Warning Signs
Shortly after accepting the job, signs that my opportunity wasn’t going to be as wonderful as I thought appeared. The first and most obvious sign was the salary. I figured out that after rent in a modest apartment, food, utilities, and student loan payments, I would be short every month. But this was my opportunity, and I was just young, arrogant, and stupid enough to believe that I could somehow pull it off. Next, we found out my wife was pregnant with our first child. So I would be taking her away from our family at the time when she would want to be around them the most. But that was okay because I just knew we could make it. It was, after all, my opportunity. And the third sign, which was the least obvious but should have been the most obvious, was that my wife did not want to move to Gallup. I found out later that what I thought were her tears of joy were actually cries of disappointment. But unlike my self-absorbtion, she selflessly didn’t want to ruin my opportunity.
The Obvious Consequences
I lasted a whole three months at my “opportunity.” Gallup for us was a horrible place to live. We were constantly out of money. My wife was isolated and miserable. We worried about the quality of health care my wife and our new child would receive. On top of that, the job was extremely stressful. I was consistently late on my deadlines, sometimes holding up the production of the entire paper.
Finally, I swallowed my pride and gave them notice. I left Gallup jobless and with a child on the way, and we ended up moving in with my mother. To earn money to pay make debt payments, I had to start waiting tables.
My Lesson
Life is full of opportunities. However, just because we have an open door doesn’t mean we have to step through it. When making decisions, we need to seek God’s will (something I didn’t do before my ill-fated move to Gallup). But as we seek God’s will, we also need to use the brains He gave us. We need to ask ourselves if there are any glaring problems with our opportunity. We need to seek ask the advice of people with more wisdom and experience. And if we’re married, we need to get the input and agreement of our spouse.
I don’t want to scare anyone out of making a bold, or even risky decision. However, all decisions need to be made prayerfully, with wisdom and with reason. What is are your motivation? Do you want it so bad you can’t see the downside?
I never returned to journalism, though I finally got a job as a technical writer, which is my profession today.
Don’t forget. When opportunity knocks, look through your peephole before opening the door.

Emotional Moments: Exactly What the Title Implies
Emotional Moments is a collection of short stories that touch upon love, loss, loneliness, and personal growth. Some of the stories are short enough to be considered flash fiction, which is good for ADHD folks such like me. However, I do not consider several of the pieces stories. For me, a story, even a short story, has a plot with a beginning, middle, and end. Several of the pieces don’t have those elements. I would argue that they are more like poetry or informal essays. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is not technically correct to consider them stories.
As far as her goal of describing emotional snapshots, I think Chibukhchyan does a good job. The stories that I enjoyed most were:

Ten Years. A story about a couple who lost touch with each other.

The Bus Rides. The adventures of an intelligent young woman studying in Europe.

Cyber Trap. A story about a woman in a cyber cafe during a power outage.

Unfortunately, this book has a lot of problems with grammar, word usage, and punctuation. Some of the stories also have issues with point-of-view, jump between present and past tense, or flip between first and third person narrative. With some cleanup, these stories could be much more effective than they are now. I would encourage the author to enlist an editor to help these stories reach their full potential.



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Finty Williams does a marvelous job reading this faced-paced YA novel. This is a story about a girl who finds out she’s a mermaid. The story is fast paced and the audiobook is fun to listen to. Recommended for younger readers or listeners.



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In fantasy writing, one of the most difficult tasks for the author is to create a unique, fantastic, but plausible world. C. Deanna Verhoff succeeds in creating two interesting worlds. Tullah is a lot like Earth. Verhoff describes it as a sister-planet to ours. Tullah is inhabited by humans, and their speech, customs, and technology is similar to ours with few differences. What I enjoyed most were the small differences in speech that Verhoff created. For both the narrative and dialogue, Verhoff invents a dialect that is just different enough from American English to make the Tullahns sound different, but not so different as to sound alien. What I found most impressive was that she did this consistently through the novel, which is something I would find hard to do. In contrast, the world of the Wybills is completely alien. It is a world run by magic, not science. And Verhoff likewise does an admirable job creating both their world and their dialect.

