Faith In Walking Shoes

Postcards

2012-02-12T19:42:00.000-08:00

I got a special packet in the mail this week. My cousin Joy sent me a collection of postcards which I believe came through her mother. All were written by someone in our family to someone in the writer’s family. Most, but not all, recipients were also our family, such as when my grandmother or grandfather wrote to her parents or his mother—i.e., my great-grandparents. Dates on them ranged from 1907 to 1944 during the War. Almost all carried 1-cent stamps.

One was written to my great-great-grandmother in August 1909 just four months before she died. It’s from a nephew of hers who years later planted in me the first germ of love for genealogy. He has an interesting handwriting—surprisingly tiny for a man, and quite neat, but so far I haven’t been able to decipher all of it. He says he wants to see her “so bad”—I wonder if that happened before she died in December?

The front of that card is special because it is of the North Chester Church which was my grandfather’s first pastorate where he met and married my grandmother, and where generations of my ancestors attended, out there in the countryside northwest of Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the little bit I have dabbled in painting, I have done a small painting of it, steeple and all. In our recent trips up there, we’ve been sad to discover that the top part of the steeple is no longer. Our guess is that when it deteriorated too much, it was too expensive to rebuild as it had been, so they just finished it off with something simple.

One postcard is a cartoon sketch written to my other great-grandmother by her stepson. It’s postmarked 1908 and shows a guy in the bathroom with suspenders down, splashing water on his face from the commode while he complains, “Goll darn this old wash basin anyway. The water runs out before I can wash my face.” Methinks there’s a bit of a history lesson there somewhere.

My grandfather was a preacher who traveled a lot, and many of these postcards are a testament to that. One is a picture of the Old North Church in Boston. I’m impressed with how often in his travels he wrote to his in-laws and how he never failed to address them as “Dear Father and Mother.”

Two priceless postcards relate directly to me. One is of a broad street in Paris in late 1938. My parents and I (age two) spent seven months there while they studied French in order to continue their mission work in the French colony of French Equatorial Africa (as it was known before independence divided it into four separate countries). My mother wrote on the back that the penciled arrow at the far end of the street was the point from which my father had taken a picture of “our street.” She also wrote, “We go down the steps right across from there the other way to get our groceries—around the lower street.”

The one that touches my heart the most is dated Aug. 24, 1938. It predates the Paris street one perhaps by only a few weeks. It boasts of being an “actual photograph” of the ocean-going vessel, the S.S. New York. My grandmother writes to her parents:

“Dear Ones – We are here in N.Y. and this is the boat they sail on tonight. We have been all through [it]. It is hard to see them go, but God’s Grace is sufficient. We had a good trip here & and a fun time at our [mission] conference in Cory [PA]. We leave for home tonight. Love, Fern.”

“It is hard to see them go,” she said.

I’m so glad they didn’t know that, because of the War already brewing, they would not see us again for seven years.

Loss

2012-01-31T19:28:00.000-08:00

Loss is an inevitable part of life. It comes in all shapes and sizes, from the aggravating loss of misplacing your keys to the devastating loss in the death of a spouse. For some losses, such as the keys, we have to blame ourselves. Other times the blame falls on others—the drunk driver who caused the accident. The most painful times are when we want to blame God.

In recent times we’ve watched loss stick up its head for us and many in our lives. Last summer we had to part with the sweet little dog we had loved for twelve years. A friend had her marriage and family snatched away from her. (Though it was a step-family, she had been very close to them.) A former coworker watched his wife lose her valiant fight against a tumor in her brain. Most recently, a young couple, ecstatic over the prospect of twin girls, lost one of them at 32 weeks and but for the quick skills of the doctors would have lost the other one. At every occasion in this little girl’s life, someone will be missing.

Loss hits us in other ways, too. Loss of vision causes confusion, struggle, and sadness. Loss of freedom brings pain, not only emotionally, but sometimes physically. Loss of a limb, or even the temporary use of a limb, can slow our world down in frustrating ways. Loss of an opportunity can set us back and pile up frustration. Loss of a dream can leave a hollow, gaping hole in the spirit.

How we deal with the losses in our lives often defines our character. If we stew, rant, or wail, we may release some emotion—but it seldom changes or improves anything. If we close up, pull into a shell, and hold the rest of the world at bay, we nurse the loss and keep it alive. If we strike out and strike back, we risk destroying relationships and perhaps opportunities.

A strong, foundational faith in God can be an anchor when dealing with loss. Having faith that God knows what will be best frees me to accept a loss without debilitating hopelessness.

I learned something about loss when we brought my precious daddy to our home for what turned out to be the last fifteen days of his life. The better the relationship, the more pain you will suffer when you lose it. Yet I’ve never found anyone willing to trade the good of the relationship for hurting less when it was gone.

May God grant give us strength to face the losses of life with courage, wisdom, and confidence in His divine ability to help. May we deal with them in ways that make us people of God and our world a better place.

Time

2012-01-21T18:23:00.000-08:00

Time…it’s a merciless taskmaster, isn’t it? When we’re very young, it seems to crawl. The birthday, or Christmas, or the trip to grandma’s—all seem like they will never arrive. All efforts to speed them up fall short. On the other hand, as every senior knows, the longer you live, the faster time seems to move. The appointment you’ve been thinking was next week is suddenly upon you. The bill you were putting off paying is now overdue. The week is just getting started—and oops! You find yourself at the end of it.

Years ago I came up with what I decided is a logical reason for why life feels this way. Think about it. When you were five years old, a year was twenty percent of your life. By the time you reached ten, a year was only ten percent of your life, and at twenty years, it was only four percent. At age fifty, a year is down to only .02 percent of your life. No wonder it seems to flash by more quickly! I’m not sure how scientific that reasoning is, but it makes sense to me.

No wonder God urges us in Scripture to “number” our days (Ps. 90:12). The reason given for that urging is that we might “gain a heart of wisdom.” My, how we all need that!

These days I find myself feeling like the final moments of an egg timer. The sand is moving faster and faster, and the amount in the top half is shrinking visibly. The difference between an egg timer and real life, however, is that in the timer I can always see exactly how much is left. In life I can’t. I have no idea whether God is going to give me five more years, or fifteen—or only five more weeks.

My heart knows that I don’t want to know that number. To know it was short would put immense pressure on me to accomplish things I know I both need and want to do before I check out. If I knew it were long, I’m sure I would find myself stressing about whether my body will serve me that long, what will happen to dear family members—not to mention what might happen in this teetering world.

But the fact that I don’t know beyond this day or hour creates its own kind of stress. All of it waves in my face that one profound word – TRUST!! I admit I’m not doing very well with it these days. I’m not worrying much about “bucket-list” things that so many talk about. I’ve had an incredibly rich and rewarding life. But I do find myself stressing about whether I’m accomplishing the things God wants me to be accomplishing at this time, this year, this month, tomorrow.

Everything in me knows that God has it all under control. He knows exactly what lies ahead. I’m so grateful for that, and I am grateful that I do not know any more than I do. Twelve years ago when I had cancer, we found and posted on our bathroom door a sign that said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow. God is already there.”

We’ve moved to another home in another state, but the sign is still on our bathroom door—only now it’s the bathroom my husband uses. Maybe I need to put it where I can see it even more often.

Another New Year

2012-01-03T14:01:00.000-08:00

Today my grandfather would be one hundred thirty-two years old. He was fifty six when I made him a grandfather—a year younger, come to think of it, than I was when I became a grandmother. A year or so from now, I’ll be the age he was when he died—but I expect to stick around longer than that.

Back to the new year. When I was young, I was very sentimental about seeing an old year out and a new one in. That has worn off a bit with the years. What I still really miss is the New Years Eve services we always had in our churches up north. We would gather at 9 in the evening, have an hour of games or a movie, then an hour of refreshments and fellowship, and finally an hour with a devotional talk and communion. Yes, I do miss that.

New years are time to make note of milestones. A big one for me every time the calendar rolls around is that I chalk up one more year free of cancer. This year (if God keeps it at bay again) will mark a dozen years for me. An interesting twist is that 2012 is a leap year, and I got my diagnosis on February 29, 2000. I could say it is only the third anniversary, but I guess that would be facetious. Seriously, I am most grateful, and this year I am determined to keep my eating habits on a healthier level.

And then there are the new-year resolutions. Like most people, I have a mixed record. I know that some folks, after years of failing with resolutions, resolve not to make them any more, but something in me can’t seem to help it. I don’t know if it’s because there’s always so much in my life that needs improvement, or that I’m such a visionary, or simply because I enjoy setting challenges. My vision for 2012 is a big one, big enough and close enough to my heart that I’m not ready to share it too far afield yet. The good thing about it is that it’s one that will be accomplished in “pieces,” so even if I don’t accomplish all of it, I know I’ll accomplish some of it, and that will carry its own measure of success. Maybe after I accomplish a few of those pieces, I’ll feel like talking about it.

As for 2011, over all it was a good year, though the one sad thing was very sad. Losing our sweet doggie after twelve years was tough, but some members of our extended family had a very tough year in far more important ways. Through God’s grace and strength, they have kept clinging to Him and taking one step at a time. May God give us all grace to do that in the year ahead.

A bright spot in 2011 was that I signed with an agent—but so far that hasn’t resulted in my getting a publisher. I’ve resurrected another of my writing projects that was tucked away for many years, but truthfully, I don’t know what God’s plans are for either the fiction or the nonfiction. I’m just trying to stay tuned.

At least one of my resolutions for 2012 is right here before me—I have restarted my blog. I could beat myself purple for letting it languish for seven months, but I am resolved that blogs are supposed to be our servants, not our masters. We’ll see how it goes.

Above all,the one thing I know is that my life and those of the ones I love are all in God's hands. Whatever happens will not be a surprise to Him, and He will walk with us through it--whether it brings laughter, satisfaction, challenge, or tears.

How Great Thou Art

2011-05-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard of a bride standing in her wedding dress, facing up a staircase, and leading a choir?

Now you have because that’s what I did the afternoon I got married.

In those days, in the fifties and sixties, overseas missions had almost no high schools on the field, so most teenagers had to attend boarding schools in their home countries. To help meet that need, for ten years my parents made a home for our mission’s teenagers in Wheaton, Illinois. Because of all the maple trees on the two and a half-acre property and because our mission was Mid-Missions, we named the home Mid-Maples. Many years, we had twenty or so around our two large dining tables for every meal. During the early years, I was attending college there in town, so I was part of that large family.

We were a mission operation, and the imagination of many folks and churches was captured by those young people who were separated from their parents, at least for one year and some for as many as four. The year my parents furnished the home, before the arrival of the teens, churches got the vision to supply the mountain of linens that would be needed, and each year at Christmas they asked for sizes and wish lists and sent boxes and boxes of gifts.

When we had an invitation to visit one of these interested churches, we decided to put together a program. The young people from different countries dressed in typical clothing of their countries and sang in the languages they had grown up with. We wanted to use our theme song, “It Will Be Worth It All,” so we prepared it as a group number with the young people singing parts. I became the designated choir director, and we ended up many Sunday evenings traveling to churches within driving distance to present our program. In time, we added other musical numbers. One of those was a song fairly new to America in the 1950s—“How Great Thou Art.” My dad would close the meetings with a meditation on godly young people.

I was a senior in college the year serious romance and a diamond ring came into my life. Because most of the young people stayed right through the summer, our August wedding became a huge family affair—especially since we decided to hold it right there in the large Mid-Maples house. In my wedding dress I came down the front stairs with my Daddy, and Fred and I said our vows said in front of the big picture window with the bamboo-print curtains. Some of the guys served as ushers, other directed traffic outside the house, two of them lit the candles, and three of the girls served the cake and refreshments in the big side yard afterwards.

I don’t remember whose idea it was to use “How Great Thou Art” as one of the music numbers for the service. The kids gathered in the front hall at the top of the stairs, and I stood in my wedding dress facing up the stairs, unseen from the seventy-five people in the living room and dining room below. From there I led them in singing, and it turned out pretty well.

That hymn would probably have meant a lot to me all these years even if we hadn’t used it like that in our wedding, but because we did, it has meant even more. It is a great song with great truth and has become an icon of music for many in our Christian faith.

Memorial Sunday for Last Year's Flood

2011-05-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

We had a special and touching church service this morning. It was framed as a memorial to the big flood a year ago this weekend when we had fifteen inches of rain in 48 hours. The pastor told how a year ago about fifteen people (that included us) had made it to church when he realized they needed to cancel it. Fifty families in our church alone were affected to some degree, at least half of them losing everything.

In the children's sermon he held up the visual he had planned to use for the children that Sunday a year ago--it was a framed picture of Noah's Ark. The point he made with it is that the first thing Noah did after coming out of the ark and that traumatic experience was to worship the Lord.

We had two testimonials--one from the lady who ended up organizing much of the effort as our church served for a month as a disaster-relief center for the community. She said she never got over the joy of watching someone leave with a smile after they had come in completely beaten down. The other came from a couple who lost everything in the flood (I don't mind telling you there were tears with that one).

The choir sang a thrilling arrangement of the song, "The Anchor Holds."
The anchor holds though the ship is battered;
The anchor holds though the sails are torn;
I have fallen on my knees as I faced the raging seas.
The anchor holds in spite of the storm.

We sang "Great Is Thy Faithfulness."

Our pastor brought an excellent message from Ps. 40:1-3 and Ps. 93, including these verses: “He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord.”

Especially in light of what has happened to so many in our same part of the country this past week (over 350 dead from tornados), it was touching, sobering, and a powerful reminder that our Anchor does hold in the face of the storms that come our way in this earthly journey.

New Challenges (Part 5)

2011-05-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

When we turned up a school year without enough kindergarteners to justify a full teacher just for them, I was offered the opportunity to “float.” A number of my previous class of kindergarteners needed speech therapy; would I continue the work I had begun with them the year before? Sure. Because of my interest in writing (I don’t remember how they knew about that), would I be willing to teach a time slot three days a week of creative writing to the fifth and sixth graders? I would. Besides, interestingly enough, I had taught several of them in kindergarten a few years before. In addition, I could be available to be something that was a luxury to that setting—a substitute teacher within the school system itself.

That year worked out well, and in the course of it I substituted in almost every grade, including what we then called junior high. Meanwhile, the visa situation became tighter, and it didn’t look hopeful for securing enough teachers for the following year. During break times in the teachers’ room, we would joke about the first grade teacher covering K-2, the one who then had 3-4 would cover 3-5—and Esther Gross would cover 6-8! We all laughed together.

Then one day our principle (by then a personal friend, of course) called me in privately and said, “We’ve been joking about taking different classes next year. Would you consider teaching 7-8?” She wasn’t kidding. I said I’d have to think about it.

My teaching certificate covered K-8, so no problem there. But those two grades were different from kindergarten in more than just student ages. For one thing, they were a double grade. Both grades were taught in the same room by the same teacher. That of course was not a new concept in American education, but I had no experience with it. When I had subbed in those classes, I did okay. Maybe . . . If they could find someone else to teach math and science, I could probably handle English, social studies (ancient and American history), and Bible.

But . . . but . . . what if I couldn’t handle it? What if I “blew it”? What if I did a horrible job? As I thought and prayed about it, God had a message for my heart. If this was something He wanted me to do, then my task was to obey and do it. The consequences—how it turned out—were His problem. So I agreed.

Remember the kindergarteners I had again in grades 5-6 for creative writing? Many of them were now in junior high, so I taught them once again—and at the end of the school year, the principal gave me the pleasure of handing them their eighth-grade diplomas.

I don’t remember when I noticed that God again “grew me into” the job He had for me. I had decided to become a kindergarten teacher after I had children of my own that age. And what did I have now? Children of the age I was being asked to teach. My youngest would be an eighth grader in my class. Junior highers were not the terror to me that they had been years before when my only experience was with little ones.

And what that rule that students had to call their teacher “Mrs.” even if she was their mother? I remember fretting some about that over the summer. How hard would be it be get my son to do that? It wasn’t that he was a difficult kid, but I never found the courage even to mention it to him. The new school year started. A couple of times, Don Paul called me Mom, but no one paid any attention.

Then one day he wanted my attention and couldn’t get it. After calling me Mom a couple of times, he tried “Mrs. Gross.” His classmates busted out laughing. So . . . that was the way it was, was it? Apparently at that age, his classmates expected him to call me “Mom.” Anything else was strange and comical. The rest of the year proceeded without any further attention to the matter, and I never breathed a word about it to the principal. I wonder if now, thirty years later, I should refer her to this blog . . . .

After nine school years in Colombia, we ended up back in the U.S. for good. I continued working with the Children’s Education Department another sixteen years, writing curriculum and later doing layout and editing of newsletters that went to our people overseas. I did some moonlighting teaching English skills to students in a community college, and eventually I taught fellow missionaries in many workshops.

So my teaching career ended up (with the exception of high school) spanning from kindergarten through adults. It has been humbling to watch God lead me step by step and give me joy all along the way. I enjoyed each thing I did, yet when God nudged me on to something else, I never looked back with regrets.

And to think I started out not knowing I would like to be a teacher!

Mixed-Culture Teaching (Part 4)

2011-04-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

So given the fairly unorthodox way I came to the teaching profession, what did my teaching career look like? How long did I teach, and did I actually teach kindergarten as planned?

The answer isn’t a simpler yes, or no, or a number. I did teach kindergarten, the two years in the States and four years at the mission school in South America. I loved it. Teaching in a mission school has some interesting twists—such as having behavior problems with a five-year-old in morning class and then playing volley ball next to his father at 5:00. Parent-teacher conferences were interesting. That first year I went to Linda’s class for a conference on my first-grader’s progress, and she came to me for one on her kindergartener’s. That happened several times over the years with different students and different fellow teachers.

I faced a couple of cultural adjustments I didn’t expect and have never forgotten. I still remember my shock when the principal came into my classroom to remove the American flag. Yes, he acknowledged, we were mostly Americans, but we were guests in a foreign country. Someone had realized it was not appropriate to fly the American flag in our classrooms—and I soon understood that.

Another shock that lingers is when parents of one of my five-year-olds objected to a Halloween song I was teaching the kids. I don’t remember the song now, but it was a very common one, undoubtedly about spirits or something spooky. The parents objected because out in the jungle village where they worked to translate the Bible, evil spirits and spooky things were not make-believe. I complied, but it took a bit longer before I fully understood. I’ve come a long way in my feelings about Halloween since then, and I have a completely different perspective now.

Even mission schools within the same organization can come to different conclusions about school matters. Though we were both in the tropics, our school did not have all the same practices as our counterpart two countries over. While they allowed students to come to class in bare feet (often standard attire in the tropics), our school decreed that they wear shoes. I have fond memories of those rubbery sandal-type shoes we bought locally down there. In rainy season one could hardly arrive anywhere without muddy feet—so we would just turn on an outdoor faucet, stick one foot after the other under it, and continue on our way with clean feet and shoes.

The atmosphere and relationships at a mission center are usually informal and close. Children become much more attached to adults than they would in their home country and often use the terms “Aunt” and “Uncle” with first names. In the school referred to above, students were allowed to use those same appellations with first names for their teachers, but those setting policy in the early days of our school felt it would be important for discipline and lines of authority for students to use titles of address, like Mr. or Mrs., when in school. (Outside of school, of course, they could use any term they wanted.)

This became especially interesting when a teacher had her own child in her class. This happened a couple of times in third and fourth grades, and yes, the eight or nine year old referred to his or her mother as Mrs. Whatever. A side story on this in my next installment. What happened when my son ended up in my class?

And Where Was All This Leading? (Part 3)

2011-04-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

In the winter of 1969, my sister had her third child in Colombia, South America, where she and her husband were missionaries. Our mother decided to be adventurous and go visit them. She did go, and she spent an enjoyable month. In the car bringing her home from O’Hare Airport, she was bubbling over with accounts of her time there and the wonderful people she had met. As I listened somewhere in a back seat, God planted a dream in my heart. I knew I wanted to go and work in that place in South America. Fortunately, I was smart enough to realize that for that to happen, God had to plant the same dream in my husband’s heart.

Meanwhile, I looked into options for the student teaching I needed. Most such courses, in a college program, required a full year of classroom experience, or “practice.” I’m sorry I have no memory of how I heard about it, but I learned that NIU offered a fully-accredited student-teaching program during six weeks in the summer. Could that be for real? Ah, but it had an unusual requirement. One had to have taught a full year under contract to qualify.

Say what? I had taught only half days—but wait! I was in my second year. By the summer of 1970 I would have two years. Two half years make a whole year, so yes, I qualified. I would take the course in the summer of 1970 when I had finished all the other courses to qualify for a certificate.

The previous fall, my sister and her husband began a campaign to recruit us to go to South America. Their oldest would be going to kindergarten in the fall of 1970, and the mission school had no teacher for that fall. In addition, the man who kept the mechanical things running was going on furlough. That was my husband's area of expertise, and he was open to considering it.

The number of bumps we encountered along the way are stories for another time. At this point I just need to pull this together with the fact that the summer of 1970, while Fred and the girls visited friends to recruit some financial support for us and Don Paul spent his days with Grandma again, I did my student teaching in a six-weeks summer kindergarten program. I then rounded up all my credits—from Michigan again, from Wheaton, from NIU—and sent them off to the state of Illinois in Springfield.

They would issue me a teaching certificate, but I would not see it until three years later when I came back from South America. And that’s how I became a school teacher.

I never cease to marvel at the “ifs” along the way. If I hadn’t taken those courses in Michigan, if I hadn’t decided in 1967 to start working to become a teacher, if NIU hadn’t had that six-weeks’ summer course, and the biggest IF of all, if that half-day school-teaching job hadn’t come looking for me the exact time it did, I would in no way have been ready to think about South America when the opportunity came my way.

My God is so utterly amazing.

So What Should I Do About It? (Part 2)

2011-04-24T04:38:00.000-07:00

I was ten years out of college when I figured out I might like to be a teacher after all--so what was I going to do about it?

The first step was to find out what it would take to get an Illinois teachers certificate at that point. I rounded up my Wheaton transcripts and the ones from the two courses in Michigan and sent them off to the state of Illinois. I don’t remember why I decided to go straight to the state instead of back to Wheaton with the question, but God was in it because I found out later that Wheaton would have required thirty more credit hours from me to get a certificate.

The state sent me back a list of just thirteen hours total.

Those six hours of educational courses from Michigan turned out worth their weight in credits even though I don’t remember anything I learned, and the state must definitely have counted those Christian Education courses I took. The thirteen hours included requirements for two specific two-hour education courses (one was Philosophy of Education) plus a course in modern math. And would you believe . . . the thirteen hours included five hours of practice teaching?

I soon had a plan. I would substitute teach all that coming school year. Lynée was in kindergarten half days, and Grandma would be available for her and Don if I was called to sub. We brought my teenage cousin Joy from Indiana to watch the children while I took one of the education courses through Wheaton’s summer fast-track, Intersession—two hour credits in one week (or was it two?). The other ed course I would take at night.

At the end of the year of subbing I decided that, of all the classes I’d taught, I liked kindergarten best. I had even survived the day I was called to teach three sessions of it—ninety students—in one day. I patted myself on the back for having learned all their names by the end of each session. (Of course I didn’t remember them three days later—I didn’t need to.) So the following year I earned my last two credits taking a course in kindergarten teaching from the Northern Illinois University (NIU) a few miles west of us.

One day as I worked in my kitchen in August of 1968, the phone rang. A school five miles up the road from our suburb needed a kindergarten teacher—half days only. The opportunity was irresistible. Don Paul would go to “nursery school” three days a week and to Grandma’s the other two days, and I would have a chance to confirm if kindergarten was what I really wanted to teach.

Just like with the six hours’ credit God had orchestrated for me that year in Michigan because He had a plan for them years in the future, I had not the slightest inking that this was another link in the chain of a huge plan He was putting together for my life, a plan that would touch many other lives in the years that lay ahead.

To Be Concluded

I Never Wanted to Be a Teacher (Part One)

2011-04-22T19:39:00.000-07:00

Family and friends who know how much I enjoyed the fifteen years I taught school will be surprised to hear that, but it is true. As best I can figure, it had something to do with my childhood.

I didn’t grow up going to school. I got educated—with a classical education, at that, but I didn’t go to school. I learned all about the paintings, sculpture, and architecture of the Renaissance, the mythology of the Greeks and Romans, and the history of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, but it didn’t happen in a traditional classroom. Today it would be called “home schooling,” but in the 1940s it was just Calvert School in our home at a faraway outpost in a French colony in central Africa. I only had one year in a traditional classroom until I went to high school.

While I see little reason for that to make me want to be a teacher, neither do I see in it any reason for it to make me sure I didn’t want to be a teacher. But that was how I felt. All through Wheaton College, I stayed away from classes about teaching—with one exception. I did take Christian Education of Children and Christian Education of Adolescence because, I reasoned, I expected to have children of my own some day. They were both three-hour classes. After college, when I had a friend training to be a kindergarten teacher, I groaned at the idea. She could have it!

