Hanukkah | Killzoneblog.com

Welcome to 2025
Terry Odell

Hello, and Happy New Year TKZers. I have the honor of being the first to post in 2025. I hope you’ve recovered from any celebratory events at your place.

What did I do during the annual TKZ hiatus?

Unlike Mr. Gilstrap, the holidays aren’t a big thing in our household.

I continued my weekly yoga practices. Had a hair salon appointment. Took the dog to the vet for her checkup. Had a massage. All of these are ordinary, everyday type events. Hanukkah began at sundown on December 25^th, so while most of you were probably having a Christmas turkey, ham, or whatever, we gathered and had latkes, courtesy of our son. Host has the pleasure of having their house smell like grease for days afterward.

white plate with 5 potato latkes

I brought the requested rugelach, which was a little easier this year because one of my daughters was in town and helped with the assembly.

glass platter of rugelach cookies

**Those of you who are subscribed to my free Substack, “Writings and Wanderings” received the recipes for both of those dishes in my holiday post.

Tonight, we’ll light the last candles.

And I worked. Since my last post of 2024, I added about 25,000 words to the current manuscript.

stack of printed manuscript pages

I also checked with my editor, and I’m on her schedule for February 1st, which means I’ll be busy in January, finishing the draft and then getting it whipped into a shape I’m comfortable sending her.

As I write this, I still have no title or cover image selected, but I’m planning to pick an image from our trip to Copenhagen and the Faroe Islands last August.

Speaking of images, I put together a gallery of my favorite shots of 2024.
**My Substack subscribers have already received that link, too.

The Hubster and I welcomed the New Year in our own traditional fashion. An early dinner (late lunch) out, and then a bottle of bubbly at home for a quiet evening. I can’t remember the last time we managed to stay awake until midnight, and since fireworks are outlawed in our community—in fact, in the entire county with the exception of organized displays—it is a quiet night. If we were so inclined, we could go up the street a hundred yards or so and watch the annual Pikes Peak display, assuming there’s no cloud cover, and it’s not snowing. Or too cold for us. And we managed to be awake. So far, we’ve been here 14 years and have never seen the display. Not even the 9 PM test. Every year a group of climbers ascend the peak to set off fireworks. For them, it’s a two-day ordeal starting the night before when they climb to Barr Camp and spend the night. They climb to the summit the next day, and set off a fireworks display at midnight.

If you want the history and more details, you can find them here.

Note: When we lived in Orlando, we could stand in our driveway and watch the fireworks from the theme parks. It was never cold.

Okay, that’s the holiday summation. What’s next?

A thought has been niggling through my brain as I think about the year ahead. “May you live in interesting times.” I was curious about the origin and meaning of this statement, and I paid a visit to the Google Machine. I found this article at Wikipedia, and I’m blatantly copying and pasting it here. I’ve redacted the footnotes. If you want all the references, you can find the article in its entirety here.

“May you live in interesting times” is an English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. The expression is ironic: “interesting” times are usually times of trouble.

Despite being so common in English as to be known as the “Chinese curse”, the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced. The most likely connection to Chinese culture may be deduced from analysis of the late-19th-century speeches of Joseph Chamberlain, probably erroneously transmitted and revised through his son Austen Chamberlain.

Origins

Despite the phrase being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no known equivalent expression in Chinese. The nearest related Chinese expression translates as “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.” The expression originates from Volume 3 of the 1627 short story collection by Feng Menglong, Stories to Awaken the World.

Evidence that the phrase was in use as early as 1936 is provided in a memoir written by Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British Ambassador to China in 1936 and 1937, and published in 1949. He mentions that before he left England for China in 1936, a friend told him of a Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

Frederic René Coudert Jr. also recounted having first heard the phrase in 1936:

Some years ago, in 1936, I had to write to a very dear and honoured friend of mine, who has since died, Sir Austen Chamberlain, brother of the present Prime Minister, and I concluded my letter with a rather banal remark “that we were living in an interesting age”. Evidently he read the whole letter, because by return mail he wrote to me and concluded as follows: “Many years ago I learned from one of our diplomats in China that one of the principal Chinese curses heaped upon an enemy is, ‘May you live in an interesting age.'” “Surely”, he said, “no age has been more fraught with insecurity than our own present time.” That was three years ago.[7]

The phrase is again described as a “Chinese curse” in an article published in Child Study: A Journal of Parent Education in 1943.

“Chamberlain curse” theory

Research by philologist Garson O’Toole shows a probable origin in the mind of Austen Chamberlain’s father Joseph Chamberlain dating around the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Specifically, O’Toole cites the following statement Joseph made during a speech in 1898:

I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. (Hear, hear.) I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety. (Hear, hear.)