Like her world building, Verhoff’s characters are colorful and interesting. The protagonist, Glory, is morally flawed. The Wybbils, while proclaiming their moral superiority over Tullahns, come across as self-righteous and condescending. And, Glory’s best friend, Clash, is likewise an imperfect character. Both the Wybbils and Glory make selfish decisions.

However, Glory’s decisions bothered me. Though Glory’s intention to help her family’s plight could be considered noble, her actions risked the extinction of an entire species. Furthermore, her character didn’t seem to develop enough to appreciate the level of selfishness it would take to risk the extinction of an entire race. I would have preferred to have seen her grow more as a person.

I recommend this book for older teens. The book is a well-written, fun read. It left me wanting to get the next book. I am hopeful to see Glory grow more as a person.

Follow this link to get this book on Amazon.com: Glory Alley and the Star Riders

A good start but needs some work
What is good
If you have Bieber fever, “Murder at Shady Oaks Senior Estates: the Demise of Justin Bieber” isn’t for you. Because I don’t suffer from that particular malady, I found this short story entertaining. I especially enjoyed the slapstick humor and the relationship between the two elderly protagonists.
What needs improvement
However, the story needs some work. The plot of a short story should begin immediately, not with long descriptions of the setting. However, the author starts with over a half page of nothing but setting and character descriptions that have little to do with the plot. Furthermore, there were some problems with grammar and style scattered throughout the story that I found distracting.
What has potential
Just because I complained about the lengthy setting description at the beginning of the story doesn’t mean the material was bad. The setting and characters, though extraneous for this short story, are rich with potential for a longer work. Shady Oaks and its quirky residents are begging to be explored and expanded. I hope that the author considers writing a novel-length work about the folks at Shady Oaks.



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They were like Christ in the most profound way—they gave of themselves for someone else’s freedom. So whatever your party, whoever your candidate, don’t let the price someone else paid be spent in vain.

Vote.

Here’s what the book’s about:

“When one sends a blade to its brother,
He who bears both must help the other.”

On his thirteenth birthday, Thomas gets a surprise­­­­­­­­­­­­―a visit from a fairy. She has bad news, though. Sir Fedrick, his mentor and the Great Knight of the Southerland domain, is in mortal danger, and it’s up to Thomas to save him. What Thomas doesn’t know is that a traitorous plot has caused the king of Theris to invoke an ancient oath between the king’s family and Sir Fedrick’s. And now, even though Trolls rampage the countryside and mysterious creatures terrorize forest and farmlands alike, it’s up to Thomas to save both Sir Fedrick and the Kingdom of Theris from an ancient evil that even the fairies fear.

• If I don’t exercise, my body gets weak and fat.
• If I don’t work on my relationship with my wife, we drift apart.
• If I don’t practice the talents God gave me, I lose skill.

This is what makes inertia dangerous. If we allow inertia to control us, entropy kills us. Unfortunately, the older I get, the harder it is for me to avoid inertia. It’s like having arthritis.

Doctors say if you have arthritis, you have to keep moving the arthritic joints, or the disease will make them worse. But when every move you make hurts, all you want to do is stay still.
So how do you change? How do you stay intentional about staving off entropy? When our sin-ridden flesh fights against everything positive we want to do in our lives, the only thing we can do is surrender to God. By spending time in prayer and in the Word, and making known to Him the things we want to change, He gives us the power to change in the direction He wants us to do. Only God can override the law of entropy. Let’s surrender to God every day, and allow Him to change us from the inside out.

Last Sunday was my weekend to play keyboard at church. Rehearsal time for the band is 7:15 AM. I like to get there around 7:00 AM to make sure I have time to get set up, which means I have to leave about 6:45 AM.

On they way to church, I treated myself to a McDonald’s sausage burrito. I stopped at  the first drive-through window and paid the clerk. My mouth watered as I anticipated the  warm, artificial cheese, pork product, and reconstituted egg goodness. Then, I arrived at the second window: the one with the food. The clerk  handed me my coffee first and the bag second. The bag with the food—the food that would sustain me through a 7:15 AM rehearsal.

