The Readers Hub Newsletter

The Readers’ Hub Newsletter

              Friends: Here’s my pledge to you….sign up for The Readers’ Hub here

          http://authorp.blogspot.com/

 and I’ll send you updates about my work and interesting trends and ideas I come across. I hate spam and don’t like to get reams of e-mails either, so I’m not going to be bugging you with too many annoying updates! (Two times a month-topsJ)

Here’s a few odds and ends I’ve collected as I’ve worked on various projects around the internet. Every month, I’ll send you a short note. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy! –MLJ

Weddings, funerals and retirements have been the focus in this year of our Lord 2016. So many friends and family members, and fellow Baby Boomers are now retiring. Children I helped to raise are now marrying and starting families of their own. And some people, good people, tend to die too young…

 

·         The Writers Hub: Weddings and retirements are featured, as well as Notes from a Native, and The Blurb Blog, all part of the newly incorporated one-stop blog shop:The Writers Hub.

·         6 Degrees Summer Newsletter is out. New releases haven’t bowled me over of late, but critics these days are working with less material from even more film sources. So we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. See what’s coming in 6 Degrees of Film at the Movies.

·         Non Profit News debuts this month. Working in a church gives me an overview of not only issues that affect us here at home, but globally. See the list and the links in NPN.

·         The GF Writers Cooking Journal is the home of our magazine of the same name. Eventually, the book will debut! Meanwhile, check out the encore posting of the excerpt: “Marge & Dad: A Love Story” on the blog.

This summer promises to be as productive as all summers tend to be. You go in with a bang, thinking you’ll have plenty of leisure time and lazy days to finish that novel, clean up the mess in your {fill in the blank} and to just chill and relax. It all sounds good and it goes so fast…Proof is in the picture below, of my niece Kirsten, now married and expecting her first child. Oh, how time flies!

Please connect with me through The Writers Hub and sign up for monthly updates. Here’s the link….Or go to  my website: 6degreeswriter.com. You can also e-mail me at mljtpa@6degreeswriter.com.  I’m on Twitter @mljtpa. My Facebook connection is just Mary Lee Johnson.  I’d love to hear from you!

Tis the Wedding Season

 

Jane Austen always ended her stories with a wedding. So it seems fitting that the final episode of Downton Abbey closed recently with another wedding. This is the season when weddings abound.

 Spring blooms forth, and those of us ridden with allergies reluctantly peek our heads around and venture out to participate in weddings and picnics and walks in the park.

 With a wedding in the works in our immediate family, all eyes are on the bride and groom, along with the upcoming shower and pre-nuptial events. There are engagement photos and bridal showers, the catering and flowers, the planning and the all-important dress.

 

All of these things condense to a point where we are left wondering where the fantasy ends and the reality begins. One of my favorite bits was from an old Bob Newhart show where Bob tries to bring the prospective groom back to Earth with a reality check on the practicalities of day-to-day life for a young couple. To which the young man responds, ‘To heck with marriage, Bob, we’ve got a wedding to plan!”

 

So apropos is that remark when staring down the barrel at another young couple’s approaching wedding date. No practicalities can match the starry-eyed fantasy attached to a young girl’s Dream Wedding.

 

If only we had a society where high school and beyond came equipped with classes designed for reality. “Everyday Living with Others”, “Budgeting”, “Compromise in Relationships”, “Learning to swallow your pride” and “Love means learning to say you’re sorry-several times in the course of a day!”

 

So with great regret we pause and consider the fictional world of Downton Abbey. And then, we consider the fictional world we imagined when we were younger. Then… Life Happens. Jane Austen had it half right. Life begins when you are a young and dewy eyed bride or groom. And happily ever after’s are found in the fairy tales of young children. But for most of us, Life is what you make of it, and at times, you must turn the Lemons into Lemonade!

 

For Retiring Baby Boomers: Life is what you make of it...

 

For Baby Boomers, it’s that time. There are so many friends and family members retiring soon. It’s such a finality. The boss I have loved working with for the past ten years will be gone soon.

What’ll I do? When you …

Are far away..

& I am Blue…

What’ll I do?

 

As my mother told me many years ago, “All of Life is about change.”  And I would add that it’s about how we adapt to change, really. I started my working life when computers were as big as a car. Now we run programs on micro-chips the size of a fingernail.

 

I was born in the fifties during the Cold War.  Back then, we were afraid of nuclear annihilation.  Now, we are living with terrorists who threaten to take us back to the Dark Ages. We are faced with the phantom fear of beheadings and torture. The irony is that technology has become so advanced and we still look back at fears that haunted us in the Middle Ages.

 In spite of this, we have seen incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. The Golden Age of Information Technology has arrived. We are braced for many more wonderful discoveries in the 21^st Century. It’s like standing at the peephole of King Tut’s Tomb. What do we see? Wonderful Things! Many more advancements in medicine and in future technology that will enhance the way we live our everyday lives are in store.

 And still, we tend to be a bit sad to see things change. As McLuhan said:

 “When faced with a new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in ‘Bonanza-land.”

 

I have long suspected that retirement would open up this Brave New World for Baby Boomers. Those of us who feel that there is life, a vital and productive life to be found on the far side of fifty, should feel energized and re-vitalized about this Golden Age we have landed in. And that’s why the gift of Retirement and Old Age may be a Blessing or a Curse. Old saws still apply.

 

Life is what you make of it. So Viva Retirement and Bring it On! We Baby Boomers have survived so much, and so we will look forward to all that the future holds in store.