March Madness

Time always passes faster than I think it should, but March sped by in a blur.

In addition to taking a week off to visit my sister – which was wonderful, I spent extra time preparing bulletins and announcements for Holy Week church services as well as attending services.

My clients, as usual, had plenty of work for me to do, and I created a new Web site for our church, All Saints Anglican Church of San Antonio.

That has left little time for blogging, and I didn’t write a series this month. I haven’t read and commented on other blogs as much as usual and I missed out on Joanna Young’s group writing project … and perhaps other projects I didn’t even know about.

I’m trying to catch up and hope to be back to the blogging world next week.

Christ the Lord Is Risen Today! Alleluia!

Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!
our triumphant holy day, Alleluia!
who did once upon the cross, Alleluia!
suffer to redeem our loss. Alleluia!

Hymns of praise then let us sing, Alleluia!
unto Christ, our heavenly King, Alleluia!
who endured the cross and grave, Alleluia!
sinners to redeem and save. Alleluia!

But the pains which he endured, Alleluia!
our salvation have procured, Alleluia!
now above the sky he’s King, Alleluia!
where the angels ever sing. Alleluia!

~Compleat Psalmodist, 1749

Hear the music to the hymn.

[tags]Easter[/tags]

Good Friday

Holy Week, which started last Sunday on Palm Sunday, is an intense week of devotion to recall the sacrifice Jesus made to cleanse us of our sins and give us eternal life.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ~John 3:16 (NIV)

Yesterday was Maundy Thursday, commemorating Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist and His washing of the disciple’s feet to demonstrate servanthood. The worship service included a foot washing ceremony in which the priests washed the feet of parishioners designed to represent us all, followed by Holy Communion. At the conclusion of the service, the altar was stripped as the congregation chanted Psalm 22. After the altar is bare, the parishioners depart in silence following the priest carrying the Presence to the Altar of Repose.

Today on Good Friday I attended the Way of the Cross service, in which the congregation walks from one station of the cross – an event in Christ’s journey on the road to Golgotha and the cross – to the next. The service our church uses has fourteen stations, where the people stop for a meditation and prayer. The service lasted only about half an hour, but it is a very powerful devotion.

After the Way of the Cross, I took my took in the Vigil at the Altar of Repose. I wrote about my experience at the Vigil last year.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asked His disciples to wait as He prayed. When he found them sleeping, He asked:

“Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.” ~Mark 14:37-38 (NIV)

Participating in the Vigil at the Altar of Repose gives us the opportunity to watch and pray for an hour with the Lord.

The world turned dark when Jesus died on the cross, and the veil of the altar was torn from top to bottom. The veil separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple. When a priest went into the Holy of Holies once a year, he wore bells and had a rope tied to his leg. The bells were assure the other priests that the priest inside had not been struck dead for entering God’s presence. The rope was for his fellow priests to pull him out without having to enter the Holy of Holies if he was struck dead.

The veil was torn asunder at the moment of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and now we can each enter God’s presence without fear, but with love and joy.

Good Friday was a dark day indeed, but we know the rest of the story. Easter is coming!

[tags]Holy Week, Good Friday, Maundy Thursday, Crucifixion[/tags]

Powerful Witness: Saving a Life and a Soul

Thanks to Annette at Fish and Cans for bringing this amazing video to my attention.

Better Late Than Never: You Are Part of My Life

With apologies for severe tardiness, I’m finally responding to a meme tag from Mihaela Lice at eWritings.

The instructions for “Who Is Part of My Life?” – originated by Lauren of Can You Be a Part of My Life – state:

Post a quote that speaks from and to your heart and dedicate it to at least three other bloggers.

Mihaela (better known as Mig) wrote a beautiful post saying “on the web we are just people.” She selected the following quote for the people she tagged:

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t. – Richard Bach

I am honored to be part of Mig’s life and to have her as part of mine.

I dedicate the following quote to the bloggers who are part of my life.

Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today. ~James Dean

Laura Spencer at Writing Thoughts and Yvonne Russell at Grow Your Writing Business have already been tagged by Mig, but I want to recognize them along with other special bloggers in my life.

Jeanne Dininni at Writer’s Notes

Joanna Young at Confident Writing

Matt Keegan at The Article Writer and Word Journey

Michele Tune at Writing the Cyber Highway

Misti Sandefur at Life of a Writer

Phil Davis at Authors on the Net 

Renae Brumbaugh at Morning Coffee

Robert Hruzek at Middle Zone Musings

I realize that some of you don’t participate in memes. I don’t expect you to respond; I just wanted to thank you for being part of my blogging life!

