Tag Archives: writer

The Cookie Jar

07 Wednesday Oct 2015

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“A cookie jar, though beautiful, will always disappoint if found empty.”

My cookie jar is empty.

It’s seen a batch or two–maybe–in the months since I returned home from Mount Hermon’s Christian Writers Conference; but for the most part it’s been unoccupied. Relieved of duty. Free of tenants.

And for a while I blamed my husband.

See, we had a plan. As you probably know from a previous post, my youngest daughter started kindergarten this year, freeing up my afternoons. And according to the plan I would take the first year to write full time with keys blazing and submissions flying.

But somehow in my short, five-day conference absence the plan changed. Just up and flew away somewhere. Out there. Over the rainbow. And in its place: “You need to finish your degree.”

Say wha?

My arguments against this new scheme raged vehement. Very artistic and author-ish too. Something about sensible suits and academic labels, the futility of human standards of achievement, the colors of my creative mind fading…you get the picture. When that failed I took the practical financial approach.

Nothing worked. God has a new plan, saith my husband, and a degree for the missus therein lies.

Well alrighty then, Misters.

That was six months ago. I saw evidence of God’s hand in the orchestration, including a ripple effect in other areas. Then I discovered I could finish much earlier than expected. I snatched that baton and sprinted off with it. On top of that aim I added honor student. And because a writer must always be reading and writing I made sure to check those boxes too. Super productive. No time for baking cookies.

I felt very much like degree people feel. Accomplished. Potentially important. But in what way? And to whom?

The answers came when my son returned home one night from Awana with a list of two things he wanted to do better. One of them read:

Leave Mommy alone when she’s doing homework.

SLAYED.

Reading those words made me consider how many times I’ve said them in the past six months, and how many times I haven’t played Terraria with my son, or done Zumba with the girls, or watched My Little Pony, or baked the weekend’s cookies; all because I’d immersed myself in God’s plan–stretching it into something self-serving–instead of remaining immersed in God who keeps my priorities straight.

My kids are awesome little people. I’m proud of them. And if I graduated summa cum laude and became a bestselling author whose books hit the big screen they’d be proud of me too. And all of it would be a pretty package to behold.

But if the intimacy is not there, if I don’t remain a present, attentive mother who knows them and is known by them–who keeps school and writing and whatever else comes up out of family time–then what we’re headed for is no better than an empty cookie jar.

And that will never be a part of God’s plan.

My jar is still empty, but now it’s only because the cookies are cooling.

Your turn: Have you ever found yourself running ahead (or away) from what God’s doing in your life?

The Labor of the Journey

05 Saturday Sep 2015

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IMG_2430

“You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain…” John 15:16

My youngest is in the first weeks of her kindergarten career. After years of seeing her older siblings off to school and spending her days with me all to herself, the adjustment hasn’t been painless.

She greets Monday mornings with tolerance. Tuesdays with grudging acceptance. Wednesdays with stoicism. By Thursday her patience has run out. She flings back the covers, fed up to the full, and demands to know: “Again?!?”

Her annoyance amuses me, especially since she actually loves school when she’s there. It’s the getting there–and all that comes with it–that bothers her. The getting up, getting ready, getting denied the freedom to spend her day how she chooses, getting the task of bringing home work; work that she must get done.

She’d love to read as well as her siblings, make friends of her own, have her name on awards, have her great-grandma send her a dollar for each A. She sees what the twins have accomplished and she wants the same; she’d just rather skip over the journey and land at the destination.

I sympathize with her because I know what that feels like. I enjoy knowing I’ve done a job well. I just don’t always enjoy doing the job. Or I might like being in the midst of a good work, but I resist the need to get it started or experience pessimism before it’s finished.

Perhaps it’s the resentment of obligation, or the loss of freedom, or the overwhelming scope of the task that makes the individual steps seem insufficient, or maybe it’s a combination of those things. The Good Work seems so elusive that we lose faith in the constant work–the again, and again, and yet again work–it takes to get there.

Natural intelligence, which my daughter has, and the natural talent that so many of us possess is not enough in itself to get us where God wants us to go. We must work hard with diligence and patience, building on the unique gifts God created in us.

And we know by God’s promises that our work will be rewarded and our lives fruitful, if we couple our faith with works, and persevere in the labor He has given us to do on the journey He has called us to take.

A Wrecked Perspective

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Faith, Relationships, and Other Topics, Writing and Pursuing Publication

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thanks

“In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
~ 1 Thessalonians 5:18

Recently, on a day like any other, my three kids and I set out for an evening of gymnastics and Kenpo practice, with a potential coffee stop squeezed in. The smell of mint wafted from my older daughter’s tea mug. The youngest girl crunched on a carrot as if it were her last meal, and my boy pretended to finish homework (I saw him tuck a toy in the jacket of his Gi before leaving the house).

We sat in the left turning lane behind a line of cars, underneath a partly cloudy sky. Tires screeched. Metal crunched. We lunged forward. Slammed backward. I screamed.

My pulse pounded in my ears, and I couldn’t hear anything else for a moment. The surge of adrenaline made me dizzy. I couldn’t believe I’d been hit, or that my kids were in the car.

