Five Sentence Fiction: Exquisite

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The word: Exquisite

“Just one more…that’s it!” she said, “One more!”
I shook my head, beads of sweat ran down my face and I thought I was finished, but I pushed again, just once more.  The delight on my husband’s face was all I needed. He glanced at the midwife, who nodded, and our child was delivered into his waiting hands. Once the cord was cut, and her delicious cry voiced, I watched as my daughter stared into her father’s eyes and my own welled with exquisite, unshed tears.
(When I was born, back in 1971, there was a nurses strike and only one midwife on duty when Mum went into labour. Dad became a midwife that day and I was delivered straight into his hands…I know ‘exquisite’ is a word he’d have used!)

Photograph of Lisa Shambrook by Peter Roberts

Neiman Marcus Cookies

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Soooo, I was looking for a cookie recipe that I hadn’t tried before…I wanted one that was soft and chewy and more like shop bought cookies… Not long ago I received an anonymous email entitled: 
‘Neiman Marcus Cookies’. 
To be honest I have no idea who Neiman Marcus are…I live in the UK. Apparently they’re a big US store…and they really upset one of their customers!
My homemade cookies with the Neiman Marcus recipe…

I have no idea of the authenticity of this story, snopes.com does say that it’s all an urban legend and that Neiman Marcus has developed a cookie since in response to the rumour, so don’t feel badly about the shop…but hey, this is how I got it, the name it’s known under and the recipe is great! So I’ll give it to you, just as it came to me…with an added testimony of my own: I made these cookies, to the recipe below…and they are good! They keep really well, which is just as well, because as the recipe says it makes about 112 cookies! NB use a big mixing bowl!

So here it is just as I got it:

‘A little background:
Neiman-Marcus, if you don’t know already, is a very expensive boutique shop (they sell a typical $8.00 T-shirt for $50.00)
My daughter and I had just finished lunch at a Neiman-Marcus Cafe in Dallas, USA . Because both of us are such biscuit lovers, we decided to try the ‘Neiman-Marcus cookie’. It was so excellent that I asked if they would give me the recipe. The waitress said with a small frown, ‘I’m afraid not, but you can buy the recipe.’
I asked how much, and she responded; ‘Only two fifty – it’s a great deal’
I agreed to that, and told her to add it to my bill.
Thirty days later, I got my Visa statement, and the Neiman-Marcus charge was $285. I looked at it again, and I remembered I had only spent $9.95 for two sandwiches and about $20 for a scarf. At the bottom of the statement, it said, ‘Cookie Recipe – $250.00’. That was outrageous!
I called Neiman’s Accounting Department and told them the waitress had said it was ‘two fifty’, which clearly does not mean ‘two hundred and fifty dollars’ by any reasonable interpretation of the phrase. Neiman-Marcus refused to budge. They would not refund my money because according to them; ‘What the waitress told you is not our problem. You have already seen the recipe. We absolutely will not refund your money.
I explained to the Accounting Department lady the criminal statutes which govern fraud in the state of Texas. I threatened to report them to the Better Business Bureau and The Texas Attorney General’s office. I was basically told: Do what you want. Don’t bother thinking of how you can get even, and don’t bother trying to get any of your money back’
I said, OK, you’ve got my $250, and now I’m going to have $250 worth of fun. I told her that I was going to see to it that every cookie lover in the world with an e-mail account gets a $250 cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus for free. She replied, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’ I said, ‘Well, perhaps you should have thought of that before you RIPPED ME OFF!’ and slammed down the phone.
So here it is! Please pass it on to everyone you can possibly think of. I paid $250 for this, and I don’t want Neiman-Marcus to EVER make another penny from this recipe!’
NEIMAN-MARCUS COOKIES (Recipe may be halved as this makes heaps)
2 (500 ml) cups butter
680 g chocolate chips
4 (1000 ml) cups flour
2 (500 ml) cups brown sugar
2 tsp. (10 ml) Bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp. (5 ml) salt
2 (500 ml) cups sugar
500 g Grated Cadbury chocolate
5 (1250 ml) cups blended oatmeal
4 eggs
2 tsp. (10 ml) baking powder
2 tsp. (10 ml) vanilla
3 cups (375 ml) chopped nuts (optional)
Measure oatmeal, and blend in a blender to a fine powder. Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla, mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and bicarbonate of soda. Add chocolate chips, grated Chocolate and nuts. Roll into balls, and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees (180 ˚C).
The above quantities make 112 cookies. Enjoy!