Over time, the Chamberlain family may have come to believe that the elder Chamberlain had not used his own phrase, but had repeated a phrase from Chinese.

That’s it from me. Any thoughts, traditions, events you’d like to share. The floor is yours.

New! Find me at Substack with Writings and Wanderings

Double Intrigue
When your dream assignment turns into more than you bargained for
Cover of Double Intrigue, an International Romantic Suspense by Terry Odell Shalah Kennedy has dreams of becoming a senior travel advisor—one who actually gets to travel. Her big break comes when the agency’s “Golden Girl” is hospitalized and Shalah is sent on a Danube River cruise in her place. She’s the only advisor in the agency with a knowledge of photography, and she’s determined to get stunning images for the agency’s website.
Aleksy Jakes wants out. He’s been working for an unscrupulous taskmaster in Prague, and he’s had enough. When he spots one of his coworkers in a Prague hotel restaurant, he’s shocked to discover she’s not who he thought she was.
As Shalah and Aleksy cruise along the Danube, the simple excursion soon becomes an adventure neither of them imagined.

Like bang for your buck? I have a new Mapleton Bundle. Books 4, 5, and 6 for one low price.

Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”

Dreams, Goals, and a Gift
Terry Odell

This is my last official post of 2020, but the official TKZ Winter Hiatus doesn’t start until December 21st, so don’t stop visiting.

Is it too early to think about the New Year? Are you already thinking about the tradition of making resolutions? With a new year come new beginnings. Fresh starts. We all enter a new year filled with hope and promises to make it better than the last one.

And, usually, by the end of January, all those good intentions have gone by the wayside. I gave up making resolutions long ago (although I occasionally make them for the Hubster—less chance of me breaking them that way). What I’ve learned, is that if you want to see success, you have to narrow your focus.

These resolutions don’t work:

I resolve to be a best-selling author.
I resolve to write three novels this year.
I resolve to make $100,000 selling my e-books.

Why don’t they work? They’re dreams.

Dreams are wonderful. Dreams are things you’d love to have, but they’re also things over which you have no control, because they depend on other people. You need goals.
Goals have to be measurable. I learned that way back in college when I was getting my teacher certification. The course was “Behavioral Objectives” and we learned to set ways to measure whether we were getting through to our students. We could set a goal that at least 90% of our students would score at least 80% or better on an exam. This was a measurable outcome. If they didn’t, we’d have to go back and figure out why. And, frankly, the usual answer would be “because I didn’t teach the material effectively”, NOT “the students were lazy slackers.”

Another thing I learned in that course was that you had to take small steps. You had to figure out what skills were required for a student to answer a question on that exam correctly, and then work on practicing those skills. (Not teaching to the test—teaching skills.)

How do you turn those dreams into goals? Break them down into things you can do in small increments, and that you can measure. Being a best-selling author isn’t measurable. (Can I call myself a best-selling author if I pay for an ad and my books hit the number 1 slot on a very small niche at Amazon for a week? Some authors do, but that’s not something I’m comfortable with.)

Those who say, “I’m going to write three books this year” are likely to fail if that’s as far as they go. What does it take to finish the book? You take that lofty goal, break it into small pieces, and then figure out what you can do to achieve each piece.

Write X words/pages a day/week until you’re done. That’s something you can track. You can see your success. You have a specific goal each day/week.

And, most importantly, you can reassess and adjust these goals over the course of the year. Are you making your word count goal by 10 AM? Maybe it’s too low. Are you staying up until 3 AM and still failing? Don’t be afraid to lower it. Of course, you’ll want to take a hard look at why you’re not meeting your word count goals. If it’s because you’re spending 8 hours a day on Facebook, you might want to cut back on your social media time!

As for making $100,000? That’s a dream that depends on others. You have no control over who buys your books. You can develop a marketing plan, a budget, hire a publicist, but the sales are out of your hands. The one thing you can do, however, is to use the best marketing tool out there. Write the next book!

Whatever you’re looking for in the new year, I wish you the best in attaining it.

(Did you forget about the word “Gift” in the title? If you’ve read this far, I’ve got one for you.)

Tomorrow is the first night of Hanukkah, which is the winter holiday my family celebrates, although there’s likely to be a different slant on the retelling of the “miracle” this year.

Because I consider everyone at TKZ, on both sides of the site, my family, I thought I’d offer you a gift as my last TKZ offering of 2020.

My gift to you: Enjoy a free download of Deadly Production, Book 4 in my Mapleton Mystery series. You can find your gift at Book Funnel. You can download an epub, mobi, or PDF file. If you have trouble, the wonderful folks at BookFunnel will be happy to help. (Download deadline is December 18th.)

Have a wonderful and safe holiday season.

My new Mystery Romance, Heather’s Chase, is available at most e-book channels. and and in print from Amazon.

Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.” Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.