Lianne's Little Corner

“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” The introduction to chapter 20 of my World History book, the chapter on World War I, uses these words to describe the mindset of folks going about their lives just before the outbreak of the Great War. Émile Coué, a French psychologist at the beginning of the 20 th century, had his patients say the above phrase over and over in order to propel themselves to self-healing. A similar belief to Coué’s mantra permeated Western thinking at the time. The booming progress of the 19 th century had caused the standard of living of many to rise. Scientific and technological discoveries made life easier, and advances in medicine had helped to cure or eradicate many of the diseases which had devastated the populations of the world. Truly, the world seemed to be getting “better and better” every day.  Palace of Nations in Geneva - Headquarters  of the failed League of Nations Then right smack dab in the middle of 19...

Have you ever looked back over your life and suddenly realized something really ugly about yourself? I have. Several times. I’ve known for some time that I can be a really irritating whiner. I don’t speak in a whiny voice. I’d slap myself. But when I look back on my younger days, and some of them weren’t so far away, I realize that I really did complain a lot. Some of it was just to God, some of it was also to my husband who has the patience of Job with me. And occasionally I whined to my girls or friends. But some of the worst whining I did was on Pinterest. Yep. Before we bought our home, I would pin these lovely garden ideas with a message that read something like this: Sigh…some day…if I ever get a house with a backyard. How pitiful is that? my backyard lawn  I’ve now been in my house with a backyard for over two years. That’s three summers of being off from school. We’ve done a little gardening. Put in some extra palm trees, some crape myrtles and mandevilles,...

Since I decided to start blogging again, I've had a monsoon of topics deluge my brain. I wrote down the ideas and have been working on making them take shape for the past couple of days. I think one of the reasons I didn't keep up on blogging when I started back to work is because it takes me so long to write a single post! So I'm stocking up ahead of time. Smart, if I must say so myself.  :) I don't know how many hits I'm getting since I lost whatever audience I had in 2008, but I'm going to try to post reasonably often. Yet I don't want to post just to post. That's rude. This afternoon when I sat down to get started, I opened an email from my boss with a link to the best retelling of the Three Little Pigs I've ever seen. As a former English/literature teacher and current history teacher, I truly appreciated this. It's a little long if you're in a hurry, about 8 minutes and 23 seconds, but if you do have the time, and you appreciate a litt...

Have you ever wondered about the woman from da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa painting? Who was she? Theories abound and range from a da Vinci self-portrait, to his mother, to a princess, to an unknown courtesan. Self-portrait, you ask? But wasn't daVinci a man, and isn't Mona Lisa a woman? There are some who look at Lisa and think she has masculine facial features. I didn’t think so, but after learning a little more about beauty standards in 15 th and 16 th century Italy, it made a little sense.  Notice the wide forehead  Lisa has a normal forehead. No bangs, but not so wide that it looks as if she has a receding hair line. Women of the Renaissance wanted wide foreheads, and if they didn’t have one naturally, which most women didn’t, they would pluck out the hair around their faces in order to get that look. My research tells me that hair was a bad thing for women. They would often pluck their eyebrows either completely or to a very fine line. While no eyebrows i...

So...on to part 2. :) After a family trip over spring break to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, I knew I wanted a story set there. And so I began with a new focus. I plotted a story and fleshed out my characters, wrote the first three chapters, and sent my proposal off to the same fighting editor from the big name company. It was a no. And then we were on the move again. Hubby was a full-fledged hospital chaplain, and he applied for a job in Homestead, PA. We still don't know exactly what happened, but Homestead, PA, turned out to actually be Homestead, FL. This  journey moved us to a place that took more adjustment time than either Dallas or Brazil had taken. Homestead, FL, is about 20 miles below Miami. No hills. No beach. Two seasons – hot and hotter. (Does God have a sense of humor or what? I really don’t like hot weather, so Homestead, PA would have been perfect!) At the time we moved, there were few tall, shade providing trees in the Homestead area since everyone was stil...

As you can see by the title of this post, I began it with the intention of chronicling my writing journey. What was supposed to be a simple blog post turned into a short story of over 5k words. So I should probably label this "My bio with a strong emphasis on how writing has played a role in forming me into the person I am." But that would be too long of a title, so I'll just keep the original. So here goes. :) It's long, so...  I’ve been a writer as far back as I can remember. In my earlier years, I didn’t realize that’s what it was. They called me a day dreamer, a kid who would not pay attention in class, who seemed always to be somewhere else. In those days, at least where I grew up as a missionary kid in Brazil, no one was diagnosed with attention deficit problems. Good thing, too, because I probably would have been thrown into that category, and it would have followed me around for the rest of my life. I paid attention. I just didn’t pay attention to the thi...