I’ve been nursing a bad back the last couple of weeks, not going out much, except to doctors and oral surgeons, but I don’t feel guilty for lying around because I’ve been working, even though no one can tell it to look at me. I’ve been getting ready for the SCBWI Southern Breeze SpringMingle conference in Atlanta this weekend.

And getting ready for a conference means not only reading over my stuff, and deciding what I might want to pitch, should the opportunity arise. It also means researching the speakers to see what they have written, represented, or edited.

So a couple of days ago I checked to see what Kirby Larson had written, because I’d never read anything by her. She wrote a Newbery Honor book, Hattie Big Sky. Hmm. Why had I never read it? I clicked over to Amazon and found that Hattie is a historical. And…historicals are not my favorite books. I loved the Little House books, though, and Hattie seemed to be in the same vein…. And Kirby would be speaking at the conference. I needed to at least read the first chapter of Hattie Big Sky to see if she could write.

Oh, my.

I was sucked in completely. Downloaded the book onto my Kindle. Read it that evening. Went back and downloaded her next two novels right away. Read The Dear America: The Fences Between Us yesterday, and I will read The Friendship Doll today.

I defend my investment in money and time, this way: This is work. We have to read. It makes us better writers. We have to read books written by speakers at conferences, if we want to be able to speak sensibly to people we meet at those places. And we have to read award-winning books, if we want to know what’s going on in the industry.

The fact that I loved the books doesn’t mean I’m not working.

I once told my pastor that I didn’t feel called to write (by God). I felt that writing was a guilty pleasure. And he said, “Oh, you’re one of those.”

“One of whats?”

“One of those hair-shirt people. You don’t think you’re working unless you hate it.”

Wow! You mean we don’t have to kneel on broken glass and wear hair shirts to pay penance for writing novels?

I’ve heard of various authors saying that when their wives think they’re staring out the window or napping on the couch, they’re really working. And I think the day-dreaming part of writing novels is an important and fun part of the process. But I guess in the end I’m a reader first and a writer second, because reading someone else’s dream, full of people I can’t help but love, is even more fun than dreaming up the stories myself.

So, my dear blog readers, I’m sorry for neglecting you a bit. But I HAVE been working here. Don’t let the jammies and hot chocolate and stack of novels at my elbow, fool you.

What about you? What books have you read recently, which made you remember why you wanted to be a writer in the first place?

This gal caught my eye for a couple of reasons. One is that she’s a wonderful public speaker. I can learn from watching her speak. In many ways, she’s a better public speaker than I am and that means she can teach me in this area. The second thing that struck me about her, though, was that her message is not a good one.

There’s a reason we say that throwing a tantrum or failing to exercise self-control is childish behavior. We say that because children, as they grow, learn to exercise self-control. And they should learn to exercise self-control. When adults fail to control themselves, they are acting in a way that is acceptable for children, but unacceptable for adults. When we tell adults they are acting childish we don’t mean that there is anything shameful about children acting like children. We mean that there is something shameful in grown men acting like small children.

Adora goes on to say that teachers should learn from children, but she never tells us why. She says because we don’t trust children, we restrict them—we restrict their internet usage, for instance—and we shouldn’t restrict children because that’s what fearful, control-freak totalitarian regimes do.

Well, sure but it’s also what loving parents do. We restrict children to protect them while they are learning how to exercise self-control and while they are learning how to think critically.

Adora goes on to tell us that adults underestimate children’s ability. When her mother tried to help her get published, they were disappointed to find that one children’s publishers didn’t publish works written by children. (I’m sorry, but even we adults have to fight the urge to believe that just because our mothers love our work, that doesn’t mean it’s fit for public consumption.) And finally she tells us that we need to turn children into better adults than we have been. This is how progress happens.

