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I can’t believe I haven’t hit this one yet – today’s top 10 is a list of my favorite characters from novels, in no particular order:

1) Owen Meany from Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany: “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. ”

2) Samuel Hamilton from Steinbeck’s East of Eden: “I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he’d manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his discomfort.  They’re the last things we’ll give up.”

3) Lucy Pevensie from Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

4) David Copperfield from Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

5) Kincade from Duncan’s The Brother’s K: “Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength.”

6) Holden Caulfield from Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

7) Gandalf from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “End? No, the journey doesn’t end here.  Death is just another path, one that we all must take.  The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it…white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

8) Albus Dumbledore from Rowling’s Harry Potter Series: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

9) Cathy Trask from Steinbeck’s East of Eden (incredibly, mind-numbingly evil but so well written) She is introduced by Steinbeck this way: “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. . . . They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins.”

10) Lord Peter Wimsey from Sayers’s The Nine Tailors: “A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”  Oops.

So who are your favorite characters ever (no quotations required)?

What types of thoughts are controlling your mind?

Do you spend most of a day’s quiet time arguing  in your head?  Do you talk to yourself with the same or greater kindness than you afford others, or do you belittle and demean yourself with your thoughts?

My uncle Mike and I recently posted something on meditation on his blog: basically, everyone meditates. So what do you meditate on?  What’s controlling your mind?

If your mind is being controlled by the parts of your life that you feel are destroying you, those things will win out. Addictions that are causing you pain; behaviors that leave damaged people in your wake; choices that send you reeling, hurt, confused: if these parts of your life control your mind, then an emotional or physical death is not far off.

Another one of my uncles, Jonas Beiler, told me of how his childhood taught him to embrace one idea of himself: stupid Amish man.  You see, he was dyslexic before learning disabilities were diagnosed, and since he attended a school with non-Amish classmates he often heard teachers or fellow students refer to him as the “stupid Amish man.”

As he grew older, he started referring to himself that way, partly in jest.  Then someone helped him to understand that a person often becomes what they tell themselves they already are.

There are other forces that can control our minds, forces that won’t lead to death: love is one. Joy, peace, and  patience are others.  Being kind, good and faithful are options. How about gentleness or self-control?  It takes discipline.  Often times it takes a good counselor (or psychologist, or psychoanalyst), but if you can allow these forces to control your mind, they will lead you to life and peace.

What’s controlling your mind?  Have you discovered practices that allow forces like love, joy and patience to take over your mind?

Rom 8:6; Gal 5:17-26

Adam Tucker has been kind enough to include me in his Friday Author Question and Answer post.  You can check it out HERE. Now for the continuing story of our search for a house, back in March of this year.

It was freezing cold and rainy the day we found out we were chosen to rent the house. When I told Maile we were moving I think she cried, at least a little.  But then again, she cries over most things.  Still, it was exciting.

We moved into the house, stepping over patches of old snow drifts that remained from the blizzard we’d had a few weeks before.  But as the snow melted we found more things to be excited about – a patio with a fire pit; all kinds of rose bushes and early flowers pushing their way up through the cold dirt; paths through the woods.  This was our new start.  We were officially on our own again.

I remember the first day I walked up the stone drive to the large, three-bay garage. The wooden steps creaked as I walked up to the workshop.  I put together my table, the same one I had worked from while we lived in England, and in Virginia.  I looked out the window, stared into the woods.

I felt very much like I was about to do something very special, create something amazing, begin a life I would never want to end.

But after about thirty minutes the cold rendered my fingers numb and I could barely type, so I had to take a rain check on writing in my workshop.  I headed for Angela’s Cafe and a nice cup of hot chocolate.

This is what happens when you gain the courage to leave your basement. Leave that semi-comfortable place and take a risk.  Of course, you might have to face failure – there’s a very good chance we will run out of money; I might have to get a part-time job to pay the bills.  When my kids get a little older they might not like the fact that we live in such a small place or can’t buy all the nice things they want.

They might not like that they get dropped off at their friends’ houses in a 1990 GMC Safari.

That’s okay, though.  This is the journey we’ve chosen.  And I’m hoping that they’ll appreciate the heritage I leave with them, even if it’s not accompanied by a huge inheritance.

To read the very first segment of this story, which tells about how Maile and I made the decision to move from Virginia to Pennsylvania (and into my parent’s basement) click HERE.

Today is Sam’s first birthday.  He is our youngest and most likely the last child we will ever have, so he will always be the baby.

He is old enough that we can start to see firm glimpses of his personality – he’s a softy (likes to cuddle) with a firm sense of what he wants (ie screams bloody murder when he doesn’t get what he wants – working with him on that one!).   He is not a follower and is not naturally afraid of things (he loves to crawl around in the grass and even on the stone driveway, if that’s what required for him to get where he wants to be).

If you’ll recall, I named him on my own with no input from my wife (which you can read about HERE).  He was named after Samuel Hamilton from Steinbeck’s East of Eden, my 2nd favorite character of all time.  He was also named for all the Samuels and Sam Smuckers that have come before him (quite a few in our family).  I like that his name will some day provide him with some sense of a bond with his heritage.

