Moments ago I was lying there in my big feather bed, nursing my enfeeblement, when a knock comes at the door. Next thing I know, I’m nothing but this here chunk of nibbled meat in a jar watching my granddaughter lying there in bed chatting it up with a werewolf like she’s hanging with her beau at her coming out party.

NOTE: this is based off the reconstructed oral version of the tale according to Jack Zipes in his book The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood

I had it down to a science: bait ’em in with gingerbread walls and lollipop fence posts, cram them in the pantry, then back ’em when they ripen. Now, thanks to that clever, goody-goody Gretel and her dumb lout of a brother Hansel, my arms are sticks of shriveled jerky and the whole cottage will smell of burned hair before I’m done bakin’.

The gifted Jeanette Andromeda over at Horror Made drew a picture of it.  Go visit her blog at horrormade.com.  Do it NOW!

Jeanette Andromeda’s Rendering of this Two Sentence Fairy Tale.

The two-sentence version:

I swam for hours upstream against the raging current. I’d have made it, too, if it weren’t for that cuss of a bear and his wicked, yellow teeth at the waterfall.

And as a haiku:

Against the current
swim upstream passionately
fanged by a bear

Here is my first attempt at writing a story in two sentences:

I walk, for now undetected, with a mimic of their emotionless countenance set like chiseled flint on my face while the terror in my heart races  beneath the drab, gray, requisite coveralls.  The cold, unforgiving sidewalk provides the solution: fill the empty cavities with concrete, leaving only the minor inconvenience of alone performing all those lobotomies.

So I was poking around on the FA Forums to kill a few minutes, and I ran across this 3-month-old thread about how much description in writing, which caught my attention because I’d been thinking about it lately.  I thought this post by Ursa Maximus was really well put:

I think above all else, an author should stick to what they’re best at. Writing engaging visual description is probably one of the harder literary skills, so for most authors, less is more. But if you stubbornly want to get deep into it, there are definitely not just two types. There aren’t even just two ends to the spectrum of visual description.

None: The wolf stood in front of an office building.
The office building is not described, only named in a sentence about something else. It could look like anything. Who cares. This is not a choice to scoff at. It’s the easiest way to not screw up!

Vague: The office building was grand and imposing.
The office building has just an adjective or two flavoring it. Three artists would produce three very different pictures but maybe this is all the reader needs to know. The words do double duty, offering both visual and emotional content, while the text stays light and easy to read.

Factual: The office building was three stories tall, the façade mostly glass, situated in the center of a large parking lot.
Though far from complete as a description, everyone is imagining pretty much the same thing. Sterile though, no emotional content. If this goes on for paragraphs or if you do it too often, readers are gonna die of boredom.

Evocative: The office building looked cheap, like the kind of place you’d see on the news after a storm had torn off its roof.
No visual description is given but you can practically smell this place, with its damp air and moldy drywall. Hear the buzz of fluorescent lights. How clearly your vision comes through is a function of your skill as an author and the life experiences of your readers. So this type of description can easily miss the mark.

Metaphorical: The massive office building opened its mouth, consuming a stream of suited businessmen.
Who cares what this place looks like, it’s eating people to survive, man. Abolish the wage system. Prepare for readers to roll their eyes if you ham it up too badly.

Vivid: The office building stood, majestic, inconceivably tall, its upper floors cloaked in resplendent, gossamer clouds.
You can do great things by piling a bunch of multisyllabic words on top of one another until you evoke exactly want you want, both visually and emotionally. But again, you’re going to lose readers who just plain don’t know the words you’re using or, even worse, maybe you don’t know the words you’re using as well as you should.

I guess I shoot for a mixture of whatever seems right at the time, then edit aggressively until every single word is working in service of the story.