She sums up her talk by repeating her main points:

• We need to listen and learn from kids
• We need to trust kids
• We need to expect much from kids
• So that we can make our children into better adults than we are

OK I don’t really disagree with her points. What rubs me to the wrong way is the emphasis she puts on them. As if children, just because they are children, are somehow wiser than adults. This is what the sitcoms teach. Dad is a dolt, Mom is smarter than Dad, and the kids are smartest of all. Once upon a time we believed that Father Knows Best, but we had a big knee-jerk reaction to that. Has anyone seen the Flicka movie that came out a couple of years ago, and compared it to the one with Roddy McDowell?  How about the remakes of Cheaper by the Dozen (the movie that made poor Steve Martin fall off the pedestal I had him on) and Yours Mine and Ours?

Those three remakes speak volumes about the differences between the way many people in our society used to view children and parents and discipline and teaching and wisdom and right and wrong, and the way they view those things now.

I think Adora, rather than lecturing adults on how they need to listen to and learn from children, might do better if she lectured children on how there is some wisdom in saying that children should be seen and not heard. Regardless of age, we need to listen and learn before we can teach. Children, most often, have not listened and learned long enough to be able to teach adults.

Generally speaking.

Yes, children do sometimes see that the emperor has no clothes. Yes, children are sometimes right. Children sometimes see truth before adults do.

And that’s what matters. Whoever is right should do the teaching, no matter what the person’s age is. If Adora is right she should teach. If she’s wrong she should listen and learn. It has nothing to do with age and everything to do with knowledge and wisdom, which are often gained by way of experience.

So…have any of you seen those three movies—the originals and the remakes? What’s your favorite sitcom and what does it say about authority/discipline/children?

One of the things that most made me want to pursue publication was that you can write from home. I had a disabled husband who needed care and two small children, when I decided to really buckle down and complete a novel and try to sell it.

OK my dear husband has since passed away and my sweet children have grown up and I still haven’t sold a novel, but that doesn’t change the fact that you can write from home. And I still love that.

Who cares if you get paid for your art? Artists have almost always needed patrons to support them while they created things no one wanted to pay for. What’s so great about writing is not that you make money doing it, obviously. It’s that you can do what you want, and you can do it from home.

God has given me the perfect set-up. I stay with my mother all day. She pays me to take care of her. I’m charging her a sixth of what a nursing home would take, and I love her more than nursing home workers would love her. She is allowed to eat what she wants, when she wants, instead of having to be on someone else’s schedule. So I feel good about taking her money. I feel like she’s getting value for her money.

And me? I have the great good fortune of being allowed to sit home writing with only a few interruptions during the day.

So I should be able to a better job of blogging, I guess. But I’ve been taking sick days the last couple of weeks. Painful, painful dental work, and I threw my back out, too. Lots of pain. Lots and lots of pain. And no pain pills. I’m in agony.

So I had to blog about it, because…we are supposed to write what we know.

Pain. I know pain.

But…I’ve managed to finish a proposal for a new book—a synopsis and the first four chapters—even with the pain. This is the thing about writing fiction: I can’t really get into writing nonfiction or working on blog posts when I’m in pain, but fiction works even in pain. It’s just so much fun that it feels like a distraction instead of feeling like work. And since no one is paying me for my fiction and I don’t have to turn anything in on any particular day, it really isn’t work. It’s all play.

Is there anything in the world that is as much fun as writing?

Do you find that those who are closest to you, don’t know you? Do you have family members who don’t support your writing?

A prophet in his hometown is without honor, the Bible says. Among his own household, and with his own family, he is not honored.

Maybe this is on my mind because I had so much family around for the holidays. My family supports my writing. They think I’m talented. They like to read my stories. My father was the only one in my family who wasn’t supportive, but he never supported any of his children, poor fellow. He’s gone now, anyway, freed from his depression and the deep sense of shame he felt over himself and all his progeny, so I’m left with my mother who thinks I’m the smartest person who ever lived and my siblings and my children who like my stories or who are willing to lie to me, at least, if they don’t like them.

