Category Archives: Challenges

Life with Sparky: Attack

It’s evening.

I’ve been writing for a few hours. Quietly lost in my mind.

Sparky has slept on my feet for the last hour, keeping them warm.

Suddenly, he wakes up and starts to bats around the back of my hands.

I’m sprinting. Trying to write as many words as I can in 20 minutes.

He doesn’t think I need to be writing. He thinks I should play with him. He bats at me, then turns toward my foot stretched out on the footrest of my easy chair.

He starts chewing on it!

Sparky! Leave me alone.

I push him away and continue to type words into my computer. I’m trying to get lots of words written. There are people I write with who can write twice as many words as I can in 20 minutes. I’m trying to keep up.

My foot is attacked again. Claws and teeth out.

Sparky! Stop!

I push him away again.

He thinks it is a game. He attacks my feet, I push him away. Sometimes he spins away backward, usually landing on his feet. He knows I will push him off, but he comes back for more.

He sits on the footrest and pokes his head beneath the blanket I’m using in an attempt to hide my feet from him. His claws poke me!

Sparky! Not now! I’m writing.

I guess attacking my feet is better than walking across my computer, pushing on keys and changing a manuscript I’m trying to prepare for publication. Nothing like odd letters showing up in the middle of the book because the cat decided he needed to walk across the keyboard.

I’ve had it. He won’t leave me alone.

“Where is that spray bottle?”

I filled a bottle with water when Sparky attacked a small grandson yesterday.

My husband picks it up and sprays the cat. Water doesn’t hurt him. It is a warning.

He stares at us.
Washes his face.
And walks away.

I’m no fun to attack when I spray him.

We’ll see if he attacks me tomorrow.

0Shares

Life with Sparky: Little Things

Little things have become more difficult since Sparky came to live in our home with us.
Things like walking down a hall without being tripped,
searching for something that fell on the floor,
or putting clean sheets on the bed.

Each week as I tug the sheets off the bed to wash them, Sparky is right there with me,
examining each sheet,
wondering why it is moving,
and racing to catch the drooping ends as I carry them to the washing machine.

He’s curious.
He’s spunky.
He’s feisty.

I get that.

But when I return later, with clean sheets to stretch across the mattress, it is a different story.

Sparky loves dark places.

When I toss the sheet up so I can pull the corners around the corners of the mattress, there is a lump in the middle, chasing after the loose ends.

Sparky crawls under each sheet as I try to spread it flat across the bed.

Then comes the quilts. He lies on the top sheet and lets me spread the warm quilt and the bedspread quilt over him, leaving a nice lump on my otherwise smooth bed.

He’ll slide out from under the quilts in time to chase the edges of the pillow cases while I stuff pillows into them.

At last, the bed is made. It looks smooth and ready for me.
It must look good to Sparky, too. He’s laying in the middle of it.

0Shares

Life with Sparky: Screens

Sparky lies calmly on my lap, sleeping.
Until the phone rings.

It’s my daughter and grandson, calling on FaceTime.

Sparky hears the sound of people he doesn’t know and investigates. He looks in the front, he looks at the back. He doesn’t understand where the sound comes from and who are those people she is talking with?

When he first arrived, he would sit behind my computer. He liked the warmth of it.
But he’d hear my fingers bouncing on the keyboard and peek around.
His paws crept around.
And then, he’d pounce on me!

Later, he decided my keyboard is the place to sleep. He likes to lay on the keyboard close to the screen where he can change the pictures. Before I got a new computer, he managed to turn on the music almost every time.

I never did.
I’m not sure I knew where to do that.

Worst, he thinks his path into the room should include jumping onto my chair, walking across my keyboard, then on over toward Jack. Sometimes, he stops to sleep on Jack’s feet. Other times, he bounces off to play with his toys.

The problem is he always changes the document I’m working on. And when it’s taxes or a book, it can really cause problems. I’m learning to pick up my computer when he jumps up.

It was a big problem when he bumped the power cord out of my computer, and everything went off.
And I lost everything I was working on.
Because the computer battery died.
Good thing my new computer came!

Sometimes Sparky focuses on our television. It sits on a stand. He likes to jump up in front of the television and look at the picture.

He walks around it.
He knocks off the modem …
And the router.

Suddenly we don’t have internet service again!

Sparky!

0Shares

What Big Cat is He?

He crouches low, creeping toward his prey. He bounds forward, leaping before it gets away. He races through the tall grasses, over a log, then hurdles the final obstacle. The female wildebeest jumps away.

He misses.
Yet again.
Next time.

Sparky thinks I’m his prey.

I have to dance away as he leaps over the sofa toward me. I heard him coming. Good thing, or he’d be dragging me down like a lion drags down a gazelle or a wildebeest.

I have to watch out for him. He hides behind the furniture and under the bed, streaking out to attack my calves as I pass. Sometimes, he manages to leap higher than my waist.

It’s a good thing he has learned to pull in his claws. Jack might be accused of abusing me with all the scratches and bites I’ve had on me.

Sparky is lucky he is a beautiful cat.

My scratches are healing.