Five Sentence Fiction: Shiver

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The word is: Shiver
‘Her heart hammered and she was sure it could be heard thumping against the wall of her breast. She pushed backwards, her cold, clammy hands stretched flat against the damp brick. Fingernails dug deep into the mortar, splintering as she strained her ears to hear…nothing, and she wanted to breathe, but couldn’t. A putrid stench permeated the alley and the foul odour assaulted her nose despite her breath still caught in her constricted throat. Hot sweat dripped from her cold, shivering body as she began to slip into unconsciousness, his hands still clasped around her throat…’

And a new twist…my son is struggling with English at school, he’s always found creative writing difficult, and with GCSE’s on the horizon, we thought this exercise would be great practise for sentence structure and creative writing…so here’s Dan’s try (influenced by Michael Morpurgo’s ‘War Horse’) he really enjoyed having a go:
‘The lieutenant could see his horse shivering with nerves because he had to go to war the next day, so he practised and practised with his lieutenant, eventually night fall came. 
Today was the day that the horse had to go to war, and the horse ran and ran down to the enemy trenches trampling over dead bodies then an enemy sniper’s bullet skimmed his lieutenant’s leg, so he ran for help. On the way back an enemy jumped onto his best friend, another horse, after he shot his rider and as he kicked him flying off, the enemy shot him dead. The horse was concentrating on his best friend that died and his lieutenant got shot in the head, and the horse ran back as fast as lightning. When he got back the nurse looked at him and could feel the horse’s breath on her arm as she looks at his legs covered with scars.’

Five Sentence Fiction: Clandestine

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I’ve seen a lot of this lately and thought I’d love to join in…so for anyone who doesn’t know, Five Sentence Fiction is about packing a powerful punch in a tiny fist. Each week Lillie McFerrin posts a one word inspiration, then anyone wishing to participate will write a five sentence story based on the prompt word. The word does not have to appear in the five sentences, just used for direction.
This week the word is: Clandestine

‘Icy darkness infiltrated, plunging the city landscape into a cold and moonless night. All was inky black and quiet, just how he liked it. Stepping softly, he shivered as he wandered the urban streets, his dancing fingers furtively composing a silent masterpiece.  He performed his second trick of the night and vanished with the first rays of day, exposing his intricate works of art. All the glass of the town lay beneath a delicate lattice, a coating of glorious filigree workmanship…all signed, sealed and delivered by Jack Frost himself.’

Photograph by Lisa Shambrook (please do not use without permission)

Why write?

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Painting ‘Forest Nymph’ by Lisa Shambrook: 1994 (Please do not use)

Sometimes I wonder why I write…but the answer is easy; I write because I have to, if I didn’t I’d be lost… As highly-strung as I am, if I didn’t allow myself to escape in writing, I think I’d go quite mad…
So why do I write?

Escape… I write to escape. I free my imagination and let my fingers loose on the keyboard, and words come alive… Life sometimes gets too much and I can lose myself in another world, a world in which I choose what happens, unless my character dictates for me! Which brings me to my second reason:

Create… I can create worlds, lands, species, dragons, people, languages, situations, anything and everything. I can breathe life into creations, I can watch romances develop, sunsets fade, I can melt hearts, I can kill, I can raise the dead…nothing is forbidden and remember, creation of life is the ultimate human achievement.

Fiction… Stories have always filled my mind, seeking an outlet and I have to give in. I’ve had a wild imagination all my life. When assignments to write stories were given as homework, I would spend hours writing and would wait, with bated breath, for grades accompanying the latest 15 page story scrawled in my homework book! I love making up stories, I love seeing imaginative visions end up in print on a blank page…expanding and growing, metamorphosing into something more, something bigger…

Inspiration… from Enid Blyton to JRR Tolkien, inspiration has accompanied my reading. I spent my childhood lost in books, curled up on my bed, or in the corner of the lounge with my head buried in literature, feeding my love of words, descriptions and adventure. I hope my writing inspires others…isn’t that what we, writers, want? To inspire as we have been inspired? I hope…

Manipulation… maybe this goes along with creating…I love the ability to manipulate, to change things, to alter and decide. I’m a control freak, there’s no escaping that. I love writing for a person, a character who becomes dear to me, but one who cannot see where her life is going or what she will face after the next turn in the road… I can decide if she finds happiness or I can break her heart…but where I take her will help her grow, will change her and mould her…until, and sometimes it does happen, she controls me…and I have no choice but to take her forward to whatever comes next, whether I want to or not!

Discovery… I grow! I discover new things about me. I move and grow with my characters, I cry with them, and laugh, and shout, and argue. I get taken to places I’ve never known, and experience emotions as raw as my leads. They teach and I grow…

Consistency… I’ve kept a diary, a daily diary, since I was fourteen-years-old. Can’t miss a day…my OCD trait, well one of them! I added journals many years ago and discovered blogging just a year or two ago. Sharing secrets with a journal became a way of coping, a way of archiving, a way of saving my life. I pour out my heart and file it away, day by day, year by year…and I know that I am alive, I am living!