Still, I’m starting to write a nonfiction book and I’m thinking that I’m not going to be honored in my own family.

When Jesus says in his own house a prophet is without honor, he’s saying this because the people in his hometown think they know him. He’s a man just like any other man. They know his mother and his brothers and his sisters. He is no one special. He is no prophet.

But they don’t really know him.

In Jesus’s case he is dishonored, not because he’s a hypocritical sinner. He wasn’t.

Yes, he was often accused of sin. The religious leaders of the day accused him of blaspheming. They accused him of being a glutton and a drunkard. Worst of all, they accused him of being in league with Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, the Dung God. This was such a low cut. They were accusing him of being nothing better than a god who hung out with the flies on the dung piles.

They didn’t like him so they assumed God didn’t like him either. They saw him as an arrogant usurper. He was young and he dared to scold them. As if he knew better than they did. As if he was worthy of untying their sandals. They took great offense.

Their perceptions were faulty, though.  Jesus was no sinner.

I can’t make the same claim.

So I’m wondering how my family will react to my nonfiction book. Not that I’m going to include them in the book. But what will they say when they see me giving advice? As if anyone should listen to anything I say. I am, after all, the youngest in the family, and arguably the most messed up. If Jesus, the sinless one, was attacked when he said hard things, how much more easily will people want to knock me down a peg or two, when I start dishing out advice?

The people who know me will find my nonfiction book laughable, no doubt. They’ll know what a hypocrite I am. Because if my book is to be any good I have to communicate truth even though I fall short of practicing what I preach every day. I have to say, “Do what I say, not what I do.”

I feel a little arrogant, trying to give people advice. As if I’m in a wheelchair, telling physically fit people how to dance. And yet, I believe it’s possible for crippled people to learn from the injuries, and they might even see things from their vantage point that others can’t see as they rush about on their two legs.

What about you? Are any of you writing non-fiction? Do you have your family in mind when you write? How does your family react to your writing, either fiction or nonfiction?

The way we view children in this country has evolved over a period of a hundred and fifty years . My grandfather had to quit school and go to work when he was ten years old. He had to help support his family. Today, child-labor laws don’t allow this. Hiring a child is illegal for the most part, and education is mandatory.

Mandatory education is a good thing, we probably all agree.

Except….

When you make education mandatory, children are apt to no longer see it is a privilege. Instead they might think of it as an intrusion on their time. They’d rather be playing video games. (Or are my children different from other kids?)

So it’s not just society’s view toward children that has changed over the last hundred years. Children’s view of society, and their place in it, has changed. We hear about an entitlement mentality and I can see some of this in the teens I know. Many of them seem to see themselves as people who should be served, rather than as members of the family who need to work hard and contribute to the welfare of the family.

We don’t see boys and girls delivering newspapers and babysitting very much anymore. Our children are busy with homework or organized sports. Or with video games, and texting.

And even for older children…it seems that work is being delayed longer and longer I hear more these days about parents putting their children through college or about student loans than I hear of children working night jobs to put themselves through college.

Now, I don’t mean to bemoan the loss of the good old days. There is much about those days that wasn’t good. I’ve read the horrific stories of the children forced to work in the cotton mills or the coal mines. I know that children are vulnerable members of society and they need advocates to speak for them.

And I don’t mean to tell you that I’m a good mother and my children have learned to work hard and I have done things right. That simply isn’t true. There is a huge gap between what I believe and what I do, and my children are paying the price for my lame parenting practices.

But what I’d like to ask you is this: Have we, as a society, overcorrected when it comes to child labor? Have we overreacted to the horrors of children working as slaves in the mills and the mines and gone from viewing our children as people who need to help support the family, who need to sacrifice for their brothers and sisters, to viewing them as people we must serve and coddle until they are well into their thirties?

And a couple of bonus questions: How does society’s view of children affect the way we write for children today and how does it affect reader choices? Are thirty-year-olds reading YA books because they still feel like children?