I wonder if he descended from a lion, a tiger, or a cougar. He has beautiful stripes along his back legs like a tiger. He’s fierce like a lion. He lies in wait to attack along the back of my sofa like a cougar.

I wonder if he dreams of being a big cat?

Perhaps he does, as he lies across my keyboard.

0Shares

We Have a Problem

Early on, we knew we had a problem.

I walked into my closet to see a quilt I had stored on the top shelf now lying on the floor. The quilt, made by my mother, waits for a granddaughter to grow old enough to graduate or get married. I had to take a chair into the closet to get the quilt on the highest shelf.

Now it lay on the floor.

Sparky!

But how?

I watched him when we were there for the next day or so. It didn’t take long to learn how he did it.

He leapt up from the floor, or from my husband’s oxygen machine, crawled up the sleeves of Jack’s shirts, and on up to the shelf above the clothing.

Later, we found Sparky sleeping on the shelf.

We banned Sparky from our bathroom.

I walked into the guest bath not long after and found claw holes in the toilet paper he had unrolled, completely.

Enough!

He’d jump up on me and onto the counter by the sink. Once, I had to move him from the sink so I could wash my hands!

He’s banned from both bathrooms.

In the living room, Sparky climbed on top of the empty birdcage and starred at the moving ceiling fan.

That wasn’t going to happen.

I moved the birdcage outside. I can’t give it away yet. I can’t get another bird yet. So it sits on our back patio, waiting.

Meanwhile, Sparky jumps from the floor to the top of the printer, which rests on a bar stool. He sits on the back of my chair, higher than me.

Brat.

0Shares

Life with Sparky

Our son set the small purebred Siamese kitten into my husband’s arms. “You need something to keep you active,” he said, only a little in jest. “Besides, he is scratching the baby.”
Before Jack could do more than pet him twice, the cat leapt from his arms and raced to the back of the house.
“Sparky. His name is Sparky, like the sparks of fire. Look how fast he goes.”
With that, we inherited another animal from our sons.
We already have turtles, and their fish, (We gave them the fish to eat. They kept them as pets!) one son left home when he moved out.
We also had a love bird, left behind when he got married.
Now, we had a cat.
He’s a beautiful Siamese, but he is feisty!!!
When we pried him out from under the bed, he took an interest in the lovebird. He’d stand on his hind legs, trying to see what was in the cage.

Then, on the second or third day, he knocked the cage off the stool it had been perched on for nine years with no disasters.
The cage collapsed.
Eryl escaped.
We thought he was fine.
Wrong.
In less than a week, I found her with his wings splayed out like she was too hot.
We pulled him from his cage and loved on her for the hour we had left before she drew her last breath.
And then, we cried.
Apparently, her escape from the collapsed cage wasn’t without injury.
We are back to two kinds of pets. Turtles, and their fish, and the cat.

0Shares

A Conversation with Adam

We have another character from my books who stopped by for a short interview. Welcome to Adam, husband of Eve, our guest last week. As the first man on earth, and the first prophet of Jehovah, you must wonder about what has happened to the world you first settled.

ADAM: I am saddened by all the hatred and violence that pervades the earth. Father showed me what would happen to the earth and its peoples early in my life. I know how the world will end. Because of that, I can accept the challenges of today’s world. Jehovah will win the final battle against the Destroyer. Man will learn to trust and depend on God.

ME: We would love to hear your answers to the same questions we asked Eve last week. Are you ready?

ADAM: I have only a short time. I will do what I can. What is your first question?

ME: A reader asked what it was like to anger God.

ADAM: I thought I had angered him in the beginning. That is why we hid from Him in the garden. God was not angry with Eve and Me. He expected us to eat the fruit. However, not yet. The time was not right. The person who gave it to us was had no right to offer it to us. Father’s anger was for the Destroyer. For us, he felt sorrow and grief. We had to suffer, as do all of our children.
Even though Father knew this would happen, he had to allow us to make the choice on our own. He could not force it on us. It had to come from Eve and me.

ME: A connecting question, for you. What was it like to receive God’s forgiveness?

ADAM: We had to live a time in this world and prove we our obedience before Father forgave us. The day I knew I had received forgiveness came when the Spirit took me to our pond and baptized me. That was a special and sacred day. I still cannot share what happened, except to say that I received Father’s forgiveness on that day.

ME: A reader wants to know: Is God to be loved or feared?

ADAM: In the years since the words “fear God” were written, the meaning has changed. You think of fear as something painful, fearing punishment for sin. I think of fear as an awesome love. I am constantly awed by the love I receive from Father. For that reason, my answer is yes. God, my Father, is to be loved and feared as you would love and respect and hold in awe your earthly father.

ME: I know you must leave us soon. One last question before you go. Do you still like apples?

ADAM: Eve warned me that you would be asking this question. Yes. I still like apples. However, the fruit of good and evil was not an apple. Sometime in the future, when you are ready, you will know what that fruit was. Until then, enjoy your apples.

ME: Thank you for your time, Adam.

ADAM: You are welcome. Remember to obey Jehovah’s commands. I look forward to seeing you at the judgment bar. Farewell for now.