Thank you, also, to many other bloggers who enrich my life with your blog posts, your comments, and your presence.

[tags]meme, you are part of my life[/tags]

Small Press Month and Read an E-Book Week

I’m a fan of small presses. I have one novel published and a second scheduled for publication by a small independent publisher. Most of my book editing clients either self-publish or are published by independent publishers. According to statistics quoted on Parapublishing, there are 6 large publishers (in New York), 3-400 medium-sized publishers, and 86,000 small/self-publishers.

The month of March is Small Press Month to celebrate the writing published by those 86,000 independent publishers.

Small Press Month, now in its 12th year, is a nationwide promotion highlighting the valuable work produced by independent publishers. An annual celebration of the independent spirit of small publishers, Small Press Month is an effort to showcase the diverse, unique, and often most significant voices being published today. This year’s slogan is Celebrate Great Writing.

If you usually read books only from the six major publishers (which have a number of  subsidiary companies and imprints), you might try reading a few independently published books this month to discover new authors with unique voices.

Of course, I can make a few biased recommendations. The following list includes books I have written or edited that are published by independent publishers.

• As Shadows Fall by Grace Anne Schaefer, published by GASLight Publishing
• The New Day Dawns by Grace Anne Schaefer, published by GASLight Publishing
• On the Wings of the Wind: A Journey to Faith by Patricia Eytcheson Taylor and The Reverend Doctor James C. Taylor, published by LangMarc Publishing
• Patchwork Trail (children’s book) by Janet Kaderli, published by GASLight Publishing
• Some Monument to Last: Memoir of TV Journalist James Muñoz with Family Poems and Letters by James Michael Doughty, published by Doughty Enterprises (print book scheduled for release in May; pre-order the print book now and receive a free e-book immediately)
• Spring House by David Bowles, published by Plum Creek Press
• Stroke of Luck by yours truly, published by GASLight Publishing
• Uncle Big Bud: A Family’s Journey from Slavery to Self-Determination by James E. Williams, published by HenryRetta’s Publishing (release date later this month)

Most of these books are also available as e-books, and my novel is available only as an e-book. March 2-8 was Read an E-Book Week. I failed to recognize it since I didn’t have Internet access last week. But if you didn’t read an e-book last week, it’s not too late.

BEEN READING eBOOKS TOO LONG? appeared in the ParaThoughts section of a recent issue of Dan Poynter’s newsletter.

My speaking travels average some 6,000 miles each week…. Traveling as light as possible, I do not carry printed books.

…I was home for a couple of weeks. I had a couple of mass-market paperback that I wanted to read. They were not available as eBook editions so I decided to read myself to sleep with one of them.

How awkward! With the printed book, you have to turn on the (bright) light….

Holding a printed book (pBook) is awkward. It take two hands.

Poynter describes other advantages of e-books: no need for a bookmark, lower cost, ability to adjust the type size, built-in dictionary, the convenience of being able to download books from anywhere in the world, and the ease of disposal without impacting the environment. He concludes:

Electronic books are a far superior platform to dead-tree books for numerous reasons. But let’s be practical. After trying both—extensively, I prefer to annoy electrons than cut down trees. This is not just an environmental concern, it is a practical reading decision.

I love eBooks.

I love e-books, too, and I love books from small presses.

Related Posts:
E-Books, Parts 1-4

What I Learned from the Law

Veterans’ Day in 1979 started badly and got worse.

A partner and I owned a plant and pottery store in a small strip center. My partner created handmade pottery in her home studio, and I managed the store.

The day started with the sewer for the whole shopping center backing up in our toilet. As usual, I was alone in the store when I discovered the problem. I called the landlord for help, then I opened the back door, a few steps from the restroom, and started bailing water and dumping it out in the alley. A plumber sent by the landlord arrived, spent a few minutes assessing the situation, then left for more tools.

Instead of closing the store (a lesson for another What I Learned From …), I kept the store open and continued to make periodic trips to the back to bail water.

Shortly before noon, a man entered the shop. There were several restaurants in the center, and it wasn’t unusual for men to come in on their lunch hour. This man looked like a typical customer, though I noticed that he had his hands in his jacket pockets. However, it was a cold day (cold for south Texas anyway), so I didn’t think anything of it. I greeted the man and asked if I could help. “No, thanks,” he said. “Just looking.” As he was browsing, I went to the back to check on the plumbing disaster.

