Tag: reading

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GKP Writing News

Cowgirls

Forget cartoons. I grew up watching westerns: The Lone Ranger; Broken Arrow; Wyatt Earp; Bat Masterson; Sky King; Roy Rogers; Gene Autry and more. One thing was missing in most of these: Cowgirls.

Westerns love to have cowboy heroes. Big, strong, brave cowboys protect the timid frontier women. They spend their time loading guns, hiding, watching the cowboys fight for them.

Are There Cowgirls?

According to “Cowgirls: Women of the American West” by Teresa Jordan, one of five pioneers was a woman homesteader. These were not wives, they were independent women who staked a homestead and proved it out. Some built up ranches. Other women became widows and decided to stay on the ranch to run it.

These women worked digging post poles and stringing fence, working cattle or horses or sheep, breaking horses, riding in rodeos, all the things cowboys did. Some of the heavier work was beyond them physically, but most of it wasn’t. It needed doing, so they did it.

What About Children?

Forget the pampered children of today. Frontier children worked as part of the family. Ranching was hard work, not that lucrative, so everyone had to help or all would fail.

“No Life for a Lady” by Agnes Morley Cleaveland tells of growing up in New Mexico territory. As soon as children were able to sit on a horse (six or seven years old), they were helping keep track of the cattle, riding tens of miles for the mail and other things.

More modern cowgirls often take their children out with them. Now babies can stay in a truck. Once they sat on the saddle behind a parent or in an insulated box on the wagon seat. As toddlers, they are on their own horses.

Today’s Cowgirls

There are still cowboys and cowgirls. Some things have changed as tractors, trucks and other vehicles have replaced many of the horses. But fencing still needs fixing. Cattle still need to be rounded up.

Find copies or this book and other books to find out more about cowgirls, women who deserve better than a footnote.

cover of "Old Promises" Hazel Whitmore #2 by Karen GoatKeeper
When Hazel and her mother arrive in Missouri, their new house has not been lived in or cleaned in a decade. As women all over, they did what needed doing: they cleaned up the cobwebs, dust and mouse nests.

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GKP Writing News

My Reading Goal

Bleak December, the last month of the year has arrived. With all the hustle and bustle, there are so many things to wrap up. My reading goal is one.

This year started looking like a normal year. I set a goal of 72 books. Then disaster arrived.

My Goats

My ten-year-old buck, High Reaches Silk’s Augustus, got sick. It was terminal and I had to say good-bye. His pen looked so forlorn.

Dairy goats must have kids to continue to give milk. Terrill Creek Huckleberry came home. He was a love, just a wonderful buck. Somewhere he found and ate something poisonous and died.

Then my beloved Agate got sick. No matter what I did, she kept getting worse. When she finally collapsed, unable to stand, I had to say good-bye to her too.

Nubian doe High Reaches Agate in pasture
Nubian doe High Reaches Pixie’s Agate was a good friend. If I called the goats out in pasture, she led them in. She stopped on the way out for neck and ear scratches. I miss her.

My Family

My goats are my family. They have been my companions through several moves and over fifty years. All of them are special. Three have been extra special: Jennifer, my first goat; Bridget, my traveling companion; and Agate, my bottle baby.

Reading and writing almost ceased for months. That leaves me now, in December, seventeen books away from my set goal.

Making the Goal

I do read fairly fast, especially light fiction. But not that fast. At present I have just finished “First Ladies: An Intimate Group Portrait of White House Wives” by Margaret Truman. This is a wonderful look at the job of being First Lady and how many different approaches by women of so many different backgrounds did this job.

Three books are ongoing. “Five Little Peppers and How They Grew” is one I read as a child. It is very much a portrait of growing up poor around 1900, although it is fiction. “Arsene Lupin Gentleman Thief” was mentioned in “The Cat Who Saved the Library” along with “Moby Dick” (read the abridged version!) and “The Three Musketeers”.

Third is “Of Time and Turtles”. This is a fascinating look at turtle rescue and turtles. These creatures have existed for 350 million years, yet modern humans may destroy these special, unique animals by greed, carelessness and ignorance.

