Being Still

I’ve been cooped up in the car for 21 hours the past two days. I hate long car trips. I can’t DO anything! My normally busy hands and feet are forced into quietness, as is my racing mind. No schedules to remember, no list of things to do.  

So I sit—listening to music, reading the map, and thinking.

It’s amazing what happens when I am still. So many thoughts pop into my head, so many things I can consider. Spiritual matters, personal issues, writing ideas.

Besides prayer and pondering some of the truths the Lord has shown me lately, I came up with a new story idea (probably a short story), some ideas for my work in progress, goals for the upcoming year, and an idea for a young adult novel.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been that productive!

Maybe I need to take a long car trip a couple of times a year. Clear my head, consider new ideas, make notes. It seems to be the only time I can manage to be completely still, think uncluttered thoughts.

After a week of Christmas with my in-laws we’ll drive another two days back home. Another bout of stillness, another chance to consider. I can’t wait to see what gems come out of that journey!

Forging Friendships

I love my writer-life. I love getting to know people via email, where a wall-flower like me can shed the inhibitions of time and place, of physical appearance and insecurity, and just be words on a page.

The first time I experienced this was over five years ago when I took a couple of writing classes on-line through UCLA extension. One woman in the class and I began corresponding regularly even after our classes ended. In fact, she introduced me to Nanowrimo (National Novel Writers Month) during which I wrote the first draft of my first novel. And I helped her slice words from an essay which later won a national contest.

I’ve come to know other writers through conferences, then kept in touch and deepened our relationships via email. And just these past couple of weeks I’ve begun a correspondence with a writer on an email loop I subscribe to who emailed me off-list concerning a post I’d made. We’ve written a little back and forth since then.

And then there is the neat relationship I’ve forged with the daughter of a teacher at my kids’ school—where the mom found out I wrote and told me her daughter did, too. I asked for her email address and plunged in—just words on a screen careening into cyberspace rather than the scary voice-to-voice or face-to-face meeting with a stranger. That was the beginning of a fun friendship. We do hope to meet face to face one of these days, but for the moment, our words suffice.

My introverted world has expanded and I love the people who populate it. Who knew that God would use a computer and an internet connection to push me into forging friendships I would have shied away from in person.

SAHM I Am

I finished SAHM I Am by Meredith Efken as I waited for my children’s school to pop up on the “closed” list for tomorrow (a little ice in Texas goes a long way.) Anyway, it was a delightful read!

Written as a collection of emails to and from various characters all connected by a Stay-At-Home-Mothers (SAHM) email loop, this book captured the frustration and joy and mayhem of stay-at-home moms. I could so relate to the issues of preschoolers and feeling worth and getting crosswise with your husband and wanting so much to be the woman God wants you to be. I laughed through the whole book—and cried at the end.

Now, I’m not sure that in the midst of those years in my life I could have laughed through it. I might have bawled through the whole book! But with my youngest at the ripe old age of 11, I can look back and see God’s faithfulness, not only in allowing us to survive those years, but in bringing about the heart change in me that I so longed for.

SAHM I Am would be a great gift for any young mom on your Christmas list this year. I plan to give a few of them.

Woes of a Writer-Mom

Sometime I wish someone else would be “Mom” for awhile. That someone else would keep up with the library book due dates, remember to give one child money for a project at school, fret about Christmas decorations still hidden in the attic in December, shop for groceries, figure out the logistics of getting to a birthday party.

Such are the woes of a writer-mom. It’s not just that I get weary doing the same old thing, staying on top of five schedules all at once—it’s that all of these things must take precedence over pulling words out of my brain and seeing them appear on the computer screen in front of me. Those words often require time—time that is eaten away by “motherly” duties.

Not that I don’t find joy in serving my husband and kids—I really do. In fact, that has been one of the greatest works in my heart that the Lord has done over the years. But some days I look longingly at my quiet computer and sigh. If only . . .

