~~

I see The Times has posted their version of the twenty best movie endings ever.  Something to while away the summer nights of August:

Se7en, Blair Witch Project, Memento, Planet of the Apes, The Shawshank Redemption, Gone with the Wind, Dr. Strangelove, Les Diaboliques, Wizard of Oz, Thelma and Louise, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, The Italian Job, Some Like It Hot, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Chinatown, E.T., Casablanca, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Carrie.

I might add The Illusionist.  But then, I love magic, too.

When I look to the heavens late at night, I see the reflection of so many people that have come into my life.  Friends light up each other's lives.  A best friend is like the moon.  You can always count on the moon -- even on cloudy nights.   The closest friends are like the planets.  Planets are the brightest lights in the night sky and they are never hard to find.  Stars are like so many people you know and love.  One couldn't begin to count them and they will probably never realize how important they truly are.  Occassionally, God will send a shooting star across your sky -- an angel to dance across the heavens.  Treasure them like a diamond as they are precious and rare.

Proverbs 17:17 A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

Prayer:

Loving Father, thank you for those that light our darkest nights.  Please bless those that we can lean on and bless those that we count on, for they are truly made in your image.  I pray they will find favor in your eyes so they may find night lights in their own dark skies.  In Jesus' name,

- Amen

WWW.BIBLEDONATE.ORG

So thanks to our friends at Studio Fred, enjoy Big News Episode 279, featuring our special guest Erik Charles Nielsen!

And you can now subscribe to the Big News Podcast! We offer a few different options: iTunes, Miro, normal feed, and Revver. Go here to subscribe!

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.654184&w=425&h=350&fv=allowFullScreen%3Dtrue]

In this installment:

- Barack proposes the perfect solution for the Hillary Clinton dilemma!
- The governor of West Virginia proves the state is about more than just inbreeding!
- A group of co-workers congratulate a colleague on a presidential milestone!
- John McCain tells Chris Matthews his "canny" vice presidential selection!
- Rachael Ray comes under fire!
- So does Universal Studios!
- Ed McMahon is foreclosed, sir!
- Kevin Federline becomes Father of the Year!
- A Michigan judge presides over an unusual wedding ceremony!
- Danny and Sandy remember the good times with their Hummers!
- And Governor Schwarzenegger shows how to cure the California drought - with a little help from another '80's action star!

BIG NEWS EPISODE 279 - "Hillary Under Water"

Starring Sean Cowhig, Susan Deming, Bailee Desrocher, Neil Garguilo, Jimmy Guidish, Jason Kelley, Gregg Lopez, Jim Nieb, Tammie Smalls, Ray Stakenas, and Phillip Wilburn

1. WATER? by Keith Bush, Julia Gaudette, Michael Hughes, Nikitas Manikatos, Matt Manser, Kito Buni Robinson, Catalina Rodas, Laurenne Sala, and Phillip Wilburn
Dianne Feinstein (Bailee), Barack Obama (Jason), Michelle Obama (Tammie), Hillary Clinton (Susan), Bill Clinton (Phillip)

2. WEST VIRGINIA: IT’S MORE THAN JUST INBREEDING by Tom Repetto
Dick (Gregg), Joe (Jimmy), Bob (Ray), Billy Joe (Sean), Mary Lynn (Bailee), Robert Byrd (Jim)

3. CONGRATULATIONS! by Michael Hughes
Lisa (Tammie), Debbie (Susan), Bill (Neil), Kevin (Ray)

4. MCCAIN’S HISTORIC RUNNING MATE by Adam Fisher & Danny Ricker
McCain (Phillip), Chris (Gregg)

5. THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS by Steven Waldinger
Rachael (Bailee), Agent #1 (Jim), Agent #2 (Jason)

6. UNIVERSAL STUDIOS TOUR by Erich Eilenberger
Kimmy (Tammie), Jerry (Ray), Billy (Neil), Father (Sean), Alan (Jimmy), Jeannine (Susan)

7. YOU ARE FORECLOSED, SIR! by Matt Mondlock
Bill (Jason), Ed (Phillip), Edna (Susan)

8. FATHER OF THE YEAR by Scott Garner
Announcer (Jim), K-Fed (Sean), Pookie (Neil), Jamie Lynn (Bailee), Casey (Jimmy)

9. MISS MICHIGAN by Howie Scheer
Bailiff (Gregg), Judge Fowler (Jim), Bill Tucker (Ray)

10. HUMMER LOVIN’ by Kristina Adelmeyer
Danny (Phillip), Sandy (Susan), Kenicke (Gregg), Doody (Neil), Sonny (Jason), Putzie (Jimmy), Tom (Sean), Rizzo (Tammie), Frenchy (Bailee)

11. SPECIAL GUEST: Erik Charles Nielsen
Intro (Sean)

12. BIG NEWS REPORT by Burkhart, Dorsey, Eilenberger, Glassberg, Houston, Hughes, Judy, King, Manser, McClain, Mondlock, Morelli, Nordvall, Paulas, Reber, Repetto, Scheer, Simm, Stakenas, ten Bosch, Weitz, West, and Wilburn
Susan/Jimmy/Tammie/Phillip and Jason et al.

