Writing News
This week I added some more buttons to the site so that it would be easier to navigate, fixed more grammatical errors, found and put up some pictures of animals and things that were found in ancient Assyria, put my sample chapter up in two other places on the site, and spend an hour in prayer about this whole thing. It’s hard to believe that all of this took me over nine hours of writing time, but it did. Then at 7:43am on Friday, I Kristen Joy Wilks, sent out my first query for “Overturned”. I felt so good all day long knowing that finally after 5 years, 1 month, and 2 days spent on this story I am finally at that point! Now during the query process if I have any good news to share, I will. But I shall keep any bad news to myself so as not to discourage any publishing professionals who might pass by. Don’t fret though, if I get a contract in hand I will reveal all, including rejections. Oh, and for your information the first agent I queried has a response time of 2 months. So Mom, remember that really annoying song about Herbert the snail you used to sing to us? “Have patience. Have patience. Don’t be in such a hurry.”
Breaking News
We celebrated Halloween this week. We carved pumpkins. We roasted pumpkin seeds. We burned our tongues on insufficiently cooled pumpkin seeds. Sweet boy #2 and I made candied apples while sweet boy #1 was at cubbies. That was interesting! In my attempt to bring the candy to the brittle somethingorother stage I overcooked it and some of the apples have great clumps of red goo perched upon them in volcanic heaps instead of the sleek trim dressing of red that the package portrays. Then as the culmination of the festivities we read a bible story (Elisha, the fiery armies of God, and the attack of the blind Arameans) 2 Kings 6:8-19, walked to Great Grandpa and Grammy’s house, watched “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown”, and made popcorn balls so marvelous that they may have actually put my diabetic grandfather at risk if he had been born a less stubborn more reasonable man. And in the middle of all this I realized that Halloween is a marvelous celebration for Christians. It is a wonderful time to remember that in Christ we were not made to be afraid. God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of love, power, and a strong mind! Even the creepy decorations can help us celebrate how we need not fear!
We truly had a great time.
Harrowing/Heartwarming
Parent Moment of the Week
Two stories for you this week.
I had my three darling cyclones all by myself for the whole day last Saturday and things went pretty well. Or so I thought. That night when I settled down for bed I realized that my eyebrow was hurting. I poked it and discovered that I had an actual knot in my eyebrow. Like one would get in an overtaxed back, but in my eyebrow. Apparently I was not quite as marvelous a mother as I thought for the only conclusion that I was able to come to as to the origins of this knot is that I developed it from scowling at my 3 sweet boys all day. Well, tomorrow is another day. Hopefully the friendliness of my facial expressions will improve!
Sweet boy #1 is doing Saxon math K. He was supposed to graph a pile of colored counting bears when all of a sudden he burst into heart breaking sobs. I had taken away some of the bears so that his graph was not even! Not only did I not give him sufficient quantities of bears to fill up each column completely, I didn’t even have the heart to give him bears that decreased evenly! He desperately wanted his graph to make a tidy, organized slant with each column having one less bear than the last. So after I finally deduced the cause of all this horror, we made the graph his way and enjoyed it for a moment before moving on to the terrible and uneven world of graphing random piles of bears. They are so sweet and so very strange.