I know it really isn’t long now. Three and half years from now, the first chickadee will fly the coop. A mere seven and a half years (which used to seem like a lifetime and is not the blink of an eye) and they’ll all be gone. Though it won’t really be “over,” it will calm things down considerably.

Help me, Lord, not to wish away these days. Help me to enjoy them—to love and serve my family, knowing all the while that You hold onto my words, keeping them for those glorious moments when nothing else demands my attention.

Believably Unbelievable

*My intention was to comment on my “currently reading” list, at least when I have something positive to say. I wrote this blog entry just before my computer died a couple of weeks ago and have now recovered it from the old hard drive.*


Daphne du Maurier is one of my favorite authors, one of the few I discovered AFTER seeing a movie made from her book. Rebecca, both the old Hitchcock version and the newer Masterpiece Theatre version, fascinated me. I read the book—and loved what I read. So on my many trips to the used book store, I’ve searched out her other novels.

Du Maurier is a master at first person storytelling. She draws the reader in from the first sentence with the voice of the character and the insinuations of something mysterious. I love the way history and suspense are woven together in most of her books.

I just finished The House on the Strand. The premise is kind of out there: “On vacation at an ancient manor house, a young man takes an experimental drug that transports him 600 years into the past—while leaving his body in the present.”

Can you imagine pitching that to an editor? It sounds crazy! And yet she makes it work. From page one, the reader is drawn into a past world, wondering why this modern man is in it and is he really in it and how did he get there. Interspersed between his trips to the past are snippets of his present life. Each era has its own problems. Each provides a kind of escape from the other. Each is filled with its own suspense, its own plot. And complications ensue when the worlds threaten to collide.

This book stretched the limits of my imagination. An unbelievable premise turned into a believable, enjoyable book, told by a credible first person. Books like hers inspire me to strive for a level above my current storytelling, my current level of craft. I can’t wait to find another Daphne du Maurier gem in the musty stacks of some used book sale.

Ready to Write

My new laptop is up and running. I’ve even recovered my old laptop’s hard drive (everything except email addresses). Thanksgiving is done. Christmas shopping is well underway.

And school reconvenes on Monday.

Ah. Music to my ears.

Although I’ve come to appreciate the time my children are not in school, by the time they go back, I’m ready. I’m ready for the familiarity of my routine, no matter how crazy. Ready to re-claim my house. Ready to settle down in the silence and write my little heart out.

My prayer has been that these past two weeks of “vacation” from working on my book (one week forced by the death of the aforementioned laptop, the other chosen to capitalize on the week off school for Thanksgiving) will make me more productive and creative when I begin again.

I hope so. At the moment, though, I can hardly remember where I left off. My characters (as I’ve heard other writers express) remain frozen in mid-stride, waiting for me to release them to finish their stories.

I can’t wait to see where they’ll take me next.

Recovery

Don’t you love getting a “new” something? Something fresh, unsullied, full of possibilities?

I got my new laptop this week. A fresh hard drive. A working CDRW drive. A screen that isn’t hanging on by one hinge.

It’s good. It’s exciting. But it has also been time consuming. Setting everything just the way I like it. Linking my favorite websites. Loading my essential programs. I’m ready to get back to writing now.

But I still have the issue of my old hard drive—the one with two blog entries written but not posted. The one with the pictures of our England vacation. The one with emails and email addresses I don’t know how to find again.

We are working on recovering these, retrieving information and images I hate to lose. But they haven’t reappeared yet. So I write again, losing myself in what I can do rather than freting over what I cannot. I will do a victory dance if I get my information back. But if I don’t, I must still go on, trusting that the Lord holds even this in His hand. What I need, He will supply.

In His way.

In His time.

Mourning

My laptop died Friday. After three years of faithful service it simply quit turning on. So, alas, I'm in mourning.

It's amazing how dependent I've become on the porability of writing, taking it with me to sports practices, to my husband's office, on vacation. Now I'm tethered to a desk again and it is hard. Hard to sit in this chair. Hard to make the time to be in that room.

