“Spreading your wings in a perplexing world”
September, 2017                                                                                       James Hurd      

 Contents

• New blog article: “California Luau”
• How to purchase Wingspread: Of Faith and Flying
• Writer’s Corner
• Book and Film reviews
• E-zine subscription information
• Quotable quotes

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New blog article: California Luau

 Shawn wondered if Rod would be here. Of course he would be here; Rod had to be here, mainly because Sally was here. Rod was barely 5’8” tall (Shawn was a full six feet), and had just completed his first year at Fullerton Junior College. What he lacked in good looks he made up in wit and confidence. Shawn was certain Sally looked at Rod as older, more mature, a man with a plan, already in college and on his way to a skyscraper corner office. How could Shawn compete with that? Like Shawn, Sally had just graduated from Orange High School. Read more here: https://wordpress.com/post/jimhurd.com/1081

(*Request: Please share with others, and leave a comment on the website after reading the article. Thanks.)

Buy James Hurd’s Wingspread: A Memoir of Faith and Flying  How childhood (Fundamentalist) faith led to mission bush-piloting in South America—and Barbara. Buy it here:  https://jimhurd.com/home/  (or at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc.)

See pics here related to Wingspread: Of Faith and Flying: http://www.pinterest.com/hurd1149/wingspread-of-faith-and-flying/

 Writers’ Corner

Writer of the Month: John Grisham. A Time to Kill (1989), The Firm (1991), The Pelican Brief (1992), The Client (1993), The Rainmaker (1995). A novelist who writes criminal and legal stories. Some of his novels are very long (e.g., 250,000 words). Good page-turners. Driving narrative.

Book of the Month: John Grisham, The Chamber (1994). A longer novel, but engaging. An attorney attempts to save a condemned death row murderer from the gas chamber.

Word of the Month:   In medias res: “In the middle of things.” The cure for writer’s block. The cure for “where do I start?” In the middle of things. Try starting just before, or just after, the crisis or climax in your piece. Just jump in—in media res.

Question of the Month: Where does the reader’s mind naturally place emphasis?

Last month’s quiz: When do you use a hyphen, an en dash, and an em dash?
Answer: The hyphen joins two modifying nouns (half-pint bottles). The en dash is used for page numbers (Pp. 2-6). The em dash, the longest, shows an abrupt change of thought within a sentence (He jumped—actually fell—from the tree). Not all text programs support all three of these dashes.

Tip of the Month: Try mixing action and dialogue to make your dialogue more believable. Judy was eating her hamburger. Finally she said, “I don’t think I’ll go.” She popped the last bit of bun in her mouth.

The Great Mix-up
We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!
To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary.
In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.
If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used.
It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don’t give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.
When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.
When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.
When it doesn’t rain for a while, things dry UP.
One could go on and on, but I’ll wrap it UP, because now my time is UP, so……

It’s time to shut UP!

Book and Film Reviews
John Grisham, The Chamber [as in “gas chamber”]. A typical Grisham adventure in criminology and law. Fast-moving narrative. The lone attorney for the accused holds a secret incentive to defend him. Will he be successful?

Movie—Dunkirk. A docudrama of the small civilian boats trying to rescue thousands of allied soldiers from the coast of France. Spitfires defending hundreds of small boats offshore that are taking fire from German Messerschmitts.

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 Quotable quotes

Economic wisdom

♠   The world will always need economists, if for no other reason than to make meteorologists look good.      Tim Essenberg

♠   Inflation is like sin; every government denounces it and every government practices it.       Sir Frederick Keith-Ross

♠   An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.    Laurence J. Peter

♠   To err is human; to get paid for it is divine.    William Freund, economic consultant

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