If all else fails, I suppose I can count picture books. I read and review (on my Goodreads blog) about six a week. I do hate to not make my reading goal.

When I finish reading a book, I do a review on Goodreads. The picture books are reviewed on my Goodreads blog.

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GKP Writing News

Book Review Topics

Each month I write a short book review column for my local library newsletter. I find it helpful to have book review topics to help me choose books to read for this column.

Last year my book review topics came from the names for the full moon of that month. There is a story about these in “Exploring the Ozark Hills”. Sometimes I did stretch the topic a bit to include books more local readers would enjoy.

cover for "Exploring the Ozark Hills" by Karen GoatKeeper
When days are short and nights are long, the night sky holds more interest. The full moon is one of the topics of an essay in this book of 84 nature essays and photographs organized by the seasons.

Why Use Book Review Topics?

The column mentions a book for adults and some picture books for the children. Having a theme of sorts makes coordinating these easier for me.

As the newsletter comes out each month, I have to be a month ahead. The December review for the long night moon is turned in. Now I need to start the January book.

And I need a new set of topics for the new year. As using the moons – suggested by a picture book “Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back” – it needs to give some structure to choosing books, yet have some give to accommodate a wide variety of books.

Other Considerations

The advice for writers is to read a lot and widely. I’ve done that in the past. However, I am much older now and see no point in reading or trying to read books I dislike for one reason or another.

There are some genres I do not care much about. Horror and dystopian are among them. Westerns are too formulaic, although I do enjoy reading about the West in biographies and histories and historical fiction.

It’s so tempting to ignore current events and cocoon myself in a world created by books. Yet these events can not be completely ignored as they affect everything.

Picking a Topic

I am presently reading “First Ladies: An Intimate Portrait” by Margaret Truman. Politics is not on the topic list. However, how much do we really know about people and places around our country? I’ve been in 48 states and know the present political diatribe is only a political ploy.

Joining my book review topics list will be reading about some aspect of the states, one each month.

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GKP Writing News

Looking For Her Story

March is Women’s History month. I’ve been looking for her story. It’s often not in the history (His Story) books.

There are two good places to go looking for her story. I’ve been reading books from each.

One place is historical fiction. “Something Worth Doing” by Jane Kirkpatrick is about the struggle for women’s suffrage in Oregon. One woman, Abigail Dunwithy, led the movement for over forty years trying to convince the men running the state that women, the women they depended on to provide homes, raise children, develop homesteads and businesses, deserved the right to vote. Even her own brother fought to keep women from voting.

Women went to jail and insane asylums trying to earn the right to vote. They wanted to be seen as real people with the right to earn a living and keep their wages, the right to own a business, the right to make decisions concerning their futures.

Telling Her Own Stories

Another good place to look is autobiography and biography. “I Am Malala” tells of the ongoing struggle for women’s rights in Pakistan. Her view of the rise of the Taliban and the present fight for the future of Pakistan explains so much of what we read about in the news. Her fight is for all children, regardless of who they are or where they live, to have the right to an education.

An unlikely book is “The Egg and I” by Betty MacDonald. Embedded in this book is the place of women in the 1930s in Washington state. One woman got married, was taken to a ranch and not been allowed to go even to town for twenty-seven years. Even the author was expected to help her husband achieve his dreams regardless of hardship, health or personal dreams.

After the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor emerged from his shadow and became a world figure fighting for women’s and human rights and world peace. “Eleanor: The Years Alone” may be about her, but is a history course about the United Nations and post war U.S. politics as she was involved with both.

Personal Story

Even though these were interesting, they were long past. I’ve seen so many changes in my lifetime. I grew up at a time when women had few choices in life. Wife, mother, nurse, teacher, secretary were the acceptable ones. And those with jobs were expected to quit when they got married.

Women wore skirts. At my high school a teacher could make you kneel on the sidewalk to make sure your skirt was the proper length.

