Lindsay Eland - Middle Grade Author

It’s a sort of glorified chaos at my house this week. My kids are all home for their winter break, so I have them all to myself for five wonderful days…and I don’t mind at all that I’m completely and utterly selfish with them for these five days.

But with a week off of school comes great chaos.

The house is messier, the toilet is rarely flushed, my kitchen is covered in watercolor pictures and playing cards, the living room littered with Lego pieces, and the couch cushions and blankets pulled into forts or used as rafts against the “hot lava.” There is a constant  dusting of flour on the counter tops from baking something each day, and a constant stream of laughter, sound-effects, high-pitched singing, or crying fills every inch of the house.

But it is a beautiful, tangled, cluttered up sort of chaos that I’ve kept myself from controlling or stopping or managing. But rather one I respect as I watch my kids create, fight, make-up, play, and laugh. And one  that I will crave when I drop them off at school next week.

There is a quote from Louis Pasteur that has stuck with me for the past few months. It says: When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.

And that is just one more reason why I love writing for middle grade readers…I can’t help but watch them in their beautiful mess and wonder what they may become and I love, love, love that.

Below is a recipe for chocolate chip muffins that I adore! We just made them this morning and I loved how my kids walked away from the table with thick chocolate rings around their mouths…another beautiful mess.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

1/3 cup sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp cinnamon

2 eggs

1/2 cup butter, melted and slightly cooled

1/2 cup milk

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 and lightly grease or line 12 muffin cups

2. In a bowl mix flour, sugars, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon. Set aside.

3. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs. Stir in the melted butter, milk and vanilla. Then add to the flour mixture and stir until combined. Then add the chocolate chips. Spoon the batter into muffin cups.

4. Bake for 20 minutes or so.

Enjoy!!

I think one of the things I like most about baking is the science of it. I love how you can take a bunch of otherwise bland and/or completely disgusting substances, combine them together, heat them up for 10 to 20 minutes or so, pull them out of the oven still steaming, and then eat them with utter delight.

It’s amazing.

It’s science.

It’s art.

And it’s delicious…well, most of the time, unless you forgot one of the ingredients…which I have done, and then it’s super depressing. But anyway.

I think baking is a lot like writing. We as writers take ingredients that alone would be bland, tasteless, useless and sometimes disgusting: characters, descriptions, scenes, dialogue, incidents, action, thoughts, setting, time period, names, metaphors, rising action, crisis, conflict…the list goes on and on.

We mix them together in our own way with our own measurements. We are creating a new recipe…one that isn’t written down or can be followed to the last teaspoon or baked for a specific amount of time. A recipe that can take months or years to create.

Then we must perfect it. We revise and revise and rewrite and rewrite under the heat of critiques and deadlines and revelations. Paring down on certain ingredients while adding more of others.

And then finally we sigh with a dash of relief and a teaspoon of fear as we click the SEND button and our finished story is set on a platter and given to agents, editors, and readers.

Once that’s done, we only have the taste in our mouth of the experience of writing it, the smells, the fun and the frustration of what it was like to make that story…and hope. We have hope that what we have created delights readers and causes them to crave more and more.

Writing is amazing.

It’s a science.

It’s art.

And it’s delicious to do…especially with chocolate chip cookies nearby!

Have you ever wanted to jump into a photograph or a painting? To step into that meadow by the lake, or be at the base of that mountain or on that sunlit beach a million miles away?

I remember a picture I had hanging on my wall in High School. I think I bought it with my own money one hot summer while perusing the Arts Festival that my beloved town holds every year.

It was a picture of a bright green hill, with even greener hills in the distance. The sky was a robin’s egg blue at the forefront and slowly faded to a stormy greyish-black in the distance. And on top of the green hill there sat a single tree, it’s trunk thick, and the wide branches bending under the weight of flickering leaves that created a small little shaded space. You couldn’t tell whether it was a sunny day and that the dark sky was making it’s way like a grumpy old man towards the tree, or perhaps that the grumpy old man had just past by and all that was left was the back of his long black coat as he left.

But either way, I always found myself longing to sit under that tree, in that small shaded space. And I never thought about what I’d do when I got there or what I’d think about or wonder,  I just wanted to be there…all alone under that solitary tree and watch the world go round.

I still think about that picture every now and then and I sometimes wish that I could jump into it and sit beneath the tree without the sound of voices calling for me to settle a dispute, make dinner or breakfast or lunch or snack or dessert, or clean up throw up, or help make 50 some valentines, or wipe a nose.

But mostly, right now, I don’t think of the tree on the hill that much. Instead, I think of photographs that hang lopsided on my fridge, and I long to jump back inside and be there.

To be with an eighteen month old Ella Jane, standing on our old Cabin deck with too-big pink Hello Kitty boots on, thin short baby hair, and round pudgy cheeks.

