Pelican Pouch or Dewlap?

 I am getting older and no part of me is getting younger.

Just ask Conner. He is nine years old and my grandson. His skin is pristine and without wrinkle. His eyes are keen. His powers of observation are laser-like.

I have forbidden him to look at me—for the rest of my natural life.

This weekend I caught him staring. I always know when he’s going to comment on some unfortunate aspect of my advancing decrepitude. He shuts his mouth. And he quits blinking. 

Sure enough.

“YaYa,” he began. 

“What, Conner?” I said, girding up my wrinkled forehead.

“You know what you could be for Halloween?”

No good could come of this, but I asked anyway. “Oh good grief! What? What could I be for Halloween?”

He leaned over, pinched the fat under my chin and said, “You could be a frog or a lizard. You know, one of those lizards with that flapping thing under their chin.”

“A dewlap? Are you saying that I could be a lizard with a dewlap for Halloween?”

He smiled a cherubic smile. “Yes.”

I sighed. “I was thinking more of a pelican with a pouch.”

His smile widened; his dimples flashed; his eyes twinkled. I searched his profile for a hint of a gene-induced double chin. Nothing.

Getting old is making me crazy. I thought I would be better at it or not care so much! But wow! It’s the worst and not because it limits your Halloween costume choices.

Stuff is starting to break, hang, and quit outright, all over the place. 

And if Conner isn’t happily reminding me about my dewlap trouble, it’s the television telling me that my ears are shot. 

Tinnitus. Ringing in my ears. I have it. I don’t know when I got it, but now I have it. The television commercial said that I might get tinnitus, and then I got it, which means that I got it from the television . . . or from Conner, telling me that I should be a frog for Halloween. Either way, it stinks.

Linda (Croak-Croak) Zern 

Write On and On and On

When I proudly handed a copy of my first children’s chapter book to my sister-in-law, she took it, looked at it, and said, “That’s a lot of writing.”

She was not overly enthusiastic. 

When I started sending funny, little, quirky emails to friends and family sixteen years ago (before blogging, before vlogging, before posting) another close relative said, “And stop sending me those damn silly emails.”

He was less than encouraging.

Rejection comes in all flavors. Yet . . . I write on and on and on.

Sixteen hundred words a day or as much as my line editor can safely edit without losing her mind. Over the years, I have learned a couple of tricks and tips and techniques. Here are five.

1) For Women Only or Overly Meaty Men: Write braless: There is nothing worse than writing for sixteen hundred words worth and then realizing that your boobs have turned blue from lack of oxygenated blood. It’ll throw you off. Trust me.

2) Thesaurus – Yes or No: That’s a big yes. My professor said to throw the thesaurus out. Whatever. I’m pretty sure that no one knows all the synonyms for the word “heave.” Editors get testy when you use the same word for stuff over and over again. So, if you need another word for heaved in the following sentence, “Her bosom heaved,” with a thesaurus you could write: Her bosom surged. Her bosom billowed. Her bosom huffed. See? How handy is that? 

3) Snack With Caution: Writers live at their keyboards. Potato grease in sour cream & onion chip dust can make the computer keys slick. Bad things can happen when your fingers slide around. Words like shoot and shot can come out in the wrong spots. That’s my theory. Poorly executed grammar, creepy spelling errors, upside down word choices, and dazzling typos are ALL due to slippery chip grease fingertip trouble. True story. True chronicle. True fiction.

4) Handling Massive Rejection: Eat more chips. Type more words. Tell more stories. 

5) Why Write? Because one day your ten-year-old granddaughter will hand you a story she’s written just for you about pumpkin seed fairies, and she’ll say, “When I grow up, I want to be a writer just like you, YaYa.” 


What I like best about being a writer and dreaming of having a wildly successful book, novel, tome, or opus (thesaurus alert) is that there can never be too many good ones. 

Good books are like potato chips; you can never stop with just one.

Linda (Keyboard) Zern