Almost drooling, I parked my SUV, removed the  burrito and opened the wrapper. And that’s when then odor hit me. The thing smelled like Play-Doh. I have nothing against the smell of Play-Doh, but not in my food. And what’s worse, the burrito tasted like it smelled. Because I was still hungry, I held my breath and consumed the salty, doughy conglomeration of food-like substances. I didn’t savor my Sunday breakfast.

By its nature, fast food is not meant to be savored. It’s designed to be prepared, sold, and eaten quickly and cheaply. It doesn’t last. It doesn’t taste good. It’s fast, cheap food for fast, cheap living. The opposite of savoring.

Image from thewvsr.com

Being a writer geek, I immediately applied this experience to my writing,  to how I like to write and what I like to read. Savoring is an act of the senses. When you savor something, you take the time contemplate what you’re experiencing. When I read, I want to know what the character feels, tastes, and smells. That is also how I like to write. As an example, I’m going to discuss two passages, one that I can savor over and over, and another where the author could have done a better job. I’m going to start with the latter first.

My first example is from Amanda Hocking’s novel, Hollowland. If you’re not familiar with Amanda Hocking, she’s a self-published author who has sold about eleventy-kabillion ebooks on Amazon.com. I have nothing against self publishing. In fact, [[SHAMELESS PLUG WARNING]] I’ve finally decided to self publish my own book, Oath of the Brother Blade, in the next few weeks. However, I think I would be safe to say that Hocking’s books are the literary equivalent of fast food. She can crank out a novel in about a week or two, and her books range in price from free to $2.99. Nothing wrong with a fast food book every once in a while, but you don’t want to make it your complete diet.

Hollowland is set in the very near future in which civilization has been run over by a zombies. In this scene, the main character is removing a gun from the hand of a dead soldier:

The thick ooze of zombie blood covered my hands, and I grimaced. I finally found the clip, along with his service revolver. He’d been using a semi-automatic shotgun, and it was still in his hands. I pulled it free, hating the way it felt to loosen a dead man’s grip.

In writing, you don’t always savor pleasant sensations. In this passage, Hocking missed out on a wonderful opportunity for some major gross-out savoring. The passage leaves me with lots of questions. What did the zombie blood smell like? Was it still warm? What did it feel like on her skin? Did it burn? Was she worried about getting the zombie disease from touching the infected blood? Was the dead man’s hand still warm? Was it stiff? Did touching it remind her of her boyfriend’s hand?

Since this is the first time we see up close the effects of a zombie attack, Hocking should have taken advantage of this scene to draw us into the visceral, disgusting, traumatic horrors of a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world. However, we’re only given a scant description of what should have been a shocking scene.

My next example of savoring is from Tosca Lee’s novel, Havah, a story of about and Eve told through the point-of-view of Eve. In Havah, Lee masterfully allows us to savor all the delights of Eden that Eve experienced in her newly created body. It also demonstrates the horrors of sin after Adam and Eve disobey God.

In the following scene, Adam leads Eve to experience water in a river for the first time:

We entered the water. I gasped as it tickled the backs of my knees and hot hairs under my arms, swirling about my waist as though and around a staunch rock as our toes skimmed a multitude of pebbles.

This passage is only two sentences long, but it’s a masterpiece of showing through the senses. Lee doesn’t say that water is cool, clear, deep, and gently flowing. However, we know the water is cool because Eve gasps when she steps in. We know the water flows gently because it tickles the backs of her knees and the hair in her armpits. (Yes, everyone, Eve had hairy armpits. But the big question is, did pre-fallen bodies get BO?) And we know the water is clear because even though it goes up to her armpits, she can still see the pebbles under her toes.

So how about you? Have you read anything that draws you in with the senses, that makes you want to savor each word? Do you know any authors who are especially good at writing for the senses? I’d love to know.

Havah and Hollowland are available at Amazon.com.