storyfires

I'm on a fiction-writing roll--haven't left my house for three days--but I haven't posted for two weeks, so today you get...my own awesome recipe for hot fudge sauce, invented by me. Perfect on Breyers vanilla icecream. Chocolate makes everything better. Makes you write better. Makes you well when you're sick. Maybe. That's not a scientifically-proven statement. But I stand by it anyway. Homemade Hot Fudge Sauce 1/2 C. real butter (no margarine) 1/2 C. slavery-free fair-trade cocoa powder (Dean's Beans is my favorite--you can buy online at http://globalexchange.org/ ) 1/2 C. milk 1 1/2 C. sugar Melt butter in covered glass bowl in microwave. Whisk in cocoa until combined. Then whisk in milk thoroughly. Then whisk in sugar. (Don't try to dump them all in at once or it won't work). Microwave on high 2 minutes. Take out and stir. Mike another minute; stir. One more minute, then stir again. Continue until mixture is thick and begins to foam up. ...

America believes in fast: fast cars, fast food, fast writing. Look at Stephanie Meyer. She wrote Twilight in, what, two months? Wow, that blows my mind. We love speed. I know a lot of people who read fast. I've heard rumors that JFK read some ridiculous number of words a minute--7,000, or something, though I have no legitimate source on that. I took a speed-reading course in college, even taught speed-reading mini-classes as part of my job at the reading/writing center where I worked. I know HOW to read fast. But I don't do it. Not that I didn't understand all that speed-reading stuff. I just didn't like it. I never could make myself practice. I like reading slowly. Not that there's anything wrong with reading fast. I admire those people who can read 2 or 3,000 words a minute. Or even 700. How nice to be so efficient. It has to be good for school. But I read slowly. I mean, really slowly, as in read-aloud-slow, like Charlie Brown's Snoopy from the ...

In honor of intellectual freedom and ALA Banned Books Week (Sept. 26-Oct 3), I'm making a plug for reading a banned book this week. You'd be astounded at some of the books on the ALA's banned list: Where the Wild Things Are , Speak , Harry Potter , Golden Compass , To Kill a Mockingbird , Bridge to Terabithia , Farenheit 451 , Lord of the Flies , A Separate Peace , and the Gutenberg Bible, to name a few. Some of my favorite books have landed their authors in jail, including the wonderful Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. Call of the Wild was burned in Nazi bonfires. I'm admittedly conservative about the books I'd personally hand to a young child; I believe, like Corrie Ten Boom's father (the Hiding Place), that some subjects are too heavy to ask young children to carry, just as a large suitcase might be. But that's a decision for individual caretakers to make for their own children, not for other people's. And I get angry when others try to make that...

I collect happy thoughts in a file folder. Really. I stick things in there like the Mothers' Day card my daughter once made with a picture of an oversized version of me in my glasses and ugliest green sweats with a creepy grin on my face, and I'm standing on a mini version of earth like some sort of balancing super-sweat woman; the caption underneath my huge self says, "to Mom, the best person in the WORLD." Wow. And you guys thought YOU were hot stuff. Think again--I'm better. The best. Arguably, according to this picture, the largest, as well. Though she's the daughter who liked to balance my ego by shouting when she was mad at me that I was the WORST person in the whole world. But I digress from happy. Anything that makes me smile goes into that file in the drawer. And I like to take out my happy thoughts and read them sometimes. So here are just a few of mine this week, and not from the drawer: *the Wasatch Mountains in the fall *yellow ch...

Ever since I was six I knew I hated open-casket funerals. My friend, Chrissy, died of leukemia that year, and though I was not really disturbed by the idea of her death (I knew she'd been terribly sick and she wouldn't be anymore; besides, she was going to live with Heavenly Father and be happy forever--why was everyone crying?), I was pretty creeped out by the sight of her waxy-faced body. I didn't think it looked like a person in there, let alone the living, breathing girl who'd come to my last birthday party. The viewing didn't bring me any sense of closure; it just brought a sense of mild horror. It felt like voyeurism. Except that I was six, and didn't know what voyeurism meant. The same sense of vague creepiness always comes back whenever I see another embalmed version of the shell of someone I once knew, pumped all full of formaldehyde and smeared with a ridiculous amount of make-up, especially when I think about the outragous cost of creeping people ...