Three dozen day 12/12/12

I'm calling today "three dozen day," in honor of the date 12/12/12. It will be a long while until we have another symmetrical date like today's . We'll of course have 1/3/13 and a palindrome, 3/1/13 next year, but that's not quite as pretty as the date patterns we've had going for the past eleven years, starting with 01/01/01.

To celebrate, here are three sets of a dozen goodies for you:

A dozen quotes (from yours truly)

"...truth is beautiful, no matter where you find it."
(From a guest post for Tricia O'Brien, "Make your stories sing")

"If you wait for inspiration to strike or writing conditions to be optimal, you’ll never finish anything. You have to keep chipping away at projects on good days and bad."
(From my interview on Read Review Smile)

"Gratitude is light in the darkness, friends. It is a powerful weapon against despair, a powerful creator of joy." (From "Thanks and Joy")

"A funny thing about listening to fear--it takes away your power to contradict it."
(From "Leaving Fear, Grasping Hope")

"Hope comes from being like the Magi--keeping an eye on the far horizon, watching for something good. We lose hope when unhappy things in the immediate environment consume our vision and we stop regularly scanning the horizon." (From "Following Your Star")

"...the stuff of creativity--joy, life energy, what have you--is like manna in the wilderness. It is a gift that must be gathered fresh daily." (From "Living Forward")

"The past doesn't stay in the past. It always has implications for the present and future."
(From "I've Got a History")

"Remember that where you come from shapes who you are."
(From an interview with Melissa Sarno, "Let Setting Emerge from Character")

"Real attraction, real magnetism is more deeply layered than finding someone hot. It grows out of finding something admirable in another person that resonates with who you are and want to be."
(From a guest post for Laura Pauling: "Romance is more than 'hotness'")

"The writers who do non-preachy well...succeed because the way faith deeply shapes how the characters think...around the idea of rescue and redemption, of deeply needing help themselves."
(From interview with Karen Akins, "Edgy? Clean? Writing across genre divides")

"Despite the eye-rolling, daughters know they’re valued when their dads don’t let just any guy get close to them."
(From a guest post for Tyrean Martinson, "Why Dads Matter")

"One of the most lovely things about literature is how it opens a window into other worlds, gives us a chance to understand other perspectives by living inside them for just a little while."
(from guest post for Leigh T. Moore, "Getting Real About Faith...and Doubt")

A dozen albums that inspired Never Gone

The Hurting, by Tears for Fears
Requiem, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Disintigration, by The Cure
Once Upon a Time, by Simple Minds
Macalla, by Clannad
Avalon, by Roxy Music
Mercury Falling, by Sting
Fields of Gold, by Sting
Hey Jude, by The Beatles
Optical Race, by Tangerine Dream
Thirtysomething Soundtrack
The Best of Simon and Garfunkel, by Simon and Garfunkel

A dozen British slang terms from Never Gone

barking mad / barmy / blimey / bollocks / crikey / fancy / gadding about / Geordie / git / hobgoblin / nutter / peaky

More chances to win

I also have a few giveaways going on. If you'd been hoping to win a copy of Never Gone and haven't yet, check out Read Review Smile (2 copies up for grabs) and Day 6 of  Fifteen Days of Christmas giveaway at Ramblings of a Book Junkie!

How will you celebrate Three Dozen Day? 

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Shh...it's a secret blog hop

Welcome to the next stop on the "Shh...it's a secret" blog hop. Participants can share a story about a secret pact they have made, a friend they are close to, or a close knit group that has helped them through hard times.

The Pub Pact (or the Anti-Saloon League gets some sense)

Welcome back to Warwickshire, long-lost cousin!

I’d been dreaming of going to England since the day Mom read me the story of Lucy Pevensie hiding in a wardrobe and landing in Narnia. Not only was England magical, but also, according to my Dad, our ancestral home. Though my Webster ancestor left Warwickshire for Connecticut in the 1600s, I was certain that going back would feel like arriving home. It would be a struggle to get there, of course. As the youngest of five, I knew college alone would be financially difficult for my family, and studying abroad? That would be above and beyond—something I’d have to make happen for myself. For seven years I worked a string of terrible jobs, from Avon lady to foam-head carnival character to janitor to discount store cashier. My college study abroad experience, I believed, would be my Cinderella-at-the-ball experience.

What a starry-eyed kid I was.

My college friends who’d spent a semester abroad before me gave me lists of things you couldn’t buy there (back in the pre-Internet era). I loaded up on Reese’s cups, a giant jar of Jiff and some favorite toiletries and considered myself ready.

I hadn’t prepared at all for the possibility that culture clashes would be deeper than a British dislike of peanut butter. My rudest awakening was discovering the program I’d joined, run by a consortium of Christian colleges, would be plopping us into a secular school—one with a culture built around pub crawling.

Social lubricant or demon drink?

I was old enough to drink in the US and well above legal age in Britain. But having grown up in a teetotaler household and spending 3.5 years on a dry campus, I found the idea of binge drinking a bit scary. And as hard as I’d worked to get to the land of castles, cathedrals and magic wardrobes, pub crawls weren’t high on my list of great ways to spend your time and money in England. This left me at total loss of how to not die of loneliness while my classmates went off to get wasted most nights of the week.

Fortunately, I wasn’t quite so alone. I soon discovered that about half of the other American students in our group of 18 weren’t that keen to binge drink. We quickly banded together to make the most of our time abroad actually traveling beyond the strip of pubs near campus. We shared the task of researching hostels and bus schedules, and had some great daytrips and weekends away together.

Early on, it became clear we all took our faith pretty seriously. Soon we were debating American Christianity’s taboo on drinking and whether it’s actually Biblical. Back home, there didn’t seem to be much room for debate on the topic, so it was really refreshing to re-examine my upbringing in light of another culture and try to find some middle ground between total abstinence and total debauchery. Visiting pubs to try local craft brews with a plate of bangers and mash or shepherd’s pie became as much part of the group’s identity as trying a variety of church services and praying together.

While my naïveté took a serious beating during that semester, my study-abroad buddies helped me not just survive, but change, grow and thrive.

image credits:  castles.org; realbeer.com
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The "Shh...it's a secret" blog hop is in honor of the recent release of Poetry Pact volume 1. Blog hop host Angela Felsted is offering awesome prizes to those who participate in the hop and/or help promote the anthology. Click HERE to find out more.

Want to join the blog hop? Sign up here:

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