A new one is on its way, but until it arrives, my word count decreases, my novel creeps along, and my blog is neglected.

Good-bye, dear laptop. You served me well.

My Thanks

Sometimes—ok, a lot—I get discouraged in the writing life. That’s when I need the reality of those who walk this road ahead of me. What a blessing that writers such as Brandilyn Collins, Randy Ingermanson, and the various contributors to the Charis Connection blog share the ups and downs of their own writing lives with the rest of us.

When Lori Copeland talks about a typical writing day—one where life gets in the way of words on the page—it helps me chill out and take things as they come. Apparently being published and having your kids out of the house doesn’t banish life from eating away at writing time. So I must learn to cope, sooner rather than later.

When Randy Ingermanson (in his wonderful e-zine, Advanced Fiction Writing) and Brandilyn Collins (on her blog, Forensics and Faith) confess that by the time they turn in a manuscript, they hate it, I don’t feel so discouraged about the novels sitting in the top of my closet, read and revised so many times that I can’t stand the thought of them.

When Deborah Raney talks of unplanned plotting, and Liz Curtis Higgs writes of the joy in the actual writing of our unique stories, I am able to take a deep breath and simply move to the next scene, the next chapter of whatever is before me.

So to all of these authors, and many more I’ve met and read, I want to say Thank You. Thank you for being honest, for not maintaining a shroud of secrecy over the hard things, and for encouraging one more writer not to quit.

The Kite Runner

This is my first ever attempt at a book review. I have to say, I’m doing it as much for me as for anyone out there reading this. In spite of my love of reading and even of literature classes, I have never done well at evaluating a book overall. I’m not really a big picture person. But I’m learning. I’m not sure I’m learning enough to put it all into words on a page, but I’m trying.

So, here goes.

The Kite Runner.

My husband and I picked up this book after a good review by Marvin Olasky, editor of World Magazine. I read the first fifty pages, intrigued, while I sat at our school book fair waiting for children to bring money to exchange for books. Then my husband took it over.

Intense and disturbing. That’s all he would say as he read. Intense and disturbing.

“But was it worth it?” I asked when he finished (he read three straight hours on Saturday.) I asked this for a reason—a reason like Cold Mountain, where I labored on and on only to hate the ending and want to chuck the book across the room. He considered his answer for a moment. “Yes, it was worth it.”

So I began, fifty pages in already.

This is a beautifully written book about a time too close to be remembered (the late seventies, early eighties) in a place far away (Afghanistan.) The words, the images, while definitely intense and disturbing in places, took me into a place I’d never been, never imagined I wanted to go, into a culture I knew nothing about. It is a story woven over a span of thirty-five years with unforgettable, real characters, in spite of their unfamiliar location.

The relationships between Amir and his father and their servants, Hassan and his father, Ali, intermingle with bitter and sweet, with truth and lies. Among life and death, wins and losses, normal days and extraordinary ones, Amir must deal with the choices he has made. They shape his life and his relationships. In the end, they define who he is. The story takes unexpected twists and turns and leads to a bittersweet but satisfying ending.  

It is an intense and disturbing book in that it shows the depravity of our hearts, but it also shows our capacity for forgiveness. It made me consider my actions, why I make the choices I make. I wept, not only for Amir and his life, but for the regrets I harbor in my own, as well. The only flaw here is that the forgiveness and redemption do not flow from their only true source: Christ.

But The Kite Runner was a beautiful, haunting read. One I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

Writing Aerobics

I know all the arguments for consistent aerobic exercise. You’ll have more energy. You’ll lose weight. You’ll be healthier—in body and mind. In fact, I know a woman who is clinically depressed who says if she doesn’t get enough physical exercise, her outlook on life takes a nose dive.

After years of battling my own dark clouds, I have discovered something about myself. It isn’t the physical exercise that bolsters my spirits and gives me energy. It’s the exercise of writing.