0Shares

What I Learned About Writing

Yesterday I was privileged to share my author journey with a group of home-schooled children who wanted to know how I started writing. We had a good time talking about what books they would write. Some of those will be authors to watch for in the near future.

I share some of our discussion with you today.

I am a reader. I have been all my life. I inhale books, often several at a time. In my early days as a reader, I learned to recognize a good book, although not how to write one.

I don’t remember having a drive to be an author. I wanted to write, but other things were more important then. I loved writing poetry. I tried to write a short story in high school. I failed. Later in college, I took a fiction class from an author and wrote the first chapter of a book. Between then and 2013, I wrote several first chapters, but never managed to get the second chapter written.

In all my years as a reader, I somehow missed the important elements of a good story. It wasn’t until I co-taught a kindergarten class in a private school that had every child write a book that I figured out why I couldn’t finish a story. I forgot the basic elements of story!

What are the elements? Character, setting, problem, and solution.

It seems easy. Now I know. Before I didn’t understand how to do it.

Then I received a challenge to participate in National Novel Writing Month in November of 2013. The challenge is to write 50,000 words in the month. To do that, you have to write like mad without editing.

I took a story I’d tried to put down before, changed the point of view, and remembered the basic elements. I’d think, “What problems would she face?” Then I’d try to come up with a solution to the problem.

I may write differently from many other authors. I don’t outline my books. I’ve never been able to do that even for big research projects in school. Instead, I write into the dark. I decide who my characters will be, where and when they are living, then think of problems they may face. As they try to solve the problems, the characters have other challenges to solve, until they finally solve the major problems of the story.

I write to discover what happened to the people I learn to care about as I write about them. I started Lost Children of the Prophet because children went missing and I needed to know where they went and why. I know now what my end story will be in that series, though I haven’t determined how many more books it will take me to get there.

After that? I have no idea. I’m sure some other character will want me to learn about her and want me to tell her story.

I write books about women because they have been forgotten through time and their stories need to be shared. If you have a suggestion of women whose story has been forgotten, I’d love to hear it.

9Shares

How Will You Change the Country?

“What are you going to do to change the country?” my friend asked me the other day.

This has had me thinking for several days. “What can I do? I’m a lonely author, who has little impact on politicians and others who make laws for our land. I can vote, complain to others, respond to social media, and write letters to my Congresspeople. It has little impact on the country or the world.

My response to my friend was, “Nothing. Except live the best life I can, obeying God’s laws and the country’s laws to the best of my ability.”

Later consideration brought a few more ideas. I can be a friend to others, and do all I can to make my part of the country, and thus the world, better. I can offer assistance to others. I can do my best to be kind. And, I can write more books.

I’m an author. I try to change the world with my books. My imagination takes me to places I can never go. I share things I’ve learned as I tell my stories. I learn more things in the things I write. A long time ago, as a teacher, I discovered you don’t know what you know until you write it down. Writing my books helps me understand what I know about a few things, as I explore a time no one knows about.

The human experience doesn’t change, only the leaders and the things people gather around them. They walked, rode horses, or rode in carriages. We walk, ride in cars, airplanes, and soon spaceships. We all eat, dress, have children, or die. We love, hate, argue, solve problems, and search for happiness. It has been so from the beginning.

I’ve considered challenges in my life in my books. Some of the results I don’t like and hope my children never suffer the consequences I write about. Others of my stories I love. I hope more of my family receive these results in their lives.

So, I finished the editing of my next book, Betrayed Trust. I will release it in about a month. I still need a cover and a description for the back. More to come when it is closer. It, too, explores a different part of the human condition.

What will you do to change the world or the bit of the world in which you live? How will you make the lives of those around you better? (I’m hoping you will choose to read more of my books and review them.)

What would you suggest I write about in my next book? The one I’m working on now was recommended by a reader, one of you. I do listen.

5Shares

I’ll tell you mine, please tell me yours

Today is Have a Bad Day.

This is a picture of my last bad day.

This is a picture of my last bad day after the nurses wiped some of the blood away. Yep. Broken nose, split lip, bruised elbow, sprained wrist, banged up knees, and a bruised heel. Not fun.
How did this happen, you ask? Easy if you’ve been diagnosed as a Klutz.
As I hurried back across our apartment parking lot, thinking of five things I needed to do, and trying not to bump into the pyracantha bush on one side and the car parked on the other, I slipped off the curb and fell. I landed so fast I smacked my face on the curb. I heard a crunch and knew I had broken the nose. I jumped up, holding the blood and rushed home. My husband took one look at me and went for his shoes. I grabbed a towel (it happened to be red and didn’t show all the blood) and put it to my face. My husband drove me to a local hospital.
I spent five hours in the Emergency Room. They x-rayed my knee and wrist, not broken, and did a ct scan on my head and neck, no concussion. Eventually, the nurse put a stitch in my lip and glue on my nose to hold it together and sent me home.
I’m healing quickly, thank you. The scabs on my face are gone, though I still hurt.
I’d love to hear about your last bad day. Share in the comments below here.

0Shares