Then the ironies began. I married a man who decided to go to Bible school, so it fell to me to support the family. But with a college diploma that included a Bible major and an informal minor in languages (I also knew a fair measure of French), I didn’t really have any marketable skills. But I needed a job. I was about to take one as a cashier at a supermarket (I can’t even imagine that now) when a job possibility dropped into my lap.

We were at a car dealership in Grand Rapids, Michigan, trying to trade in my new husband’s lovely Buick for a more appropriate car for student life when he mentioned that his wife was looking for a job. The dealer perked up. Did I have a teachers’ certificate? No (of course not). Did I have a college degree? Well, yes, I did. But, hey, that was all I would need. The dealer knew of a school very much in need of—a second grade teacher! According to Michigan law, if one had a college degree and took one night class a semester, one could get a provisional certificate.

Given all the things I do remember from that far back, I’m surprised I don’t remember what I thought or felt at that point, but I accepted the job, took the night classes, and taught the school year of 1958-1959. We moved back to Illinois for what turned out to be one very interesting year (including our first baby), but that has nothing to do with this story here.

A few years later when Fred finished school, we settled in our first house in Carol Stream, Illinois, on the north side of Wheaton. We got involved in a small, just-starting church. There were only a few people and many opportunities to get involved. Our first Christmas there, a new friend and I were asked to come up with a Christmas program for the kids, and later I agreed to provide a program for school-age children during Wednesday evening prayer meeting. Hmmm. This wasn’t so bad. Meanwhile, I had two more children of my own.

By 1967, with a preschooler and two in school as well as working with children’s activities at church, I had become accustomed to being around children. Oh! Could that have been why I was so sure I didn’t want to teach? Growing up, I had never been around children (except once a year at conference). Even my teen years were spent in a boarding school where staff had only two small children. Was that why I didn’t know I would like working with them? Was there a possibility I would like to be a school teacher after all . . .?

To Be Continued

Epiphany by Candlelight

2011-04-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

The word “epiphany” was never in my vocabulary until fairly recent times. I had heard it, but I only knew it as some high-church religious term that didn’t touch my world. Several years ago I heard it used in a way that made me become more aware of the word in a context of everyday life. Recently I’ve found myself using it occasionally.

The dictionary describes “epiphany” as a “sudden, striking understanding of something.” That fits the way I’ve been understanding it and using it. That’s a comfort. And if that is its meaning, then I had an epiphany last evening—by candlelight.

Now that I’ve finished the myriad writings and rewritings of my first novel, Tangled Strands, it is time to think about the second one. This one has had a root file on my computer for as many as two decades. I’ve had it all plotted and outlined, but based on all I’ve been learning about writing in the last few years, this one had problems that would need to be solved before it went anywhere.

Among the many things I’ve learned about novel writing in the last six years are these:
• You have to have a main character, and with few exceptions male leads need to be written by male authors.
• That main character must want something very badly; otherwise, you don’t have fodder enough for a story, let alone a whole novel.
• Your opening sentence or two must strike your reader between the eyes and make him or her say, “Oh, I’ve got to read more of this!” Today’s readers have no patience to start with flowery descriptions nor the heroine studying herself in a mirror.
• The opening scene must center on the main character, which means that character must appear in those opening sentences.
• Not long after your “opening hook,” you need an “inciting incident.” That is something that kicks the story into action, and it needs to connect to the goal/desire/longing of the lead character.

All this is well and good and I agree with it—but that didn’t make it easy to make decisions about the entirely new opening I needed for my new novel, Tapestries. Just two days ago I made a name change to one of the candidates for main character, and that (don’t ask me how) helped me bond to that character and be content with what I already knew—that she needed to be the lead for the whole tale.

But where and how to start? What could I use for the opening hook and the inciting incident?

Storms yesterday afternoon and evening took away power in our part of the city for eight hours, including the evening. I was happy to spend time reading a top book on novel writing and watching the fading dusk through the double windows. But later in the evening, by the light of a stubby candle that willingly submitted itself to being used up, I got out my little computer and started green-lighting about this story.

I was just past the middle of the page when it came to me—after all these months (even years) of thinking about it. I would start with Catherine preparing for her wedding (but not studying herself in the mirror!). And just like that, I had the inciting incident, too—a meltdown by a four-year-old boy. The need for the meltdown was already in the story; I just needed to recognize where it needed to happen. I had my “sudden, striking understanding,” my epiphany.

So now I am on my way to being able to sit down and write a brand new version of what I hope is going to be an emotional story.

Across Six Months

2011-03-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

Gifted author of the last century Irene Hunt wrote a wonderful book entitled Across Five Aprils. In it she wove a poignant story based on her grandfather’s life as a young teen during the years of the Civil War (from Fort Sumter in April 1861 to Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. I’ll never be an Irene Hunt, but her title intrigues me, so I want to paraphrase it as I set out to weave a bridge across the six and a half months since I last wrote on this blog.

Back then my husband and I had just finished a busy summer of travel. We had visited old friends and old times in our lives. My friend Krista’s baby had been born with a serious heart problem the doctors already knew about, and I had just facilitated a new online course for missionary coworkers.

Since then, my husband has had both knees replaced and made an excellent recovery. Krista’s baby has gone on the heart-transplant list. During research on the genealogical resource Ancestry, I discovered an ancestral line that reached back into the 1100s. And I heard from a literary agent that he might be interested in representing my Tangled Strands novel if I did certain things.

That led to a flurry of efforts that writers understand—changing a point of view, writing a new scene for the main character, adding references to enhance my time setting, exploring the possibility of a mentor. I agonized over a new synopsis, and I sent it all in before leaving on a two-week trip.

Suddenly, with the exchange of three e-mails, I had on my computer an agent agreement. Please print two copies, sign them, and return them to the agent. My husband took a picture of my signing them that very evening before I caught a 6 o’clock flight the next morning for Colorado.

That was two weeks ago last evening. After visiting friends in four states, I’ve been home since 4 o’clock this afternoon. Buried in the pile of mail was a copy of the agent agreement bearing both my signature and his. I’m going to have to take a another picture.

Where do I go from here? First on my list is to write and resurrect this blog. Next, I have a long list of thank-you notes to write related to our travels during the last two weeks. Starting next week, I’ll facilitate another online course. In the very near future, my husband will have another surgery, unrelated to the knees, and once again I’ll be here to help him make a good recovery.

Beyond all those things, I’m eager to get back to my story. I want to expand on a romantic attraction in it, deepen the story’s theme, and make some final adjustments in those points of view. I’m happy to be back home, and I look forward to getting back to a semblance of routine. Spring has always been my favorite season, and I am soaking it up with joy. I rejoice in having meaningful work to do and grateful that I’m healthy enough to do it—in spite of the aches and pains inevitable in my season of life.

With God’s help, may the next six months be as full and profitable as the last six.

Finding Grandfather Emery

2010-09-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

Last week I was sitting in an armchair in front of a dormer window in our friends’ two-story home looking over the small, private lake in front of their house. The sun at high noon was reflecting off the water, and the picnic table sat briefly in a spot of bright sun. Lily pads floated silently, a few of their flowers still blooming on that late summer day. Birds flitted from one graceful birch to another. A way out from the shore the raft drifted along; we wouldn’t be using this trip because cool temperatures had suddenly sent the hot summer ones fleeing.

I could live with a peaceful scene like that every day. I can understand why the owners of the home go up there from their city lives every chance they get—-like nearly every weekend.

Two days before, I had located the grave of my great-great-grandfather Emery Moneysmith. He lingered in my thoughts that Sunday morning. I couldn’t help wondering if he had ever enjoyed such an experience. I have no reason to think he did. I know pitifully little about his life, but I have a feeling I know much more than even my father knew about him. Not only did Emery die in another city when my father was six years old, but it appears Emery had cut all connections with family at the time he died and perhaps for years before.

We had been looking for Emery for many years. We knew he was born in Ohio, the oldest of five children, and that when he was nine, his mother died leaving a newborn baby. We knew he married in Ohio and that his first marriage, the one that produced my grandfather Jacob, ended in divorce. We recently learned that in middle age his married a teenage girl but shortly afterwards abandoned her. What was that all about? We thought he might have ended up in southwestern Michigan because that was the next to last home of that first wife, my father’s grandmother. Finally, my genealogist nephew, mostly through census research, tracked him down in Dowagiac, in southwestern Michigan, only a few miles from where we had once looked. We haven’t a clue what he was doing there.

Fortunately, we already had some helpful information from the cemetery. We knew he was on Lot 16, though I had forgotten being told he had no headstone. No headstone? I’ve visited many ancestral graves, including two with headstones almost as tall as I am and one that has no headstone of its own, just his name on someone else’s stone, but I’ve never visited one with no stone at all. With the help of the current sexton, we could tell which of four “bare” plots he was in because the earth sagged on one of them. “1916?” said the sexton. “They were still burying in wooden boxes.” With that, he laid aside the probe he had brought with him.

Yes, I am fully confident that Grandfather Emery never sat in a lovely room like I did with the freedom to stare out at a peaceful scene and be refreshed in his soul. If he ever in his life made any peace with God, we don’t know about it. There’s a good possibility we were the first people ever to visit his grave. That makes me melancholy.

I know it doesn’t do him any good that we found him, but I am glad for me that we did.

The Old Schoolhouse

2010-07-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

None of my generation went to school there, neither did my parents’, but my grandmother did and who knows how many others of our Porter and Stauffer ancestral extended families. By the time I came along, it was no longer used as a schoolhouse, but it was still standing. We have a nice picture of it from a photo book of my grandparents’—from the days before “I came along.” Earlier than that, though, is the picture of the school children with my grandmother Fern (then Porter), age six or seven, labeled on the front row. (When did our culture decide on a change from sober pictures to smiling ones?)

In 1992 when we made our first family-history, or ancestor, tour, one of our stops was at the school. It was weathered, the bell was gone, and lush vines were enjoying a happy life on the outer walls, even across half the front door. We peeked in the windows but couldn’t see much. We had in our group that day three school teachers of today’s generations—daughter-in-law Ginger, daughter Lynée, and myself, so we had our picture taken sitting on what was left of the front stoop.

As we drove away down Truman Road, we didn’t know it was the last time we would see the school standing.

The next time we were in Michigan, we drove by—and stared. The school was gone—almost. The only thing left was the chimney. Of course we had to take a picture of it. We learned later that it had burned down, and our hearts said a fond farewell.

But that wasn’t the end of our adventures with that old schoolhouse. When we went back on another “ancestor trip” in 2007, we had trouble identifying the spot where the school had been because even the chimney was gone. The site was surprisingly overgrown. But surely the chimney might still be there, we reasoned, right where it fell. So my sister, my nephew, and I went tromping through the undergrowth in search of it—and there it was, all stretched on the ground and overgrown.

Grandma (little Fern in the picture) has been gone almost sixty years now. It is mostly from her side of the family that we have such a rich ancestral heritage. How I would love to spend an afternoon with her, sharing her past and my present. I would ask her how long she attended the school—come to think of it, I’ve never heard what she did for high school. I would ask her how she got to and from school in the early days, especially on icy Michigan winter days. With her born in 1894, I’m guessing cars weren’t common for rural farm people until she was almost grown.

For my turn, I would tell her about her grandchildren and great-grandchildren who love the Lord, about the intense struggles some of them are dealing with, and how I’m sure some of the strength of the faith that sustains them had its roots in her and Grandpa. What should I describe to her that would leave her shaking her head? Computers? Cell phones? Moon landing? No. I see no reason to mention those things. She had a rich life in her time. I’m not going to suggest she missed out on something just because I have it and she didn't.

Except maybe air conditioning...? Surely am thankful for that these days.

Storms and an Anchor

2010-07-22T19:34:00.000-07:00

Lots of thoughts are whirling in my head and my heart this week. It’s nice to be home after so much traveling, and I have caught up on a few things. But we can’t find a pair of Fred’s jeans from our June trip—hey! jeans are too big to lose in a little house like this, and I can’t find some very important papers related to my writing. Things like that are so distracting.

Much more distracting are things happening in the lives of some of our friends. The doctors detected several months ago that the baby my writing friend was expecting had a serious heart problem. Baby Annabelle was born two days ago, and the doctors were right. She’ll be having her first surgery this weekend. As far as we know, her mommy hasn’t had a chance to hold her yet. All we in the writing group can do is stand by, pray, feel helpless, and pray some more.

Last month one of our children’s school mates at the mission school in South America lost her battle to an aggressive cancer. This week another one has gotten word that her cancer prognosis is not as good as they at first thought. The word “aggressive” has been used again. We long ago lost track of how many of us who lived and worked together at our beloved Lomalinda have ended up with cancer. Several have lost their battles, and a few of us—for whatever reasons God has—can, for now, be termed “survivors.” Could it have been something in the locale itself? Is there any common denominator? I don’t think it would help to know.

I learned last weekend that a sweet friend at church was so upset back in May over her dear friends who lost so much in the flood that she couldn’t help anyone because she was crying so hard. A few are getting back into their homes after much hard work and financial expenditure, but a number of houses along the roads sit vacant and haunted, with windows gone and dregs of their lives still scattered across the yards.

An agent and his “reader” are taking a second look at the proposal and sample chapters for my novel. I’m very conflicted about all of it right now—but I did work my way through the whole of it this week and reduced the chapters from ninety-nine to sixty-two. Many of them were way too short before. But that’s of least importance in light of all these other things, as well as some things too close to the heart even to talk about. I’m glad that this week I was reminded of a song about anchors and storms, Ray Boltz’s “The Anchor Holds.”

The anchor holds though the ship is battered.
The anchor holds though the sails are torn.
I have fallen on my knees as I face the raging seas.
My anchor holds in spite of the storm.

Hannah Marie

2010-07-16T16:59:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a family with ancestral roots around Grand Rapids, Michigan. They knew a few things about their ancestors, such as Delilah who, they were told, was French and from whom the brown eyes in the family came. They knew that when Grandma Porter had surgery for cancer in 1930, "they found her so full of it that they just closed her up again." And they heard it declared from time to time that bad traits in the family, for whatever reason, were attributed to someone they called Great-grandmother Wells--whoever she was.

Though the family didn't know much about their ancestors, the ancestral heritage was unusually important to them. Every year on Memorial Day, as many of the family as could gather, did—even from out of state. They would drive by the brick farmhouse and little North Chester Baptist Church that had played important roles in their family history. They visited the graves of parents and grandparents and planted flowers at the headstones. And the patriarch of the family, Grandpa Hawkins, would take off his hat, bow his head, and express a prayer of gratitude for the spiritual heritage left to the family by those who had gone before.

Come to think of it, that was an interesting twist because Grandpa's own predecessors did not leave a trail of spiritual truth for him to follow. He led his father to faith just before he died, and in all the years I knew Grandpa, he didn't have any contact with his other relatives. That makes it all the more poignant that he so much appreciated the heritage into which he married.

Then one day in 1951, one group of the extended family, on furlough from far-away Africa, paid a visit to a fairly distant family member—and a seed was planted.

Beginning of Lifetime Hobby
Yes, that was my family, and I was fifteen the day we visited Guy Lockwood. He was a fellow Wells descendant, a cousin of Grandma Porter's, and a first cousin twice removed of my mother, Esther Hawkins Moneysmith. And he was a grandson of the legendary Great-grandmother Wells, who had died in 1888 when Guy was just seven.

The important thing that day was that Guy brought out and showed our family paragraphs he had copied from his grandmother’s Bible. It became clear that ancestral heritage had been important to her, too. It caught my interest enough that I copied it into a notebook. Though it would be more than a decade until, as an adult and young mother, I made my first effort to learn more about the Compton family, that exposure marked the beginning of our current family’s interest in our ancestral heritage. What a journey it has been, especially since the mid-1990s when the Internet became available!

Now, sixty years later, we know that Great-grandmother Wells, born Hannah Marie Compton, was a fine, godly woman, the youngest of eleven in a large, fascinating family. Wouldn't she be amazed to know that, more than a hundred and twenty years after her death, some of her descendants and the descendants of several of her siblings have connected with each other and continue to dig deeper into the family history—both before her and after her?

I'm going to use the above as a new introduction to the Wells page on my family-history website (www.esthersscrapbook.blogspot.com). It tells about Hannah's family--from her grandfather who had his jaw shot off in the American Revolution to tidbits like the fact that her parents had at least eighty grandchildren.

Old Times and New

2010-07-08T04:11:00.000-07:00

Almost sixty years ago we came together at a Christian boarding school northwest of Orlando. We shared an identity for which a term hadn’t yet been invented—“third-culture kids.” No, Ann and Mary Jane weren’t missionary kids like me, but they had grown up in other parts of the world. Mary Jane’s mother was an American missionary, her father a Syrian, and she was born in Damascus. Ann, American born, grew up in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia where her father worked for an oil company. Mary Jane was educated by her mother through Calvert School, as I was, while Ann attended an American school run by the oil companies.

Through the years we’ve connected only a couple of times, but in the next five days we’re going to see a lot of each other. This weekend, near the school in Florida, is the school’s biannual reunion. Because Ann and Mary Jane live even further from Florida than we are in Nashville, they have come to travel with us, both to and from. It should be interesting. Since the time when we were school mates, we’ve each lived a lifetime and raised families. Ann has two sons, Mary Jane two sons and a daughter. I have two daughters and a son. Mary Jane has two Japanese daughters-in-law.

We’ve shared a few memories so far. Mary Jane remembers that back in school I advised her to take the creative writing course I had taken. She loved it and is now involved in a writing group at her church. No, none of us had to sing for our breakfast because of showing up late, but I remember Mary Jane’s first Halloween “costume”—she showed up without the long braids she had arrived with a few weeks earlier.

Tonight we’re going to stay with a friend of ours east of Atlanta, a warm, friendly lady who has a big house. I met her when we were roommates at a workshop in the Philippines. On the way home Monday, we may try and make the whole trip in one day.

At the reunion, I’m going to meet a good friend I’ve never met. An oxymoron? Not in this day and time. For more than six years I’ve been part of an online chat group, all alumni of the school through none of us actual classmates. We’ve become truly caring friends. I’ve met all of the regulars but one at other reunions and been in the homes of two of them. It’s going to be great to see them again—even for just two days. But Tom I’ve never met in person, and I’m looking forward to it. Our group plans to eat together at Friday evening supper—provided the tables at this campground are big enough.

Yes, it should be an interesting five days.

A Most Unique Reunion

2010-06-17T20:25:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post a blog last night; in fact, I got a good start on it. But it was past my bedtime, and what I want to say is too complex to be rushed. Yesterday afternoon and evening were the beginning of our incredible MK reunion, a reunion that is not only incredible but unique. I'm eager to write about it, but I need more time. So I set out to write just this short one--and then the computer ate it, and I was too tired to try and find it. Thankfully, I turned it up this morning.

Several things are unique about this reunion. One is that it is multigenerational. One lady says she remembers me when I was a baby, while I told one of the younger men that I remember a picnic with his family when he was a toddler. We have at least two people in their nineties, while my nephew's baby son is just five months old. The MKs at this affair were born in at least seven different decades.

Just one more tidbit. We had been invited to submit songs of long ago that we wanted to sing, and did we ever sing them! We started with "Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before" and tackled oldies like "Do, Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me." Before we were finished, we had done WWII favorites such as "What though wars may come with the marching of feet and the beating of drums" and "I'm too young to march in the infantry..., but I'm in the Lord's army."

If we'd had rafters over our head, I assure you they would have been ringing (now there is another expression that dates me!).

Miscellany

2010-06-12T19:17:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed how much life is made up of miscellany? (I had to look up the word to see the noun form is actually in the dictionary; it is.) Occasionally a major event like a wedding takes center stage, and for a time it get most of our focus. But most days aren’t like that. Most days are sprinkled with miscellany.

Today was like that. The thermometer outside our house reached 99 before finally slipping. I’ve already started praying that the week after next won’t be like this. My daughter’s family will be with us for their annual visit, adding two young teen boys to the two already here in our son’s family. Not too many years ago, all it took to make them happy was a collection of Thomas trains and a rug one which to play with them. Or take them with their toy boats and cars to the river. No longer. It would be so nice to have weather a bit cooler that week.

For my morning walks recently I’ve been staying in my own neighborhood rather than going to the development next door like I used (I admitted to liking it because it was a tad more “up scale” than ours). But that neighborhood got hit by the flood, and walking there is now a sad adventure. Most of the piles of trash (soaked furniture, dry wall, insulation, appliances, duct work) are picked up by the city and gone, but traces still remain. A few sidewalks are still white with residue. One driveway has broken glass. A port-a-potty sits on one corner, and dumpsters and storage pods adorn a few driveways. Even a little patch of flowers by a mailbox has given up. Monday morning will find me back walking in Lexington Pointe.

This morning was our monthly writers’ meeting, and we had a record attendance of twenty-one, at least a third of them visitors scouting us out. Word is getting around about our group. We’re going to have to find a larger place than the Panera where we meet. It was a good meeting as we learned from an experienced writer some concrete things about revising our work. A couple of nuggets? Always just write your first draft without doing a lot of editing and rehashing as you go. When you get to revision, do it on a fresh copy so you always still have an original. And of course always back up your work—in three or four places if you can.

In other miscellany, I’ve been getting back to my genealogy work and spending time browsing in my database. It is getting close to three thousand people. No, they’re not all ancestors; relatives and other descendants of ancestors count too. I got to puttering, counting generations, and I found I have two lines (Zug and Diefenbach) that go back to eleventh great-grandfathers and two others (Stauffer and Wilder) that go back to thirteenth great-grandfathers. But the granddaddy of them all (pardon my pun) is Peter Bauman, my seventeenth great-grandfather. The oldest date we have is for him—he was born in 1420.

Meanwhile, I can’t find a file I started on the computer last week. Every so often this happens to computer people. We create a file, then don’t get back to it right away. The consequence? We can’t remember what we named it nor where we might have saved it. I know I created and worked on that file because I clearly remember yellow highlighting the spots where I made changes. But where did I put. Grrrr.

So what kind of miscellany has been happening in your life these days?

2010-05-30T19:53:00.000-07:00

I’m still in shock.

I cannot get my brain to focus well enough to pull cohesive thoughts together. What do I say? Where do I start?

We learned today that our young friend Kevin died earlier this week. He was the age of our own children. People that age aren’t supposed to die of heart attacks.

My husband and I met at Kevin’s parents’ wedding. A year later, we were married. In the years following in the late 50s and early 60s, we alternated having babies. When we traveled to their part of the country during our furloughs from South America, we stayed with them. Kevin went to college with one of our daughters, and we have graduation pictures of them and us together.

I’m sure I should be coming up with something profound and touching to say, but instead everything is vague and undefined. We know where Kevin is—with the Savior he loved and served, and that is a comfort beyond words. But the idea that his life has suddenly been . . . been guillotined is surreal.

I know somewhat of what his family is going through. I have not lost an adult child, but my parents did. My brother died in a car accident when he was 24. Kevin turned 3 that month. Don should be past 70 now, yet he’ll never be older than 24. The hole he left in our lives is still there. Most of the time, the edges aren’t as jagged as they were in the beginning, but it is still a gaping hole.

Kevin’s died in eastern New York state, and we hadn’t seen him in years. We were up there just a month ago, and we had hoped to stay with his parents. But they and Kevin were away that week on ministry business, so we missed them. That makes me extra sad now.

My prayers are for his family now – his parents, two sisters, and a brother, each with spouses and children. They are hanging together, and I’m glad. I know that the God who saw our family through such a tragedy will not leave them to bear this alone, but I also know that the days and weeks ahead are going to be long and often dark. But I know the One who will be there with them.

The Apostle Paul called Him God of all comfort (I Cor. 1:3).

What Kind of Sermon...?

2010-05-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

It all started a week ago today—what they are now calling a 500-year event. Since last Sunday our city has been through the fire—excuse me, make that water. Now those streets that were covered with water have mountains of trash piled as high as my head all along their sides. Friends, family members, and strangers alike have worked side by side to empty out the flooded houses—everything from sodden furniture to cherished possessions to all the gutted siding and insulation.

What kind of a sermon does one preach at the end of a week like this? I was confident our pastor would have a real word from the Lord, and he did.

He talked about the three lessons we have learned this week. The first was the most glaringly obvious. Material possessions are fragile and fleeting. Luke 12:15: “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses.”

Boy, is that the truth! I’ve done a lot of thinking about the things I would have lost if it had happened to our house. This house is full of family history and treasures, including the huge Bible of my second great-grandparents, printed in 1886. But that afternoon as it continued to pour and we had to think about evacuating, I could not figure out what I would should take with me if I had to flee. I simply didn’t know where to start. (I suppose I should live with such a list handy, and I’m thinking about doing that.)