When life gets in the way of my words, I sag. I’m learning that even when I rightly put relationships in my life ahead of my writing, I still need some small outlet for my words—whether journaling or blogging, writing a note or an email.

And isn’t that the definition of a writer? Having an innate, God-given urge to put words on a page, whether to instruct or rebuke, encourage or entertain?

Join me in exercising whatever gift God has given you. If you are a writer, enjoy the pleasure it gives the Lord as you write the words He has called you to write for this particular day. And see if you don’t find a lighter spring to your step and a brighter smile on your face.

I do.

Losing Words

I lost my words today. Over 1700 of them. Seven pages. They just vanished due to an error when I tried to close and save my file.

Fortunately, I’d printed them, due to a similar loss last week. But now I have to type them back in again.

It’s frustrating to make progress only to slip back to where you began. Like being called for a holding penalty after a thirty yard gain.

I’ll push ahead again, but with considerably less vigor. I like to keep moving forward on my first drafts rather than edit as I go and this will slow things down a bit.

I keep telling myself that even in this the Lord is in control. He sees all my words. He knows which ones will stay and which will go. He sees the finished product when all I see are tangles and frustrations.

So I will write my words once again. As I do, I’ll marvel that the Lord gave them to me in the first place.

Juggling Act

I have two novels finished, one in the process. Well, actually, I can already see work that needs to be done on the other two, so I guess technically, they aren’t finished. I need to tighten the writing and plot in book #1. I need to do some fill in research about an obscure area of the world in book #2. Meanwhile, I plug along on book #3.

I’m so into book 3 that when I sat down to work on re-vamping my proposal for book #2, I couldn’t remember the main character’s name! It was quite disheartening. There sit Thing 1 and Thing 2 on my shelf, languishing in the realm of “near completion.” I want them to be finished, to push them out into the world. But the circle winds ever tighter. Until they are finished finished, will they attract any attention from editors or agents? Until they attract attention from editors or agents, is it worth my time to finish them?

I’m not sure whether to take heart or lose it when I hear stories such as those of T. Davis Bunn and others who had many “finished” novels taking up shelf space before one got published. And it wasn’t one of the ones sitting, either. So I keep writing. Book 3 builds, week by week, into a complex story.

I wonder if this one will be a sitter, too. Will these characters ever live for anyone but me? Maybe not. And I guess I’m okay with that. But it would sure be nice if one of these days everyone else could meet the people with whom I spend most of my days.

A Short Story

In participation with the Celebration of New Christian Fiction (click here for a listing of participating posts), I am posting one of my yet-to-be-published short stories. It’s an experiment in present tense and I think it reflects the heart of Christ for our relationships.


Issues of the Heart


The ringing phone jolts me from a deep sleep. Fumbling for the receiver, mouth dry, heart pounding, instinct propels words from my mouth. “Hello? Hello?”

No answer. Another ring.

Press the “talk” button, my fuzzy brain reminds me.

“Your father had a heart attack early this morning. Don’t worry, he’s okay.” Mother’s voice shakes just a bit as she speaks.

“Where are you?” I swing my legs off the bed, my toes searching for the fuzzy slippers usually within reach. With the phone still at my ear, I shuffle across the tiled bathroom floor and into my large closet. She talks while I jot mental notes—people to call, things to be done.

I snatch up the wrinkled pair of jeans on the floor and wriggle into them. I wrestle a sweater over my head, trying not to drop the phone, still listening to my mother’s raspy voice.

“You don’t need to come to the hospital. Just make a few phone calls for me. I’ll call you this afternoon, after I’ve talked to the doctor.”

My heart flutters in protest. How dare she assume I wouldn’t drop everything to be there with her—with him. I puff up, ready to explode my answer. Silence on the other end deflates my angers. She’s hung up.

I stare at the phone, the dial tone sounding loud in the stillness of early morning. Memories of that other early morning swirl thick, driving me to my knees. Has it been five years? It feels like yesterday.

That morning I had been the one making the call.