1. Pink fuzzy slippers.
2. Coffee in the early morning.
3. A cool summer nights breeze.
4. My cat greeting me at the door when I come home from work.
5. Hearing from an old friend.
6. Driving through old historical neighborhoods.
7. A worn in faded pair of blue jeans with my fuzzy pink slippers.
8. A smile and a wink.
9. Sour cream and onion potato chips.
10. Having someone walk up behind me and whisper in my ear, holding on to my waist.

This shot shows our two hooligans having a firelight pillowfight--beat that for summertime fun, will ya?

(Ya know, I just love the lights of the house glowing in the background)

~~Happy Summertime!

**Click on over to Stacy's at The Land of K.A. for more 'Summer Fun' posts!**

Also, just in case anyone is missing out, I invite you to look at the comments posted after the previous entry on this blog, where you'll find the vindication of my Tolkien tantrum and the verdict on Cymbril.

But anyway, to the nitty-gritty of this posting -- I came across the following quote earlier this evening. It's talking about the cathedrals of Europe:

"The divine presence lives in nature, in space, and in light, and the cathedrals brought these elements together in such a magnificent way that even today modern man, so cut off from his own divine nature, can still feel them." -- Janet Brennan, "The Cathedral Code," Fate, December 2006

When I read those lines, they resonated with me. I felt they provided a clear elucidation of the reason I love caves and caverns so much. Nature, space, and light. When I think of the most holy places I've ever seen (churches aside), I have to nod in acknowledgment. Those three elements are always present. The barn I played in as a child: a lofty, dusky space, scented with fragrant hay and old wood, suffused with the green glow of light falling through Virginia creeper leaves. The barn was built by man, but nature had embraced it and encroached upon it, peeking in at all its windows, skittering across its plant-sprouting floors. And then caves: Grand Central Station in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky -- a place where soaring passages come together, an enormous space in the deep Earth, with towering boulders dim in the distance, a shadowed ceiling high above -- a place made by the hand of God. Nature, space, and light. Some of my favorite places in Mammoth Cave are the grand stairways, where the path ascends flight after flight of stairs, all within a gargantuan chamber.

In The Lord of the Rings, my favorite setting by far is the mines of Moria. How I would love to have seen it when it was Khazad-dum, during the noontide of Dwarrowdelf, before Durin's folk disturbed the Balrog! Nature, space . . . and light -- for it's the dim lighting that makes the place so alluring. The Chamber of Mazarbul: we've got indirect lighting filtering in from outside. That was an ideal I strove for in my years of designing dungeon for my Verralton campaign: echoing halls in the Earth, dimly-lit by filtered sunlight through fissures or from various haunting sources of light. (For anyone who may be going "Huh?!" right about now, I'm talking about Dungeons & Dragons.)

That got me to thinking about my writing. Dragonfly was written when I was in my early twenties, and (I'd like to believe) it still holds up pretty well. My second novel, called (in various drafts) Lachii or The Fires of the Deep, was an absolute disaster. I labored away on it for five years before I ever showed it to anyone. When an editor and two agents rejected it, I went on laboring away on it in isolation, striving to bring it to "perfection" before I ever let it out of the nest again. And it became, as I later described it, "like a clan of inbred hillbillies" -- worked over, re-worked, and re-worked so many times, with no input from anyone but me, that it got to the point where I couldn't even see it anymore. The world in which it's set had become intimately familiar to me. But that world is vastly different from our own, and the more I lived in it, the less capable I became of communicating it to people who didn't live there. In the draft I eventually let some friends read, I realized that, in a single sentence, there might be four or five specialized terms of which only I knew the meaning. Oh, I provided a glossary, yes indeed, a magnificent opus that I worked on night and day. But as one friend commented, "Do you realize that a third of this book is glossary?" Um, oops.