A second thing we learned is that, despite how fragile material things are, love is strong (Mark 12:30-31). Love has reached out this week on all sides. Of course we’ve seen strong family ties filling unbelievable gaps and holding loved ones close, but we’ve also seen love expressed by strangers through everything from a hug on the street to hours of back-breaking labor sorting through muck and hauling the fragments of lives out to the street.

The third thing we’ve learned is that we already have the three things we need most. According to I Corinthians 13:13, faith, hope, and love are what stand the test of time—and we already have them. All three pointswere good reminders.

Our choir added to the blessings of the service with an appropriate number titled “Be Still and Know.” Yes, that’s what we all need in the midst of this storm (no pun intended), especially those who I imagine waking up every morning thinking it must have been a nightmare—and finding out all over again that it wasn’t.

Flood Two

2010-05-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

I sit here staring at the computer, knowing there’s so much to say, yet I’m unable to pull my thoughts and emotions together to say it. I reverted to a trick I learned years ago for gathering thoughts and organizing them. It starts with a blank sheet of paper and ends up looking like a many-legged spider with pockets of thoughts at the ends of his legs. I might blog about it someday if I could remember the author and book where I learned of it.

When I wrote my blog the other evening, my husband and I had just gotten back in contact with our world after two days of being cut off. Being incommunicado (no phone or Internet) still felt like a big deal. We wondered how our friends were, but with no communication we didn’t know that thirty families in our church had been hit. Many, like so many other in the community, lost everything. Almost no one had flood insurance. One couple still have their home but lost their entire $1 million dollar business. And those are only a few stories I know. Suddenly the inability to communicate fell into a whole new perspective.

With four days of sunshine and summery temperatures, the rivers have returned to their banks, including the Columbia that devastated several blocks deep of downtown Nashville all along its banks. But the wreckage left behind, both physical and emotional, will have our worlds upended for a long time to come. In addition to no insurance, whatever does one do with a house that once suffered a flood like this?

Yards are now piled high with trash as the homes have been gutted right down to the studs. Our grandchildren and their parents spent days this week helping both friends and strangers deal with this aftermath. Our granddaughter posted a beautiful piece on Facebook about how it has affected her.

Our church has set up a disaster relief center, with water and food from a local food bank, clothing and “everything” donations, and meals cooked and served by our own people to those who have been affected. My husband and I spent several hours there today. We experienced frustration because not as many people were finding us as we would have liked—but those who did went away helped.

So how am I feeling now? I’m getting a stiff neck from shaking my head so much in dismay. I’ve worked to get word out to our friends that we are okay, but at the same time I’m having trouble focusing and applying myself. I came home from church intending to make cookies to take back tomorrow, but they didn’t get made, at least not yet.

I am not the only one dealing with “survivor guilt.” Why were we spared when so many dear people were not? Did God think we weren’t strong enough to deal with it? Of course there are no answers, and my head knows I must not nurse that emotion. God has His purposes, and He doesn’t owe me or anyone else any explanations.

My biggest prayer is that this disaster will turn people’s hearts to God and not away from Him.

Flood!

2010-05-04T17:41:00.000-07:00

Our city has suffered what they’re calling “the flood of the century,” or even a “500-year event, and neighbors a block away from our home have had their homes destroyed, but because I can’t communicate in the usual ways, I’m using this way to let our friends know we are okay. So here is our personal saga.

We got home on Friday afternoon. The rains started that night. By the time they stopped Sunday night, our neighborhood had had fifteen inches. Sunday morning we awaited news that church had been cancelled; that happened just as I walked into the sanctuary. On our way home, we saw places where flooding had begun, but not horrendously. Less than an hour after we got home, the power went out. Not surprising. Surely it would come back on before too long. No power meant no Internet, and for us it meant no phones.

That afternoon we wondered why cars and people seemed to be gathering at the foot of our side street, so we walked down to see. We were appalled to discover that the neighborhood just around the corner from us was flooded—seriously with water as high as the tops of garage doors. A brick mailbox had only the top foot showing. Oh, my! Our son, seven miles away, wanted to know how many more feet until it reached us. We estimated twenty vertical feet and maybe fifty horizontal feet.

Also that afternoon, we learned that our substation was flooded and all roads into and out of our neighborhood were cut off—including I-40, our local link to town, our son, our church. Oh, my! Time to dust off some of our decades-old Jungle Camp skills. That afternoon during a break in the rain, I got out our iron skillet and started making granola on our patio grill. Before it was finished, my husband had to hold an umbrella over me; it was raining again.

With plenty of candles, we got through the evening, and we slept well that night. No TV, no music, no computer … but that was okay---for a while at least. Blackest night -- We woke up Monday morning to heavy fog that in a couple of hours changed to sunshine. Had granola for breakfast. The waters started receding except for the Cumberland that goes through downtown Nashville. Receding waters were still pouring into it.

That afternoon word came that I-40 was open, so we took the laptop and went to town. The kids’ soccer field was not just flooded but a lake, with less than half the roof of the concessions stand showing. At our son’s (they never lost power), I tried to get on the Internet—but he wasn’t there to give me his password. He and his kids were out somewhere helping flood victims. I was proud of them. Eventually, he was able to call home (his cell isn’t working either), and I got the password. Checked e-mail. Caught my sister on IM and caught her up on our situation.

Despite an invitation to stay, we returned home; that was where our pets and our life were. Radio was saying the power outage would be two or three days, so we were shocked when it came on at 8 Monday evening. Whoopee!! Internet! E-mail! Telephone! But those were not to be. It wasn’t until today, Tuesday, that it became clear that AT&T is one of the places flooded in downtown Nashville. When we’ll get phones and Internet back in anyone’s guess.

Life without communication? I’ve done it—in the jungles of southern Mexico all those years ago. But our life there was geared for it. My life here and now is not. I’m most grateful we have power, but being incommunicado is hard for me—harder than for my husband. Communicating is what I do. It is who I am. As a teacher in one capacity or another for the last forty-five years, I’ve communicated. As a writer and editor, I communicate. Communication is ninety-five percent of my work for the mission.
I’ve found this temporary way around it. I’ve written this on my computer at home—yes, with power this computer works, and I can write. I’ll put it on a flash drive and take it to our son’s and send it from there.

Hopefully. But I’m humbly and soberly counting my blessings because at least a quarter (maybe a third) of the homes in our part of town had water to their ceilings and are facing loss and cleanup like I can’t even imagine.

At least this will give our friends the word that we are fine—even if we are incommunicado.

The Girl in the Picture

2010-04-18T18:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve been haunted by a little girl the last few days.

Though we never interacted personally and she’s been gone from earth for close to seventy years, she and her family have been part of my life history the last fifty of those years.

How can that be?

Whenever I have occasion to talk about my life, I usually have reason to mention that seven years of my childhood—all in one stretch—were spent overseas. Our family got stuck, so to speak, in Africa during World War II. My parents and I arrived back their for their second term of service in the spring of 1939. By the time they would have been due for furlough, America was deep in the War. It wasn’t safe to cross the ocean. Passenger ships were regularly being torpedoed.

We knew. It had happened to one of our missionary families.

With their three children, the Shaw family booked ship passage for America. When they were torpedoed, the mother and 13-year-old sister went down with the ship. The father was on a life raft that never made it to land, while the 7-year-old daughter with a broken arm and her older brother survived twenty-one days on a life raft before being rescued.

There’s much, much more to the story, and I can’t believe that in June I am going to see those two survivors at a reunion and hear the story from them in person. That’s mind-boggling, and I can’t wait.

But it is the sister that went down with the ship who has been haunting me. Why? Because I’ve seen a picture of her this week.

In the picture she is about ten, with the sweetest smile on her face. A mutual acquaintance posted the picture on Facebook—isn’t that amazing? The girl is named as being in the picture, and it didn’t take me too long before her face came back to me, and I know which one she is. The memory has also come back that, even as a child, I thought she was one of the prettiest girls I knew, and I was so sad she died.

Now that I have a picture of her—and a little secret (she had a boy friend even at that young age!), I find myself thinking about the life and all these years God has given me but that in His Providence He did not give her. I think about the children she did not have and the brother and sister who did not enjoy her in their lives as they’ve lived all these intervening years. I try not to think about the terror she must have experienced in the last moments of her life.

I wonder what it will be like to meet that brother and sister two months from now. Will I have a chance to speak to them? Will I ask the wrong questions—or maybe not be able to decide what I really want to ask? This is a story with many layers, and some may be too painful to peel back.

I just know it is a story that has been part of my life as long as I can remember. Because of what happened to the Shaws, our family stayed put until the summer of 1945. My brother and sister were six and four before their grandparents ever saw them.

What a strange feeling to look at a picture of the girl in that story.

Who Named America?

2010-04-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows who discovered America, right? Christopher Columbus in 1492, after he sailed the ocean blue. He did land on the west side of the Atlantic Ocean in the fall of that year, but it was a Caribbean island, not any part what we generally call “America” today. So how did we end up being called America and not Columbia, Colombo, or something like it?

Wednesday afternoon, sitting in the doctor’s office with my husband, I picked up a December 2009 copy of the Smithsonian magazine. The article that caught my eye was titled, “Putting America on the Map.” I remember in my youth learning that our continent got its name America from someone named Amerigo Vespucci. I assumed he was an important explorer, the captain of his ship.

But guess what? He was simply a Florentine merchant in the early 1500s who had taken a couple of voyages across the Atlantic—-one on a Spanish ship and one on a Portuguese one. So what did he do that made his name stand out from the rest of those on the ships? He wrote letters about his trips! He told about endlessly sailing down a coast that went on and on without a break—-even beyond the equator. That eventually led to the conclusion that the earth had four major parts, not just three as people had always believed.

The article went on for pages and pages and talked about seamen, map makers, explorers like Marco Polo, dukes who sponsored the work of scholars—-and a good bit about the ancient Roman scholar Ptolemy, who produced eight volumes on geography and “invented” latitude and longitude. It talked about a huge, mysterious map that scholars wondered about and searched for some 350 years before one man, a Jesuit professor of history and geography, ran across it by accident while searching for something else. The biggest accomplishment of the article was tracing the unnamed author who first applied the Amerigo name to that still little-known world.

Reading an article like “Putting America on the Map” is a real treat for me, though I know many people would have little interest or patience for it. However, I got a surprise. Because we waited so long for the doctor, I started reading snatches of it to my husband, and then a couple more, and then something longer—-and I was surprised how many times he chuckled in appreciation.

So what did Mr. Vespucci think about the honor of his name being applied to a whole new section of the world? The truth is, he most likely never even knew it.

The SS Europa

2010-04-12T19:16:00.000-07:00

I found what I was looking for online about the Europa, that ship I sailed on as I approached my first birthday. Can't the Internet be wonderful? I even found a couple more pictures of it. It was a German liner, launched in 1930, six years before I was born, so it was in fairly good shape when our group of missionaries traveled on it. It could make the Atlantic crossing in a few hours short of five days.

For a ship, it had a fairly interesting life--including a serious fire on board, being captured in a world war, sailing under the flags of three countries, and colliding with a sunken ship in harbor. It carried US troops at the end of WWII, experienced a complete name change, and appeared briefly in a famous movie (the original Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart).

The collision happened after it had been turned over to the French as part of reparations following the War. The Liberté, as they had renamed it, broke loose from its moorings during a storm and collided with the already sunken SS Paris. Following the collision, the Liberté itself sank. After much discussion, the French decided to raise it and repair it. I can’t even imagine bringing a sunken ship up from under water, cleaning up the resultant mess, and making it usable again. It served another eleven years as one of the largest liners in the French fleet before being scrapped in 1962.

As far as a I know, the ship only made the Atlantic crossing between Europe and America. That means my parents, with me in tow, had to get from Africa to Europe in order to board it, but I don’t remember ever hearing anything about that. In these days of electronic communications, international reservations, and things worked out with surprising precision, it’s hard to grasp how uncertain everything must have been for them.

I’m going to have to watch Sabrina again and see if I can wrap my mind around the idea that, for five short days in my life, I was in person on that ship.

An Amazing Connection

2010-04-09T19:02:00.000-07:00

Have you seen any old friends recently? I mean really old? No, I don’t mean someone with a multitude of birthdays. I mean someone you knew a long time and haven’t seen for many years. We had someone like that in our home last night—someone we hadn’t seen in more than fifty years. That was what I was going to write, but during the day today some things started clicking, and I have an even greater “old friends” topic to write about.

This week someone sent me a piece of my family’s history. It is section of a page from a ship’s log, and it has my name on it. The ship was the Europa (I hope to learn more about it), and the date on the log is June 17, 1937. That was two days before my first birthday. My parents’ names are just ahead of mine, along with our ages, birth dates, and birth places. Ahead of our names on the list are the names of two missionary ladies who were a part of my childhood, and after ours are the names of the five members of the Wimer family.

When I first saw the ship’s log (sent to me by a friend whose brother ran across it during a search on Ancestry.com), I didn’t connect it to a picture I saw a few months ago. That picture was of a group of missionaries, including my parents and me, on a ship when I was small enough to sit on a lap.

Wait a minute! That’s the size I was at the time of the ship’s log, and some of the people in the picture are those whose names are on the log . . . oh, my! The two go together!

The picture was posted on Facebook by the widow of one of the young boys in the picture (I know "young boys" don't have widows, but you know what I mean). She and I have never met in person, but the fringes of our histories have overlapped, and that led us to becoming friends on Facebook.

I know this is an amazing age where technology almost daily helps us do or see things even our grandparents never imagined, but this one has me still shaking my head. The ship’s log and the picture started out in the same place, yes, but the log stayed with the shipping company and the picture went with members of one of the families’ in the picture. How can they, from totally unrelated sources and with no connection between them for almost three quarters of a century, have found their way to the same place now—-my computer?

Young Art Wimer was another lap child in that old picture. He’d also been born in Africa the year before. Some different connections between him and me lay far ahead in the future, but I’ll have to tell you about those some other day. (In the picture, I'm on the lap of the dark-haired lady fourth from the left; my parents are immediately on her left.)

Not Your Thumb, Your Eye

2010-04-06T19:16:00.000-07:00

Have you ever said, “I just don’t have a green thumb?”

Did you mean by that statement that plants never thrive for you, that most plants you’ve tried to grow ended up sickly or dead?

I found all kinds of references to the term in an Internet search this evening, but only one pure definition—-in the Oxford Pocket Dictionary. It called a green thumb a “natural talent for growing things.” I agree that's what most people think the term means. So it must be something you’re born with, right? That’s the part that I don’t wholly agree with.

You see, I have a theory. I don’t think a green thumb has anything to do with your thumb or even your hands. I think a green thumb is simply an awareness of plants. In other words, it has to do with your eyes, not your thumbs. Let me tell you why.

This morning when I sat down for my coffee break (for me, that’s hot chocolate), I naturally glanced out the double window. One glance was all it took to see that my topsy-turvy tomato plant had a problem. It was a barely noticeable problem, but my eye caught it immediately. Its leaves were slightly limp. The thing needed water.

Whatever this green thumb is, my sister and I both have it. Did we get it from our mother? Maybe, but in my theory she didn’t give it to us in our genes. She gave it to us because plants were important to her. She cared about them, talked about them, babied them. The result was plant awareness, for her and many people around her.

The truth is, this plant awareness, or green thumb, doesn’t usually come at birth. It develops over time, depending on how much exposure one has to plants or to those interested in them. A few children pick up on it, for whatever reason, but mostly I think it grows through life, depending on what one experiences with plants along the way.

Okay, I can hear the nay-sayers already. “I’ve tried and tried—-and everything still dies for me.” Remember what I said at the beginning? This is a personal theory of mine. I can’t present scientific evidence. It’s just been my observation for years and years now. People who really like plants and want them to grow will usually have more success with them than those who have a myriad other interests and don’t think about the plants until they are is seriously sad shape.

You’re welcome to disagree with me, of course. Or maybe this is a new idea that makes sense to you. Whatever, spring is a glorious time. Some folks who never think about plants any other time notice them now. So hurray for spring!

Easter Music

2010-04-03T19:28:00.000-07:00

Seven years ago last month we moved to Nashville. After we got the truck unloaded and spent a week settling in with help from family, Easter was upon us. To me Easter meant music. What was I going to do for my Easter music in this new place? One crossroad in our end of town sports three large churches, one of them Baptist, which was our background. A Baptist church ought to have good Easter music, I reasoned, so that’s where we showed up on Palm Sunday.

I was right. The choir was “classic” and impressive, but the special music took my breath away. A talented young tenor, in costume, performed “Watch the Lamb!” I was hooked. We returned the next Sunday, and a man and woman, both with powerful voices, sang the Mary Magdalene song titled “I’ve just seen Jesus.” Except for worshipping with our son’s family at their church from time to time, we’re still where we started out.

Last Sunday that same tenor, a few years older now and the father of a little girl, was part of a breathtaking male quartet that sang the Gaither song, “I Believe in a Hill Called Mount Calvary.” We were delighted when they sang it again last evening at our Good Friday service. I think the Gaithers outdid themselves in “poetic” with the line about “And when time has surrendered and earth is no more, I’ll still cling to that old rugged cross”!

At least two other Gaither songs have powerful messages for the Easter season. I’ve long loved the dramatic one about the crucifixion, with the chorus, “It…is…finished, the battle is over…” ending with “It is finished, and Jesus is Lord.” The first words of the second verse have gripped my heart afresh these last two days:

“But in my heart the battle was raging; not all prisoners of war had come home. There were battlefields of my own making—I didn’t know that the war had been won.”

Someone in our extended family is right now in the clutches of battlefields of his own making and doesn’t seem able to grasp that the war has been won. It gives me a new perspective for praying for him.

I can’t mention Gaither music and Easter without including “Because He Lives.” If you don’t know the story of how Bill and Gloria wrote it in connection with the birth of their third baby, you need to look it up. We used it at the last two funerals in our family, but it’s message is so much broader. No matter what the turmoil around us these days—personally, nationally, or any other dimension, we can face tomorrow because our Savior lives. Knowing that He holds the future makes our lives worth living—tomorrow and all the days beyond.

Here is just one of several websites about the Gaithers: http://www.praisegathering.com/Site/9/

Easter Memories

2010-04-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

Singing with the Angels
My mother died during the Easter season.

A couple of weeks ago marked the 19th anniversary of her death. Another 1 and 9 to go with the date—March 19, 1991. (I was glad when that year was over so I wouldn’t have to keep seeing all those nines and ones.)

At the time of her death, I wondered if it would forever cast a shadow over Easter for me. I’ve found instead that it has only made Easter more precious. Mother had been practicing Easter music with the small choir (eight people) at her little church in northern Arkansas. At her funeral the group sang one of the songs she had been practicing with them. Melancholy, yes, but only from an earthly perspective. I couldn’t be sad for her. She sang with the angels that year—and every Easter since.

Golden Cross
The only place on earth I have attended a true sunrise service was the mission center where we worked in South America. We gathered every year at six in the morning on the highest hill at the center, overlooking a long lake. With our blankets spread on the ground, we sang Easter songs and listened a brief devotional message.

One year an amazing thing happened. A breeze ruffled a narrow horizontal strip across the far end of the lake. We didn’t notice it particularly until the sun slipped up above the horizon at that far end. The next moment, a golden glow spread vertically down the length of the lake toward us—and the ruffled cross strip turned gold as well.

Can you see it—the golden cross on the lake … on Easter morning?

Resurrection—and Guns
Easter morning in 1981was memorable in a different way. In January subversives had taken one member of our group captive and a few weeks later executed him. Our center was still under guard by the country’s military, and we were told it would not be safe for us to meet on the hill. Instead, we gathered at a central location, with homes and trees around us and only a small piece of the lake visible. Soldiers and a couple of machine guns were in clear sight. That year we sang with extra gusto, “Up from the grave He arose, with a mighty triumph o’er His foes!”

Grandmother’s Birthday
A footnote to my mother’s death during the Easter season is that she died on her grandmother’s birthday. This was the grandmother for whom she was named and whose name my mother later gave to me. Esther Sophronia Porter (later Stauffer) was born March 19, 1868, and died six years before I was born. I like to think of her welcoming Mother that Easter season in 1991—and then the two of them singing together with the angels.

What memorable Easters have you experienced?

Looking Back

2010-03-29T19:08:00.000-07:00

My very earliest memory is a “freeze frame”—no action, just a mental picture of the dining room of the home where my parents and I boarded during our months in Paris. The picture in my mind is of a fairly dark room with one very bright, white window. We were there at the time of the war scare in September of 1938, but I was too little for it to mean anything to me.

We left France for Africa in April of 1939, and my second memory is also a freeze frame, this time of the dining room on the German ship we traveled on. Hmmm. Should I make something of the fact that my two earliest memories are of dining rooms…? Whatever, my picture of that second one is very different from the first. It is a white, white room with a high, high ceiling and filled with little round tables with white tablecloths.

The third memory follows on the heels of the second, but it has action in it. I was still two months short of my third birthday the day that ship docked on the west coast of Africa, at the port of Krebe in the country of Cameroon. The centerpiece of this memory has always been the sight, on shore, of our blue pickup truck that had preceded us.

The action part of this memory was the way we got off the huge ocean liner that day. Ever try going down the side of a ocean liner on a stairway and into a small boat? In my original memory, it was a ladder and a canoe, but I now know it was a staircase and a fair-size rowboat. All of it was especially precarious for my mother since she was six months pregnant.

We loaded our possessions on the little truck and set out for the interior of the continent where my parents’ missionary work awaited them. I don’t remember the trip, but I’m sure it was long—at least a week, perhaps a few days more than that. None of the roads were paved, of course. I wish my parents were still alive so I could ask them about where we slept at night and what we did for food along the way.

All I know is that my next memory is of my third birthday two months later. For whatever reason, my parents woke me up from my nap for my party—if one can call it a “party” since not another soul was around for it except my parents. The tiny black and white pictures show me with a deep scowl on my face, and I actually do remember being unhappy because they woke me up from a hard sleep.

What is your earliest memory? I’d love to hear about it.

Continents, Countries, and States

2010-03-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks to those of you who dropped in and made some guesses about my states and countries. Though the two places I lived in Africa are now two countries, they were only one—French Equatorial Africa—when I was there, so I count them as one for this exercise. Of course I’ve live in the U.S. and North America, as well as the country of Colombia (no “u” in the Spanish spelling) in South America. As far as the shorter ones, when I was two I lived in Paris, France (i.e., Europe for the fourth continent) for seven months while my parents studied French. In the ‘70s, I lived four months in Mexico for Jungle Camp and five in Costa Rica for Spanish study.

As for the six states, I spent two of my parents’ furloughs (when I was one and when I was nine) in their home town of Mishawaka, Indiana. As a teenager, I lived for three years at a Christian boarding school in central Florida. I lived in Illinois for college and eight years in the ‘60s, broken up by three years in Michigan while my husband attended Bible school. I spent the ‘80s and ‘90s in Texas and now seven years in Tennessee.

My earliest memories—one in Paris, one on a German ship, and one at a unusual port on the coast of Africa—will make up my next blog. I might even have some pictures of that third one.

Where have you lived? Countries? States? Have you crossed an ocean or two? I’d love to hear about it.

Time for a Fresh Face and Focus

2010-03-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

This month marks two years since I started this blog. I wrote it mostly for my family and friends about the revisions I was making on the Christian novel I wrote many years ago. That major revision is finished. As with anything a writer writes, revising and polishing are never done until a piece goes to press, but for this blog, it is time to move on to something else. I started doing that with my last two blogs, and last week I gave the page a face lift.

So where do I go from here? Let’s start with a question.

“Where are you from?”

A friendly question, common in our society, but I have to smile when it comes my way. Where am I from? Right now I live in Nashville, Tennessee. It's the sixth state I’ve lived in, but I’ve also lived in five countries besides the USA—no, six others, and on three other continents (four total). I lived in three of those countries for months, not years, so maybe I shouldn't count them, but they weren't just visits. So who knows what I might write about here in the days ahead? Fasten your seat belt and stay tuned.

How about it, family members? Can you name those six states and six countries? I’ll have a prize for the first one to get them all right and reported in a comment here on my fresh blog. I’m not saying what the prize will be because it will depend on who wins it. And the first non-family member to get any six of them right will get something, too.

The Team Scatters

2010-03-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

My friends are gone.

At this moment, many of them are thirty thousand or more feet up in the sky, winging their way home. Several will follow the sunset west. A couple will not reach their destination until tomorrow is newborn. One man and wife are still at the airport awaiting their flight time. That’s where I’ll be early tomorrow morning, catching my own chance to spend two hours in a hollow, metal tube in order to reach home again.