I replay the conversation in my head, as I have a hundred times since then. “Mom, Kyle’s had a heart attack. We’re on our way to the hospital, but it’s not looking good. I only have a minute. I know you’re busy, but if you could just make a few phone calls for me, I’d appreciate it. I’ll talk to you again this afternoon and let you know what’s going on. Thanks, Mom.” Click.

A natural defense, I tell myself again. I didn’t want to burden them. I didn’t want to disrupt their lives, too. But even as I tell myself this, I know it is a lie. I hadn’t wanted her there. I hadn’t wanted her to see me hurting.

I hadn’t wanted to need her.

Now she didn’t want to need me.

The smell of coffee forces me into motion. Pushing aside the memory of Kyle making me coffee every morning, I run a brush through my hair and whisk makeup over my face. In the kitchen, steaming liquid fills my tall, stainless steel travel mug. I savor the first bitter sip. It kicks me into high gear. I grab my purse and head out the door.

My hands shake as I dig for my cell phone. I throw it on the empty seat beside me, both hands gripping the wheel. Ten short minutes later, the hospital looms before me. I look away, concentrating on the signs for visitor parking. An empty space. Turn the car off. Now the phone calls begin.

It is hardest to call my children. Natalie told me just last week the boy she is dating might be “the one.”

“Will Grandpa walk me down the aisle?” she had ventured in a small voice.

“Of course,” I had replied.

Now I hear worry in her voice. I picture her biting her lip and twirling the lock of hair that falls next to her face, like she did at her dad’s funeral.

I call Daddy’s sisters, then Mother’s. “We wish we could be there,” they all say. “We are praying.”

Steeling myself against the onslaught of memories, I step from the car, my feet heavy, reluctant. And yet at the same time, eager, anxious. At the Emergency room entrance I feel the tingle of flesh as my fingers touched Kyle’s until the paramedics wheeled him out of reach. It was the last time I felt the warmth of his skin on mine.

Misty-eyed, I stumble through the waiting room doors. My mother sits slumped in a chair, hair half-curled, half-straight, eyes wide and shadowed. The sleeves of her sweater bunch unnaturally and I spy a bit of pink satin, lace at the edge. Battered white slippers cover her feet. It could have been me. It had been me.

I lay my hand on her shoulder. Her head jerks up. We look into each other’s eyes, sisters now—sisters in suffering. Suddenly, we are in each other’s arms, crying tears we should have cried together before—tears we must cry now.

More than an hour we sit, sometimes talking, sometimes crying, sometimes in understanding silence. The TV drones on in the background, telling of other people’s tragedies; we know only ours. The nurse intrudes politely. Daddy has been taken to the ICU. We can see him.
We stand, unsure of each other.

“I can go now, if you want me to,” I stammer, afraid to hear her answer.

“No. Don’t go.” When she places her hand on mine and I almost can’t tell which is whose. When did I get to be so old?

“I want you here. . .” she pulls her hand back and drops it at her side, “unless it’s too painful.” She shrugs and looks away. “I understand, either way.”

I feel a tug at my heart that hasn’t been there since girlhood, since just before those first years of asserting my teenage independence. I smile as a memory flits down and lands softly, like a butterfly whose wings flap, then slow, until I can see every color, every intricate design.

“Do you remember the first time I really skinned my knee, Mom? I was six, I think. I had on my new roller skates and hit a bump in the sidewalk. It bled for so long I thought it would never stop. Then my whole knee turned to scab.” As I tell the story I can see that scrawny, headstrong little girl, pigtails flying. “Once the scab got hard it hurt to bend it. Remember?”

Mom nods. The light in her eyes tells me she knows what I want to say, but she will let me say it anyway. Still, I hesitate.

“I think it’s time for my heart to bend a little.” I bite my lip and look away. “I’ve been limping for a long time. I know it will hurt for a little while—but it will heal. You told me that, and you were right.”