When a girl went to college or university, she was expected to get an mrs degree. All I got was a bachelor of arts and my grandma considered me a failure. No counselor or mentor had time for a girl.

Being Challenged

Today so many careers and opportunities have opened up for girls. But these opportunities are being challenged. Go looking for her story, find out where women’s rights came from and decide whether they are worth fighting for. Otherwise you may lose them.

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GKP Writing News

Book Challenge

A book challenge isn’t really necessary to encourage me to read lots of books over the year. I love to read.

I love to write and don’t really need to have a writing challenge to keep me writing. Yet I love participating in NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) and Camp NaNo over the year.

Setting goals might not be necessary, but they do keep nudging me to make sure I set time aside for meeting those goals. They are like deadlines.

My reading goal on Goodreads is 70 books again this year. The number is doable and challenging.

Books are not the only thing I read over the year. Science and writing magazines take up time. The Sunday newspaper is enjoyed weekly.

That is why a book challenge matters. It’s too easy to read materials other than books.

Why does reading books matter?

As an author, I read not only for pleasure, but to see what works and what doesn’t in a book. Do I find the book enjoyable? Why?

What parts of the book bore me? Do the descriptions work well? How do they enhance the story?

These answers and more help me improve my own writing. There is no way I can ever copy some other author’s style or story because my background is much different. The answers tell me how I can focus my plot, bring a setting to life, increase the suspense or tension.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
Do you like tongue twisters? The sound of words? I do. I’ve read books of these over the years and found the challenge of creating one stimulating.

What will I read this year?

I don’t really know. There are shelves and piles of books at home. And there is the library.

In fact, the library can be too tempting. I had to wait for someone at the library for ten minutes or so. First I browsed the table of large print books. Next I noticed the picture books on the bookcases. There is a table of juvenile books.

Yes, I brought home a book from each place even though I am half way through two books at home.

The juvenile book is “Virtual Currency” by Martha London. It was interesting. I like starting to learn about a complicated subject with a juvenile book as adult books often make the number one teaching mistake of assuming the reader knows vocabulary or other things the neophyte doesn’t.

So I have completed my first book of the 2023 book challenge. Only 69 to go.

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GKP Writing News

Banning Books

An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was about how banning books has become popular. For me, as both an author, reader and citizen, this is frightening, infuriating and frustrating.

An English teacher I had in high school told us about an incident in Arizona. It seems there were new literature books with selections from various time periods. A parent came to the school board decrying a story in which a knight put on his girdle and demanded the books be discarded.

Knights? Remember about the Dark Ages, Medieval Europe? Or maybe you don’t as so much of history seems skipped now.

At that time girdle was the name for a belt. It had nothing to do with women’s undergarments. What this parent was saying was that they were ignorant and wanted to punish everyone rather than learn something about how vocabulary changes over time.

How many other books are on the banned lists because vocabulary used in them is not today’s accepted form? Or attitudes? Use these as lessons in how we’ve changed, hopefully for the better.

Another book was a graphic novel about the Holocaust. A graphic novel is not a comic book although some are very close. This one is not.

I read a graphic novel “They Called Us Enemy” by George Takai. It was about the Japanese internment camps of World War II, camps ignored by history, denied by the government and educators. He had an interesting comment: We need to learn both the good and the bad in our history. The first makes us proud. The second is a way to do better, not repeat our mistakes.

Banning books is popular with dictators as a way to stifle thinking, knowledge, different viewpoints. Is that what we want here?

There are many books I choose not to read. Horror, romance and violent thrillers are among them. But I do not think I have the right to forbid those who like these genres to read them. And, yes, I’ve read a book or two in these genres before deciding to avoid them.

That is a most frustrating point about the present book banning. Most of these people have never read the books they want to ban. They heard about them on social media from some entity who may or may not be who they say they are.

We have many problems in our country. I choose not to write about them or politics or religion. But banning books thereby shutting off other viewpoints, facts we may not like, is not the way to solve those problems.

Problems are solved by getting them out in the open and listening, really listening, to each other. Respect is a two way street. And no one is always right about everything.