Five days ago, eighteen of us came together for a phenomenon we call “annual meetings”—twelve from eight different states plus six locals. We renewed friendships and caught up with each other’s lives. We met new colleagues and began getting acquainted with them. We sat around a big U of small tables, all but two with laptops. (Those two, bless them, endured some good-natured teasing.)

We knew we were well into the 21st century because each morning our leader reminded us to turn off our cell phones and close down our computers so we could give him our attention for an initial time of inspiration and prayer. During that time, our focus was drawn to the story of Aaron and Hur holding up Moses’ hands during a battle (Exodus 17). We learned what constitutes a team and the essentials what make a team work well together.

We learned, we discussed, we explained, and occasionally we disagreed. We wrestled with some challenging issues, and we shared some frustrations. We learned practical things like how to reduce electronic pictures and add video and music to PowerPoint presentations (of course some already knew how). Through it all, we renewed our vision and our determination.

We laughed a lot this week, but we also shared shared needs and prayer requests. One member got some terminal news about her father. Another is a young girl with a strange and serious disease that has kept her from work for almost five months. We were glad for the hours she was able to spend with us.

We ate together a lot this week—everything from sandwiches and pizza to chicken cordon bleu and beef bolognaise. One late-afternoon time slot was scheduled to play together, and I ended up in a game of Apples to Apples with ten other ladies. That was a hoot! At the end of the week, we wrote notes called “Hots” and “Nots”—what we liked about the week and what we didn’t.

And now it is over. In the space of an afternoon, we have scattered to the four directions of the compass. Tomorrow we will unpack suitcases, catch up on laundry, and relish how good it is to be home. Even the “locals” who didn’t leave home will do some of that. Our time together is over, and we are the better for it.

It’s just going to be hard to believe, as I fall asleep tonight, that we will already be so far scattered.

Battles Not Won

2010-03-10T17:57:00.000-08:00

Battles. Life battles. Have you faced any recently? Did you come through them with flying colors, or did you find a way to skirt around them? Our human tendency is to avoid difficulties if we can possibly find a way. Occasionally, that bent is part of the survival instinct built into us by our Creator, but often we use it to wriggle our way out of something the Creator wants us to deal with.

These questions remind me of one of the most memorable experiences I’ve had in my life as a missionary. For full membership in our organization, we had to attend a four-month training session in southern Mexico, fondly—or notoriously—known as “jungle camp.” In the first stage, our family of five lived in a five-room mud house with a mud floor and a grass roof. Kids continued studies with books they’d brought while mom and dad attended classes, learned to give shots, went on a day-long hike and an overnight canoe trip. We had swimming lessons in a river where I almost learned to hate swimming because the water was so cold.

In the second stage, we lived in a stick and plastic “house,” cooked on a cast-iron plate built into a hand-fashioned mud stove, washed clothes by hand in the lake, and carried up from the lake in pails all the water our family needed. My husband sailed through it, our children enjoyed most of it, and in the years to follow I lived to wish I had put my heart into enjoying something more than just the peaceful lying in the hammock, staring at the treetops rustling in the jungle canopy sixty feet above. (I didn’t say that was the only thing I did; it’s just the only thing I remember enjoying.)

One of the infamous features of the second phase was known as “survival hike.” Men and women did it separately and in at least some isolation. Needless to say, most women dreaded it, I not the least of them. I told myself I had better reason than most to worry about it because I had spent my childhood in central Africa where the jungle harbored leopards that regularly ate our cats and at one time even lions that ate our family dog. How could I ever endure being left out there alone—even if hundreds of missionary women (including my own sister) had survived it before me?

The men went first, but while they were out, something happened. Soldiers were found searching for guerrillas reported in the area. The camp leaders went into high gear to round up the men and get them back to camp. They didn’t want either the soldiers or the guerrillas to find the men alone in the woods—-and they certainly didn’t want either the soldiers or the guerrillas to find the camp of women and children without any men.

Needless to say, we women did not go on survival hike that session.

I was not prepared for my personal response to that development. At first there was predictable relief, but it came tainted with perplexity. God doesn’t allow His children to wriggle out of trials! All the promises say He will be with us in them. What had happened here?

In the weeks that followed, I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing. A bigger surprise awaited as another emotion crept in. It felt like disappointment, but how could that be? Was it possible God thought He couldn’t trust me with the experience? That wasn’t a good feeling. I have no way of knowing, but as I continued to look into my heart, the conclusion sifted out to one clear point.

Here was a victory I didn’t get to win because I never got to fight the battle.

I know God had purposes for those events far greater than my little story and my little fears. I know He would have seen me through it. Only He knows why He chose not to push me on it. I believe I learned from it even so.

But like I said earlier, today I almost wish I could do it over so I could handle it better than I did. Almost.

Verse on Waiting

2010-02-24T03:24:00.000-08:00

I ran across a verse sometime back that relates to waiting and God, and I just found it again.

Isaiah 5:19: "They say, 'Let god hurry; let him to his owrk soon so we may see it. Let the plan of the Holy One ... happen soon so that we will know what it is.'"

That's the way most of us feel at one time or another, especially us writers. May God give us grace to stop wanting to hurry Him!

Waiting

2010-02-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

Waiting.

It’s a human experience. It’s part of life for every person who walks the earth. Often it brings out the worst in us. Occasionally it demonstrates character and purpose.

Waiting has been part of being human through all time. Abraham had to wait for the promise of a son, Jacob had to wait for Rachel, David had to wait for the kingdom to be his.

Our culture is replete with occasions to wait—-at red lights, in checkout lines, even for the morning coffee to perk. Life itself is full of waiting—-mothers wait for the birth of a baby, children wait to grow up, adolescents can’t wait for adulthood, and the athlete with a broken leg chafes for activity while waiting for the leg to heal.

As much as we fret about waiting, it is something God values. We are told repeatedly in the Scriptures to “wait on the Lord.” That grates against our human longing for “instant gratification.” Why God might be interested in our waiting is a topic for another day.

I am in a time of waiting right now. I’ve sent a full proposal with sample chapters to an agent. He responded promptly with “If you haven’t heard from me in three months, feel free to remind me.” So I will be waiting. That’s okay. I’m using the break to catch up on other things in my life, including writing things. I hope to read more blogs and get back to studying my writing books. More than either of those, I need to get back to building up my own blog.

Right now I’m feeling some things I’m not sure I want to feel, but God knows about them, too. I will wait for Him to make things clear.

Cancer

2010-02-04T12:27:00.000-08:00

We just got the news that another friend and coworker has gone into hospice care. I say another because just two days ago another friend we’ve been following closely slipped away to Jesus in her sleep.

These two events strike close to my heart because they both started their fight with cancer about the time I did ten years ago. Since then, they’ve had good times and bad, up times and down. They’ve both gone through extensive and sometimes severe treatments, and yet they’ve lost their battles with cancer. Another friend who started dealing with her cancer back when I did already died a couple of years ago, and her husband has remarried.

Lots of people when they are struck with diseases and prognoses like this are prone to ask Why? Why did it happen to me? My question these days is on the other side of that coin—why have they had to struggle so long, only to succumb in the end, yet I have had no further trouble since I underwent treatment? This month marks the tenth anniversary of my diagnosis. I had surgery and radiation but didn't have to go through chemo (something for which I become more grateful with each passing year).

I know God has His purposes and perfect plan for each of us. I can truthfully say I’m not questioning His will, but I do have to put down occasional twinges of guilt that I’m doing so well. I read an interesting truth recently. People talk a lot these days about being “cancer survivors,” but one lady pointed out that you will never know for sure if you are a cancer survivor until you die of something else.

The lady who made that statement in a secular magazine did not sound to me like a person of faith. I could be wrong, and—faith or no faith—what she said is true. But my perspective is a bit different. It doesn't matter whether I turn out to be a cancer survivor or not. I want every day God gives me life to count for Him—whether I have to fight cancer again or not.

My very personal perspective is that anyone who has had cancer shouldn't be squeamish about their age. Every added year is a gift. I don't mind folks knowing that I will be 74 this year. That will make me just two years younger than my mother was when she died. I still have lots of things I want to accomplish in my life, but God will have the last word on all that, and that’s just fine with me. My confidence that He never makes any mistakes is as strong as ever—even though Helen has to go on hospice care.

In our Sunday school class we just worked out a schedule to help supplement hospice care for one of our own members. Seems like I keep being reminded that cancer could come back. If it does, I know God will be just as much with me as He was the first time, no matter the outcome—and just as He will be with Helen in the days ahead.

Hope

2010-01-31T14:39:00.000-08:00

My quiet time this morning took me to verses in Psalm 147 that I memorized a few years ago:

“His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of a man. The Lord delights in those who fear him, who puts their hope in his unfailing love” (147:10-11).

It took only a few minutes of thinking about it to realize what it had to do with this day. This is the day I am submitting my story to an agent, so I decided a paraphrase would be appropriate.

“His pleasure is not in the skills of an agent nor his delight in a well-written story. The Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope his unfailing love.”

Hmmm. Hope seems to be a way of life for writers. We’re always hoping for something—-for a conference invitation, for acceptance by an agent or a publisher, for the final arrival of you book in your hands. But even at that it isn’t over. Nowadays, anyone and everyone can review published works on line, so even after publication, one has to hope for good reviews from readers.

It’s a comfort to me that my God wants me to place my hope in Him. Not in a writers' group or critique partner. Not in an agent. Not in a publisher. Not in an advance. In Him. Just Him. The other things matter in their time and way, but the real anchor in life is hope in the God of the universe, in His pleasure and His delight.

I’m glad I don’t have to worry that I don’t own a horse and that my legs won’t carry me running more than a few feet anymore.

Discouragement

2010-01-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

Something happened today that hasn’t happened before. I came home from my local writers’ meeting discouraged rather than charged up.

Our topic for the day was helpful, and our discussions lively—but I had scarcely a word to say. The problem? Simply that I got a renewed view, not only of what it takes to get published but how far I am from arriving. Our leader was I’m one who knows personally about how long it takes to build up your craft. She mentioned two years—and I didn’t have the courage to correct her that it’s been closer to five.

Those five years had already been on my mind, and I think they are probably the bottom line of my current state of mind. In another two months it will be five years since I attended my first writers’ conference. That’s when I learned something so basic as having to have a main character rather than a nice ensemble cast, and the main character was to be someone with a problem that needed solution, someone who learned and grew as a person in the course of the story.

Fine. I settled on Sharon as the obvious one, and I think I’ve done well in giving a depth to her problem that wasn’t there before.

At the end of 2006, I connected to the American Christian Fiction Writers and Middle Tennessee Christian Writers, and I began to learn the craft of fiction writing big time. I’ve worked hard to apply what I’ve learned, and I’ve felt all along that I was getting somewhere.

Then at the big ACFW conference in September of 2008, it became clear that I needed to cut off the first six months of my story, including the reams of back story that had been plaguing me forever, and start the story when Sharon came back rather than when she left. I told everyone it would take me a couple of months. But here I am sixteen months later, still hanging on by a thread to one agent’s invitation to send him something—and I know that I’m still not fully ready. Last evening I was looking over my three sample chapters and was dismayed to find how many unresolved issues they still have.

This morning I debated whether to ask if I should still go ahead and submit to that agent, or if it is entirely too late, but I decided not to ask. I have nothing to lose by sending to him. All he can do is say no. Yes, it will be an opportunity lost, and I hate that, but I’ve tried hard, yet I haven’t arrived at where I need to be.

In the days ahead, I will share some specifics of what is troubling me today. Some of it has been troubling me for a long time. I’ll finish up with just one of those for tonight.

The feelings and reactions of others
I do not at all blame friends and family who don’t understand what is taking me so long. I don’t understand it myself, but I understand it better than they do. Yes, I can respond to hubby that “I have another life!” but it is more than that. It isn’t just time. Even when I have time, I often find it hard to focus and accomplish.

Another reason for the five years is that some of the things I’ve learned have been a challenge to master and apply, and time has relentlessly rolled along. I’ve written about some of those lessons in this blog.

Meanwhile, family members and my prayer partners watch from the sidelines, wondering and puzzling over what all this is about. Some of them, I know, wonder if I’m not ruining my story by trying to “improve” it. I’m positive I’m not, but until and unless I ever get a publisher, I can’t explain that to anyone else.

Seasons

2010-01-03T19:15:00.000-08:00

We finished putting away the Christmas things today, and tonight with my pizza I finished the holiday apple cider. It was a special Christmas, a fairly quiet one, but that’s not at all bad. I’m not sure why, but this year we didn’t get through our Christmas-music CDs like we have other years. As we worked on the dismantling, we commented that sometime it is more work to put the Christmas things away than it was to get them out. True or not, putting Christmas away is always a bit melancholy for me. I’m glad our outdoor lights are still on outside my office window tonight, but this may be the last night for them as well.

I find interesting the way we measure “seasons” by different things. Besides the obvious ones of spring, summer, fall, and winter, there is childhood, puberty, parenthood, grandparenthood, retirement. Much of my life organizes by geography—Africa (childhood), Florida (boarding school), Wheaton (college), Michigan (school for hubby), Wheaton again (building a family), South America and Texas (mission work), and now Tennessee.

Another way to look at the seasons of my life is what I’ve been doing through the years—teaching, mothering, more teaching, writing curriculum, coordinating publications, and the last eleven years training and consulting.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, I can pars out the seasons of Tangled Strands in my life as well, some of them paralleling phases mentioned above. Creating the characters (young mother), writing the back story (South America), studying writing in a vacuum (pub-coordinator), and more recently studying writing in community with other writers and bringing the story up to standards of Christian fiction today.

Will there be a season of marketing, book signings, and reviews—both glowing and glaring? Only God knows, of course, but I haven’t given up on the possibility. Meanwhile, I’ll accept and align myself with the new season that is upon me—post-Christmas, new year, whatever you want to call it. The God who has seen me through all the others will see me through the next one.

In fact, who knows what exciting season He may know lies ahead?

Finishing

2010-01-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

Chuck Swindoll was meddling this morning.

He actually did his part of the action almost thirty years ago when he wrote Growing Strong in the Seasons of Life, but what he said only crossed my quiet time this morning . He was talking about being thorough in our work and finishing things. Ouch.

I’ve been struggling lately with two things related to my writing—getting my proposal off to an agent and getting back to blogging regularly. I’ve read that agents and publishers are wont to check writers’ blogs to learn about not only their writing style but whether they are prompt and faithful in their writing. Getting back to doing it “if and when” I feel like it is not an option.

I got off track on this blogging last winter when my husband was in the hospital for sixteen days, with at least that many more in continued recovery. This past fall my primary focus was getting through the major revision of Tangled Strands, and I haven’t been able to get back in the groove. Those are reasons, but not excuses.

Now I have a new year in front of me. What is it about fresh new years that makes us think something is going to change? I’ve lived long enough to know that nothing changes just because of the arrival of a new year. If things are to change, it will be because we do what is necessary to make change happen. I gave up making resolutions many years ago, but I don’t ever want to become unwilling to change—to grow in good ways.

One of the Scriptures Swindoll included for further study was the familiar one in Colossians 3 about doing everything we do as unto the Lord: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.” On the surface it might not seem that writing a novel can be working for the Lord rather than for men—but if it’s not, then I should have shut down my computer a long time ago.

Ah! That reminds me of a topic I’ve long planned to blog about someday. Does writing—or even reading—Christian fiction have a place in a Christian’s life? You can guess my perspective, but many who are wiser and more experienced than I have expounded it. It is worth some thought, and I’ll try to pull some of those thoughts together soon.

THE Hook

2009-12-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

I’ve been wrestling several days with a “hook” for the proposal for Tangled Strands. Afew minutes ago a wrote a friend that I was torn between working on the hook or working on a blog—and then it occurred to me. Maybe I should write a blog about the hook.

Sorry if that sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook, but I am serious. So let’s back up and talk about the hook. In writing, it is simply a set of words, a devise, by which you try to “hook” a reader the same way a fisherman hooks a fish. The opening of every book needs a hook if we want the reader to take the book home. The end of every chapter needs enough of a hook to keep your reader turning the pages. The back cover on a paperback or the flap on a hardback book are designed to be hooks in themselves.

What I need right now is a hook for the opening of a book proposal. The proposal is what you send to an agent or a publisher (or your agent sends to a publisher) when you are trying to connect with an agent or a publisher. The definition I have at the moment is this: HOOK – the selling hook of 30 words or less; extremely important summary of why the reader should buy the book (italics mine).

In other words, I have thirty words to convince a reader that my book is worth the $$ being asked for it—or, in this circumstance, thirty words to convince an agent that taking a look at my proposal and my synopsis will be worth his time.

What’s the difference between a proposal and a synopsis? The synopsis of course is a summary of the story. A synopsis can be a half page or many pages. A proposal may include the synopsis, but it includes much more—everything from the number of words in the article or synopsis, to who you think will read it, to why the author is qualified to write it, and what plans the author has for trying to sell the final product.

You can see why the hook is important. If it doesn’t catch attention, none of the other “good stuff” in your proposal may be looked at.

So now that I’ve written my blog about the hook, I still need to get back to coming up with the hook itself. I need to find those thirty words that will capture attention and make the reader of the hook say, “Wow! I want to know more about this.”

Trying to Get Back on Track

2009-12-04T19:33:00.000-08:00

I know it is bad news, if I consider myself a writer, that I haven’t kept up with my blog. Whether an excuse or a reason, the truth is that my focus the last two months has been on getting that revision done so I can get on with the challenges of finding an agent and a publisher. Is the revision is done? Are you kidding? A novel is never “done” until it goes to press. However, this one of mine is far more done than it has ever been. Most important, it is pretty close to where I want it before I contact the agent again.

I could do many more things to it before considering it “ready,” such as looking at each chapter to see if it begins with something catchy enough to keep the reader reading. Or does every chapter end with a punch or an element of suspense that will keep the reader turning pages. I need to go through the whole thing again looking for those “to be” words that weaken writing, especially when combined with an –ing word (I don’t fully understand why that is bad, so I have more learning to do). I need to do a “deep edit” scouring for excess and unnecessary words (like just, really, and a dozen of their pesky cousins).

Speaking of “to be” words, many of which are linking verbs, I was impressed recently to discover one of my grandsons with an assignment to write an essay without linking verbs. They’re teaching that in seventh grade now? Yikes! I can promise you that it isn’t easy.

I won’t make any bold promises about getting back to writing regularly on this blog. I want to. I have to. I must if I am to broaden my readership and get it to the place where I can use it as a proper author’s tool.

Passion for the Task

2009-11-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

The online course of my writers' group for November is about writing your passion and getting published. We haven't gotten to the getting-published part, but the first assignment was to write about your passion for your "wip" (work in progress). I just posted this:

If I didn't love my story, I would have abandoned it a long time ago. Though I had created the characters and story idea many years before, I finished writing the story more than twenty years ago. I made a few half-hearted efforts to get it published, but it wasn't until recent years that I began a serious effort to upgrade it to today's styles and guidelines in Christian fiction.

So I've been learning and applying things like show-don't-tell, eschew was and -ing, no head hopping or butlers in the chandelier, goal-motivation-conflict, deep POV, hooks that grab and endings that don't let go--the list is endless. The more I practiced what I learned, the more I discovered I needed to learn. Then I had to discover how to apply those things without letting them kill my "voice"--in other words, making them my servant, not my master.

Doing that has taken more time than I ever imagined--so yes, it has taken passion. I believe in my story about a girl who "tosses aside love for a ride on a whirlwind," an action which soon lets her crash and subsequently sets her up to learn about forgiveness and second chances. It's a story about relationships and God's ability to unravel "tangled strands" and weave them into meaning and beauty despite human failures. I'm within sight of the end, but still wrestling with a few issues. It must be passion keeps me going. (End of assignment)

If you've been reading my blog very often, some of that will sound familiar. I hope so. I'm happy to report that I've finished what I called the "forward progress" on my big revision. Unfortunately, that is not synonymous with being perfectly "done." But as I said in my report to my local writers' group, I'm much closer to done than I've ever been before. Meanwhile, I keep digging deeper for that passion that is trying to keep me going.

A Showing of Some “Show vs. Tell”

2009-10-17T17:43:00.000-07:00

I know I am highly delinquent in keeping up with this blog, but I’m not going to apologize. I’ve been working very hard to make forward progress on the long, drawn-out revision of my novel. Rather than give you a tale of what that has involved, I here give you an example of what I’ve been doing.

I’ve said that a big feature of today’s style of fiction writing is to show the reader an action as it happens rather than simply narrating, or telling about, that action. Here’s what I’m talking about. The next paragraph is the original of a passage in my Tangled Strands story.

<< When word finally came that a bona fide marriage had indeed taken place in New York between Sharon Champlin and Anthony Casanetti, Agnes and Sharon laughed and cried and hugged each other like schoolgirls. But they sobered quickly because the message from Alec also requested a meeting in his office with Agnes and Sharon, Mollie and Chris. Unable to imagine why he needed to see all four of them, they arrived at the appointed time promptly—and soberly. >>

Following is how I rewrote it to show the actions as they happened:

Sharon was in the backyard filling the bird feeders when she heard Mrs. Baldwin hollering her name. Hollering? Mrs. Baldwin never hollered. Sharon dropped the container of seed on the bench and dashed into the house.

“What’s the matter?”

“Chris’s father called. Are you ready for this?”

Sharon’s knees went weak and she reached for the nearest chair.

“They found it! They found the marriage certificate.”

“You mean—mine and Tony’s?”

“A genuine marriage between Sharon Marie Champlin and Michael Anthony Casanetti III.”

“Are you sure?”

Sharon began jumping around, laughing and crying at the same time. The next moment she did a double take when Mrs. Baldwin grabbed her and began jumping with her.

Suddenly the older woman stopped, and the joy on her face shriveled.

“What?”

“There’s more. Mr. Thorne wants you, me, Chris and Mollie to meet him in his office at two o’clock this afternoon.”

Sharon’s mouth fell open. “Really?”

“Really.”

“But why? Why would he want to see all four of us?”

“I have no idea, Sharon. Let’s just make sure we arrive promptly.”

Fact is, the second version took more than twice the words the single paragraph did. That isn’t a problem unless a novel already comes in at 120,000 words (the author undoubtedly has two stories there). In my case, the original was about 87,500 words. It is now 91,300. Less than 4000 added? Not so fast. A year ago I moved the beginning of the novel forward six months, and that cut off 13,500 words. If I’ve crunched the numbers correctly, that means I’ve written some 17,000 new words in that last year.

And here everyone thought I was “just editing.” I hope it means I now have a better understanding of “Show, don’t tell.”

The Kind of Book I Want to Write

2009-09-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

I finished reading a book today. It’s the first book I’ve read in a long time where I found myself wondering what has happened to the family since the book was written. That’s natural and quite common when the story is from real life, but this one was fiction. My audible comment when I finished was, “Now there’s a writer who know how to make characters live!”

Now that is the kind of book I long to write. Whether I can or not remains to be seen. I won’t be able to do as good a job as this author did because I will never have the years of experience she’s had, but I’m going to do the best I can, and I guess that is what counts.

My husband enjoys mystery and suspense sagas by this same Christian author, but the story I read was an emotional family drama. Fred has been raving about how well she portrays character emotions, and now I know what he means. I may need to read it again as I put the finishing touches on Tangled Strands.

The book, by the way, was Never Again Good-bye by Terri Blackstock.

Taking the Harder Route

2009-09-07T19:09:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting time working on my novel over this long weekend. I am now well beyond the beginning where I had to find new ways to cover what I had lost when I moved the beginning of the story forward by six months.

Now a lot of what I am doing is getting rid of speaker labels that are built with adverbs, such as “she said sadly” and replacing them with some form of action that shows how she feels instead of simply telling the reader she is sad (e.g., “she sniffed and wiped her eyes). Much of the dialog in those chapters was already quite satisfactory; I just have to polish up the “speaker attributions.”

Another thing I’ve been working on is getting more “deep point of view” (POV) into the story. Here again it is usually a matter of showing rather than telling. Instead of saying “she wondered if he would come again,” you simply write, “Would he come again?” Deep POV takes the reader more inside the mind and heart of the character, which is good. It took me a some time to catch on to how deep POV worked, but I’m getting the hang of it, and it can be fun to do.

So I was tootling along making progress when I came upon a block of chapters that stopped me in my tracks. Four of the nine of them need to be almost completely rewritten. I had known a couple of those chapters were coming because I remembered them well, but I hadn’t known how many.

Why do they need so much rewriting? Once again it is the issue of showing vs. telling. Those chapters were written in the old style of a narrator telling the story to the reader rather than showing the story happening. In some ways, it is a lazy way to write. It is harder to show things happening and to bring your reader into the heart of your characters as they are living out a scene than it is to simply tell the reader what happened.

