest Britney Spears song while standing in the kitchen on a chair after drinking some of Uncle Bert’s ‘eggnog’, I’ve been cruisin’ around the net and I found myself looking at pictures of Victorian women.
I’m not a big fan of the Victorian era. Seems as if the women of the era were repressed, overdressed, and their hair a serious mess. But I still find myself looking at the pictures. They just fascinate me. It’s almost as if, in their stern, unsmiling faces, I can hear all of their thoughts.
Seriously. And no, I haven’t had any eggnog — yet.
Here, see what I mean . . .
Take Hannah for example. (By the way, Hannah may not be her name, but it worked for me.) She’s having a serious moment as her picture is taken, probably wondering how much longer she can hold her breath and who she’s going to kill as soon as she gets out of the corset that is pressing her belly button into her spine.
If I were Hannah, I’d grab a knife and go after whoever developed the corset.
You know, a good writer would look up the history of corsets and give you a little historical taste here, but I’m too busy hiding from my family and MUCH too distracted by those darn presents.
One of them looks like it COULD be a bracelet. Do you think– No. No. It’s too heavy.
Hmmm.
Sigh. Ok, back to corsets, we’ll just say the horrible person who invented the corset was a man named “Frederich Schmelt,” a known masochist whose mother rejected him at a young age, hence his determination to cause pain to all of womankind.
Poor Hannah! At the mercy of such a horrible man! “Evil genius!” she is thinking as black spots swim before her eyes. “How I loathe thee and wish to cut thy privates with a very dull letter opener!”
That Hannah. She has some ‘anger issues.’ I would, too, if someone trussed me up like a roast before Easter.
So, whatcha doin’ today? Are you out in the wild world of the family dinner? Cooking for an event later today? Or getting ready for tomorrow? If you get bored and can sneak off to be by yourself, check out Hannah and the rest of her sisters from the Victorian era. Those poor dears! And while you’re looking at their stern, sad, serious faces, eat some pie and be glad someone finally recognized Frederich Schmelt for the sicko he was.
Dec 23rd 2008Suzanne EnochOn Writing!
And all through my casa,
Piles of boxes and paper and ribbons
Lay thicker than salsa.
These for my family, those for my friends,
A few for the stockings,
Small odds and ends.
Across from the ribbons I spied another small stack
Of papers and scribbles,
Red pen and black.
Dash it all, dash it all, I’ve a book still to write.
I’m close to the end,
But I’ll not finish tonight.
So the day after Christmas, I won’t hit the mall.
I’ll be sitting here typing
Until I finish it all.
How many days off do you get for the holidays? Do you go anywhere, or do you stay close to home? And who’s having a white Christmas? And whose plans are being messed up by the weather this year?
Dec 22nd 2008Karen RoseOn Writing!
It’s a nice word, tradition. For you word-o-philes, it comes from trans = transfer and datum = something given. It means to hand over, hand down, entrust. I like that.
Traditions can come from faith, family, culture, or combinations of all of these. But what traditions have in common is that they tie us back to the past, whether it be thousands of years or only a few. They tie us to those who came before and keep alive the spirit of what we hold dear.
This seems a good time of year to think about this topic, although the incident that spurred my thoughts was not holiday based.
Last week, my good friend and karate teacher earned her black belt. (That’s us together. Isn’t she lovely?) It was the culmination of years of her hard work and dedication. Earning of all belts is a cause of celebration in the dojo, but the earning of the black belt is something very special. My friend was not alone in her celebration – several others either earned black belts or were advanced a black belt degree, or Dan. It was a beautiful time, a gathering of friends and family to pay tribute to the sacrifice of those honored, and to their teachers. Each honoree gave a small 
speech and by the end, sitting in the audience, I was unapologetically crying.
And so were some of the black belts who’d traveled the same road. Theirs were tears of pride, understanding, and a connection to what had come before. I liked that. I felt included, part of something bigger than myself.
Not all traditions have to be so big and sweeping. I thought of another tradition a few days ago, when I opened the box of cookies my mom had made herself and sent for Christmas. She’d made peanut butter cookies, with a Hershey’s kiss in the middle. I don’t think it’s a proper PB cookie without the kiss, because that’s the way my mom always made them. When I make them, I do that too. It’s a small thing, but tradition jus
t the same.
What are your favorite traditions? How long have they been handed down? I’m thinking this time of year, it’ll be easier to think of a holiday tradition, but do you have any that you do at other times of the year? Who started them? And why are they important to you?
Dec 21st 2008Karen HawkinsOn Writing!
Ok, this guy’s not really Santa. More like Santa’s not-so-little helper.
What’s cool is that no less than FOUR of you, our beloved goddesses, sent me THE EXACT SAME PICTURE to put up on for FROS. It’s true what they say about Good Taste — it is universal.
I must say this particular FROS made my tired, shop-worn heart go pitter-patter with gratifying swiftness. Yes, indeed, it perked me and my tired feet right up!
So now, without further ado, here is our annual Christmas FROS!
Ahhhh! I think I could brave a few more days of shopping now! 
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO EVERYONE!
Dec 20th 2008Sabrina JeffriesOn Writing! & Sabrina Jeffries
Some of you may remember our discussion about mondegreens last year. A mondegreen is when someone unknowingly mangles the words to a song, giving it alternate words (like “Bells on Bob’s tail ring). My husband found this hilarious page on snopes.com where they explain how the term came about and give a whole list of Christmas mondegreens.
But it occurred to me that the reason Christmas carols are so ripe for mondegreens is that many of them date back centuries, when the language was quite different. Or they refer to things like “chestnuts,” which you don’t find much in America. So that got me to wondering–why do we hold on to these old songs? There are new Christmas songs being written every day, yet some of us still love carols that are so ancient no one really knows all of what they mean.
It also made me wonder if I’m alone in loving the really old carols. I’m talking about rather obscure songs like “The Boar’s Head Carol” and “The Cherry Tree Carol,” both of which date to the 15th century. So here’s a little quiz:
Dec 19th 2008Claudia DainOn Writing!
You know that option on the DVD? Where you get to watch the scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut? I don’t like watching those.
I also don’t like reading the deleted scenes in books, which some authors put on their websites as a fun look, sort of a behind the scenes of how the book got put together.
I normally think that the way 
the book or movie came together was the right way for that story to have been told. The only exception to this is The Lord of the Rings 
trilogy. I love all those deleted scenes, they should have been kept in, but then I watched all 12 hours of how the clothes, the armor, the weapons, and the sets were made for those movies so you really can’t go by me when it comes to LOTR.
But back to books. I don’t even keep the scenes I delete. Some authors save them to another file. I hit DELETE and they exist no more. Gone from planet Earth as if they’d never been. I like it that way. It keeps me focused. If a scene doesn’t work in the book, then it doesn’t deserve to live. Bwahahahaha.
What about you? Do you like the deleted scenes? Do you normally think they make the story/movie better for not having been included or should they have been left in?
