IWSG, Wild Swans, Being Thankful

Posting the First Wednesday of every month, the Insecure Writer's Support Group, is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. YOU can sign up HERE to participate.

Every month a question will be posed that may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Remember, the question is optional. You can write about anything that relates to your writing journey.

Let's give a warm welcome to our co-hosts:  PK Hrezo, Pat Garcia, SE White, Lisa Buie Collard, and Diane Burton! 

This month's question is: Are you a risk-taker when writing? Do you try something radically different in style/POV/etc. or add controversial topics to your work?

I've been working on and off on a book for almost 20 years that is radically different from anything I've ever thought about writing. I mean...writing an historical fantasy about Tibet on the eve of the Chinese invasion is pretty different from my usual tropical settings. I've done tons of research and I'm still very attached to the story, and those few who have read it think it's a good story. But will it ever get published? I don't know... I'm currently stalled out with edits and revising. 

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I hope everyone had a blessed and happy Easter!

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April already... Where did March go? 

Oh...got a new roof put on because of damage done to it during the hellacious hail storm of May 2020. 

Got my first COVID vaccine shot - Moderna. 

My sister turned 75, which is just weird... 

And, we lost two greats, Larry McMurtry and Beverly Cleary. But aren't we blessed to have the books they left behind?

Also in March I read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China...

...the heart-wrenching and horrifying biography by Jung Chang about her, her mother and grandmother who lived through Japanese occupation, WWII, the Chinese civil war, Moa's rise to power and the Cultural Revolution. BLOWN AWAY. I learned a whole lot about what was going on there. I think this is a book high school juniors and/or seniors should read as part of their history classes. I think it's a book everyone should read because how in hot f**k does a leader brainwash and indoctrinate a country of (at the time) nine hundred million people and get them to do the horrific things they did to each other? Because, you see, it wasn't a military force that terrorized the people. It was the people who terrorized the people. It was children who terrorized adults.

"An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history."

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Being Thankful

Today I'm thankful that I didn't grow up in China in the 1960s. Yes, the 60s were tumultuous and unsettling here in US (three assassinations, riots all over the place...) but I'll take that any day over what was happening in China. 

Today I'm also thankful for the rain we had in March. 

Not a lot, not enough, but at least some.

It's dry here, folks.

What are you thankful for? Every take a risk with your writing? Have you read Wild Swans? Do you have favorite McMurtry of Cleary book?