What was missing from the book, I now know, was light. The "nature" was there: a subterranean world, echoing and epic in every way, built directly upon my childhood love of caves. The "space" was there: endless, miles-wide corridors called dulons, large enough to fly airships through without getting anywhere near the world-walls (Shur) or the ceiling (Ra). The world was built -- elaborately built. Just as Inuits have all those words for different kinds of snow, my Hurlim people have many different words for stone: lodin are the dry boulder fields; kalodin are the huge, dry boulders; lys is wet, living stone; lysshur is a wet, living stone wall; losshur is a dry wall; los is dead, dry stone. There were abundant folk sayings that made sense in the context of the Hurlim world: "He's on a skurl under the needles." "That'll happen when los becomes lys." "Hey there, all! What's in the bucket?"

Yes, the world was painstakingly built. Yet it still didn't feel alive. Somehow, it seemed all merely academic -- a theory.

I know now what was missing.

Light.

I'm not saying this is true for all fantasy writers, but what's revealed in that Janet Brennan quote above is certainly true for me. The triangular equation is nature, space, and light. When the three are present, I can build a setting that feels real, that invites the reader to come in. (The hot Orcharan sands of the Arena seem to work for test readers of "Here About to Die.") But in my Hurlim world of Ama, I was trying to manage without light. The Hurlim people rely on a sense called yla, which is also an energy that flows through the Earth, emanating from the core. It passes through all spaces and solid objects, bearing a record of all it has passed through. Hurlim eyes, attuned to the yla, can read in it the distances and the surface textures, but it is a sense wholly apart from color. Water appears opaque: if calm, it appears as a flat surface; if rippling, it appears to ripple -- but nothing can be seen beneath the surface; hence, the Hurlim fear of water, which seems solid, but which can swallow the unwary traveler who sets foot on it.

In contrast, look at Dragonfly -- also set in a subterranean world -- yet one in which the descriptions (though often horribly overdone -- hey, I was a kid, cut me some slack) are vivid. Dragonfly, for all its dimness, is full of light: torchlight, jack-o'-lantern light, firelight, balloon-light, moonlight, starlight. . . .

The lesson to be learned is this: when a writer doesn't have light to work with, his/her hands are tied. Imagine an artist trying to paint a picture of a landscape without light! Take any book in which the settings are vibrant, in which you can picture everything so clearly that you feel you're there, living inside the scene -- and then notice how light makes those descriptions possible. See what I mean?

Maybe it seems elementary to you, a principle that we wouldn't need all these words to arrive at. But for me to realize it, I had to write draft after draft of an enormous novel. The hardest thing I've ever done as a writer was trying to tell a story without light. In the next draft of The Fires of the Deep, you can be sure I will have found a way to introduce light into the Hurlim world -- and we'll have the shadows and the dimness and the glimmers and the silhouettes -- to give the characters a vivid setting in which to live and breathe.

The act of writing any story, to use Tolkien's term again, is an act of sub-creation. We rearrange elements God has provided and stack them up in our own way, in our own tiny corner of the universe. Looking back to our prime model, the original Creation: it began with "Let there be light." Seems to me that's the way to begin.

Even though I missed out fireworks on the 4th of July I got to see them after all! My friend Breanne invited me to go to a Bees game with her. It was a perfect, hot summer night. I did my best to capture the awesome fireworks with my small point-and-shoot (without a lot of success)....but I did get this one that was ok :)

I am a Firework Purist. My favorite ones are white and gold -- I love the fireworks that look like shooting stars, fairy dust, and popcorn popping. And, I prefer it when there's only one or two at one time. When a purple, red, and green one all go off at the same time I think it's too cluttered and disorganized. I'd rather watch them slowly and take in each one rather than the finale of jumbled fireworks strewn together haphazardly.

What are your thoughts on fireworks? Am I the only person who thinks this way? So far, the people I have expressed this to think I am weird....

I have a lot of memories about summer from when I was younger. My mom used to take me and my brother to my grandmother's apartment to stay with her for several days. We would hang around the pool all day and later in the afternoon our aunt would take us to 7-11 for Slurpees or to Thrifty for ice cream cones (then and now, I always got mint chip). Some summers we would fly to visit my mom's parents, and my memories there involve camping, or sitting around my grandparents' table eating peanut butter on white bread and drinking cherry koolaid, or climbing to the top of my grandpa's big Chevy van and sitting on the roof of it feeling so big and on top of it all.