And finally… I write because I am compelled to do so… I write because it is in my soul, the need to put words on paper is a compulsion, part of my very being. When I am sad it consoles me, when I am broken it mends me, when I am happy it completes me, when I am in love it raises me higher than ever…writing is who I am, it’s what I do…I write to be me…

So Here It Is…

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Having just decorated the cake, it now feels like Christmas! It’s been the same over the last few years…my cakes used to be standard, just rough iced, but after watching Kirsty Allsopp a couple of years ago I became more adventurous!

The first year I put polar bears on my cake and I haven’t looked back since…this year I attempted penguins. Not all plain sailing…couldn’t buy black fondant icing anywhere, so had to make it with food colouring. Advice is to use gel paste colourings, but couldn’t find a black one, so it was liquid colours…and that didn’t help. You need a lot to make white fondant black, though I made it a day before and it darkened from steel-grey to black overnight. The icing became softer and stickier with each drop of black…which added to my frustration as I tried to mould penguins. It turned out to be easier to keep the icing in the fridge and only bring it out each time I moulded or added something (eyes, feet etc), was a long drawn out operation and several penguins were violently sacrificed during this process!

The iced-over pond was made by melting four glace mints in a tiny cake tin on grease-proof paper (at a low temperature for about 15 mins) then cooling in the fridge. The bubbles made as the mint heats makes the ‘ice’ you’re left with look pretty authentic! The pond sits on top of very stiff royal icing (I add as little water as I can get away with when making my royal icing, I like the peaks!) and I lightly coloured the icing below the pond with the palest blue (food colouring). Finished with a few snow-covered rocks of white fondant and the penguins surrounded by ‘snowballs’ (sugar decorations) and silver balls.

The rest of my cake is a standard rich fruit Christmas cake and traditional marzipan. My husband makes the cake with the children, I marzipan it…then make decisions about decorating it myself in secret and we all enjoy the big reveal when it’s finishSo, yes, now it’s Christmas!

I’ve had my face painted, cute snowflake on my cheek.

Along with the cake we’ve made our Christmas pudding, lovely recipe, which makes our main pudding and several mini ones too! Takes ten hours in the oven, but oh boy, the house smells good that day!

Since Caitlin moved to High School, I’ve missed the infants/junior school concerts and nativities…what’s not to love about little boys with gold cardboard crowns, tea-towel shepherds, grumpy inn-keepers who forget to open the door, reindeer with runny noses and angels with wonky halos..? I miss the innocence and enthusias

So what’s left? I must finish the present wrapping (before school’s out!), Santa’s done all his! We’ve got our Santa hats, the holly and the ivy…what more?

‘Variety alone gives joy…’

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Looking at the themes of my own book made me wonder about books for children these days…It begins with the line ‘Freya was seven-years-old when she got hit by the car. It was a 4×4 with a bull bar.’ It deals with death from the outset, and continues with themes of grief and guilt. However it is balanced by the inclusion of Freya’s heaven…as seen from a seven-year-old’s point of view and purposely laden with rainbows and flowers and sparkly things…Hope and insight is gained from death, grief and terminal illness, dreams are wished for and ultimately our dreams are the things that give us hope. When we strive for the things we dream of…we triumph.
But these strong themes of death and grief made me wonder…Should we protect children and teens from specific themes in books?
These days any subject matter under the sun is up for grabs and writers contend with them in many different ways.
I enjoy books of all varieties and genres, and it made me think back to my own days of reading, curled up on a sofa or turning pages by torchlight beneath the covers, well past my bedtime…
My childhood was spent reading. I was a frequent customer of a tiny local bookstore in the backstreets of Brighton with a shelf in the back room full of second hand children’s books, where I spent a good hour or more choosing books while the little, white-haired, old lady who owned the shop sat reading novels or sorting stock. She kept a pile of ‘Famous Five’ books aside for my visits and it didn’t matter how ragged they were, I still wanted to buy them!
So what did I read when I was small?
Everything I could lay my hands on…when I graduated from picture books, I discovered Enid Blyton, ‘The Castle of Adventure’ had me hiding inside the gorse bushes with Philip, Dinah, Jack and Lucy-Ann as they out-foxed thieves and smugglers! Then came the aforementioned ‘Famous Five’, I wasn’t a ‘Secret Seven’ fan, I wanted to be tomboy George!  I also devoured ‘Malory Towers’ and ‘St Clares’ and longed to attend boarding school with Darrell Rivers and her friends… and can you believe it there’s actually a tongue-in-cheek website here informing you of Darrell and her cohorts whereabouts now…weird!
I spent the last of my preteen years reading horsey stories…I adored ‘The Silver Brumby’ series by Elyne Mitchell, I read them over and over and over again…Patricia Leitch’s ‘Jinny’ series, all the ‘Jill’ books by Ruby Ferguson, and anything by the Pullien-Thompsons.
Horse books were interspersed with ‘Watership Down’, ‘Duncton Wood’, ‘The Tuesday Dog’ any animal stories and anything by Malcolm Saville, especially ‘The Lone Pine Five’.
Then I will be forever grateful to my middle school teacher Mr Lawrence who introduced us to fantasy, he read Susan Cooper’s ‘Over sea, Under Stone’ with such enthusiasm and verve that I fell in love with the genre. I spent a whole summer immersed in ‘The Dark is Rising’ Sequence…