Most of these chapters were summaries of action-type things—friends helping someone move, cleaning up the house, then planning a work marathon over Labor Day weekend (really—I didn’t make it up for this weekend; it was written many years ago like the rest of it). Most of those will not be difficult to turn into “showing” accounts, except that I don’t want to blow them out of proportion to how important they are to the story.

One of them, however, is not action based. It was life reflections of an important but minor character who is not and should not be a “point of view” person. (A point of view person is someone in the story through whose eyes you let the reader experience the story—I’ve talked about that before.) I already have a max of POV characters, so I couldn’t make him into one even if his part had been actions rather than reflections. Because it is reflection, that one has been a real challenge to my creative thinking ability, but I now have a plan sketched out that I believe will help me win eventually. How?

You’ll have to read Tangled Strands someday and find out .

A Writer's Platform

2009-09-04T20:10:00.000-07:00

I was referred to two articles today on writing and getting published. It’s nice they come at the beginning of a long weekend when I expect to be able to focus on my writing while my husband revels in the return of football. Of course, I may join him for a few interludes since I enjoy football too.

Though both articles have good advice, they have different focuses. One is on keeping up one’s confidence as a writer, while the other is about the importance of having a “platform.” A platform? In publishing terms and as I understand it, a platform relates to how many people you know and therefore how many might be interested in buying a book you get it published. An extensive platform lowers the risk to a publisher of putting out a product no one buys because they never heard of the author.

Platform is one area in which I can feel at least a measure of confidence. I have more relationships than I can keep up with, and I appreciate them all. I’ve enjoyed a rich and varied life on three continents. I am blessed with multiple circles of friends from different eras of my life, including:

• My growing up in Africa—and now through Facebook a whole new generation of those who grew up there after I was gone.

• The boarding school and college I attended

• Forty years with our mission large organization, including dozens of former students and even more coworkers

• Those who have been interested in our work over those forty years, many who have invested financially at one time or another, including those in fifteen states on our current statement of gifts received today

• Folks in seven churches in five states who have invested in varying degrees in our ministry during those years.

I didn’t mention family, but of course they count big time, and some of them are my greatest pillars of support. I don’t have a large family, but they all have friends, too. As I said, I am blessed.

Now if I can just keep those relationships going until I find a publisher . . . They don’t all know about my writing dreams, but a good many do. In fact, recently when I felt the need for concentrated prayer for my efforts, I got positive responses from eleven wonderful friends in nine states.

That must count something for the beginning of a platform.

Giving God Permission - Part Two

2009-08-24T18:52:00.000-07:00

I should have already understood about giving God permission because He had taught me that same lesson seven years earlier when terrorists killed one of our coworkers when we were in South America. That experience hit close to home for our family because my husband Fred was one of the twelve adults present when they took our friend captive. Fred spent an hour and a half face down in his pajamas on the cold floor with his hands tied to his feet behind his back.

Seven weeks later, they executed our coworker and swore they were coming for the rest of us—-and our house at the mission center was way out on the edge of things. I’ve never forgotten the night when I was afraid to take off my clothes and go to bed because I was sure someone was going to come pounding on that front door in the middle of the night.

Now I had known most of my life that nothing could touch me unless it was within God’s will. However, that head knowledge alone did not give me peace in the midst of that situation. That head knowledge had to get down into my heart so that I was able to say, “Okay, God, if it is your will for harm to come to me at the hand of those terrorists, then that’s okay with me.” When I could say that…and thus give God permission…I was able to sleep in peace.

Somehow I didn’t remember that lesson until after Daddy died. Since then, God has brought me other opportunities to test whether I trusted Him enough to “give Him permission.” Not surprisingly, on some occasions I’ve remembered early on and been able to do that, yet in others it has taken the a long time (in one case, years) to make peace with something He sent my way. I have an idea that is simply our human condition. We learn, and we forget. We trust God, and yet we worry again.

I’ve recently started thinking about this “giving God permission” in relation to my Tangled Strands story. One of these days I should write about the things God has done that make me believe I have His blessing to be working on it. I can do that because I'm talking about hind site—what I have seen Him do. But to claim assurance about what He is going to do in the future strikes me as presumption, and I can’t pretend to know what God’s plans are.

All I know is that, for today, I have reason to believe He wants me working on it. I even believe it is a story He could use to accomplish something spiritual in someone’s life if it gets published. At the same time, I have to keep my heart open to giving Him permission to do whatever He plans as far as its getting published.

Giving God Permission, Part One

2009-08-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

My father was dying.

And I was not ready to lose him.

When we brought him to our home here in Dallas for what turned out to be the last fifteen days of his life, I did a little memory inventory. I found only two times—-one in my childhood and one in adulthood—-when my daddy and I were really upset with each other. It is always hard to part with a loved one, and I assure you it is especially hard to give up a relationship like that.

My being upset with God did not mean I was crying my eyes out during those fifteen days. In fact, I didn’t even cry when Daddy died, and I didn’t cry at the funeral. It was three weeks later before I finally broke down—-and then I cried so hard and so long that it took the chiropractor months to get my neck back the way it should be. And it was nine loooong months before I was able to say to God, “It’s okay that you took Daddy away.”

Obviously, God did not need my permission to take my father, and He clearly did not wait for any permission from me. So what’s the big deal about giving God permission? The big deal is what happened in my heart when I finally granted that permission. That was when healing of my pain could finally begin.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The above is the beginning of an oral devotional talk I have given in connection with my work of training missionaries. So what is it doing here? Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the first time God taught me this lesson about permission, and then I’ll tell you how it relates to my Tangled Strands novel.

Out of the Groove

2009-08-16T14:06:00.000-07:00

Blogging. It was something I hesitated to get involved in for a long time. My biggest concern was that I wouldn’t keep up with it. I knew how easy that would be. But when one of my writers’ groups offered an online class in how to get started, I took a chance. And I surprised myself. I went the first year doing pretty well, and even a while after that.

But this summer the inevitable happened. I got out of the groove, and now I’m having trouble getting back in. It’s not that I never think of anything to say; I just never feel like saying it. For someone who considers herself a writer, that’s very bad.

So what shall I talk about? Getting my desk back in relative order again? A great hike with my grandsons? Getting back to going to the Y? Some new recipes I’ve tried?

I could talk about any of those, but my original idea for this blog was to talk about my novel. Not the novel I’m “writing,” but the one I am rewriting. Part of the problem is that I’m taking so long doing that, I’m sure anyone who is reading the blog is tired of hearing about it. Sometimes I struggle with just how much I want to put out there for everyone to read about.

The truth is, I don’t have very many reading it, and that is both a comfort and a frustration. I know many families members do, and I appreciate that. I know a few friends do, and that’s rewarding. I realize that so far most of what I’ve written about probably isn’t of interest to anyone who doesn’t have a personal interest in me or the progress on the book. In some ways, that is a relief.

Enough philosophizing. Something has to change, and it’s going to have to be me. Yet right now I’m putting on a big push to make progress with this revision, so that doesn’t encourage me to take time out to write a blog. And so around the circle I go.

I like that last one I wrote about the calendars and time lines. I’ve kept up with that religiously, and it has been a wonderful tool. I think I finally have a date for that baby to be born. As a matter of fact, I have another similar tool that is helping me, despite the fact that it is time consuming. I could write about it—nope! I did a search and found out I already did that. But I’m still keeping up with it, and that it a good thing.

Maybe if I give myself a good shaking, I’ll get those wheels turning again. Hmmm.

Of Calendars and Time Lines

2009-07-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

When I wrote my Tangled Strands story all those years ago, I had a rough timeline in my head. Sharon’s birthday was in August, she came back to Willow Valley in February, and her baby was born in late spring. Other events wove themselves in between those in a flexible way. Since I got into this serious revision of the novel, I’ve known I’d have to go back to work things out more specifically with a calendar—the 1958 calendar, to be precise. Doing that during the last few days has turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

My first step was to find a 1958 calendar. Of course the Internet could give it to me, but it didn’t prove as easy as I anticipated. I could find calendars for that year, but I needed a blank calendar so I could write in all my events. I eventually settled for printing out nine copies (that’s how long the story lasts)of a calendar template and filling in the numbers for the days. I wrote the names of the months in block capital letters in pink marker across the top. I didn’t bother with Sunday, Monday, and the like because those are always in the same place on a calendar. I did, following the 1958 calendar, handwrite the dates in each one, and that didn’t take too long.

Of course I worked in pencil, but even that isn’t perfect because I don’t have a fresh or decent eraser in the house that won’t leave dark smudges if I erase. I was at the story today but didn't think to get one. The 1958 calendar told me Easter came on April 6—important because I have an event that relates to Easter. Larry has Easter vacation, and the plot events at the close of that are some of the biggest in the story. As it turned out, it gave me a little trouble, but most of all were the surprises over how things came up that just didn’t let themselves be nailed down without some kind of problem. Most of them were related to Sunday.

For example, I had pictured the cookie-baking effort towards peacemaking happening the day after the big blow-up with the slap. But the blow up definitely happened Saturday, and the day after would be Sunday. Not that one couldn’t make cookies on a Sunday (though I know some who wouldn’t), but Sharon’s first Sunday had other things that needed to happen, such as her declining to go to church with Agnes. So the cookie-making idea had to be pushed to Monday. Sharon’s doctors appointments were another thing that needed to be anchored down on logical dates that spring.

Sharon’s grandmother told her how many weeks it would be until her track-driving father would be back in town. So when would that happen? The date of the meeting in Alec Thorne’s law office controlled the date Sharon started looking for a job, so that all had to be coordinated. I’ve finished the effort now, up through where I’ve done the revisions, but not beyond. I have yet to figure out and nail down the rest of the dates as I go along (except for Mother's Day, which is a given),and I look forward to finally having a birth date for Sharon’s baby.

Ooh! I just thought of another issue to check. Between the blizzard at the time of Sharon’s return to the day she reflects by the river, is there enough time for the snow to melt? I just checked and—whew! there is.

Applying GMC to Life

2009-06-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

Today we had our second writers’ meeting of the month, the one we call our “Think Tank.” The idea of it is to provide a practical venue for whatever we need—perhaps green lighting together, seeking input or critique from each other, or in some way applying what we’ve been learning. Following our meeting on Goals, Motivation, and Conflict (GMC) from our meeting two weeks ago, some of us have been working to apply it to our stories, as I wrote about doing last week.

To accomplish that, sometimes I’ve had to go to the very core—What does the Point of View character want in this scene? (goal) Why does she want it? (motivation) What is keeping her from getting it? (conflict). Those are the building blocks of any story that keeps the reader turning pages.

Today at Think Tank we had a chance to apply the concept to ourselves personally. First we went around the circle and expressed one of our goals for this year, whether for our writing or some other aspect of life. One, for example, is working to lose weight, one wants to connect with an agent, while I want to get beyond this revision and rewriting.

Then one at a time we had to verbalize our motivation, our why? Those were interesting, but most interesting was when we had to verbalize our conflicts—what is keeping us from our goal? An interesting collection turned up, with a fair amount of overlap. Most of us have work responsibilities, one has young children. We deal with interruptions of every kind, every day. Most of us simply have more things that we need or want to do than we have hours in our days, and everyone can identify with that. I know my ancestors worked harder physically than I ever will, but I’m also sure none of them were pulled in so many directions almost constantly.

We learned a good bit about ourselves today, some more than others. I invite you to take a few minutes to do the same, either alone or with a spouse or someone else close to you. Choose a goal, something you really want. Verbalize why you want it, and then take a good look at the conflicts which fight against your obtaining it. You may pick up some practical perspectives on changes you might be able to make to help you better reach your goal.

Styles vs. Rules

2009-06-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I wrote a message to a fellow writer who is feeling a bit overwhelmed with all he is learning about writing Christian fiction in today’s world. I have his permission to post here what I wrote him.

A lot of what you are going through is familiar territory to me. I came to our writing group 2 1/2 yrs ago with a WIP [work in progress] I'd written years ago, and I hate to admit that I've been working every since to "bring it into today's writing styles." Among the many things I've learned and tried to put into practice are the likes of point of view (POV), sprinkling back story instead of dumping it, showing instead of telling, weeding out to be verbs and -ly words.

To keep my sanity in all this, I've come to distinguish between "rules" and "style." Subject-verb agreement is a rule, so is using the right tense of a verb. How often you say "he said-she said" or whether you say "arid" instead of "very dry" is a matter of style. Even the now-notorious "head-hopping" is a matter of current style; it didn't used to be an issue, even twenty years ago.

The point is that if we want to sell in today's market, we have to learn to write mostly in today's style -- i.e., what editors are publishing these days. One of the reasons for that is that our world has changed, people have changed, our culture has changed. Today's TV-saturated brains are used to quick changes and seeing everything--not to having it described as in Kaye's favorite example of the audience Dickens wrote for.

All this is immensely complicated by the fact that we are supposed to do that without abandoning, or losing, our own “voice,” which is pretty close to the same as our own style. Impossible? An oxymoron? Sometimes it feels that way, but it must not be since so many seem to be succeeding these days.

Sixteen months ago I started a blog in which I've talked about some of my struggles and challenges. It occurred to me that you might find some of them helpful. I did a quite stab in the dark and found one that says some of what I've tried to say here but which might also serve as a starting point to browse some of the others. The blog is at http://faithinwalkingshoes.blogspot.com/, and that particular one at http://faithinwalkingshoes.blogspot.com/2008/11/improve-or-destroy.html. For whatever it's worth....

Above all, hang in there! We're glad you're a part of our group, and if we can help you as others have helped us--well, that's pretty much what a writing group is about, no?

I’ve Been Doing It!

2009-06-20T19:13:00.000-07:00

(Note: You won’t understand this blog if you haven’t read the one before it.)

I made a lovely discovery today.

After spending considerable time working on “goal-motivation-conflict” issues with my main characters, I went back to the “scenes-analysis” table that I’ve been keeping for two or three years. I had modified it periodically, and last week I had already modified it by setting it up with columns for GMC. Then I set about, one scene at a time, from the perspective of the point-of-view character, to try and verbalize the GMC for that character in that scene.

Perhaps it’s still all Greek to you, but it has begun to make sense to me. After four or five scenes, it dawned on me—it looks as if I’ve been writing this way already! I didn’t have to struggle to identify a goal, motivation and conflict going on in each scene.

That means I’ve been doing something right! To say that was a good feeling is an understatement. At this point, I have done the analysis for two of the three pages of scenes that are already on the chart. I may go ahead and do the third sheet (it has some cool scenes on it), or I may get back to the revision process and just report on each scene’s GMC as I finish with the scene.

I’m still far from an expert on this, and I sometimes still confuse the goal with the motivation. In the online class I am taking on the topic, distinction is made between external GMC and internal GMC, but in the work I did today I didn’t make that distinction. Maybe next week I need to ask the facilitator about that.

Through this GMC business, I am really getting into my main character and understanding better what makes her tick. This is good because I didn’t know all that as I wrote her story initially. (I didn’t even recognize and acknowledge her as my mail character until I took a class from Angela Hunt at the first writing conference I attended.) So good things are happening.

One of those good things is that the more I get into this, the more I see the rich possibilities in stories beyond this first one.

Back Story -- My Journey Continued

2009-06-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

When I first sat down to write what has turned out to be my lifelong wip*, I wrote the opening scene, and then I charged ahead and wrote pages and pages of back story. Years later, I learned that, though back story is necessary—you dump it all at the beginning like that! Before I learned that, I worried a lot about that back story – i.e., would it keep people reading until they got to the “real” story, but I still assumed all the back story was necessary straight out the gate. How else could the reader understand what was happening in the “present” of the story? For a while I tried breaking up the back story, but the story still wallowed in reflections and emotions but no action. It has taken me years to adjust my thinking to using back story only as a teaser to create suspense that keeps the reader turning pages.

Last fall I decided I needed to jettison the first six months of my story and begin it, not when Sharon ran off with Tony, but when she came back widowed and pregnant. Those who encouraged me to do that said, “Oh don’t worry about what you cut—you can just weave it in as back story!” Oh, great. More back story was something I did not need.

But I went ahead and tackled the challenge. I made only brief references to what had happened six months before, and like a good girl, I left out more chunks of the original back story. Then I submitted it to the Genesis writer’ contest. In the feedback I got, one theme was repeated about things the judges didn’t understand—why does Agnes feel so compassionate towards Sharon? Why does Sharon feel this way when she’s been gone only six months? Why does she feel thus and thus about Larry? Why? Why? Why?

You know why? If they only had some of the critical elements of back story that I had to cut, they would have understood all those things. I was ready to throw up my hands. Then came the June online course of the month on Goals, Motivation, and Conflict. You know what I learned? Despite the many ways I’ve heard back story maligned since becoming involved with writers’ groups, it is not only necessary, but it has an important purpose. Isn’t that exactly what I’ve always thought?

It is, in fact, an integral part of “goals, motivation, and conflict.” The motivation for all the goals and sometimes the conflict comes from the back story! So I wasn’t that far off. But I’m also learning that using it is extremely tricky because, according to the writing styles of this day, you have to find ways to weave that back story in so subtly that the reader almost doesn’t notice it as back story. It needs to be done seamlessly enough that the reader doesn’t feel jerked out of the forward motion of the story for a trip backwards.

But I thought I had done a lot of that! I know I tried to do that. It’s clear I’m going to have to try some more. How? Besides trying to stand “outside” the story and figure out the GMC on every character and scene, I’m going to have to do an analyze of just the back story—laying out what I have in there now, figuring out what more is still needed, and finding more ways to weave it in “seamlessly.”

Can I do this? I have to have faith I can. And I have to have faith that my story is worth it. My one comfort in this discovery is that my characters have lots of powerful back story.
*Work In Progress

Seasons of Drought

2009-06-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

Seasons of drought happen in our lives in many ways. They happen with the weather, they can happen in our spiritual lives, they can happen in our progress and creativity. How should we respond? Would it help to panic? Can we avoid despair? Should we rustle around trying to stir up rain?

We could do any of those, but most of the time strategies like that don’t do much but drain our energies. They do this not only physically but mentally and emotionally. We can end up rustling around, stirring up mental or emotional dust, and still not find any true relief.

Sometimes a good strategy is to let it rest for a while. Don’t try to force anything (with the weather, you definitely can’t). Don’t get so worked up that you can’t think objectively or creatively. Sometimes with a dilemma, a disappointment, a misstep we’ve made, we need to simply let it rest and unwind, let it germinate and simmer, let your mind or your heart explore or come to peace.

In any of these things, it is always good to pray and wait on God. The Scriptures are clear that God wants us to wait on Him, to be patience, to trust Him to work out His plan. He has that plan for us all the way to the end of our days, whether they be few or many, and He knows how the present is going to evolve into the future.
Sometimes we just need to wait out a draught.

Life Without a Computer

2009-05-02T07:24:00.000-07:00

I know a whole generation of young people, including all my grandchildren, who can’t imagine life without a computer. For something that has so completely revolutionized our lives, the computer hasn’t been around that long. In fact, in my early adult life I worked for two publishing companies who were still setting type by hand, one letter at a time. Even though I lived seventy percent of my life before computers came on the scene, as a writer in today’s world, I have trouble imagining life without them.

I think the most amazing difference between writing on a typewriter and on a computer is the ability to make changes without having to retype the text you’re not changing. When we wrote terms papers in those olden days, if you found a mistake on a page, you had to retype the whole page—which ran you the risk of making some other mistake in the process.

If you decided you wanted to add a sentence, you would not only have to retype that page but an indefinite number of pages beyond because all the text would have to move forward to make room for the new sentence. The testimony of one of our organization’s early Bible translators was that, in the process of translating the Scriptures into one of the minority languages in Mexico, she typed the entire New Testament twenty-seven times. How many of us have even read if twenty-seven times?

I wrote the first five pages of my Tangled Strands novel on a typewriter in the summer of 1975. I wrote the rest of it in the late 1980s, and by that time I had a computer. I thought what that WordStar program could do was pretty terrific, but it was amateur compared to what I can do now.

The truth is, I have enormous respect for all those people who wrote books before the advent of the word processor. I can’t help thinking of Grace Livingston Hill, who turned out dozens of books in the ‘40s and perhaps earlier—all on a typewriter. I have a personal theory that it is harder to get published these days simply because computers make it so easy to write a book that many times more people are doing it. And there is no way I would be reworking my story the way I am if I had to retype a whole page for every little polish or improvement I make.

However, typewriters had something wonderful going for them. They were not subject to viruses and “crashes.” I’m thinking about all these things this week because the hard drive of my main computer left home by UPS three days ago so that experts in another state can try and solve its problems. Thankfully, I have a laptop, but it isn’t the same because I don’t have access to all my files and resources.

So my hat is off to those stalwarts who wanted to put words on paper and get published enough to manage it on a typewriter.

Changes in Writing Styles

2009-04-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

I’ve spoken a number of times in this blog about the changes that have taken place in Christian fiction in the last fifteen or twenty years. By listening and studying, paying attention and practicing what I’ve been learning, I am gaining steadily in my skills of recognizing and using these new styles. Another thing I’ve done to build my skills is to read primarily the kind of fiction I want to write and authors I know writing in the new style.

You see, not everyone has made changes. A few well established writers have such a following and have sold so many books that they haven’t needed to worry making changes. Why should they if people are reading their books as much as ever?

This brings up a question about whether these changes are necessary, even justified. Have they really made the reading better? Few deny that Christian fiction two or three decades ago was shallow and not highly thought of by people who knew quality writing. Those who advocate these style changes are convinced they strongly increase the quality of Christian fiction.

Again, what kind of changes are we talking about? We’re talking about helping one’s readers to experience the actions and emotions of a story rather than simply telling about them using strong nouns and verbs rather than “propping them up” with adjectives and adverbs, and giving readers credit for “getting it” the first time, not talking down to them through an omniscient narrator who explains things.

Though as I said I’ve been reading almost exclusively novels written by authors writing the newer styles, I broke my pattern this last week. I picked up a book by an ultra-successful author who has been writing for many years, who has sold dozens of books in multiple series (stories that follow the same characters, often generation after generation). I wanted to see what his writing style has been in more recent times.

I found the book written the way I used to write.

The first thing to be obvious was that he didn’t follow the current mandate not to jump from one character’s head to another’s within the same scene. That style change, called point of view, or POV, was one I resisted for a time. It took practice to master it (and maybe my Genesis contest entry will show that I still slip up). (I’ve learned it did indeed evolve during the past decade and didn’t start out as firmly entrenched as it now is.)

Questions have been raised about this POV business, such as whether readers who aren’t writers really notice, let alone care. I can’t answer that, but I know that now that I’ve become aware of the difference, I didn’t like going back to the old ways as I read this book. Perhaps the author has made changes in his writing more recently, but in 2003 he was still “head hopping” all over the place. It bothered me a lot, and I didn’t like having that omniscient narrator popping in all the time to tell me how things were instead of setting me up to discover them for myself.

So this weekend I’m back to continuing work on my novel (written so long ago) where I’m trying to show instead tell and take readers deeper into the hearts of my characters through the illusive thing called “deep POV.” Only time will tell whether it will be worth the effort.

Summaries

2009-04-16T17:23:00.000-07:00

I’ve been working the last several days on chapter summaries of my novel. This is for an agent who invited me to submit my work. The end result will run to four pages, each with two columns.

Chapter summaries are interesting creatures. You have to pull out the essence of the chapter and express it is 1-3 sentences. My longest two or three are fifty words long. Most are in the thirties and forties, with a handful under twenty. The agent says he wants to see the flow of the story. That sounds like a worthwhile reason.

Summarizing is a challenging mental exercise. A similar effort is called synthesizing. My Merriam-Webster Dictionary says a summary tells the main points briefly, while a synthesis is a combination of parts into a whole. I’m sure some of my education cohorts could explain the difference between the two, but that doesn’t concern me right now. “Telling the main points briefly” sounds like exactly what I’ve been trying to do.

Once I finish, I’m going to study the whole to see if I’ve missed expressing any elements essential to the story. I’ve already become aware of one crucial plot ingredient that isn’t strong enough. Going back and figuring out where and how to strengthen it will be a good setup for the rewriting I have yet to finish. Or perhaps I will decide I have it expressed well enough in the text and just need to get that clear expression into the summary.

I remember sitting with family members working to write a summary of each of my parents’ lives for their funeral programs. Each of them lived fewer than eighty years. Today I read the funeral program of a friend who lived ninety amazing and eventful years—again, a summary, only this one even more condensed.

I wonder what kind of summary someone will write about my life when I’m gone. All I know today is that I hope to add a lot more to the whole before that happens. Then let someone else figure out how to cover the main points briefly or weave the parts into a whole.

Storms

2009-03-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

Did you ever have to shepherd your children into “bed” in jungle hammocks, on the darkest of nights, in the midst of pouring rain, deep in a tropical jungle? I did. Honest.

