Sandra Rose Hughes

The cat in the picture is mine. She is a small calico, and she loves to jump into the refrigerator in the summertime. I like this poem because of all the onomatopoeia. I also like some of the words I used like, "mottled," "swifted," etc. I think the repetition creates a neat rythm. The scene described used to be a daily occurence at my home, until I got a new car. All the animals recognized the sound of my rattling car and would wait for it every day. I really like my pets, and I really enjoy writing about them. Ka-clunk The mottled cat sits staring from the window. She licks her paw, but rivets her eyes, waiting. A fly buzzes around her; she flicks her tail, she flicks her tail. The black dog lies in the sun behind a fence. A slow sunbeam plays across her face. One ear is raised, listening. The cat’s eye twitches. The dog’s tail thumps, her tail thumps. In the distance, they hear it. The sound. C...

A lot of poetry is made up of metaphors. My husband made up a beautiful metaphor last night. He said: The love I hold in my heart for you is like boiling water in a hot teakettle. He made a haiku!

A lot of poetry is made up of metaphors. My husband made up a beautiful metaphor last night. He said: The love I hold in my heart for you is like boiling water in a hot teakettle. It's sort of Haiku-like.

Some of you may be familiar with the popular and wonderful lifestyle website, www.sparkpeople.com. If you're not, it's basically this amazing free website (this is not a paid ad by the way, it's my personal opinion) that helps people lose weight and get healthy. Some people use it to gain weight if that's what it takes to get healthy. They have millions of members now. My twin sister and I both joined about 3 years ago, and we've had great success keeping our weight in a healthy range and exercising. We even got to appear briefly (about half a second) on Entertainment tonight as a success story. http://www.etonline.com/news/2009/07/76746/index.html Anyway, what this all has to do with this blog is that I have been toying with writing some weight loss poetry. I have never seen a poetry magazine that published weight loss poetry, but maybe I haven't looked hard enough. I think weight problems are something that the majority of people in the United States will deal...

The article below was originally published in the Kern Valley Sun. It is all true, and I recieved more feedback on this one than any other article I had published with them. I like to think I was channeling Dave Barry a little here. My mother used to read Dave Barry's articles to us every Sunday, and I always hear her voice speaking to me when I try to write something amusing. I would like to point out that although the title of my blog is "My Mother Thinks I'm a Good Writer," she's not the only person who has supported me through all this. My father has also been very supportive, as well as my sister, my brother, my sister-in-law, my bro-mo-law (brother's mother in law), my aunts and uncles....the list goes on and on. Last summer they all tolerated listening to chapter after chapter of my Guinea Pig book. I think it might have been painful, but they cheerfully listened and offered feedback week after week. Without further ado, here is the article. My Humiliat...

Here I am, scaling the wall of writing and submitting. When I submitted my poem to Midnight Screaming, they recommended a website called www.duotrope.com. This is a free website that is basically a directory of thousands of magazines that accept submissions from writers. If you sign up, you can track all of your submissions. It's a great resource for anyone with stories or poems they would like to get published. They do a really great job at keeping their entries about each market up-to-date. I also like it because it's a very "no-frills" website, so my incredibly slow dial-up internet does not freak out everytime I log in. Here is a very silly poem I wrote on a whim a few months ago. I don't think I will submit it anywhere, but I do like it. It is based on the song, "Someday my Prince will Come," from Snow White . Someday my prints will come Some day, I’ll get published. Some day I’ll get my wish, And how thrilling that moment will be, When the prints o...

Every country girl needs a faithful dog. The one on the right is Ladybug- she comes into the story a little bit later. If could be any writer, I would probably choose to be a combination of Dave Barry and Roahl Dahl. Both of them are just so quirky and clever. I hope to always keep an element of humor in the things I write. The following story first appeared in the Kern Valley Sun last summer. I have an unfortunate tendency to skim directions without reading them closely, and occasionally this leads to some interesting misadventures for me. Cattails I was raised in the suburbs. As a child, I lived in the Los Angeles area, and for most of my adolescence, I lived in Bakersfield. In both of these places, nature seemed very far away, and the wildest animal we ever saw was the occasional possum dead on the side of the road. When I moved to the Kern Valley, I was pleased to discover the amount of wildlife and nature we have in our area. Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about wildlife or ...

The piece below is a piece that I wrote while I was in college. For the most part, I was very happy at California Baptist University, and I believe it's a wonderful, Godly school run by Godly staff. However, by my Senior year, the attitudes of some of the students began to grate on me. That's when I wrote the piece below, which I recently revised. Each conversation below actually happened to me. Entitlement at CBU By Sandra Rose Hughes “I don’t get how they always manage to screw up the PowerPoint slides in chapel. I mean, it’s not that hard,” said a loud female voice coming from the row of folding chairs behind Sandy. It was joined a few seconds later by a quieter voice, also female. “Well…if you don’t have very much time, sometimes it is easy to make mistakes. Do you mean like the spelling errors?” “Yeah, and the timing and the format. They’re not even creative.” At this point, Sandy tuned her ears out of the conversation and tried to focus on the drama sketch she and her Dr...

My husband Anthony doing the most romantic thing in the world: building me a house. In one of my favorite movies, Elf , Will Farrell runs around yelling, "I'm in love, I'm in love, and I don't care who knows it!" That is how I feel about my husband. I love to write love poetry about him and for him, but I am not usually happy with how it turns out. It seems like, unless you're the person in love, nobody else really wants to read too much love poetry about someone else's relationship. It's like watching the high schoolers I teach make out in the hallway. It's revolting, and it makes you want to hit them or break them up with a firehose. All that being said, my mother asked if I would post a love poem for Valentines Day, so here's one of mine that I was pretty happy with. I submitted this poem to a local poetry competition put on by the writers association here in the Kern Valley. They didn't really give me any feedback at all, except to tell...

Acceptance is such a great word. When I was little and I was able to make friends with other kids, I felt accepted. I was thrilled when I got accepted to the Oxford Honors Program where I spent a semester in college. When my husband proposed to me, he was excited that I accepted . When The Kern Valley Sun, Concise Delight, and Midnight Screaming accepted my writing, I felt like I could really make it as a writer! When I get accepted by anything or anyone, it makes me feel like I'm worthwhile- it's like another person patting you on the back, saying, "You're good enough...you're good enough." The hard thing about acceptance is that it is someone else's to give or recieve. You can't control their decisions. If other kids teased me or refused to play with me, I felt rejected. I applied for a lot of scholarships before college, and although I did get quite a few, it sure hurt to get rejected. However, rejection is a part of life. More people will reject m...

My Husband and me at my Cousin Jennifer's wedding in 2006 One of my my New Year's resolutions was to write a page a day every day this year. As Guy De Maupassant (French writer and author of the creepy story "The Horla,") put it- the best way to become a better writer is simply to "Get black on white." I had been playing around with writing here and there when I got inspired every two or three months, but I decided it was time to really buckle down. Ergo, if I'm going to be a writer, I need to get in gear and WRITE. So far, my resolution has yielded good results. It sometimes feels like slow-going, but I am already six chapters (about 40 pages) into a new children's book about a little girl named Marilyn Marlin. The book will only be about 13 chapters (about 80 pages), so I'm practically halfway! I like it much better than my first children's book, A Cavey Journey , which I am still revising. I think Marilyn is a likable, albeit pathetic, ch...

Granddad I have only four memories of you left: Teasing your whispy white hair into improbable shapes, Waking you in your duck-patterned sleeping bag with my hugs, The taste of Frosted Flakes, and the feeling that you liked me.