It’s blog tour-alicious!

Once again it’s time for the Drollerie Press blog tour, this time telling stories of kindness to celebrate Sweetest Day:

•My post is up at Heather Ingemar’s blog.

•Imogen Howson will step away from her own blog to post below.

•Drollerie will have all the blog tour links up some time today. And my story Red Moon Rising will finally be out in their Straying From the Path anthology next week.

For anyone visiting who wants to know more about me, check out the What I’ve Written space or see some of my previous posts. For now, take it away, Imogen!

Hi, and thanks to Fraser for letting me walk around on his blog today!
When this month’s blog tour theme was set, I—being four thousand miles from where Sweetest Day originated— had to go and look it up.
Now, being in England, I’m not sure how Sweetest Day is celebrated in practice, but it doesn’t seem to be as big a deal as most of the other holidays.  Which is rather nice.  I mean, I have nothing against Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, Valentine’s, Halloween, Mother’s and Father’s Days, but they seem to be looming ever larger in the yearly calendar—less fun little festivals and more annual obligations that you’d better live up to (limited budgets, recessions and general ennui notwithstanding) for fear of causing grave offence.
A random selection of examples:
Families juggling the competing demands of the extended family, trying to divide visits fairly between Christmas and New Year’s (and for some of you guys, Thanksgiving as well) and still ending up offending someone.
Parents who seem to feel obliged to give, not just Easter eggs at Easter, but toys, books or money as well.
Couples who expect not just Valentine’s cards but flowers, jewelry and dinner out from each other.  Not to mention the way the festival takes over every shop and restaurant for the whole of February, all those teddies and hearts and roses (and, oddly, cuddly gorillas) instructing you on the right way to have romance in your life.  Me, I’m rarely, if ever, grateful for flowers.  And never for cuddly gorillas.
More seriously, the equally insistent messages around Mother’s and Father’s Days.  The pressure to show your appreciation for what your parents have done for you.  What effect does that have on people who’re estranged from their parents—or from their children?  Whose parents were abusive?  Who have just lost a parent or child?  Or who are trying to come to terms with being unable to have children at all?  I always appreciate the cards and gifts my daughters make at school on Mother’s Day, but as they get older I’m not sure I’ll be very appreciative of gifts that they’ve been guilted into buying for me.
As I said, I’m not actually sure how Sweetest Day works, but it sounds as if it’s on a smaller scale, and—hopefully—a less pressurizing one.  About the small gestures—candy, a card—rather than the big ones.
When I’m writing, and trying to show the development of a relationship, often the thing to focus on is the small details.  Eye movement, a sentence started and not finished, a chewed nail, a character mirroring another character’s thoughts.  There’s a place for the page-long speech, but the real relationship, that the reader can believe in, is built through tiny “tells”.  Little gestures, all the more meaningful for being unobtrusive.
In real life, sometimes the grand gesture is nice.  When I had our first daughter, my husband turned up at the hospital with the hugest bunch of flowers ever.  For my thirtieth birthday, he wrote me a song.  Traditional romantic gestures—and very much appreciated.  But day to day, year to year, a cup of tea, an offer to make dinner, a bar of candy on his way home from work…little things, they’ll do fine.