The TV weather people this evening tell us we’re going to have storms by morning. What is it about storms that makes us gravitate towards shelter? Why are we that afraid of getting wet? That night during our jungle training in southern Mexico doesn’t seem like thirty-five years ago, nor does the next day when we walked nine hours in rain to get back to camp. Having survived those experiences, do I now relish getting caught in the rain? Do I hold my head high so the rain can fall on my face? Sorry, not I. I still duck and run.

Sometimes we do enjoy storms, but it is usually if we can do it tucked into a cozy place, snuggled under a blanket with a favorite person, or watching safely behind solid glass. We have fun songs about singing in rain and raindrops falling on our heads. A favorite memory is watching my grandchildren delighting in a rainy afternoon in their little boots and colorful raincoats. But generally, it seems to me, those are exceptions.

And then there are the storms of life. In addition to storms that make us wet, there are those that bring us pain, that challenge our fortitude and endurance, or occasionally bring us to our knees in defeat. Then again, if we are blessed, we may come through storms that bring out courage we never knew we had.

Some of the most challenging storms we humans ever face are those that affect our children. In recent days we’ve been watching some precious family members dealing with that kind. As they’ve walked their beautiful little girl through the early traumas of cancer, they’ve shown us what it means when faith has an anchor. This journey for them is just beginning, but they already have an army of warriors behind them, praying for them and watching for the grace, comfort, and strength they will need from their God.

Those incredible jungle hammocks provided us shelter that night, but more important, God in His infinite mercy never sends us storms without being our divine Shelter.

Plunges and Risks

2009-03-10T19:45:00.000-07:00

Forgetfulness is not the reason I haven’t written in this blog for three weeks. With my husband recovering from surgery and sixteen days in the hospital, life has not been much under my control. I have been very aware of needing to write here. I’ve mulled over idea after idea, but none seemed worth the time it would take me to write or for anyone else to read.

Something big happened during those three weeks—-in fact, less than a week ago. I rustled up the courage to hit the Send button and submit the synopsis and sample chapters to the two publishers from whom I had invitations. Before doing that, I went through the usual writers’ trauma of worrying that the “baby” wasn’t perfect enough and, in the process, finding all kinds of imperfections. Many of them were legitimate, and one was quite serious. But eventually I took the plunge.

One might expect me now to be wound tight with anxiety over the responses I will get. Submitting is always a risk, but surprisingly, I am not up tight. I’m not totally sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve been through this before, and yes, at this stage in life I’ve lived through many disappointments. I have learned that, being me, the best thing I can do to prevent going to pieces when hit with a big one is simply to expect it. This is the approach I took when I faced a cancer diagnosis nine years ago, and it helped.

What works best for me goes something like this: “If it’s bad news, I need to have prepared myself for it. If it is good news, I won’t have any trouble knowing how to respond.” So I’m not holding my breath or planning my book signings (that doesn’t mean I never daydream about them).

Two weeks ago I felt overwhelmed with all that was on my plate in addition to doing what I could to help my husband recover. I had a missionary newsletter to write and print, not to mention several dozen that needed notes plus the stuffing and stamping he usually does (the letters went in the mail today). I needed to get the submissions off, and I wanted to get on with the revision of Tangled Strands. I haven’t made as much progress on that as I would have liked and as I need to in order to be done with it by the end of the month. But I have gotten past that beginning and had a chance to get an overview of what lies ahead. I’m really eager to get on with it.

Something else happened at the end of these three weeks. Two days ago marked the first anniversary of the day I launched this site. The fact that this is the first time I have gone this long without writing is gratifying. I’m glad I took that plunge and the risk because writing here has turned out to be both rewarding and satisfying.

God’s Foot Soldiers

2009-02-15T08:11:00.000-08:00

When I wrote the blog below on February 4, I had no inkling that eleven days later I would still be sitting here in the hospital watching my husband try to recover from that emergency surgery. The surgery, in fact, happened two weeks ago today. Those two weeks have included times of walking in a fog, moments of wondering if I would ever get my life back, and days of waiting for a digestive system to give up its unexpected vacation and get back to work. They have included horrendous hiccups every waking moment, confusion both comical and disturbing, and now a shrill cough that triggers gagging and nausea. We have had challenges to our patience and our faith.

Through it all, God has been here.

His presence has been experienced most clearly through the love and concern of His people expressed in willingness to help in any way needed. A friend gassed the car for me, a couple picked up and delivered a prescription, and another brought me lunch from the cafeteria. A neighbor drove me to and from the hospital a couple of times, including the morning after I got only ten minutes’ sleep. Several have visited or called faithfully to inquire how things were going, always asking what they could do to help.

Local family members took care of our pets, saw that I had something to eat, and took a turn to stay as often as they could. Distant family members have called, advised, sent flowers and stuffed animals, and shed a tear or two because they couldn’t be here. A daughter dropped her responsibilities to come and help when it became clear the whole thing was going to last longer than expected. The other daughter is standing by to come next week if needed.

Thanks to e-mail, I’ve been able to keep friends and family informed almost daily of what is happening, and prayer partners in a dozen states have held us up in prayer. They’ve confirmed it by cards, notes, e-mails—even an occasional phone call. Nurses and hospital staff have been kind and helpful.

So God not only had Advanced Operations to prepare the way, He has had foot soldiers along the way to hold up our hands and lift our burden when they could. All have helped our “faith in walking shoes” to keep pressing forward, one step after another. We’re confident God has a Rear Guard that will see us through to the end.

The latest word is that that may happen tomorrow.

God’s Advance Operations

2009-02-04T13:56:00.000-08:00

This isn’t where I expected to be writing my next blog—sitting in a seventh-floor hospital room watching my husband of fifty years recover from emergency major surgery three days ago. But none of this took God by surprise, and that is so good to know.

The beauty of faith is that in my sixty-five years of walking with God, I’ve seen Him go before in many amazing ways. In the military I think it is called Advanced Operations, or Advanced Ops (Ad-Ops? Who knows in these days of “hurry and say it as briefly as possible”?) In multiple aspects of life, it helps immensely to have someone scout out and prepare things in advance. Sitting here, I’ve looked back, and it hasn’t taken much rummaging in the memory trunks to make a list grow.

Perhaps the biggest example of this happened with my becoming a teacher. I didn’t grow up with any plans to be a teacher, and I went through college that with attitude. I realize now that I probably had no desire to teach because I had never been much around children. Most of my growing up was on an isolated mission post in central Africa during World War II. My brother and sister were the only other children of my culture around. My theology tells me that God understood that, and He didn’t push me. It wasn’t until ten years out of college, with the beginnings of a family and early experiences working with children in church that I was surprised to discover I liked working with children. I started to work on a teaching credential, and exactly three years later, when I was finishing up, God started the wheels rolling for our going to South America where I would be a school teacher. I’m still stand amazed.

Eleven years later the speaker for our annual conference on the mission field was a trained counselor, and he chose “Dealing with Stress” as his topic. Well, that was a blessing and all very interesting, but I remember wondering why God had led him to that focus because, frankly, our life was fairly nice and peaceful at that mission outpost. Yet within a week after the speaker left, one of our coworkers was kidnapped and seven weeks later executed. Clearly God had known something we didn’t know, and His Advance Operations had laid some groundwork ahead of the experience.
One of our daughters had a yen to be a nurse, but she wasn’t sure she was cut out for it. After she helped care for her dear grandfather during the last summer of his life, both at a hospital and in our home his last fifteen days, she was hooked and wanted to get the training. At that very time, her company phased out her job, and that left them required to pay for her training for another line of work. God’s Advanced Ops had perfectly set up that timing.

So it hasn’t been surprising that He was still performing special tasks for His children this week, and what a comfort it has been. For starters, our daughter-in-law’s parents were in town, which has made it possible for her and (when he was in town) our son to spend more time at the hospital with us/me. It has been more than a blessing because we have minimal drivers in this extended family, and an extra one wasn’t just convenient but next to necessary. Our dear neighbors have been in a “light” time in their work, so they’ve been avail to help in a number of ways. The fact that my car was already full of gas shows that the Divine Advanced Ops doesn’t deal in just the big things.

At the moment, my Tangled Strands story focuses on the other side of this issue—on God coming in to clean up what has been left behind in a mess. How comforting that our amazing God can handle both with equal divine perfection.

Journey, Concluded

2009-01-24T18:25:00.000-08:00

I’m sorry life got in the way the last two days and I didn’t get to post more installments of “Journey.” I will post the rest of it now.

The sections about the body and the Bible came to me fairly easily when I first worked on the piece. The one that follows about the Companion didn’t come together for me until much later. It took considerably more effort—not so much because of the truths in it but from trying to make it follow the pattern of the previous two.

The last section, I think, is my favorite. None of us know when it will be our time to slip beyond that window, and sometimes thinking about it can bring unease. I hope when my time comes for that, I will have lived so that I can face it peacefully and with assurance and that those I leave behind will be able to accept it the same way. So without further ado, here is the rest of my piece about “Journey.”

My companion for the Journey is a Comforter sweet, the Spirit of Truth, the Breath of God.
Though spirit, He is a person.
Though invisible, He is ever with me.
Though quenchable, He cannot be extinguished.

This Holy Companion for my journey both …
guides me and redirects me, comforts me and convicts me,
reassures me and prays for me in my weaknesses.

Sometimes He is grieved by my failures, sometimes heartened by my progress.
Sometimes He sustains me in the depths, sometimes challenges me to new heights.

Through every twist and turn of my journey,
over every mountain top, through every valley,
my Companion has been at my side,
my Map has been steady and true,
and my vehicle has stood by me.
Someday, at a moment chosen before the foundation of the world,
my vehicle of clay will reach the end of its tether.
Then the eagle will fold its wings, the tortoise draw into its shell.
I will step beyond the bridge and slip beyond my window in time—into forever.
© 1996 Esther Moneysmith Gross

Journey 2

2009-01-21T18:41:00.000-08:00

As an introduction to the next installment of my “Journey” piece, I could become a theologian and expound on the history, authenticity, and utter trustworthiness of God’s Word, but this is neither the time nor the place. I will simply say that this journey of my life wouldn’t be complete without the Bible. Our world today is trying to diminish its importance and its influence in our lives, but we’ve read the end of the book. We know that those efforts will not, in the end, succeed.

Nevertheless and inevitably, my theology comes through, and that’s just fine. I should go through and make a list of the references involved in case anyone should ask me for them. Good project.

My map for this journey is a Body of Truth, a Holy Book, a Divine Blueprint.
Though heaven’s wisdom, it is earth’s compass.
Though history, it unveils eternity.
Though authored by many, its Author was one.

This Divine Blueprint for my journey both …
cheers me and chides me, strengthens me and humbles me, comforts me and challenges me.

Sometimes it is a sword piercing my soul; sometimes a balm dispersing my tears.
Sometimes it is living water quenching my thirst; sometimes food nourishing my soul.
© Copyright 1996 Esther Moneysmith Gross

Journey

2009-01-20T18:30:00.000-08:00

I am not a poet, though I have written a handful of poems over the years—one about seagulls, one about determination, and other miscellaneous. The events of this past weekend stirred up the memory of a free-verse time thing I wrote in 1996.

My parents were missionaries in Africa in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and my siblings and I spent our childhoods on that side of the pond. Our dad came of age at the beginning of the Great Depression, so he never had any formal or trade education beyond high school. But that didn’t stop him. If he had the vision for something, he found a way of making it happen, with a crew of African workers or without—whether it was build a large home from scratch (“scratch” meaning making the bricks from a termite anthill to cutting the logs from felled trees, to adding electricity and running water personally installed), or whether it was seeing that his wife got a piano in Central Africa, even if he had to rebuild the whole inside following its travel traumas.

Another thing Daddy did was to carry equipment to Africa to take movies, and that brings us back to the events of the past weekend. Those movies are old now, old 16mm stuff. Last fall the family pooled some resources to have them digitized. Since my sister and I are the only ones left who “were there” and could tell for sure what was being seen, we had to do something about that, so last Saturday, with the help of her son/my nephew, we recorded three hours of narration to the movies. Then we allowed him to “interview” us for another two hours about the lives of our parents and others who are already gone. Sunday we spent at least a couple more hours coming up with as many names as we could of people in the old family photo books from 1925-about 1934. (Pictures and all are on his computer now.)

Talk about journeys into the past! I suppose it is not surprising that such journeys spur mental forays into the future—however brief those have to be. What will they say about me when I am gone? When I was awake in the night again last night, I was reminded of the “Journey” piece that I wrote more than a decade ago, and I knew it was time to get it out again. It is long, so I’m going to present it in installments, with another one tomorrow and at least two days after that. I call it simply “Journey.”

My life is a journey through a window of time,
a window in eternity custom designed for me
by the Master of the Universe.

In omnipotence He directed the beginning.
His omniscience has seen the end.
With magnificent omnipresence
He is lovingly orchestrating every moment in between.

The strands of humanity that are me were woven together by Him—
uniquely, purposefully, to make me who He wanted me to be.

My vehicle for this journey is a body of flesh, an earthen vessel, a jar of clay.
Though mortal, it birthed my immortal soul.
Though earthbound, it gives me eyes to see heaven.
Though temporal, it is my bridge to eternity.

This physical vehicle of my journey is both …
tough and fragile, complex and simple, dependable and unpredictable.

Sometimes it soars like an eagle, sometimes plods like a tortoise.
Sometimes it is exhilarated with vision, sometimes weighed down with the struggle.
~~ ©Copyright 1996 Esther Moneysmith Gross

Show, Don't Tell

2009-01-14T06:24:00.000-08:00

The now popular phrase “show and tell” originated in kindergartens decades ago with youngsters bringing to class something they wanted to share with their classmates. The child stands in front of the group, holds up what he or she brought, and tells about it. The idea, at this most basic level, is to give beginning scholars experience in communication.

Today the advice in written communication, at least in fiction writing, is “show, don’t tell.” In today’s world, where so much communication—not just television but video games and now even cell phones—happens in visual images, wordy descriptions are out. The long passages of description common a century ago rarely cut it with today’s readers. They don’t have time for them, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have the patience. Today we want to see things, experience things, not just have someone tell us about them.

This is one of the areas in which I have had to learn new writing skills. Show, don’t tell. Instead of saying “It was really cold out outside,” I write that “when Agnes Baldwin stepped out of the Wells’ Corner Market, the biting wind took her breath away. She gave her scarf an extra toss around her face….” Instead of just telling that Agnes is shocked to learn that Tony is dead, I show her reaction with “Agnes’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh, Sharon—no! When? How—?”

Another way this applies is that we try not to simply tell who said something. “He said . . . she said” is passé. More effective is showing the speaker doing something. Sharon set her teacup down . . . Chris went to the sink to wash his hands . . . Chris leaned against the counter and studied her. Where the cup is or the fact that Chris washed his hands or leaned against the counter aren’t actions crucial to the plot, but they help the reader visualize the scene as well as hearing the spoken words that accompany the actions.

Of course there are still times we need “tell.” Otherwise, our books would so large we couldn’t lift them. The writer’s challenge is to discern which is which—which needs to be made vivid by showing and which contributes better to the advancement of the story by being presented in an overview.

I’m still learning. My friend Linda is better at this than I am, and she helps by pointing out when I’ve neglected to show. Then it falls to me as the author to determine if that phrase needs to be reworded, or if it is one where actions need to be summarized.

Show, don’t tell. Who would have guessed in when I taught second grade fresh out of college?

Dreams, a Broken Tooth, and Jalapeño Pumkin Pie

2009-01-12T17:35:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was our monthly local writers meeting at a Panera Bread. When I go to those meetings, my husband likes me to bring home two of Panera’s wonderful cinnamon crunch bagels for our Sunday morning breakfast. Yesterday, in addition, I picked up for myself two small, hard, sourdough rolls. I munched on one of them as I drove home and put the other in a plastic zip bag when I got here.

For some unknown reason, I woke up around 2:30 this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. After a while, I got up, turned on the computer, and wrote a first draft of the blog that I will post tomorrow. In time I went back to bed but didn’t stay long because I got to coughing again. At some point of my in and out, my husband stirred enough for me to request that, should I drop off to sleep a any point, please don’t wake me up. He mumbled something about its being Sunday, but we didn’t argue about it. Eventually I got to settle back in bed, and I drifted into a sound sleep with one of the most fascinating dreams I’ve ever had.

In it, I had been up during the night and finally managed to fall asleep again. When I awoke, a number of family members were around, including my mother-in-law (who died in 2005). I learned they had all been to church and back while I slept. I was incredulous. I never sleep in. I told about the only time I ever slept through Sunday school and church—when I arrived home after a 52-hour trip back from the other side of the world (absolutely true). I wanted to know when we were going to eat—I was starving because I hadn’t had any breakfast. Oh, but we were waiting for others to arrive, including Ron and Judy.

We were standing at the top of the hill watching for them to drive up when I slowly opened my eyes—and was shocked to discover I was in my bed and it was daylight. I could hear Fred shaving. He had made his coffee and eaten his bagel. We were to leave for church in twenty-five minutes. At times like this I am glad for the boarding school experience that taught me how to dress quickly (anyone late for breakfast had to sing a solo). Of course I hadn’t had any breakfast (sound familiar?). I started to get out my bagel, but it was too big to deal with in a hurry. Then I saw the hard roll. Perfect.

The trouble is, if you want hard rolls to stay hard and crisp overnight, you need to store then in a paper bag, not a plastic one, but I didn’t stop to remember that yesterday. My roll was definitely chewy, but I sliced it, buttered it, and chomped away as I got ready for church. I was aware that in my hurry I wasn’t chewing as thoroughly as I might. When we got in the car, I made an awful discovery. I had snapped the front off a molar on that roll—and apparently swallowed it! Thankfully, it has a nice solid filling that comprised the center of the tooth; that was still in place, as well as the back, and I feel no pain. Guess where I’ll be going this week and what I’ll be doing with some of that extra Christmas money? So it has been an interesting day. Maybe worth writing about in my blog?

I didn’t know it wasn’t over yet.

We baked a frozen pumpkin pie, and Fred decided to have a piece of last evening’s homemade pizza before his piece of pie. He was done before I started, and I took just pie because of the sore throat that’s been bothering me for days. The first two-thirds of my piece was delicious, but suddenly my mouth started burning. If you know me, you know I don’t do spicy, or picante, except in small doses. Now my whole mouth was on fire, including the sore throat. I tried drinking. It didn’t help. I wanted my money back on that pie! But how could a pumpkin pie get jalapeño in it?

My logical husband came up with a question. Did I reuse his small plate for my pie? Y-e-ess. Of course, that was it! He likes to add red pepper flakes to his pizza—and you can figure out the rest. Needless to say, I won’t forget this day for a while—and that doesn’t even count the fact that we are finishing our third whole day without Internet access!

Revisiting a New Year Sermon

2008-12-28T12:50:00.000-08:00

What emotions are you experiencing as you face the prospects of a new year? Anticipation? Uncertainty? Eagerness? Fear?

The year that is coming to an end has generated many emotions, challenges, and difficulties—everything from a devastating hurricane to an divisive election. What will the year ahead hold? For those of us trying to break into the field of publishing, we can’t help asking those inevitable questions about whether 2009 might be the magic year about which we dream. But we know it could more easily be a year of further disappointment, perhaps outright rejection.

A number of years ago I heard a sermon on the last Sunday before the new year, and I’ve never forgotten it. Its topic was the seven times Jesus is recorded as saying “fear not” in the book of Luke. Some of the occurrences are in familiar passages, and each carries a distinct message.

1:13: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard.”
1:30: “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God.”
2:10: “Do not be afraid, [shepherds]; I bring you good news of great joy…”
5:11: “Do not be afraid, [Simon Peter]; from now on you will catch men.”
8:50: “Do not be afraid, [Jarius], just believe, and she will be healed.”
12:7: “Do not be afraid, [friends]; you are worth more than many sparrows.”
12:32: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the Kingdom.”

As I review those verses and the comforting words of my Savior, it is inevitable that my mind wants to apply them to my adventures in trying to get Tangled Strands accepted by a publisher. Has my prayer been heard? Have I found favor with God? Will an e-mail or phone call bring me that coveted good news? Will God open up for me a whole new area of ministry from Christian fiction? And surely it can’t be as simple as “just believing” to see it happen?

No matter what the answers turn out to be to those questions in relation to my writing, I find solid assurance in the last two. Whether I ever get published or not, I have the Savior’s assurance that I am “worth more than many sparrows.” And whatever theologians have to say about the Father “giving us the Kingdom,” I know that my eternal destiny is sure, and I know that I have tried to do my best for that Kingdom all through my life.

So . . . with God’s help, I want to face the year ahead without fear—whether fear of what is going to happen in our country and the world or in my efforts to put my story out there for examination and possible publication.

Saying Good-by to Christmas

2008-12-25T20:06:00.000-08:00

After all the anticipation and preparations, Christmas is over. With few exceptions, the gifts we worked so hard to choose have been opened, the food we spent so much time preparing has been eaten, and the wishes we sent have been received. Children are enjoying new toys—and some adults are, too. Our ears are about ready to stop hearing the Christmas music we looked forward to a few weeks ago, and our eyes are almost ready for us to dismantle the decorations we have been enjoying.

Many of us feel blessed beyond measure. We have cherished times with family and friends and have celebrated a cornerstone of our faith, the birth of our Savior.

Others among us have had a different experience with the season. In the midst of all the festivities, they have struggled with illness, grief, loneliness, and melancholy. For them the end of the season comes with relief.

And it can been even worse. Tragedy is no respecter of seasons. Last night a mother was murdered, today the father arrested, and last I heard the ten-year-old son could not be found. Is he hiding somewhere in terror? And tomorrow’s headlines will tell of the angry, vengeful man who went to the large family Christmas party, shot several people, set the place on fire, and later killed himself.

What do we do with Christmas in the midst of a world like that?

During our country’s tragic Civil, War Henry Longfellow wrote the words to the carol, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” He begins with words about bells, “wild and sweet,” repeating words of “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” Then he looked around him and wrote the third verse that has long haunted me.
And in despair I bowed by head:
“There is no peace of earth,” I said,
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men.”

I’m grateful that Longfellow didn’t stop with that verse but went on to write two more, including this third one:
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead nor doeth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, goodwill to men.”

I’m grateful for that reminder. Yes, Christmas is over, and I don’t expect right to win out over wrong any time soon. But I cling to the fact that God is not dead nor doth He sleep.” I’ll take that assurance to bed with me tonight, and I’ll take it with me into the new year that starts in seven days. Without it, saying good-by to Christmas would be an empty exercise. With that assurance, I can file this Christmas away with all the others in my memory bank and look forward to whatever God has for me before another one rolls around.

Delays and Dilemmas

2008-12-12T06:53:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about two things that often dog our paths and cause frustration. One is delays, and the other is dilemmas. I’m dealing with both right now. Both can be unavoidable, despite our best efforts, and both can be unpleasant.

Since Thanksgiving, I’ve been dealing with three delays. Though I’m a missionary who always determines to get the Christmas mail out by the first of December, we didn’t finish ours until yesterday. Though I look forward all year to the ambiance of a home decorated and lighted for Christmas, our only decorations so far are matching wreaths on the dining room wall. And as a writer trying to break into the Christian fiction market, I know the importance of being timely with submissions, yet the submissions are hung up on the second part of my title—dilemmas.

Some dilemmas are not as big as others, but they can still trip us up or slow us down. My husband has a yen this year to get a new tree, but what kind? He’s intrigued by those new ones with permanent lights—but they are expensive, I can’t imagine how you store them, and they mostly come with all white lights (I’m partial to soft colors). Another current dilemma is that we can’t decide what to do about our two daughters and their husbands for Christmas. We’ve tried matching gifts, gift certificates, and taking them shopping, but each of those has met with one catch or another.

Meanwhile, I’ve dealt with dilemmas related to my Tangled Strands novel—how to arrange the text to make the “three sample chapters” I submit, and shall I send to both interested publishers at once? Bigger than any of those dilemmas is an unexpected turn in the whole thing. On September 3, 2008, I wrote a blog titled “What? Make it the beginning?” It told about members of my writing group suggesting that the scene they had just critiqued would make a good opening for the story. That would require huge changes, but I knew almost from the first moment that it was a good idea.

Since then I’ve written a new beginning, starting the story six months later. The scene they liked so well as a beginning is just that, in the form of a prologue. Now I’ve received strong but opposing advice from two respected critique partners – 1) ditch the prologue; you’ve got a good beginning with chapter 1; and 2) oh, you must keep that scene as the opening! What to do??? I need feedback from some fresh readers, but who? “Friends” aren’t too hard to come up with, but I should also query a few who have experience with both writing and editors.

