Twelve Pairs of Gloves

by Diana Mccollum

As I was perusing information on Leap Year, I came across some really interesting tidbits of information about this extra calendar day.

Leap Day is in February because February used to be the last month of the year.

According to an old 5th century Irish legend, St. Bridget petitioned St. Patrick to allow women to propose to men every four years. Thus balancing the traditional roles of men and women much like Leap Day balances the traditional calendar year.

In America we have Sadie Hawkins day dances where the girl asks the guy to be her date, and it is generally celebrated in Leap Year. 

In Scotland it is considered bad luck to be born on Leap Day. 1288 Scotland passed a law that allowed women to propose to men during Leap Year. Any man who declined had to pay a fine, which could be anything from a kiss to a new silk dress. 

In Denmark the old Leap Year tradition goes, if the woman proposes and the gent declines he owes her twelve pairs of gloves. One pair for each month to hide the fact she is not wearing an engagement ring.

Greece considers it unlucky to marry in a Leap Year, and especially on Leap Day.

The Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies is an organization for persons born on Leap Day. 

According to the Guinness Book of Records, there is a family who produced three consecutive generations born on February 29 and there are different records of children in the same families all born on February 29th..

As a writer, I can see many, many story ideas embedded in these fun facts. I personally don’t know anyone born on February 29th. I have a friend whose husband and their first daughter were both born on Valentine's Day.

Do you know anyone with a birthday on February 29th?  Or a family whose birthdays fall on the same day?

Leaping Less Often--Making Time for Me

Leap Year. An extra day. Oh, boy!

Since I don’t need to spend time on any Sadie Hawkins activities, maybe I’ll invest the day finishing projects that have fallen to the bottom of my ever-expanding to-do list. Often these are half-finished home improvement, clutter removal, paper filing or garden projects. Tasks I figured would take me, say, a day when I started them. Unfortunately I have a severe handicap when it comes to estimating woman-hours per job.

As my husband will testify, I have no problem leaping. My inclination is to say, ‘Sure, I can do that. Shouldn’t take me more than a day (or hour) or two.” I’m an optimist. And, yes, the appropriate adjective is cockeyed.

When it comes to professional matters, I’ve learned to follow the advice provided by my better half after observing my time management skills for a number of years. Before I promise a client a completion date, I tell myself to take a deep breath and multiply whatever number I think is realistic by three or four. Usually this means I only have to stay up until midnight to finish on time instead of pulling an all-nighter. If I’ve promised someone else to finish a job, I keep my promise.

I’m not so kind to myself. I find it very hard to say “no” if I’m asked to judge a writing contest, help a fellow author with a critique, write and layout a newsletter for a nonprofit I believe in, or serve as secretary for our neighborhood association. Often that means the only pruning my roses get comes courtesy of beavers, and the floor has become my filing cabinet because I can’t stuff another thing in the hanging folders.

So, this leap year (starting now), I promise myself to become more selective with my leaps. It’s okay to say “no” to outside commitments in order to say “yes” to my own projects—including reading for the sheer pleasure of it.

Now there’s something to leap on. Time for me.

How do you carve out time for yourself—to write, to dream, to relax?

Jump, Dive...Leap

"Leap, and the net will appear."

--Julie Cameron

The 'Great Leap,' as I have called the risk I've taken in starting a new romance genre y'all will hear about soon, has been one of the scariest learning processes I've ever put myself through. It continues to be so. This month I simply want to emphasize that it's okay to not know what the future entails. It's okay, not knowing if whatever you choose to write will ever make it to print. Not knowing if your work is way too out-of-range for readers. Not knowing if you will become a lost artform or the newest, greatest neo-something...

It's all okay, so long as it feels right for you. The moment 'not knowing' becomes a hindrance, it may be time for you to take another leap...

Because by not taking risks, and without the willingness to learn from our decisions, we limit ourselves to the future that is safest for us--not necessarily the future of our highest hopes and aspirations. Writers are dreamers at heart, especially romance authors. Out of all the people in the world, we should be used to JUMPING, DIVING and LEAPING into many things that are tried-and-true or unprecidented (sometimes all at once, depending on how much research you have to do on the latest project!).

To me, taking leaps toward an end goal means a couple different things.

Leaps usually help speed a process/processes up. It's pretty hard to stop your trajectory once you've decided to jump off a diving board. You can change your mind in mid-air, or right before you hit the water--so long as you make the jump in the first place and don't spend too much time standing on the ledge, "hmmming," and "hahhhing."

Most of the time, the key to authorship is simply making a decision and sticking to it. Decide to jump. Decide how you're going to land. Take what you can from the experience and keep going.

Leaps mean you're willing to put faith in yourself, and faith in the larger picture.

So in this leap year, jump or dive into a committment and ride it through to the end. Without taking leaps in our personal or professional lives, we're usually bound to grow gradually. Every now and again, all we really need in order to get something done is a change of pace.

Have you made any leaps this year so far? Come on, share them with us!

Go ahead, take a Leap....

It's been bought to my attention that 2012 is a leap year. Which got me thinking. Yes, those who know me can stop laughing, you know who you are!

When you say it's leap year most people will think that is the day women can ask men to marry them. At least that is what I was bought up to think.

These days I think of someone taking a leap in faith and trusting that the powers that be, whichever you may worship, will help and protect you.

My husband used to be a librarian, he lost his job and was working as a temp in different libraries in the state we lived at the time. Then 9-11 happened. Unfortunately, when people start cutting back for some insane reason libraries are the place they cut first. He ended up working in Barnes and Noble but the salary was not great. I had a good job but you can't live in New Jersey on a salary and a half. Not when your rent is $1000/month.