To look out at the ocean with Gracie for the first time and see what she’s cupping in her hand and ask her why she wanted a big straw hat so bad that summer.

To push Noah in that cheap plastic red swing and watch him giggle a toothless grin.

To stand in the water again and wave back at Isaac as he floats down the cool Colorado river in a red inner tube and wonder again at how wide his smile can make my heart feel.

To hop back into the black and white picture booth on the Boardwalk with John and make silly faces and kiss behind the little red curtain.

To be with my sister and her family in front of the fireplace and mantel that I’ve never seen, and find out what Texas green leaves my nephew and nieces were standing in front of for their pictures.

To stand with my parents on the sandy shore of Ocean City and say thanks again for paying for us all to be there together cause I know it was a lot…thanks.

To be back with my closest and dearest friends in Redstone standing in front of that camper in Bruce and Connie’s backyard.

And I know a lot of this is just sensitive, emotional me…but I find that though I long sometimes for my tree on a hill, I would trade a thousand trees on a thousand hills to be back in one of those photographs again, even for just long enough to say “Cheese” once more.

Though the tree has been put away a month ago, and the Christmas lights stored, and the stockings packed in their boxes with care, it seems as if winter should be over…or nearing it’s end at least. That spring should be peaking it’s head out from behind the trees for longer and longer periods of time until we finally catch it and yell “I found it!”

But really, we still have three very full months of winter left. And I find myself sometimes wanting to rush through the rest of the snowy days and cold mornings. Hurry up the days and months until spring…or mud season as we call it in the mountians. Hurry and rush and rush and hurry to get the days that I want right now.

But I am a rushish/hurryish type of person anyway. I know what I want and I figure out how to get it, and then I simply do it. But most times I realize that unlike making myself an iced mocha whenever I want, there are certain things that simply cannot be hurried along…nor should they be.

They come like slowly ticking clocks and flipping calendar months.

One day at a time.

One moment.

One breath after another.

And time is one of those mysterious things in life. A piece that we easily sigh and tap our feet at to “hurry up already,” as well as a piece that looks at your now 8-year-old and wonder “why did it happen so fast?”

Some days seem to last forever while others seem to strike out like a stray spark.

And as a rush-rush, hurry-hurry person like myself who does have things to get done and is always excited for the next thing to happen, I find I have to slow down and stop cause most likely that next thing to happen, is happening right now.

My fellow awesome critique partner, Kate Milford’s, The Boneshaker is due out May 24! It is so amazing and I recommend EVERYONE to go to amazon and preorder…NOW!

Right now, she is currently holding a contest on her facebook page! Check it out here:

This is what my 8-year-old Gracie wrote for a school assignment. The last line is my very favorite.

My Dreams

by Gracie Eland

“Martin Luther King had a dream that all people were treated equally. If I had a dream it would be about wishing to become the most famous artist in the world. I hope that I become not one of the best artists but this best int eh world. I would draw and paint animals and people like Mona Lisa. I hope that I become just as good as my mom’s sister, Alisa (and she is amazing!). I dream of sharing my gift to the world. I also dream of being the fastest human on earth.”

Oh, that last line. How I love it. Of course, I love the fact that Gracie wants to be an artist and she really is an exceptional one…but that last line: “I also dream of being the fastest human on earth.” It makes me laugh out loud and smile even as I read it. The randomness and sweetness of the statement and the dream.

I remember the talk in Elementary school about who was the fastest.

Fastest boy?

Fastest girl?

Fastest kid overall?

Me and a great friend Lauren McGrath were the fastest girls in the 6th grade. Sometimes she would win and other times I would (though I have to say that I did not beat Lauren after that year and she went on to race all through High School and College…the Air Force, to be exact, so umm…yeah, she’s faster) Anyway, I remember as a kid running as fast as I could, the breath whooshing through my lungs, my legs on fire. The image I had in my mind of what I probably looked like…or what I hoped I looked like was not unlike Dash in The Incredibles. So, so fast that my legs were blurry. That if someone took my picture I’d just be a streak on the film.

Ah yes. The dream of being the fastest.

Sweet memories.

How could you not love stained glass? There is an elegant and raw beauty in the transluscent color of stained glass. The way it captures bits of the sun and immediately illuminates a picture, a work of art, shards of glass glued together meticulously in an arrangement that makes you look up and take notice.

But stained glass isn’t always illuminated. Sometimes the sun isn’t hitting it at just the right angle and And the sun is not always at the right angle nor does the stain glass light up at night. And when it’s like that stained glass tends to darken, reflecting the cloudy day or the dark church or the night sky. A piece of art that is meant for those precious moments out of the day.

And there are stained glass moments through each day. Moments that are illuminated just for us—even if for a tiny second.

We just have to stop in the midst of our business, in the midst of our heartache or worry, and stop and look up and let the sun illuminate that moment that is all yours.