This:

One of the prices of modern life is that while we have more things than ever, we have less leisure than our grandparents did. When my grandfather left each day’s work as an inventor for Brach’s Candy Company at approximately 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, he left his work at work. He may have done a bit of design drawing or puttering at home, but the idea of being on-call 24/7 would have been obnoxious to him (family rumor has it that he had a lock on the inside of his workroom door and that even Mr. Brach had to knock). What our grandparents might have denounced as a kind of tyranny has become the modern way of life; when work calls, we answer, or face the consequences.

from this blog post: http://redcardigan.blogspot.com/2015/03/fathers-please-talk-to-fathers.html

is exactly my complaint.

I once took an anthropology class and it was pointed out that people living in hunter/gatherer cultures have more free time that we do.  Our “time saving” conveniences, far from saving us time, cause us to consume more and expect others to consume more.  We are saving ourselves into the temporal poor house.

A very good book that goes at this from a fictional narrative is Momo by Michael Ende.

It has been clear to me for some time that all evil that man and demon perpetrate is turned to some greater good by God.  He excels at that.  We do not always see it, but when I do, I am always amazed.

Ran across this quote:

… so also has the Devil, the father of death, been put to rout through the death of Christ.  He finds that the very same weapon he used to wield as the ready tool of his deceit has now become the mighty instrument of his own destruction.

I think this is a key component of why Jesus points out that it is necessary that salvation had to come through death.

Saw this on social media, posted by an atheist, presumably to take a stab at us Christians:

If you’re good because you fear hell, you’re not good.

To which I reply, “What is meant by ‘good’?”

This is the fundamental problem with attacking morality and then claiming there is nothing fixed from which morality derives.

You cannot claim to be “good” or “bad” if you do not fix morality in an immutable absolute.

So, after a little back and forth with the person, including some others chiming in to tell me to shut up and inform me how ignorant I am, it came down to this, I think: the intent of the post was the difference between “doing good” and “being good”.

Now that I find intriguing, because it begs a means of evaluating motive.  I have to give this some thought ….

Others said “good” depends on what evolution makes a social species do to support its survival, or maximize happiness while minimizing suffering.   But they didn’t all say it very nicely.  They certainly were not being “good” in my opinion.

But there is something deeper that gets at the heart of the matter.  Temptation is not something we can always, on our own, resist.  A healthy fear of consequences is often the extra anchor we need to remain firm in virtue.  Venerable Louis of Granada:

Without the fear of God the soul is like a ship without ballast; the winds of human or divine favor may sweep it to destruction.  Even if she is richly laden with virtue, she is in continual danger of being wrecked on the rocks of temptation, if she is not steadied by this ballast of the fear of God.

In a brief exchange in some comments, I had this to say which I wanted to save, so here it is:

The idea of the origin of a new species via random gene mutations and natural selection is hard pill to swallow. I don’t find evolutionary theory is anywhere near convincing: as a hypothetical speculation or as an evidential theory.

What I do see are several archetypical body forms under which the various species fit and similarities across archetypes. Does that mean that they all descended from a common base ancestry? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t think one can say much more about it than that they are similar. Maybe foxes are foxes simply because they have always been foxes and skunks are skunks because they have always been skunks.

What thrills me as I live out the diversity of species in my own life is that we are linked by the interdependence we share within the material universe. I have a flesh and bone body, just as foxes, owls, wolves, fish, and even skunks do :-). But unlike them, I have a capacity for appreciating the fact that we all do and for reasoning about it and for trying to make sense of it and for choosing what I do about it.

If I slip into my personal spiritual perspective on the matter, it hinges on the purpose of mankind as the steward of all that is. We feel connected because we are made to be connected. We are driven toward the natural world because we are made to nurture and protect it. We crave to bring solace to living things because we are made the bridge of their redemption. We are like it because we are made to share its destiny. I think the fact that we gravitate toward individual kinds has most to do with how we are individually made to be a part of that mission of stewardship than anything. That individuals would find a kind of transcendental connection to specific species — an affinity for and even maybe a disposition to share behavioral traits with — seems more a part of a primordial motivation toward a calling toward stewardship over a particular kind than it evidences a merger of spiritual typologies. What I mean is, maybe we feel connected with foxes, wolves, or skunks because we are made to feel connected with them.