A friend and her husband had moved to Arizona and had been trying to convince us to join them. They had retreated with their campaign for a while but started again when my husband lost his job. I kept saying I would think about it. Then winter settled in with all it's glory. It was one of the worst winters up to that time. We had to shovel snow it seemed like every day. I fell twice and ended up with cortisone shots in my knees and elbow. One day, when a usually 20 minute drive took 90 minutes because of the snow and ice, I had enough. I said to my husband, "Lets do this!"

Now you have to understand that we were not spring chickens. I was 49 and my husband 47.

Needless to say our family and some of our friends thought we were insane. All I know is once we made the decision to move, everything fell into place. The only thing I requested was to wait until the birth of my youngest brother's first child. We left mid-May and took our time driving cross country. I saw whole areas of the country I thought I would never see. We stopped to see friends along the way. Memorial day weekend we arrived at our destination. We had planned to stay in a motel one more night but at that point I was tired of driving and just wanted to get there.

I remember as we drove into New Mexico and I looked at those wonderful mountains I turned to my husband and said, "I'm home". That feeling lasted into the next state and on to our destination. It remains that way even today eight years later. Oh yea, after writing and submitting for 12 years, I sold my first book in 2003. Six months after arriving here. We took a leap of faith and we are both so glad we did.

Twelve Pairs of Gloves

Twelve Pairs of Gloves

As I was perusing information on Leap Year, I came across some really interesting tidbits of information about this extra calendar day.

Leap Day is in February because February used to be the last month of the year.

According to an old 5th century Irish legend, St. Bridget petitioned St. Patrick to allow women to propose to men every four years. Thus balancing the traditional roles of men and women much like Leap Day balances the traditional calendar year.

In America we have Sadie Hawkins day dances where the girl asks the guy to be her date, and it is generally celebrated in Leap Year.

In Scotland it is considered bad luck to be born on Leap Day. 1288 Scotland passed a law that allowed women to propose to men during Leap Year. Any man who declined had to pay a fine, which could be anything from a kiss to a new silk dress.

In Denmark the old Leap Year tradition goes, if the woman proposes and the gent declines he owes her twelve pairs of gloves. One pair for each month to hide the fact she is not wearing an engagement ring.

Greece considers it unlucky to marry in a Leap Year, and especially on Leap Day.

The Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies is an organization for persons born on Leap Day.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, there is a family who produced three consecutive generations born on February 29 and there are different records of children in the same families all born on February 29th..

As a writer, I can see many, many story ideas embedded in these fun facts. I personally don’t know anyone born on February 29th. I have a friend whose husband and their first daughter were both born on Valentine's Day.

Do you know anyone with a birthday on February 29th? Or a family whose birthdays fall on the same day?

Leaping Into The Void

Judith Ashley

For some of you who read this post, my “Leaping Scenario” won’t seem like much – to others, I’ll be applauded for my courage. Keep reading and make your own decision about my choices.

In January 2011, after failing at keeping up my individual blog and yet hearing from “Everyone” how important it was to build my platform while searching for a publisher, I was commiserating with my writing friend, Sarah Raplee over tea and coffee at a Border’s coffee shop. That conversation sparked the idea that led to this blog – Romancing The Genres.

Thank goodness Sarah not only has more technical skills than I do, but she is a consummate learner. Figuring out how to make something work in the wonderful world of Blogger and other techie things does not intimidate her – she forges on until she figures it out. I, on the other hand, would rather clean the bathroom than click around the internet searching for anything.

With Sarah as my guide and my commitment to being published firmly under my feet, I leapt! I won’t bore you with the details of what I’ve learned/accomplished. Check out my personal blog for that. Yes, I still do that too.

Our original idea had an experimental writing idea and while we were readying RTG for launching, four of us tried out a continuous story. We learned that it would take a lot more time and effort than we had at that moment to make it work.

Over the summer of 2011 as our number of blog visitors grew, we polled the other Genre-istas to see what we could do to improve. Be more reader-centric.

Another leap. We invited more published authors to guest on our Saturdays and revamped our monthly Genre-ista topics to be more reader focused than writer focused.

I digress.

In the fall of 2011, Sarah and I looked at the list of Genre-istas who’d indicated an interest in the experimental writing idea, contacted them, set up another Yahoo Group, and began to plan.

Since we see this other blog as a sister site, we decided (with Genre-ista agreement) to go with Romance From The Genre-istas. Our tag line is “Free Fiction Reads For Your Enjoyment”. We also decided to start out with Flash Fiction (less than 1500 word stories) with a Valentine’s Day theme.

Another LEAP! I went into Blogger and set up the initial page.

I copied the RTG header into the RFTG site and created pages, with Sarah’s tutoring.

While this may not seem like much, for someone who still has residual techno-phobia issues, this is HUGE! And it has BIG rewards. Because I’m an integral part in setting up Romance From The Genre-istas, I’m more of a partner than I was before. The fear that if Sarah wasn’t available and something Bad happened to the blog, we’d go down or up in flames and smoke has dissipated.

And when you stop by Romance From The Genre-istas on 02/11/2012, read our Flash Fiction Free Reads, and are entertained I’ll have to get a larger hat size!

Leaping into the Void of technology has been terrifying at times (what if I click and the whole site goes down); amazing (I’m gaining name recognition); frustrating (there are days Blogger doesn’t like me and I’m better off going for a walk, having a hot cup of tea, and doing something else); exhilarating (our RTG launch went off without a hitch); humbling (we’ve over 15,000 visits and over  2500 comments) but most of all, it’s been rewarding. I’ve conquered my fear of blogging; conquered my fear (mostly) of the internet; and am looking forward to creating a website for another of my endeavors.

What leap have you taken that has transformed your life?
www.JudithAshleyRomance.com
www.JudithAshley.blogspot.com

© Judith Ashley February 03, 2012