That leads to yet another dilemma—who to ask and how do I ask them? Though the author community of which I’ve been a part for two years now is incredibly generous and helpful, I am reluctant to intrude on any of them (it’s the holidays…they have their own deadlines…yada yada).

Both delays and dilemmas can have a good side, if we are willing to look for it. They can drive us closer to God if we let them, and they certainly teach patience, persistence, and perseverance. They can also produce subtle or unexpected blessings. The volume of Christmas mail brought fresh gratitude for all the friends God has given us. The house-decorating delay is going to result in some special time with our grandchildren as they help us play catch-up.

And the submission issues? “Special results” for that are still unknown—to me, but not to God.

Fun With the 50s

2008-11-23T18:57:00.000-08:00

I’m making progress on the reworking of my Tangled Strands story, and as I move ahead in it, I am finding more ways to show that it is happening in the 1950s. For someone like me who lived during that time, it is a lot of fun.

I’ve chosen to give the characters in my story cars that are not longer in the market. Sharon drives a little green Rambler, Agnes drives a “vintage Studebaker” (in honor of my grandfather who never drove anything but a Studebaker), and young Chris drives a classy Chevy Bel Air. We caught an old Mayberry episode tonight, and Barney Fife was splurging his whole nest egg to buy a car for $300! Of course there were no seat belts in any of those cars, and Interstates to drive them on were just coming off the drawing boards.

Other things were different, too. Not only were there no cell phones, there were no cordless phones. Most homes had only one phone, and it was anchored to a wall or sat on an end table. And the phone numbers began with words, like MOntrose 8-6931. You dialed the MO and the numerals, which gave you the seven digits we still use. Area codes were perhaps being dreamed of by those who had to think about such things, but the rest of us had no idea about them yet. And when Barney's car broke down out on the road, Andy set out to walk to the nearest phone he'd noticed in passing at the gas station a half mile back.

And then there was music. The only music you could have in your car was from the radio—yes, we did have radios. In your home, the only music you could play would be on what was called a record player because—guess what? It played records. The round black record spun on a turntable and a needle “played” the music by riding in the ridges in the record. Though it was nothing compared to what we have now, it was still a rather amazing thing, if you think about it.

As for stereo, I have to tell you a true story. This happened in the early 50s, just a few years before my fiction story takes places. I was in a Christian boarding high school in central Florida. A special speaker came to visit named Jim Voss. He had been a gangster with perhaps the most famous gangster of the time. Jim shared with us his testimony of how he gave his heart and life to Jesus at the end of a crusade with a new young evangelist named Billy Graham.

Jim had a treat for us—a brand new invention that was not available for sale anywhere at that time. He had a truck load of equipment with him, and it took him almost all day to set it all up on the stage at the front of our chapel. The equipment covered the whole platform, and some of the pieces were as big as Jim, which was pretty big. Then we all came together for a demonstration of this new marvel—stereophonic sound! I remember him playing some music where you could hear some instruments on one side of the stage and some on the other side. But the pièce de resistance—with all the lights in the auditorium turned off—was the sound of a train going from one side of the stage to the other. It sounded like that thing was going right through our building.

I’ve never forgotten something Jim said at the end of that demonstration—and you can imagine how it has returned to me many times as things have changed in the decades since. Jim assured us that such equipment would never be available for home use because it just wouldn’t be possible to make the equipment small enough.

I thought about that again today when my son was showing me his new iPhone.

Discovering Facebook

2008-11-15T11:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve known about Facebook for a while now as I’ve heard my kids talk about it. My first thought was oh, no, not another social network! Don’t people have enough to do these days but to sit around cultivating invisible relationships? It’s true many people find such relationships easier to carry on than face to face ones. I also figured it would be one more great way to waste time, or at least to spend time that I should be spending on something else. Besides, as a still-active missionary, I already had enough relationships to keep up with, including lots of long-distance ones and some online ones. I didn’t have time to add any more.

At the same time, I knew I would sign up with Facebook eventually as a means of spreading the word about my book, if and when it gets published, but I figured I could wait until such a time as I knew for sure that was going to happen. Then this week I got an invitation from a long-time friend, and next thing I knew I had gone and done it. Yikes! And the next thing I knew, friends were coming out of the woodwork. That was cool, though I soon learned my daughter was putting them up to it. “Oh, but that’s the only way they’ll know you’re there!” For now, I have to take her word for that. The truth is, it has been a pleasure to make a lot of connections, including old friends and former students.

So now the challenges for me are keep it in balance (i.e., not let it become my master), to learn enough about it to make it really serve me, and to find ways I can perhaps use it to be a blessing. And would you believe that God threw in a little confirmation that this is a good move and the right time? A real-life friend gave me a heads-up about a blog just posted by a writer about the many ways writers can use Facebook to network and get the word out. By jumping in now, I have time to learn about those things so that when the time comes to use them, I’ll be ready to roll.

If you’re a new reader of this blog, be sure and read the two paragraphs at the right that tell about this book I keep talking about. You may even want to go back and look up some earlier posts about what’s going on with it. And feel free to make a comment.

I never cease marveling at how things have changed in my lifetime. Growing up in a missionary family in central Africa during WWII, we went months without any connect with the outside world--not just relatives far across the ocean but even coworkers a few hundred miles away. Now I can not only “talk” to family members on other continents, but I can peek in on the lives of friends all over the country and the world. If you’re too young to have experienced that difference, you’ve missed something.

Improve or Destroy?

2008-11-04T16:29:00.000-08:00

Before I got seriously involved with today’s community of Christian writers, a number of my friends and family read Tangled Strands. I readily admit that the fact that they liked the story (one even admitted to shedding tears over the ending) is what gave me the motivation to bring it up to today’s standards in order to see it published. In fact, though they are polite about it, I’m pretty sure some of them have never understood why I had to “mess with it.”

Today I was going back over a seven-point framework developed by another author. He calls is the “seven beats of your story,” and we in our local writers’ group were challenged to apply it to our “work in progress” (aka WIP). I forgot that I worked my way through the whole thing several weeks ago, so it was most interesting to read my analysis. Perhaps the most interesting thing was at the very end after I’d made a stab at the seven points. This is what I wrote:

A BIG questions is this: If I try to pour my story into a mold made to fit all the “rules” and style matters of today, am I going to improve my story or destroy it?

Ouch! But it is a fair question, and it deserves an answer. There are two issues main to address in the answer.

First, I can truthfully say I am confident the end result is going to be better for all this work I am putting into it. I’ve been sharing some of the reasons with you as we go along in this blog. Some I’m electing not to get into because I don’t want to bore you to death. In fact, it has been an encouragement to me, as I’ve worked on this new beginning, that I never find myself wishing to go back to the original or wishing I hadn’t decided to make the change. So many things in that old beginning had bothered me for years, and they are now gone.

Another important issue is that, in all the things the writers teach about what makes good fiction (and not just in this day and age), they all agree on one thing and say it over and over: “It is your story, and you have to tell it in your voice. All of that supersedes any rules.” Admittedly, that makes for a challenge—to follow the principals of good fiction, to learn from what others have learned along the way, and yet to apply all of it in your own “voice” without destroying your story. (Author’s “voice” is not easy to explain, but it is related to the unique way in which one uses language.)

Another thing that everyone agrees about is that “story is king.” In other words, if the author tells a story that captures imagination and holds readers’ attention, that is more important than whether the author followed a bunch of rules.
So that is my challenge, and I’m doing my best to walk that tightrope between following proven methods and staying true to my story and my own writing style. Feel free to say a prayer for me after reading this (smile).

Of Seasons and Snags

2008-10-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

When I woke up this morning, I decided I would like to live in Hawaii. Why today? Because it was 25 degrees outside our house, and my beautiful summer flowers came to the end of their lives. The first hard freeze of the winter is always a sad milestone for me because I love my flowers. Fortunately, I’ll have a few more days, maybe weeks, because I have five portable pots with lovely New Guinea impatiens. They have been in the house the last three nights and will get to go out again for the end of this week because the weather is going to be nice again.

Every year I have to remind myself afresh that the seasons are a totally scriptural thing. God ordained them, and they have their purpose in our world and our environment. Since I’ve spent two segments of my life in the tropics, I’m not always sure what those purposes are, but I accept that God mandated seasons for certain parts of our world. In addition, this is a good time to remind myself that I’m glad I don’t live northern Minnesota or Canada.

Today most of my time on Tangled Strands was spent going back and trying to work out the little riddles and knots I had left along the way. I always write notes to myself as I write fiction. I’ve usually done it in bright blue text (I imagine one of the reasons I like flowers so much is because I like color so much). But this week I’ve discovered how to use the Comments feature in my Microsoft Word software. With a couple of clicks, I can write my notes so they appear in the margin rather than as part of the text, and they don’t effect the word count of my text.

So when I’m writing away and I come to a snag, it works better to leave a note about the snag and get back to it later. I find that more effective than stopping my train of thought to work out a kink when it first happens. Some of those today were “simple”—as in “not complex,” but not necessarily easy to solve. One of them, for example, was about the phone in the story. In a couple of places I had the phone in the kitchen, but in another scene, I have a main character working in the kitchen, deliberately making noise so she didn’t eavesdrop on the phone conversation in another room. Remember, this is the 1950s when we didn’t have phones in multiple rooms like we do today. Like I said, it wasn’t complex, but that didn’t make it easy to resolve. It turned out to be, not a matter of figuring it out, but rather of deciding which I was willing to give up. I gave up the phone in the kitchen.

Others snags were about word choice. One was needing to look up the history of trucking to see if over-the-road truck driving was a viable career in those days. Another was a whole section I needed to rewrite.

Whatever it was, it was progress.

Conveying Truth Without Preaching

2008-10-25T17:45:00.000-07:00

I’m going to take a break today from talking about my progress (or lack of it) with Tangled Strands and talk about some of the changes in Christian fiction over the years, and about one in particular. I’ve referred in this blog to things that have resulted from cultural changes—readers wanting less description, more action, and consistent point of view. The truth is, two or three decades ago, Christian fiction did not have a good reputation at all.

Author and literary agent Ron Benrey in his book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Christian Fiction (yes, one of those, and it’s really good) writes, “The complaints of critics and book reviewers that Christian fiction was boring, preachy, formulaic, heavy handed, and clumsily written…drove Christian publishers to hire editors who truly understood the craft of fiction. In turn, these editors found writers who could write compelling novels that simultaneously delivered explicit Christian content” (p.24).

He goes on to say, “Editors at Christian publishing companies have set high standards and expect authors to deliver high-quality manuscripts and proposals.” They “quickly reject manuscripts that have weak stories, sloppy prose, poor characterization, tacked-on Christian messages, . . . and careless point of view” (24,25). When I was an editor for Zondervan many years ago, a manuscript came in that had a story my boss thought was worth publishing, but the author had used the book as a platform for propagating the denomination’s theology. There would be a chapter or two of story, and then the characters would sit down and talk theology for a whole chapter. My boss gave the manuscript to me with instructions to cut sixty pages of it, including all the “preaching.”

Tangled Strands doesn't contain any preaching. In fact, it doesn’t even include a church service. It does carry strong Christian messages about forgiveness and God’s sovereignty, but they are woven into the story. Sometimes truths are shared from one character to another, but sometimes a character discovers something or works through a challenge on her own.

It took me a while to appreciate the changes that have come about, and I admit that I thought of them as simply style differences and perhaps whims of current writers. Now that I understand the quality issues better, I have more respect for these changes I am trying to implement. I guess all this effort I’m expending is to try and become one of those who can write a “compelling” novel that still delivers a Christian message. At least I will have tried.

Where Did the Rhythm Go?

2008-10-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

Or Rethinking Who Reads Your Story

I’m sorry to admit that the rhythm I spoke about last time didn’t last, and I’ve been struggling a bit—until today (more on that in a minute). In the meantime, other things have come up that I could have talked about, but I never got myself to sit down and do it. But I’m here now.

The online course from my American Christian Fiction Writers’ group right now is about critique partners and groups. That’s when authors read each other’s work and offer feedback. The two authors teaching it are two I’ve mentioned here before—Deb Raney and Tamera Alexander, and they are gems. They’ve been “crit partners” with each other for five years now (get used to that term; you’re going to hear it here), and a beautiful friendship has resulted for them. Tammy is the one I chose to do my paid critique at the conference last month; Deb did it for me the year before.

One discussion that developed in the class was whether ever to use non-writers, including family members, to read your work. Whereas I had been exposed to the idea that feedback from non-writers’ didn’t count (“your mama’s gonna like your story no matter how bad it is”), these two successful authors and others who chimed in say they definitely use “readers” in addition to those who formally “critique” their work. That was good news because I have valued the opinions and feedback from non-writers over the years, including family members. In other words, there is a place and a need for both. That’s great to hear.

The best news for today is that I think I have come to the “end” of the new beginning of my story. If you haven’t been following this saga, you won’t know what I mean, but that’s okay. It’s not all polished yet, but it is well along to way to that. I feel like I am getting back into that rhythm. What I am going to need now is two or three friends who have never read it before (or not in the last four years) to give it a read and see how it flows and whether it has any gaping holes in it. After a little more work, I’ll be ready to share it with those who have read it before. And of course I’m going to have to get feedback from some “writers” as well.

Getting into a Rhythm

2008-10-14T18:49:00.000-07:00

First of all, a correction. I’ve no idea what I was thinking when I said I was nine thousand words into my new version last time I posted. I was just over three thousand. Now I’m pushing five thousand.

The important thing to say this time is that I think I am finally getting into a rhythm. One thing helping me is realizing that I don’t have to polish as I go. I’ve been editing and polishing this thing for so long (years!) that I find myself stopping to work on improvement when I see some words aren’t quite right, or I haven’t thought about sensual details, or I’ve put something in that duplicates something I’ve already covered. I’m getting it through my head that I don’t have to fix those things now. I can go back and work on them later. Right now the important thing is to get this new beginning off the ground and catch up to the point where having changed the beginning no longer matters. I haven’t tried to decide where that will be, but I’m confident I’ll recognize it when I get to it.

I had a sweet moment today when I found a perfect spot to slip in a sliver of a scene from the very first page I wrote back in 1975—the spot where Chris tells Mollie he’s thinking of taking a vow against kissing (all the rest of that scene is gone now). I hadn’t worried about losing it, but in this brand new scene I was writing—again with Chris and Mollie in the kitchen, only now they are married—it dawned on me that I had a spot where it fit perfectly.

I have written two brand new scenes yesterday and today, and that has been a pleasure after working over old ones for so long. It’s been nice to find out I can still do that, and I have another one to do coming up next, hopefully yet tonight, depending on how it goes. This is one I side-stepped when I wrote the original. Back then, I chose to let this scene happen “off stage” while I took the reader into the kitchen to watch what was happening there with two other characters. Now I know I have to deal with that scene head on. It lays an important foundation for that slap scene that started this whole change-the-beginning business. I’ll let you know next time how it went.

One another loose end, by the way, in case you remember when I was thinking about making serious changes in some character names . . . I’ve made my decision, and I’m changing only one. It’s not a major one or first name. To keep Baldwin and Barrett from being confusing, Sharon will now have the last name of some of my ancestors I didn’t know about until 2000, the Champlins.

Of Engines and Emotions

2008-10-12T19:11:00.000-07:00

I’m happy to report that I’ve made some progress on getting that engine of creativity going to get this revision off the ground. See the end of the previous blog if you don’t know what I’m talking about. My new version of the story is starting to come together. I’m discovering effective and subtle ways to introduce readers to important things that have gone before. And so far, close to nine thousand words into it, I haven’t spun a single scene of straight back story.

As I’ve mentioned before, I first began getting a handle how to deal with back story when I read Susan May Warren’s Reclaiming Nick two summers ago. So it was a special treat for me to be able to study under Susan for two classes at the conference last month. One was about how to create a “story world” for your readers, and the other was on how to show a character experiencing emotion rather than just naming the emotion. As the introduction to the course said, “Readers don’t want to be told what to think and feel. They want to discover the story along with the characters.”

I learned there are four levels of showing emotion. The easiest is simply to state it. Picture, for example, a gal discovering a large spider in her bathroom sink. She was terrified. A deeper level is to state the emotion along with an action: She jumped back in fear. A third is to use action only and not name the emotion at all: She screamed and slammed the door. The fourth is a little more difficult, and I’ve been too busy working on my story to figure out a good example of how to expand on the emotion with a metaphor.

And yes, I got the Nick and Rafe books of the Noble Legacy series signed (one of my daughters has read them and the other will be soon) as well as the newest one I bought about their sister Stephanie, which I’m reading now. And after class I got my picture taken with Susie.

Putting Back Story in Its Place

2008-10-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

Most people have an idea what “back story” is. In simplest terms, it is anything that happened to the people in your story before your story began. There’s nothing wrong with “back story” itself. Everyone (real as well as fictional) has back story, and many of us are guilty of boring others with tales of our past. In the same way, amateur authors tend to swamp readers with far more back story than those readers are interested in knowing.

As I stated in the right margin here when I started this blog, when I wrote my story all those years ago, the first thing I did after writing an opening scene was to plunge into a fairly thorough back story on my cast of characters. I felt it necessary because their lives were so intertwined. Nevertheless, when I got the thing out in recent times, I found myself worrying about that back story. I wish I could say I was smart enough to figure it out myself because, as I look back, I see that on my own I worried about the very things I now know are brick weights around the neck of a fiction story.

The bottom-line problem with back story is simple. Whenever the author moves to a scene of back story, the main story is stopped in its tracks and the reader’s attention diverted. Even if you make the back story an active scene, you have still stopped the main story and left the reader temporarily hanging. You can get away with snippets of that but not major blocks of it nor repeated blocks of it.

It took me a long time to make peace with what I was hearing about back story. I tried all kinds of things in efforts to make it palatable. I created new scenes with my key characters and broke up the back story among them. I cut some of it—-but I still worried about it. Wouldn’t readers get bored with all this “reflection” the other characters were doing and start wondering when the story was going to get back to Sharon and what happened to her after she skipped town with her charmer?

Of course they would! And I finally got it through my head.

The thing that bothered me most about making this change is that, by starting the story six months later, suddenly everything during that six months became—you guessed it--more back story. I wasn’t a happy camper when I heard over and over that readers don’t need to know nearly as much back story as authors thinks they do. Finally, that is another thing I have made peace with—a little reluctantly, but mostly in a sort of epiphany of understanding when I finally started getting it.

A cool thing I’ve learned in the process is how to use back story to tease the reader and stir up curiosity. Refer to bits of previous events, telling how a key character was affected by it, but don’t spell out what happened until well into the story. I got good practice doing that in those eighty pages that have gone away. For that reason, my efforts on them were not wasted. Hopefully, I am better able to handle what I have to do now because of what I’ve done before. And I’m happy to report that I’ve been able to preserve a couple of my favorite scenes by giving them to another character in a later time and scene.

Challenges of Crafting a New Beginning

2008-10-08T19:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve told how my writing group started the ball rolling with the idea that I should start my story later—six months later, in fact. I think I’ve mentioned the confirmation I got about that through the conference last month (including my conference critique) and how I started feeling really good about the idea. I’ve got another blog started where I go into the reason it is such a good and even necessary idea.

But an idea’s simply being good and right doesn’t make it easy. One thing that helped me finally get started is that I haven’t gone about this by cutting anything. No, the old version(s) of the story are still in tact on my computer. What I did was start a brand new file, with a brand new name, and even in a brand new folder. I simply copy and paste what I want into the new file. That much has been good.

To give a bit of framework on which to hang some of the things I’m going to say, the story originally started with Sharon taking off with a charmer in the yellow convertible. Now it starts when she comes back months later. I’ve already surprised myself by how easy it was to write one sentence that fully covered the essentials of the first two chapters.

But that was the only thing that has been easy. By following this new plan, I have to introduce everything all over again—my characters, their relationships to one another, the setting of the story. This, I have found out, is much more difficult than it was covering those first two chapters in short order. The decisions have been harder than I imagined. How soon do I have to get the name of the town into the story? I’ve lost the good way I had before to communicate that the father in the story is dead. The opening conflict is between Sharon and Mollie—how soon do I have slip in the fact that Mollie has married Chris in the interim? How can I subtly communicate that Chris and Larry are best friends, not brothers?

And so it goes. Our local writers’ group is trying to “marathon” with our writing during this month of October. We can count our progress in number of words written or amount of time spent on it. By the very nature of what I’m doing, mine comes out a mixture of the two. My biggest challenge—okay, hindrance—so far is the fact that I do my “real” work at home as well, so I end up working on Tangled Strands in snatches that are never easy to measure on any scale.

So the one thing that is clear is that I haven’t really gotten off the ground with this challenge. I’ve done some racing down the runway, but so far I feel like the racing hasn’t come from the engine but from my feet out through the bottom of the plane, like that comical scene in The Gods Must Be Crazy 2. I don’t feel like the engine in my little plane has kicked in yet, and that makes most everything a struggle so far.

But I keep taking a deep breath and churning my legs down that runway. I have to believe that sooner or later, this little plane will become airborne.

An Experience of Faith

2008-10-02T13:56:00.000-07:00

I suppose it’s not surprising that my roller coaster ride has kept slipping back to mind during the last four days. When I looked up its website, I found this: “…this triple spiral-looping coaster makes you feel like you've landed inside a funnel cloud as you zoom down a 128-foot drop through an actual mountain at speeds of 70 mph.” Huh? I did that??

An experience like that is an experience of faith. Oh, you don’t have time to process any thoughts, but some clear impressions do flash through your consciousness. Expanded, mine went something like this as I plunged into that Hail Mary curve and catapulted into that drop described above: “What have I done? Am I going to die? No! I’m not. People have done this before and survived. I’m firmly anchored, and this has to be safe.”

All this has directed my thoughts towards parallels with life. Sometimes things hit that throw us for a loop. Illness strikes with a harsh diagnosis. Nature roars in and mows us down with a hurricane or tornado. Financial crisis threatens. A loved one is snatched away, and we are left reeling.

That’s when it makes all the difference to have an anchor of faith that says I will survive this because I am firmly anchored. I will survive this because God has gone before me. His omnipotent hand is on the controls. Nothing about this surprises Him. Yes, I placed my faith in that Tennessee Tornado, but far more is my faith in the God who keeps this universe running, literally, like clockwork—even when we feel the earth threatening to give way beneath us.

Of Roller Coasters and Fresh Challenges

2008-09-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

Sometime in the last five year I got a wild idea. I decided that before I die, I would like to ride a roller coaster. Why? It’s not as if I’ve always been a daredevil kind of personality. When it comes to the serious things of life, some folks might even consider me a stick in the mud. So don’t ask me where this yen came from. When I first got the idea, which was also the first opportunity I had to do it, I’d been undergoing therapy for my neck, so such a thing would have been foolhardy.

Because roller coasters aren’t on every corner in life, I’ve gone stretches of time without thinking about it. But this weekend, my husband and I have visited at a theme park, and it occurred to me that the place undoubtedly had a rollercoaster—though it was not visible in the central venues of the park. Hmm. Did I dare? Would it be foolhardy? When I checked the map of the place, I discovered it had two, one of them looking from the map to be more monstrous than the other. I decided the better part of wisdom, given my age and lack of experience, was not to choose the most monstrous-looking one. My sweet husband didn’t stop me, bless his heart, though he wasn’t feeling up to joining me.

So I did it. Even though the Tennessee Tornado isn't one of those creations that tries to outdo all the competition, it is plenty serious . . . breath-snatchingly fast, upside down in a complete circle twice, and sharp, sharp turns that would have launched me like a Hail Mary pass if I hadn’t been securely anchored. The scariest moment was a complete surprise, which added an extra flash of terror. We came charging up over a high peak—and there before us was a solid wall! This would have been a serious place to scream, but I didn’t (then or ever). Instead of plunging into the wall, we plummeted straight down, low and under the wall—and into a dark tunnel with strobe lights.

The good thing about going at such mind-bending speeds is that almost in a flash it is over. As we walked away, I overheard someone say it lasted a minute and forty-eight seconds.

Did I enjoy it? a friend wanted to know. In the sense that I came away completely satisfied that I had done it, yes—but I don’t feel any need to do it again. (Big smiles all around)

If I can do what I did today, then I have to believe I can rewrite the beginning of my story the way it needs to be done. Truth is, the more I think about it, the more I know it is the right thing and the more excited I am to get started. During the last several days I’ve been waiting on the Lord to show me how to go about starting with that scene my writing friends thought would make a good opening.

With God’s help, I think I’ve figured it out. Now to try and do it. Can’t be any harder than riding a roller coaster for the first time at my age.

Of Invitations and Awards

2008-09-26T19:05:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe I’ve been home from conference almost a week now. It’s fun to relive some of the special moments, including the two when I was invited—when I have the thing revised and “ready”—to “send” to them a proposal and sample chapters. Invitations to send are highly treasured. It doesn’t promise something will come of them, but it is an important step. I had three invitations to send from the conference I attended in May last year, and I “sent,” but none of them materialized into anything further. Nevertheless, they were good experience.

