Under Lavender Skies

It has been a while since I posted a short story but here we are!  This story is in the novel I am writing, which I finished the first draft of a couple weeks ago.  The two main children go back and forth telling this story in their downtime.  It may just be a story at the time, but then when it comes to an end, it turns out to mean much more for them both as they battle with wondering if a decision they made much earlier was the right one.  They answer that question indirectly by discussing the short story that they told each other.   Those characters told the story in the third person, but I switched it to the first person here.  I did that to practice writing in the first person for a story that I haven't worked on in a while but I am hoping to go back to soon.   Don't forget to stay until the end and answer a question I have for you all in the comments!    — — — — — The woods are perfect.  The perfect in-between of ...

A while ago I wrote a post about the 10,000-hour rule.  A study that challenged a book that said you have to practice or work on something (the study used violin students) for 10,000 hours to become a professional.  The study discovered that that was not completely true, some students were at a much higher level than others who had been working even longer.  A lot more comes into play for success than just practice.  You can read the post here:  https://under-the-lavender-skies.blogspot.com/2020/07/100000-hour-rule-fact-or-fiction.html I found another study about success called the Relative Age Effect.  It has to do with sports and when the children's birthdays are in correlation to the cut-off times for sports and discovered that an earlier birth is typically associated with increased physical ability.  Now, this is a study that can only be tested with sports since they have designated cut-off times but what it illustrates, in the end, is more than ju...

Today I will be telling you something you didn't know you needed to know.  My family has so many quotes, if you know us you know that we practically talk in movie and book quotes.  Did you know that lots of old quotes such as: "Curiosity killed the cat," "Rome wasn't built in a day," etc. are actually quite old (we're talking hundreds of years old) and, like language in general, have been changed and altered over the years?   Rome Wasn't Built in a Day but it Burned in One This is the oldest quote of the bunch, and how old it is amazed me.  The earliest documentation of this quote was in a medieval French poem, not by a Roman or Italian citize n but by a  12th-century cleric in the court of Phillippe of Alsace.  Later in 1538, it was said by John Heywood, an English author, and playwright.  He was the first to make the quote more wel l known and popular and also extended.  First, it was said as "Rome wasn't built in a day,"  but John He...

When I went through and made a list of the most memorable books in 2020, I realized that this list seems kind of random.  These are not necessarily my favorite books, just books that I noticed something special about, something memorable if you will.  I truly do not have one singular favorite book, and it's also rare for me to specifically dislike a book, which is why I only have three books that I was really disappointed in.  The Most Memorable Books I Read in 2020 The Street by Ann Petry This was the first book I thought of and I loved it in the most unexpected way.  Honestly, I picked up this book because the cover was stunning, I read the book synopsis and it sounded interesting enough.  It was the first time I had heard about it and I am a little surprised.  The writing all throughout this book was absolutely beautiful and I enjoyed it all because of it.  The ending surprised me, it wasn't exactly a good ending and I didn't want it to end, somethi...