That was it…then followed Tolkien…’The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’…my life was complete and I would be life-long fantasy fan!
My teenage reading collection grew and grew and was eclectic. I loved Judy Blume, beginning with ‘Blubber’, getting my English teacher to let us read ‘Tiger Eyes’ as a class when we were fourteen, and my embarrassment with ‘Forever’ as a very naive fifteen-year-old! This is where the diversity in my collection began, reading about love, jealousy ‘Jacob Have I Loved’ Katherine Paterson, anorexia ‘Second Star to the Right’ Deborah Hautzig, parental desertion and adventure in ‘Homecoming’ Cynthia Voigt, Concentration Camps and escape ‘I am David’ Anne Holm,  pregancy ‘Dear Nobody’ Berlie Doherty,  and much more, death, guilt, murder, abuse, relationships, classics like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Harper Lee, ‘Little Women’ Louise May Alcott and (forgive me) a stage of ‘Sweet Valley High’…
Thus you can see that my reading was vast in themes and ideas!
I’ve even kept most of my books, but sadly many are boxed up in the attic after, I’m ashamed to say, my own children prefer the X-Box… sacrilegious! My youngest is my most prolific reader and loves to write herself, so at least I have one chip-off-the-old-block!
So, no I don’t think children or young adults should be protected from certain themes, obviously I don’t want young children reading about sex or being exposed to true adult themes at an early age, but most themes are relevant to teens and important in their lives.
It was my own book that made me ask the question…and ultimately I believe that books are what encourages us to dream…to capture experiences that we may never find ourselves. We find ourselves in the books we read, whether it be acceptance or rebellion, adventure or peace, love or hate…it’s all there…and books were how I learned to express myself. A love of vastly different books taught me to embrace this weird and wonderful culture in which we live!

As my character old Thomas says as he is told to let go of ‘his silly dreams’, “…it’s those silly dreams that keep us alive.”

Variety is the spice of life!

(Title quote by Matthew Prior-The Turtle and the Sparrow)

The Stars and Our Earth…

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I’ve always loved the stars, staring up at the multitude of constellations filling the night sky…

Globular Cluster M15 taken by Hubble Credit Hubble, ESA, NASA

I love standing up at my parent’s house, at the top of the valley overlooking Carmarthen (On a clear day you can see Llanstephan Castle fifteen miles away…) and staring up at the stars. There is so little light pollution up there that you can see a whole arm of the Milky Way sweeping across the sky, millions of twinkling stars…

Yuriearth International Space Station 2003 (Source Wikimedia Commons)

A few years ago we got the children out of bed at midnight and bundled them outside to watch the International Space Station soar overhead… The children were young and it was an out-of-the-ordinary experience for them. Dan, who was about ten-years-old waved, hoping the astronauts would be able to see him!

So this link on Twitter made me smile…
Somehow I don’t think the inhabitants of the ISS saw our wave! 

Have a look at this video of time lapse photographs taken by the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 aboard the International Space Station from August to October 2011… and marvel at the Aurora’s Borealis and Australis… the amazing night view of earth… the lights from our cities that look as if the earth is on fire…and the sheer beauty of the creation that we live on…

Earth at night (Source Wikimedia Commons)

Expressions of Love…♥

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Today we have been married for twenty years…here’s why…
Vince:  I remember one of our first dates, a picnic then a wander through woods where we came face to face with a deer…we stood in awe for a few minutes ‘til the deer moved away…

Lisa:  I loved my first ever bunch of flowers, daffodils and tulips, from the 
Temple grounds where Vince was working as a gardener…

Vince:  On our honeymoon to Guernsey we hired a car and went to a petrol station and began to fill it up. The attendant quickly advised us to only put a few pounds in. We soon realised why when we drove round the island visiting all the beaches in one day!