Now let’s see if I can put in a picture and get it in a good place. It was nice to see author Deb Raney again. I studied under her at Blue Ridge last year, and she sort of remembered me. She told me that she and Tamera Alexander (more on her in another blog) both had to cut the original beginnings of their early efforts. BUT--the last night of the conference, three of Deb’s recent books won the prestigious Book of the Year award. I’m hoping some of that rubs off on me .

Meanwhile, my mental wheels have been turning about my story, and I’ve been journaling. I think when I get back from this weekend trip, I will be ready to tackle at it. And my local writing group has decided to make October one of our periodic “marathon” writing months. Isn’t that timing perfect? (Of course we still have to keep up with the other parts of our lives.)

Experiment

2008-09-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

This was an experiment with how to add pictures, but apparently I can't delete it now. Oh, well. At least I know how to do it for the future--without experimenting. I want to add pictures of some of the authors I'll be talking about when I share some of the things I learned at conference.

Look Back and Looking Ahead

2008-09-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

We got home from the conference late yesterday. My husband tells me we traveled 1800 miles. Joan and Krista and I not only did well together but we had had some really good times. All three of us missed our husbands, and Krista missed her three little girls, but we all profited from the conference and were glad we went.

Sunday night on our return trip we stayed with my daughter Laurie and family outside Chicago. The evening had some excitement when their sweet Desi dog tangled with a skunk in the backyard while son-in-law Rick was setting up the patio with their comfortable chairs around the fire pit. As we three sat there with our laptops, we got to laughing, so much so that Laurie said, “I think you ladies had entirely too much fun on this trip!” We didn’t argue with her.

On the rest of our way home Monday, we did that long trek the length of the state of Illinois. After lunch Joan was driving. She has some fascinating family history about an ancestral family where some of them were massacred and some captured during the French and Indian War. Joan’s next a novel, about a third already written, is built on that true story. We were having a great time talking about it when suddenly Krista realized we had missed our turnoff onto I-24 that would take us across Kentucky toward Nashville. Fortunately, she caught it when we had only gone eleven miles beyond, and we were able to cut across another road to catch the right one without backtracking.

As for looking ahead, a few minutes ago I printed out the “storybook” blocks of text that I will use to decide what to do with the eighty pages/forty scenes that will be affected when I start the story at a new and more active point.

It was interesting to talk to some other authors about this at the conference. Gail Martin, who has now sold 2.5 million books, told me that on the first book she published she had to cut the first 102 pages. Deb Raney, who had three books in three categories win “Book of the Year” at the conference, said she and Tamera Alexander have both had to cut multiple pages from where they originally started some of their books. It’s apparently common for less experienced authors to start their stories too early before the real action begins.

What I will do is cut out the blocks of text that I printed (in very large type so they are easy to work with) and use them to sort those parts of the story. Examples: What happened in this scene will be gone completely. Or, I need the essence of what happened in this one, but I’ll have to work it in another way. Or, this scene may need to be a full-fledged flashback (though I will have to be sparing with those). The biggest challenge will be how to subtly work into the new beginning what has happened before that point. I’m sure you’ll hear more about that as I go along.

In closing for tonight, I can’t believe how many typos were in the blog I posted from the hotel. Sorry about that. I fixed some of them on the trip home, but I discovered yet another one today. They were all the kind of thing spell checkers don’t catch because the wrong words were nevertheless real words. I guess it happens to all of us.

Big Day at Conference

2008-09-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

It has been long day.

It started early for me, sometime between three o’clock and four o’clock. I spent the next two hours in bed practicing my “pitch” in my head and praying about the day ahead. In addition to the big “continuing ed” class in the morning and three workshops in the afternoon, I had my paid critique with Tamera Alexander, an appointment each with an editor (representative of a major publishing house) and an agent, as well as two introductions to give for ladies teaching two of the classes I was taking.

Krista (one of my travel companions from Nashville and a first-time conference attendee) was also nervous about the day, so I was happy when the Lord reminded me of—and I shared with her--that wonderful promise that His strength is made perfect in our weakness. Oh? So when we feel inadequate, we have all the more opportunity to experience God’s help in special ways. Today was a perfect opportunity for that truth.

Fortunately last evening we were able to get Internet connectability (I know, that’s not a word, but it works for this; maybe ten years from now it will have become a word). I say fortunately because I needed to get from the website the info I needed for the two introductions—how many awards they won, the fact that one of them has sold 2.5 million books, and the services they both offer to writers through their websites.

As it turned out, when I got on the net in the morning, I found two items of major interest on my work e-mail, so I was grateful afresh that we had been able to arrange of Internet access here in our hotel room.

So how did the day go, you ask?

I’m happy to report that I would say 90% of it sent super-abundantly well. God definitely came through, and He gets all the praise. The editor invited me to send a proposal and sample chapters of my book when I have them ready. And the Lord set me up perfectly with the impromptu opportunity I was hoping for to speak one-on-one with Angela Hunt about how much her class helped me get on the right track when I took it in 2005. Angela is the keynote speaker for our conference.

Sometime soon when it is not so late, I’ll give you an update on the matter of restructuring the opening chapters of my story. For now I’ll just say that today brought clear confirmation from the Lord that I have to do that—and I am happy about it. My original opening and all the ways I’ve tried to improve on it over the last four years have continued to leave me concerned.

Now I know why. Though I haven’t figure out the “how” of that restructering yet, I'm actually getting excited about it. I have confidence that God is going to guide me through it.

Thirty-six Hours from Now . . .

2008-09-15T19:02:00.000-07:00

That’s about how many hours are left until I and my two traveling companions set out for Minneapolis and the writers’ conference. Someone warned us about last minute tensions and panic, and I thought at the time that I was doing pretty well. But the panic started setting in today. You know those last-minute jitters you get when you start wondering if you’ve remembered everything?

For a writers’ conference that is multiplied because I have all those strange things to think about such as whether my pitch is good enough, and whether I’ve printed everything I need off the Internet, and whether I will remember everything I need to get copied to the flash drive before I leave. Hmmmm.

Then there is the matter that came up Saturday about whether I need to consider restructuring the beginning of my story. I committed it to the Lord and told Him I was sure He would give me the right answer in His own time. I didn’t have to wait long to know what I need to do and to have peace about it.

No, I’m not tearing into the story and starting to chop it up. That would be foolhardy. Instead, I’m going back to exactly what I was doing before Saturday. I’m continuing where I left off in polishing and applying what I’ve been learning. That’s my first priority. Deciding what to do about rearranging anything is not something to be rushed into.

Part of what comes with the conference is one appointment with any editor of your choice and one with an agent. You submit four choices for each, and when you get there, you find out with whom you’ve been scheduled on both counts (possibly your first choices, possibly not). That’s another area you commit to the Lord for His perfect will and direction. There are additional chances to meet and talk to editors and agents at meals and informal encounters.

So there is a lot of anticipation stirred together with a lot of unknowns. We’re told our best preparation is being well “prayed up,” and I’ve been working on that. I’ll be grateful for the prayers that anyone else wants to add to mine. It’s hard to believe that next week at this time I should be freshly arrived at home. I’m confident I’ll be loaded with some rather amazing memories.

What? Make It the Beginning?

2008-09-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

We had an interesting time at our monthly writers’ meeting this morning. The agenda for the meeting was to offer each other critiques on two pages that anyone wanted to submitted. Five of us were brave enough to do it, though two of them ended up sick and couldn’t come. (If you want to be a writer, you have to learn to accept input and even criticism from others, so this was a good practice opportunity.) Of the nine of us present, at least three were published authors.

The two pages I chose were a scene with an emotional conflict between two main characters (twenty-year-old girls). Near the end of the scene, one of the girls hauls off and slaps the other one because of something she said. The scene ends with the slapped girl saying caustically, “All I’ve got to say is, you’d better not cause my brother any more grief!”

Since I hadn’t offered any background with the two pages, those reading it didn’t know what had gone before or that the scene comes about eighty pages into the book. Imagine my surprise when the group liked the scene so well that they thought it should be the beginning of the book! We discussed it around for several minutes, and I said I’d think about it.

And I have. It is just possible that, after all this time and all the work I’ve put into the first quarter of my story, I am going to need to restructure at least that much of it.

As you can imagine, you will be hearing a lot more about this.

Not a Hoax, Just a Long-ago Mistake

2008-09-09T19:45:00.000-07:00

Nowadays all of us on computers are forever getting e-mails with great or dramatic news that turns out to be a hoax. Well, it turns out our Mayflower connection was not correct after all, but it was not a hoax. It was simply a mistake made a century ago which had been corrected in some records but not all, and not the one I was looking at that day. I have to admit it was fun while it lasted, but no real damage is done. I hadn’t even gotten used to the idea. Also this week I’ve learned that, while my ancestor William Compton had his jaw shot off and died fighting in the Revolution, the second Consider Tiffany, in a completely different ancestral line, was a Tory and on the side of the mother country, England.

Much more important at the moment are the preparations for conference. The two ladies and I who are traveling together have burned up the wire with a few e-mails about the trip--like route, whose care we will take (looks like it will be ours), how we will share costs of gas, what we like to do in the car, where we like to eat, do we get car sick? We all plan to attend our monthly meeting this Saturday, so we’ll be able to finalize things in person then.

I’ve made decisions about the outfits I’m going to take, keeping in mind that it should be cooler in Minneapolis than what we’re having in Nashville now. Probably time to put away the sandals and white shoes. I need to get my hair cut this week. Tomorrow I pick up my business cards from Staples.

I still haven’t decided whether I’m taking the laptop with me, but I’m guessing I will. I still need to print out the file I’ve collected with names and brief sketches of those of us who are first-timers (we’ve been getting some great online advance orientation). I also need to print out my proposal and synopsis again, as well as the bios and pictures of the agents and editors who will be at the conference. I’ve been studying them, trying to get a head start on recognizing them.

I think it is all coming together.

Freight Train Bearing Down

2008-09-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

The American Christian Fiction Writers’ annual conference was a long way off when I first wrote about it back in May (“Minneapolis Writers’ Conference” and “Learning Craft at a Conference”). Those blogs are in the Archives down the right side of this site; click on the little triangle beside May.

Now the conference is bearing down on us like the proverbial freight train. An endless number of messages have gone back and forth, forums have been buzzing, and advice—good advice—has been available on every side. Everyone is talking about one sheets, pitches, and appointment etiquette, not to mention clothes, business cards, and a lot more.

To get to the conference, I’ll be traveling with two ladies from my local writer’s group and sharing a hotel room with them. Two weeks from now, on Wednesday the 17th, we’ll be on the road all day, getting as close to Minneapolis as we can, then finishing up the next day.

The conference starts on Thursday afternoon with a special session for first timers, otherwise known as newbies. Then we’ll have the first of three keynote addresses by Angela Hunt. There will be panels to introduce the agents and editors who have come to the conference. Part of the evening program is worship and devotions, and at the end of the evening, the first round of late-night chats. The next morning we’ll begin with the classes, and in the afternoon the workshops.

Volunteers do a lot to make the conference run smoothly. Some time ago, a call went out for volunteers to introduce the presenters at each class and workshop, and I jumped in. I got my assignments this week, and I am delighted. I’m going to get to introduce an author who helped me a huge amount with one aspect of my writing—Susan May Warren. I haven’t met her in person yet, but her first book in the Noble Legacy series, Reclaiming Nick, helped me see the way to do “back story,” compared to all the advice I had previously heard on how not to do it. I hope one of these days to tell you more about it. Of course I’m going take along Nick and the one about his brother, Rafe, and get them signed . (Lord, will I ever get to sign books for folks?)

I’ve also been assigned to introduce Gail Gaymer Martin, the teacher for the Level 2 Continuing Education class I’ll be taking. In ten years of writing, Gail has signed forty fiction contracts and has more than two and a half million books in print. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from her.

The Mayflower?? You're Kidding!

2008-08-31T18:51:00.000-07:00

It has been my impression, in the years I’ve been interested in genealogy, that the gold standard for prestige was if you descended from someone who came over on the Mayflower. That was fine, but it didn’t have anything to do with our family. In 2000 we discovered two ancestors who were involved in the Plymouth Colony during its first twenty-five years, and we figured that was as close as we would get. One of those was Anne Hutchinson, who made her way into the history books and to an expressway in the Bronx, as well as her daughter Susanna, the only one who survived the family massacre by Indians.

This past spring my fellow genealogist in the family, my nephew Matt, discovered a new branch of ancestors that we hadn’t known about. I wrote about them in my July 2 blog entitled Of Roots and Names. You may remember it was a line with the unusual name of Consider Tiffany. Matt has been working hard firming up the research on the line and getting it entered in our database.

This afternoon I was browsing back through the tree, noticing some of the female lines that brought other names into the tree. Suddenly, a name caught my eye. Ruth Brewster. Brewster?? There was a Brewster on the Mayflower. Surely not…. But one click and two generations later there it was – there HE was. Consider Tiffany’s wife Naomi was a great-granddaughter of Ruth Brewster, the grand-daughter of William Brewster who came on the Mayflower! He not only came on the Mayflower, but he became a top leader of the colony.

I’m still shaking my head over it, and fascinating stories are already coming to light…Ruth’s young father losing his first wife and their three children before the Mayflower ever sailed, and William Brewster’s children who came with him on the ship being two boys named Love and Wrestling. Now there are some names for characters in my Tangled Strands story -- NOT.

But I have been seriously thinking, once again, about making name changes to some major characters—thinking about it but not yet generating courage to do it. At least two of the changes need to be made, and I’ve come up with nice family-history names that would work well. But the changes I’m thinking about would be HUGE because they are three of the most prominent names in the story. One family member is still trying to get used to the last such change I made a couple of years ago.

These would be changes to names I started out with forty years ago. Could I adjust to them? Even if I could, what about others who have been closely involved with it in recent times? One thing for sure, if I’m going to do it, I must decide and do it before anyone else reads it. Like an editor or a publisher.

Which brings me to an invitation I already have. But this blog is long enough. I’ll save that for another one. And I'll keep you posted on what I decide about the names.

The Waiting Game

2008-08-30T07:01:00.000-07:00

No one likes to wait. In our American culture, we have become very bad wait-ers. We honk, we holler, we stew when someone makes us wait. We look for shortcuts and the fastest way to get somewhere or get something done. Just look at what a thriving and integral part of our culture fast food has become. Meanwhile, inventors produce a steady stream of products designed to do things for us faster.

Most of the time, however, our God is not into “fast.” Part of that is because time doesn’t exist for Him. With a thousand years being like a day, waiting as we know it has no meaning for Him. But He does know something about waiting because waiting is one of His special tools. Because He is God, He understands what waiting means to His children. The good news is that, because He is God, He knows exactly how to use the waiting for good.

Writers, especially those of us who aren’t published, know a lot about waiting. We wait while we learn the craft, we wait to find the right critique partner, the right agent, and we wait for responses from publishers. Most of all, we wait for that illusive piece of paper called a contract. Even after that, we wait through all the steps of the publishing process. Finally, we wait for that incredible moment when we hold that published book in our hands.

So why, if God is so powerful and can do anything, even in the blink of an eye, does He elect to make us wait? You know the answer, don’t you? He lets us, makes us, wait because He knows that what He will accomplish in us during that wait is more important, in light of eternity, than whatever it is we are waiting for. When people make us wait, it may or may not have a worthy purpose or outcome, but when God makes us wait, we can be sure that He will have a divine and worthy purpose. God uses waiting to accomplish in us things He knows will deepen our faith and strengthen our character.

Our task is to stay in tune to His voice and to trust that He knows exactly what He is doing.

Oh, Good! A Comment...

2008-08-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching for an opportunity to talk about comments to blogs, and with this last blog, I got one – first a comment (thanks!) and then an opportunity. More than one of you have said you made an attempt to add a comment but didn’t succeed. So you’re made your comments by e-mail, and I much appreciated them. That hasn’t been a problem and still isn’t especially one. However, it could be a problem in the future, so I’d like to see more of us figure out how to do it.

Up until now, I’ve been writing this blog mostly for my friends and for myself, but if publication ever does loom on the horizon, the blog will be a major way to publicize my writing efforts. I’ve even heard that in this age and age some publishers, when they are considering publishing you, they check out what you already have online, whether it’s a blog, an author’s website, a ShoutLife site or other such. From that they not only get a taste of your writing, but they get an idea of how much of a “public platform” you have, how well you are known, and the like.

Right now, looking at my blog, most could only conclude that not very many people know me or are reading my stuff. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not putting pressure on anyone or worrying about this. The same thing happened to me when I tried here and on a couple of friends’ blogs. But I tried a couple more times and got the hang of it.

What you have to have is a Goggle “account” with username and password. If you don’t think you have one, click on “Sign up here” and put in an e-mail. You probably don’t want to use your main one, so open a gmail one or some other free one. It isn’t something anyone but you needs to know. Then choose a password and type it twice also.

Yes, they give you the bit of hassle about copying the letters you see, but that is a precaution so that I don’t get dumped on with tons of automated spam. You do have to give a name, but not your last name. If you want to develop a profile with picture, more fun, but not necessary.

Come on. Be brave. I look forward to hearing from some more of you. I’ll notice—and I’ll reply to you.

Later: for a clearer explanation of all this, check out the long comment written the day I posted this.

Celebrating--and Celebrating

2008-08-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

We Americans have become great celebrators. We celebrate birthdays and much more. We celebrate graduations, Christmas, and Fourth of July. We celebrate new jobs, departing coworkers, and the birth of babies. And we celebrate anniversaries.

Last winter when the new 2008 year crept upon us, my husband and I started thinking about the fact that this year would complete fifty years since we got married. Fifty years! Could that really be? Fiftieth anniversary? Wait a minute! Fiftieth anniversaries happen to other people. Fiftieth anniversaries happen to old people. Could it really be happening to us?

Since it was, we figured we were supposed to celebrate somehow, but that idea brought frustration. How could we celebrate? Our children live in three states, but even worse, our friends live all over this country. There was no way to choose a single location that would be adequate and appropriate. Our friends in Nashville are still pretty new and mostly surface friends. Yes, we probably still have friends in Dallas where we lived for twenty years, but they were only one segment of the friends with whom God has blessed over these five decades.

Then it occurred to us (remember we’d never done this before) that maybe it wasn’t necessarily our place to plan a celebration. Maybe it was up to others to do that—and that’s what happened. The anniversary itself was on August 5, but it turns out we have been celebrating all summer. Our dear family members have seen to that.

In June, thanks to the generosity of a daughter and son-in-law, it was a week with our three kids and six grandkids at a lodge in the Smokies. In July it was the cruise to Alaska, deepest thanks to Fred’s sister and husband. The first weekend of August my sister and husband hosted us for a dinner party and an outing to the Blanchard Springs Caverns. Friends were there from as far away as Illinois and family from as far away as Albania. My sister lives in northern Arkansas where, in 1983, we celebrated our 25th anniversary with my parents on their 50th. So it was special to be there in the same place for the actual date.

On the afternoon of the actual date, Fred and I drove home to Nashville. Our favorite habit when traveling is to stop in mid-afternoon for a Dairy Queen blizzard. Would you believe that the DQ on our route that afternoon turned up at exactly three o’clock, the hour of our wedding? When we got home that night, our Nashville family came over with golden balloons to tie on our mailbox and coffee cake for breakfast.

But we weren’t finished. Ten days later when we came out of church Sunday morning, our car was decorated with balloons, crepe paper, and big words on the windows, “Just married 50 years ago.” Strangers at Subway that day were so impressed with our fifty years that they paid for our lunch. It turned out to be the doings of our Nashville family again.

Meanwhile, cards were arriving at home, though it crossed my mind briefly that it didn’t seem like as many cards as we might have expected. Oh, well. Our letter mentioning the anniversary had gone out months before, so it must have slipped some people’s minds by the time the date rolled around. That happens to me all the time.

And we’re still not finished. When we arrived here in Dallas last Sunday, our daughter shocked us with a 3-inch-fat scrapbook full of cards, memories, and pictures from those friends we knew were too scattered to get together. In fact, the cards have come from 22 states and seven foreign countries. So that’s where all the cards were that didn’t arrive at our house! Tomorrow night she is putting on an open house for us, and that may turn out to be another whole story.

Finally, Fred and I have tentative plans for a final hurrah, just the two of us, when during October fall colors we plan to make a trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway in an eleven-year-old convertible.

Walking on Water

2008-08-11T07:10:00.000-07:00

This time the reason I haven’t written for a while is because I haven’t been able to settle on what to write. I’ve come up with several possible topics—fear of failure, forty days of prayer for the conference next month, “If you don’t run, you can’t win"—but every time the words have refused to go on the paper.

The idea of that last one, the one about “If you don’t run,” came from the book I’ve been reading in my quiet times recently. I love the title—If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat. I’ve been impressed at all the author, John Ortberg, has been able to come up with out of that one story—everything from “boat potatoes” and all they miss to “God does some of His best work in caves.” A recent focus has been about failure and how God wants us to learn from it, not just bury the pain and keep trucking along blindly without letting the failure make us better.

Ortberg retells a story from the Chariots of Fire movie. Apparently Eric Liddell’s chief competitor was a guy who wasn’t used to losing. In fact, it sounds as if he hadn’t lost in a long time. He was so upset that he exploded to his wife, “I don’t run to take beatings, I run to win! If I can’t win, I won’t run!” To which his wife wisely replied, “If you don’t run, you can’t win.”

All the while I’ve been working on this Tangled Strands story, working on bringing it into the writing styles of today and along the way discovering some story elements that will make it stronger, I’ve had similar thoughts run through my mind. The truth is, all my efforts to polish it and to get it published don’t guarantee that it will get published—but if I don’t make those efforts, it for sure won’t happen. It’s true that Peter’s attention wandered from Jesus to the storm and he started to sink, but the disciples who never got out of the boat (those boat potatoes) never got to experience the thrill of walking on water that Peter did.

If I never see Tangled Strands published, at least I will have tried. In the meantime, I’m learning and growing and keeping my mind agile. I’m enjoying memorable experiences I would never have had otherwise, such as meeting and interacting with well-published authors. I am energized by all of it, and I have the satisfaction of knowing I am doing all that I can to make publication happen. Ah! Now there’s the idea for my next blog!

So if you’ve gotten out of some boat in your life recently, taken on a daunting challenge, good for you. If you’re still clinging to the side of the boat, worrying about what the waves will do to you if make yourself vulnerable to them, then I urge you to take courage. You’ll never experience the exhilaration of walking on water if you keep hanging on to the boat.

Slaying Darlings

2008-07-31T11:13:00.000-07:00

That’s ominous-sounding, isn’t it? I first learned the term from Angela Ewell Hunt when I took her fiction-writing course at the first writers’ conference I attended in 2005. Since then, I’ve heard others talk about it in other terms, but since that was my intro to the idea, it’s the one that has stuck.

It sounds ominous, and it is. Everyone admits it is as “un-fun” as it sounds. It is not surprising that we authors have powerful and possessive feelings about the things we write. The stories we tell, the characters we create, and words we put on paper feel as if they are children we have birthed, and in a sense they are. We hurt when folks criticize them, we wince when others don’t understand our intent, and we bleed when an editor wants some of them CUT. That’s what is called, by this name and a few others, “slaying your darlings.”

As an author, you have to have a tough enough skin to endure all of the above, or you’ll never make it in the profession. You have to be willing to hear what others say about what you’ve written and to accept their words with grace. I’m told you have to learn to lick your wounds in private and then rise above them to make intelligent decisions about actions that may need to be taken. For most people, this is a cultivated skill, not something that comes naturally. And all of it is slaying your darlings.

So do I have the skill? Let’s just say I have developed a little more of the skill than I had years ago. Have I experienced slaying some of my darlings? You bet. And as long as I don’t throw in the towel on my writing efforts, I’ll have to do a lot more in the future. Even if you get published, you have reviews to face.

These thoughts are with me today because I’ve just figured out that by practicing some of the writing styles that seem to be mandatory for today’s readers, I have turned up with a result that I’m afraid is counter-productive. I may have to go back and pull most of those new sections that I wrote because they now make the story drag on too long.

Am I wailing about it? No. In fact, I’m not going to do anything about it right now. After thinking and praying, I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead and keep working forward in the story, continuing to look for where I can polish and make stronger. I’m going to keep in mind these conclusions but not do anything about them until I can talk to some experienced authors. That might happen in my local group, and if not, I’ll make it a goal at the conference in September.

Even if I end up not using those sections, the effort to write them will not have been in vain. For a writer, the important thing is that you write. Not everything has to be published or seen by others. For a writer, working with words is a reward of its own, and all of it helps you hone your craft.