The man followed me to the back door. As soon as he determined I was alone, he pulled his right hand from his pocket. In his hand was a gun, which he pointed right at me. He demanded money, and I gave him the cash in the register and the receipts from the previous day (which hadn’t been deposited because it was a bank holiday). He then tied me to a shelf near the back of the shop, stuck the gun in my belly, and molested me. I was terrified and felt horribly violated but was blessed that what he did was relatively minor.

He left with the threat that if I reported the incident, he would come back and kill me and my whole family. I heard the front door open and close … but I couldn’t be sure he left because a small gazebo built into the center of the store blocked my view. I waited what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, then I struggled free of my own cloth belt that he had used as a rope. I ran out of the shop into the store next door, and the shopowner called the police.

Later that day, I heard from another storeowner in the center that an employee in her second store had been robbed and assaulted about an hour before I was robbed. The robber matched the description of the man who robbed me.

My store was in a small suburb, and the other store was in a different small suburb several miles away. We soon learned that this robber was robbing and assaulting women in strip centers throughout the city. Each time, he left his victim tied up with her own pantyhose or other item of clothing. Each time, the assault was more serious. A couple of days later, the story took up half of the front page of the local newspaper with a lurid headline about a serial robber targeting women alone. Police predicted that if he wasn’t captured soon, assault might progress to murder.

Three different jurisdictions were investigating: the police departments in each of the small suburbs and the city police department. My husband Jack made contact with the detectives assigned to the cases in each department. He quickly learned that each jurisdiction wanted to be the one to capture the headline-making robber. Rather than sharing information, each was working as a lone ranger. So Jack took it up himself to be the coordinator between the departments. He gathered all the information each detective had, then he called the others and passed on the information.

No one had reported seeing the robber leave the scene, but several people reported vehicles leaving the various shopping center parking lots near the times of the robberies. Each department was looking for vehicles matching the descriptions reported to them; each had different descriptions of the cars seen leaving parking lots in their jurisdiction.

One report described a late-model gold sedan with dealer license plates. Jack passed this description on to the other two departments. The detective in the other suburban police department said, “I’m going out to catch that so-and-so [maybe not his exact words] today.” He drove through the community checking the parking lots of all the small strip centers. About noon, he saw a late-model gold sedan with Georgia license plates (the same color as Texas dealer plates) speeding out of a strip center parking lot. The policeman took off after the car and turned on his overhead lights to signal the driver to stop. Instead of stopping, the driver sped to the nearby freeway and headed north. Along the way, he passed through the city and the jurisdiction where my shop was located. Police cars from both departments joined the chase.

Finally, after many miles of high-speed chase, the driver pulled off the highway and into a service station. This was in the days of full-service gas stations, and an attendant walked out of the building toward the car. When a half dozen police cars with lights flashing and sirens blaring followed the gold sedan into the station, the attendant backed into the building.

 Surrounded by police, the driver obeyed orders to get out of the car with his hands up. He surrendered without resistance.

The gun he had used in all the robberies was on the front seat beside him, and the police found a victim tied up in a store in the shopping center he had sped away from.

The rest of the story is for another day. This post is an entry in Middle Zone Musings’ group writing project What I Learned from the Law.

I learned many lessons from this experience - about dealing with a crisis in a retail store,  about being alert to danger, about overcoming trauma … and more.

Here is what I learned specifically from my contact with the law.

• Teamwork and sharing information are more effective than working alone.
• When detectives and police departments (or any individuals or groups) are more interested in who gets the credit than in solving the crime (or any problem), the crime (problem) will be more difficult and take longer to solve.
• When you’re a victim, you have to be proactive (or have a proactive advocate as my husband was for me). To the police, you’re just one of dozens or hundreds of victims. To you and your advocate, you are THE victim.

I hope you never have the opportunity to learn lessons from being a crime victim, but if you are ever a victim, I hope the lessons I’ve learned will be helpful to you.

National Grammar Day

I’m out in the country – far from civilization – but I left this post to let you know today is National Grammar Day.

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar says:

Speak well! Write well! And on March 4, march forth and spread the word. If you see a sign with a catastrophic apostrophe, send a kind note to the storekeeper. If your local newscaster says “Between you and I,” set him straight with a friendly e-mail.

Off to the Country

I am taking a few days off to visit my sister on the farm and will not have access to a computer or the Internet. I’m looking forward to spending time with my sister, seeing the farm and the cattle, and being away from work and the computer for a little while.