She smiles back at me, like she did when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, when lights would go on inside my head and I would reveal to her some truth I had stubbornly refused to believe before. A smile of love, with no “I-told-you-so” behind the eyes.

I reach for her hand—glad I won’t ever be too old to need my mother, glad once again to accept the role of daughter.

We gather her things and leave the waiting room. I spy Daddy as we pass through the doors to the ICU, bed propped at a semi-reclining angle, making the nurse laugh. My daddy, just like always—except for the tubes and machines. He sees us and lifts a hand. I wave back. Mom wipes her eyes, blows her nose.

And I wonder whose heart will heal faster—Daddy’s . . . or mine.

Turned On Its Ear

It’s an interesting exercise—taking a well-known story and putting in a plot twist diametrically opposed to what people have thought all their lives. I’ve run across two of these in the past few weeks, a novel and a play.

When my daughter was assigned to read C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces for her English class, I was intrigued. I’d never heard of this Lewis book, nor of the story of Cupid and Psyche, from which it is derived. (Somehow I missed most of Greek mythology.) Anyway, Lewis approached a well-known story of an ugly sister and a beautiful sister, the god who married the beauty, and the jealousy and bitterness that sprang up in the ugly sister, from a whole different perspective. His premise: what if the ugly sister couldn’t see the gifts and luxuries bestowed on her beautiful sister by her god-husband? What if her actions were interpreted as anger and bitterness over his sister’s beauty and good fortune, but instead sprang from a fiercely possessive love for her sister and a misunderstanding of her current circumstances?

It sounds crazy, but it worked—wonderfully—and on many levels.

In the same vein, my husband and I went to see Wicked last night. Wicked is a Broadway musical about how the Wicked Witch of the West became so. It starred all your familiar Oz friends and was again, quite a twist. Born green and unloved, the so-called Wicked Witch tried and tried to make good happen for people only to be misunderstood, only to have her powers used by the conniving wizard. In the end, she made Glinda, the Good Witch, promise never to try to clear her name, for it would only end up soiling Glinda’s, too.

The creativity of both of these authors astounded me—looking at the familiar in a whole new light. It made me wonder what part of the story I am not seeing in the people and situations I encounter. For isn’t that what happens in life so many times? We have expectations of people and situations and we assume the same pattern remains in place. It doesn’t always. I’m glad to be reminded of that. Sometimes others’ intentions are not what we thought. Sometimes others’ perspectives are completely different from our own. Sometimes we need to ask the Lord to reveal to us the story behind the story before we are able to see people through His eyes and extend them His grace.

    

One Fell Swoop

I woke Saturday morning to a glorious sight—an article with my byline in the Dallas Morning News’ Rockwall/Rowlett Neighbors pullout section. A full page. With color pictures. And a line in italics at the end that declared me “a freelance writer.”

WOW! It was amazing. It was thrilling. But I didn’t jump up and down or call everyone I know. I just savored the moment, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

Then the mail arrived. Low and behold, the day got even better. A large manila envelope bore my name. I ripped it open. Beginnings Magazine. My first fiction publication. I turned to the story I know almost by heart, “Seat 6.” I’d been waiting for this for almost 10 months. Again, I reveled quietly in the moment.

It’s a bit overwhelming to discover your words in print twice in one day. Fiction. Non-fiction. Magazine. Newspaper. My words on a page for all to see. Scrolling back through the annuls of my imagination, I thought I’d be elated, ecstatic, uncontainable.

But all I felt was humbled.

Thank you, Lord, for being faithful to the dream You put in my heart so many years ago. May my words always bring glory to You alone.
    

Jumping in with both feet

I've resisted long enough. It's time to take the plunge.

So here I am. One more writer amidst the surging sea of five bazillion other writers. Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings, my rantings, my ravings. Maybe they will make you laugh. Maybe they will make you cry. Maybe they'll just help you pass the time when you should be doing your own writing and are scared or frustrated or bleary-eyed.

However and whyever you showed up at my sight, welcome. I'm glad you stopped in.