We need a temperature test before marriage

He owns dozens of heavy sweaters and jackets. I have one that hangs in the closet.

He wears jeans, long johns, boots, a sweater, a jacket, a hat, and gloves. I wear jeans, a t-shirt, and runners. We look unbelievably incongruous walking side by side.

He turns the heat up. I turn it down.

He turns on the gas fireplace. I turn it off.

He piles on extra blankets. I drag in the fan and set it up on my side of the bed.

He wants to cuddle. I can’t take the heat.

We knew none of this before we got married. Really, there has to be a better way.

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Do we really need K?

Playing word games in my head trying to combat insomnia brought me to the realization that “k” is a pretty useless letter.

I mean, how many 2 letter words can you make with it? Kf isn’t a word. Kh isn’t a word. Kn isn’t a word. I get nowhere trying to sleep with k. M on the other hand? Ma, me, my and assorted abbreviations—ml, mc, md, MP, Mr., MS, m…zzzzzzzzz.

This observation got me to thinking about k words. We can neel on our nees without the k. We can nit without the k. We can cut with a nife just as well as a knife.

And then there’s the question of words like cat. Why not kat (after all it’s kitten not citten)? Or why circus and not cirkus? Try explaining those anomalies to an English as a Second Language learner.

What about the ck blend, you ask. Let’s go for the soft and hard c instead. French has delightful little accent marks to guide pronunciation. We could adopt some for ourselves. Quick becomes quiç or qui¢ or quiċ. Knack becomes naċ. The possibilities are endless.

As for my cousin Kirk … I’m sure he has a middle name.

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The travelling wedding dress

A while back I wrote about sorting through my photos. Of course I found wedding pictures and seeing them brought this to mind.

Mom: When do you want to go shopping for your wedding dress?
Me: I’m going to wear yours.
Mom: You’ve been saying that since you were a little girl, but are you sure you really want to?

We dig the dress out from the back of the closet. Ivory satin with a row of tiny buttons down that back that I love now as much as I did when I was a kid. I breathe a sigh of relief when I see that none of the buttons are missing. As the satin was never pure white, the slightly yellowed look is not a deterrent to wearing the dress.

I try it on. The hem needs to be straightened, but otherwise it feels fine. We shop for shoes and a veil to go with the dress and find both easily enough.

My wedding day is on what would have been my parents’ 25^th anniversary if my father hadn’t died the year before. A tough day for us—especially for my mother; but we get through it and I hope that the hugs and good cheer can lighten, for a while at least, my mother’s load of grief.



A number of years later I’m asked to model “our” wedding dress in a charity fashion show. As we gather backstage, I find a woman about my mother’s age wearing her dress which is identical to mine.

“My mother bought her dress in Yorkton, Saskatchewan,” I tell her, “just after the war. She said she had two choices and said that neither fit properly, but she liked this one best.”

The lady nods knowingly. “I bought mine in Calgary, Alberta in 1945 and this was the only choice. Luckily it fit me reasonably well.”

I feel a kinship to this stranger as we model on the catwalk together and marvel at circumstances that brought us together.

The dress still hangs in the back of my closet with all our memories firmly attached. My daughter didn’t wear it, but perhaps one day my granddaughter will and my and my mother’s spirits will walk down the aisle with her.

www.darlenjonesauthor.com

Uzo survives

I haven’t heard from my friend Uzo in a long while and then I get this message.

“I am currently writing you from a low-cost hotel. I lost "everything" in my apartment to a flood which devastated many homes in my vicinity (it rained heavily for six hours). Ah! It was really bad. In one case, neighbours had to break into a man’s fortress-like house (he wasn’t present at the time) to carry off his bedridden wife.

I think I can now relate on a deeper level with victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.”

I Google his city (in Nigeria) and find pictures like this.


Yes, I think, he can relate.

I write back and comment that a “low-cost” hotel can’t be very nice. (I’ve seen enough in many parts of the world to know what they are like.)

Uzo writes back.

“Well, the hotel room is better when compared to other places I lived in—a two-bedroom apartment with a leaky roof, and then a mud house in the northern part of the country (in this case, I had to fetch water each day and there was no power throughout my one-year-and-a-half stay).