He will not remember this birthday. Probably not even the next two or three birthdays.  But I will always remember them. I will especially remember on every on of his birthdays how he had a single-artery umbilical cord when he was in Maile’s belly and how we had to have him monitored almost weekly.  I will remember how when he came out his cord was in a perfect knot, drawing oohs and aahs and even a few hesitant tears from the midwife as she said, “well, you’ve got your miracle baby.”

And in the memory of his birth I remember each of our other three children’s arrivals.  And so the cycle continues.

Happy birthday, Sam.

By the time March rolled around this year, my wife, our four kids and I had been living in my parent’s basement for about five months. And while I had landed enough writing projects to keep us afloat for a while, nothing felt very certain.  Well, one thing felt certain: as long as I was trying to write for a living, we would never have enough security to get our own place.

So we just kept on living life. During the day I went to a cafe to write and Maile did her best to be a mom in a basement.  This is not easy (the mom part – the cafe part is relatively pain free).

Then one day it hit me: we had to take another leap. Problem: I was getting tired of leaping.  It seemed that no matter how many times I exhibited my faith in God, he kept asking us to take another leap.  This was getting kind of old.

Yet there was also something exhilarating about it.  Especially since every time we leaped, solid ground kept appearing under our feet.  None of it really made sense.  But a part of me was starting to enjoy the excitement.

This is where I learned a valuable lesson – you have to get out of your basement. What’s your basement?  What’s keeping you confined simply because your scared or worried? Would a change require too much faith, too much self-belief, too much risk?  We could have lived with my parents for a long, long time.  I suppose some day they would have kicked us out, but we could have really drug that on for years.  Then we got brave.  We got kind of stupid.  We decided to leave the basement.

So we got on the internet and found three places we liked.  The first one smelled like dog.  Wait – it didn’t just smell like dog, it smelled like five or six dogs had lived there, on their own, decorating the house with their hair, and in the end blowing themselves up in it.  The second place was really cute but the rooms were tiny.  Our queen-size bed would have had to be shoehorned in.

The realtor could sense our disappointment.  She said there was one other place – it was a three-bedroom, kind of small but in the country.  At first we ruled it out because it was a double-wide mobile home – Maile’s mom thought the next storm would sweep us off the face of the planet.  We almost didn’t go look, but then we thought, what the heck.

It was perfect.  The house was fine and in very good shape, but that’s not what we loved.  What we loved was the fact that it was surrounded by fields and woods.  There were two acres for the kids to run around on.  A garden.  A stream running along the back yard.  And included in the rent was a huge barn, and I could set up my office in the workshop above it.  No neighbors for miles (or at least none that we could see) – we had lived in townhouses for the previous six years, so we were excited to have some space.

One problem.  Someone else was interested.  And they probably had a real job.  And real income.  And when asked for annual salary figures, they probably didn’t mumble something along the lines of, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe mmmmfffpfff a month.”

So we had found the place we wanted to live, but we had to wait.

To read the very first segment of this story, which tells about how Maile and I made the decision to move from Virginia to Pennsylvania (and into my parent’s basement) click HERE.

October marks the first annual Fireside Writer’s Conference in Gap, Pennsylvania. You can check out the details HERE. The following are the top 10 reasons you should consider attending:

1) Writing is so often accomplished in isolation – this will be a great opportunity to spend a night and a day sharing ideas and experiences with other writers.

2) Four meals are included, and the menu will be entirely put together and prepared by the famous chef Maile (this has not been discussed with her in great detail so I would appreciate if you would not mention it should you see her in passing).

3) The funniest guy I know, Bryan Allain, will be sharing his wisdom on how to get your blog from 50 – 500 followers.  At last check he was nearing 800 followers, with 6000+ unique hits per month.  The conference will also roughly coincide with the release of his new e-book (am I allowed to mention this Bryan, or is it still top secret?).

4) Ever find it difficult to get one hour of uninterrupted thinking time in?  Come to the conference and you’ll have the opportunity to wander through a beautiful, natural setting, contemplating life and writing.  Depending on the neighboring Amish farmers, this may or may not include the wafting scent of freshly spread manure.  I can’t make any promises either way.

5) Andi Cumbo will be speaking about the beauty and pain of honesty on the page, and how this relates to your identity as a writer. She’ll also be mingling with us for the remainder of the conference.  Where else can you go for this?

6) Sometimes we need to get out of our own little patterns of life, do something different, see the world from a different perspective.

7) Ken Mueller has more insight into social media than anyone I know, with a refreshing new vision for how we go about putting ourselves out there.  He’ll be talking about how a writer can utilize social media and stay true to their identity as an artist.

8) Smores.

9) A local bookstore will be offering some of the best books on writing known to man – the ones you usually have to order because they’re not in stock.  At the Fireside Writer’s Conference we’ll have some for you to peruse, and we’ll also make some time to talk about which ones have been the most helpful for each of us.

10) Pennsylvania in October is one of my favorite place-times on earth.

I hope to see you there.  If you have any questions, feel free to email me at shawnsmucker (at) yahoo (dot) com