As I got older, summer meant laying out in the sun all day slathered in baby oil (yeah, I know, I know - I'm very lucky and see my dermatologist regularly for mole checks as should all of you!). Summer meant going to the movies in the middle of the week with friends. One year, summer meant band camp ("This one time at band camp..." A myth. I don't know of anything interesting that happened at band camp - that was the year that Bryan Adams came out with "Everything I Do (I Do it For You)" and I remember some girl had that on repeat constantly. I also remember my first adventure in dorm food at band camp... which led to a week of eating Cap'n Crunch three meals a day). The other summers meant cheerleading camp (Like, Oh my god! We won the spirit stick! We've got spirit, yes we do!). One summer, I worked at an ice cream shop, making milkshakes, cones and flurries (like a blizzard... but not) all day. It took me a long time to be able to eat ice cream again after that summer.

In college, I'd come home in the summer and work. I've always been a worker. I'd work full time, and come home and fill my nights with my friends - being social, going to parties, hanging around bonfires with a beer and some laughs (again, how I could I tolerate beer then? I hate it now).

Summer used to be something to look forward to.

Now, summer is just like any other time of the year. Except worse. It's hotter and my kids are out of school and daycare and there is a greater demand for me to be interesting and fun and entertaining. And I am interesting and fun and entertaining (Oh, I dare you to disagree), but apparently my kids don't always think so. My six year old told me yesterday, "Mom, you're not funny. Dad's not either." Great, thanks. Excuse me while I scrape what's remaining of my self esteem off the carpet.

The fact that it's July now makes me happy, as it means we are now just 30 days away from August. And August is right before September. And that's when summer ends. Summer ending will be a very good thing indeed.

Back corner bar, lights down low, summer sun a filter of speckled dust through foggy windows; leaning back in my chair I tip my glass toward lips longing for the cool wet of summer, the way the first Popsicle of the season tasted in the backyard, wearing your new bathing suit that’d be covered in wet and sticky and muddy before long, when you were six.

Shuffling chairs kick up patchouli clouds, a scarf falls off the table onto the planked floor and we reach at the same time, laughing shyly as our hands touch too much. I nod, turning back to the music, tapping toes to the beat of long summer nights, experiencing that floating feeling you get when life comes together in a beautifully poignant moment, the fracture of the kaleidoscope reflecting the symmetry of how simple life can be, how perfect life can be.

Strummed chords and hummed tunes, the lady on the dance floor is awesome twitch – her head and hips moving in opposite directions, her hands clapping, waving, shaking to the same rhythm she’s danced a thousand times before. A spread smile, wide lips, shining teeth, her face turned to the rafters – a hallelujah of praise for this little piece of Dionysus.

Clap, clap, clap – it’s so easy getting lost in the tempo of this energy, it’s so easy getting lost in the sound.

Setting sun, the clouds a pretty pink dusting of the long goodbye – the light of summer sticking to the edges of night, off-kilter voices and jagged harmony floating out the door tickling the backs of my bare legs on the slow walk home. A perfect night for summer.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

• The Smell. I love how mowed grass smells. I love the smell of the swamp cooler at my parents' house. I love walking past a pool and smelling chlorine. I love the smell of cement that's all wet from sprinklers. I love the smell of the mountains. It's just great. Today smells like summer, and I'm excited.
• The Temperature. Sure, it sucks during the day, but it's perfect for swimming, skinny dipping, stripping down to your undies and running through the sprinklers, etc. Plus, at night, you can just walk around in shorts and a wife beater and you're set.
• The Nights. Summer nights are fantastic. I love sleeping on the trampoline, or camping, or going for a walk along the canal, or stargazing, or basically anything. Last summer, I lived for the nights. I slept all day and went out at night.
• The Happenings. I love festivals. Independence day is one of my favorite holidays. The cities around here have their weeks of celebration, with a carnival, fireworks, free concerts, etc, and I love them all.
• The Atmosphere. Most everyone is relaxed. It's a time when it's all right to be a little irresponsible. I can wake up one morning, decide I want to go to the local theme park, and just go! (of course, I'd have to get work off and all that, but if it was fall, I'd have to consider the weather or possibly school.) Everyone's in a better mood.
• The Sun. I love being sunburned.

Anyway, that's enough optimism for today.

I remember as a kid being put to bed in the summer and standing at the window thinking, "It's still light out! It's not time for bed!" I never could get to sleep while it seemed like daytime to me. With the days getting longer, it's nice to be able to put the kids to bed after the sun goes down, if I so choose. Of course, sometimes I put them to bed early because I need a break. (Anyone else do that?)

Camping, boating, swimming, trips . . . I'm so glad we're done with school for the year. I love having the kids home.

Too bad the time goes so fast.

What are your family's favorite summer activities?