“I've to reprioritize my spending from now on, bearing in mind I have to replace (buy) some essentials at least, like settee and chair cushions, electronics. You may be wondering, but most of us (if not all) do not have insurance (schemes). I don't trust the state government to help; they put us in this mess with their shitty road constructions. They've seen the extent of damage caused by the disaster and are saying help is not for everyone. Can you imagine that?”

I ask if he’ll be able to move back to his home.

“Yes, I intend to go back home. In the meantime, I've invited some friends to help me clear, reorganize, and wash the things I can still use.”

I admire Uzo’s strength and resiliency. And I bitterly resent those who could, but don’t help—the wealthy elite of the world.

www.darlenejonesauthor.com

Proofreading is an art

From the first draft to the second last, my writing partner and I send chapters back and forth. We ask questions, make suggestions, point out errors in time lines, holes in plot lines, identify discrepancies in character development, and highlight the great bits.

Finally, we come to the second last draft—the one that requires the scrutiny for details. Our goal is always to have a “clean” manuscript.

My writing partner puts the chapters into one document, sends it to me, and I send it to my Kindle.

Why?

I’ve learned that reading on the Kindle puts me in “book” mode and I see the things I miss on the big screen. Note that this draft is already formatted for ereaders so I’m seeing what the buyer will see. Periods in the wrong place, a word that just doesn’t work, “is” when it should be “it,” and a couple of times I spot a missing word that needs to be added, or an extra word to be deleted.

I find a few “that” where I think it should be “who.” I make note of them and my writing partner emails back.

Just now I was looking up when to use who and that. It's okay to use that for a person, animal, or thing. The criterion has more to do with whether it's a restrictive clause or not (whether the antecedent is named and whether the sentence can stand without the whole clause). 
As far as I can tell from that, it's okay to use "that" in those cases where I have used it. It's a complicated thing though.

I see this sentence, Dad had moved to Regina to teach high school there. I comment,
I think at some other point, her dad was teaching in a college not high school.

I bookmark each page that needs attention on my Kindle and then go back to the computer copy to add my notes with Track Changes. No, I don’t scroll through pages and pages to find the one I need. I pick an unusual word on the page I’ve bookmarked and then use Find to get to the right page on the computer.  

I send the file back to my writing partner. She writes, “I went through your suggestions. I had found some of them but missed others, so thank you!” 

I offer to read it one more time, but she declines. I know she’ll go through it one or two more times. Our goal is to have an error free document and we get it right most of the time. After all, two heads are better than one.

www.darlenejonesauthor.com

Will I be sorry I threw out my old photos?

I spent the last two days going through three huge boxes of old photos from the pre-computer days with the original intent of scanning them to my computer.
Instead I threw the vast majority into the recycle bin.

Why?

• The photos were not the greatest quality as I didn’t have a good camera in those days.
• I’m not and never have been a good photographer. I blame this on poor eyesight and (more accurately) lack of real interest.
• I had three questions as I looked through the pictures. Where is this? What is this? Who is this? If I couldn’t answer even one of those questions, I junked the photo.
• Very often a fourth question came to mind. Why ever did I take this picture? And to the junk pile it went.

What did I keep?

• Pictures of family, but only the ones of people I recognized and remembered. Why, oh why didn’t someone label those old photos, I asked myself as I leafed through them. And then, in the quandary of deciding what to do with each one, this question popped into mind. What, I thought, is the point of keeping a picture of some relative I don’t remember? How would I explain who he or she was to my granddaughter? And why would my granddaughter care about a stranger?

Will I regret the great “cull?”

• I don’t think so.
• I hope not.

Did I make a huge mistake?

What do you think?

What have you done with your old photos?

www.darlenejonesauthor.com

Traversing the Sahara - adventure and romance

Like an ocean, the desert holds a magnetic pull that mesmerizes us. From Bamako to Mopti to Tombouctou to Goa and all the villages in between, I was forever captivated by the Sahara.
In Whispers Under the Baobab, I tried to convey the majesty of the desert as I had Flo flee for her life with young Josef as her guide.

Other authors have written more comprehensive tales of survival in the Sahara - Jane Johnson, for one. Her romance / adventure stories are captivating. Here are two that I particularly enjoyed.



www.darlenejonesauthor.com