Lisa:  That moment in hospital, after giving birth, when I looked over to see my husband holding our brand new daughter in his arms and tears running down his face, as the early morning sunlight streamed in through the window…

Vince:  Walks along beaches as the sun goes down and holding hands…

Lisa:  Dressing up posh for Youth Prom nights, made us feel like kids again as we never had Proms when we were young!

Vince:  The excitement when we planned a surprise, mystery day for the children which involved their first aeroplane flight and a day in Scotland…

Lisa:  We love romantic dog walks in all weather: seeing blossom on the trees in spring, listening to the bubbling river in the summer, rustling through fallen leaves in autumn and crunching through freshly fallen snow in winter…

Vince:  Visiting the Temple as a couple…both at Preston and London Temples…being in the spiritual splendour of the Temple and its grounds, reminding us of the eternal nature of our marriage…

Lisa:  I love his sense of fun…dressing up at Halloween, playing Bill Sykes in our family adaptation of ‘Oliver’ and just getting involved enthusiastically…

Vince:  I love how Lisa encourages our children to be the very best that they can be…

Lisa:  Christmas time…and family time…I love to watch our family unite in the season of giving and love…

Vince:  I love the support Lisa gives me in everything I want to do…. Even when she knows it won’t work out…

Lisa:  I love how Vince always does his best and conscientiously achieves such high standards…and his support and encouragement makes me feel special, like I can achieve anything…

Vince:  I love the confidence Lisa has in me in achieving anything, she knows my potential far better than I do, I love the way she encourages me when I have doubts….

Lisa:  I love how when I‘m anxious and worry about things Vince doesn’t let anything faze him…he tells me everything will be alright…
and it always is…

Vince:  I love when Lisa cuddles up to me on the sofa of an evening.  I love it when she comes up to me just for a hug…

Lisa:  Those moments when I’m out and see Vince drive by in his bus, or when he gets home from work…still give me tingles and bubbles of love in my heart…

Vince:  I love looking up at the night sky, with Lisa next to me as we contemplate the other worlds that Heavenly Father has created, and how we could one day, create worlds of our own…

Lisa:  I love his strength and protection… I love searching for Vince’s hand and finding it…


Twentieth Anniversary Celebration…

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Twenty years ago I married the man I love with all my heart…it was a wonderful day and I love my memories!

But…I was young and naive and we were short of cash…and we would have changed a few things if we’d had the chance. Our invitations were typewritten postcards, couldn’t afford posh stationary, and the reception left a fair bit to be desired! I wish we’d gone with the traditional idea of having the reception catered for by the women of the church, I’ve seen it work so well! We didn’t, and we weren’t happy with the catering, but I was too young and shy to object. So when Vince and I talked about having a twentieth wedding anniversary celebration, I wanted to do it my way! 
First came the invitations, many were sent out on a Facebook event page, but I also designed my own and had them printed…

I loved them, the roses were an almost exact match for the Jacaranda roses I had for my wedding bouquet! Thus our colour scheme was set…

My dress was the same colour, Bekah chose red and Caitlin wore lilac, beautiful jewel colours! Vince’s tie matched my dress and Dan’s was red. I bought reams and reams of ribbons in the same colours and twisted them to make decorations, the cake was covered in berries of the same colours. The sweetie jar was filled with red and purple sweets, and the glowsticks were red, lilac and blue! 
It rained on the day, but it didn’t dampen our spirits! 
So, the invitations looked good, and to rectify the food and drink served at our original reception (spicy food and concentrated carbonated apple juice…I barely ate anything and that wasn’t from wedding nerves!) we went for desserts and lots of them! Trifles, cheesecakes, gateaux, pavlova, eclairs, cupcakes and much more! And we drank Schloer in all its varieties…

The plasma ball and glowsticks went down like a house on fire, and we decided to have some fun with competitions! Guess how many sweets in the jar, a selection of twenty photos to guess our ages, and a list of twenty questions to see how much everyone knew about us! We didn’t realise how difficult it is to guess ages of people from photographs!
       
We chose to begin by sharing twenty ‘Expressions of Love’, memories and things we love about each other then we played twenty songs for each of our years together! It was great to feel relaxed, something we didn’t feel at our reception, (we were too keen to get away) to dance and just to have fun!
We loved our party, which incorporated my fortieth birthday too, I hadn’t had a party of any kind since I was about eight-years-old, so it was fulfilling in many ways! I loved my dress, I loved the music and the desserts, I loved all my friends and most of all I love (in the present tense) my husband too…♥