I turned to them. “Is everybody okay?” They were shocked, but otherwise unharmed. Praise God.

I got out, shaking, and walked to the car responsible, its front end demolished. Behind the deployed airbag sat a young man wearing a dazed look of dread.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He looked himself over and nodded, though he didn’t seem entirely sure. “Can I drive?” He pointed at a parking lot. Smoke drifted up from the remains of his hood, fluid poured beneath it.

“No. You should probably get out.”

By the time the ordeal ended, the police, a fire truck, and the boy’s parents and sister had arrived on the scene, and a tow truck was on its way to haul off the totaled car. I pulled my Chevy Suburban (a vehicle I shamelessly endorse) onto the road with minor rear-end damage.

Before leaving, I’d assured the boy and his family, “We’re fine. No one is hurt. It’s not the end of the world.” But for that eighteen year old, I could tell his world was crashing fast. He looked distraught, despite his parents and sister loving on him and stressing how much they cared about him and not the car.

I wanted to comfort him myself, pull him in a hug, wipe his tears and make certain he understood that the wreck, as horrible as it seemed now, would be just a memory someday. But he’d had enough trauma. The last thing he needed was some stranger bear-hugging and petting him.

He saw the totaled car and cried over what that meant for his family. What it would cost them. How they would replace it. He didn’t consider their joy over the fact that their son had walked away from a thousand pounds of crumpled metal unscathed.

But I did. And it made me look at my own kids, my own life, my own set of problems, my own trove of joys. And it made me thankful.

Thankful that even though my son and I have a homework showdown every afternoon, he’s come home safe every afternoon. Thankful that although my daughter’s already showing signs of adolescent attitude, I get to kiss her sleeping face every night when she looks most like an angel.

Thankful because, while my edits are taking much longer than I intended, they’re getting done, and I’ve got somewhere to send them. Thankful that no matter what the day brings–good or bad–I’m loved from on high by One who suffered and died for me.

Sometimes it takes a crisis to wreck our negative perspectives; to take our eyes off all that’s wrong with the world and refocus them to see the joy, the love, the good.

I regretted not saying all I wanted to comfort the young driver before I left. I’m thankful his driver information comes with an address where I can send a card of encouragement. I can only hope I don’t look like a stalker when it arrives.

Your turn: What are you thankful for?

Moving Right Along

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Writing and Pursuing Publication

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oneway

 

Let your eyes look straight ahead, and your eyelids look right before you.
Proverbs 4:25

Not too long ago I was alerted to a new comment on one of my old blog posts.

I had to read my entry for context before responding, and found myself frowning. At the time that post was written, I had a thing for semicolons.

What started out as a harmless reply attempt turned into a critique and edit session. I whipped that thing into shape, replied, and was just about to sign out, when the link to another old post caught my attention.

Hmm. What’s this one look like?

I pulled it up and rolled my eyes, asking, “Tanara, could, you, possibly, add, one, more, comma?” The actual writing? Don’t ask.

That one ground into presentable submission, I attacked a few others. Some of them were so bad they fought back.

Though my schedule’s already packed, I convinced myself something had to be done. But before I could commence Operation Edit a Hundred Blog Posts, the following verse came to remembrance:

“Behold, I will do a new thing, shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” 
Isaiah 43:19

As an unpublished novelist, it’s tempting to make sure every public word I’ve written lives up to my ever-increasing standards for writing. It may seem a worthy endeavor, but at the end of the day it’s simply a prideful attempt at perfectionism.

To learn and write new things, looking forward and not behind, is to let God guide and grow me.

He won’t make roads in the wilderness and rivers in the desert if I choose to camp there with my own little pickax and water bucket. And I can’t move forward if I keep tinkering with what’s done and over with.

Should I edit my novels? Of course. Year-old blog posts? No.

Glimpses into my writing past should result in praise for what God’s done since.

The foundations of a road have been laid, a riverbed hewn, a writer made better and growing still.

A writer determined to keep moving right along.

Your turn: When are you tempted to dwell in the past? What helps you to move forward?

What We All Need and Almost Never Get

18 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by in Faith, Relationships, and Other Topics, Writing and Pursuing Publication

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sleeping woman

For many of us it seems the more rest we need, the less we get. Between taking care of my family, actively seeking the Lord, and trying to launch a writing career, (plus all my other projects and obligations) getting sufficient rest can be as far-fetched as finding out that book I’ve never pitched has been miraculously contracted for a movie deal. (Who says you can’t dream wide awake?)

But I know I need to rest well if I’m to accomplish my goals and take care of my responsibilities with excellence. Resting well is not just sleeping, but a series of decisions that affect sleep and the quality of our days while we’re awake. Fortunately, the word for what we all need and almost never get, serves as an acronym for how to get it:

Resist the urge to take on more than you can accomplish. I’ve been known to say yes to things I didn’t have the time, the resources–and sometimes the desire–to do. Even when I did say no, my hesitation would be pounced upon and a yes wrestled out of me. I’ve learned (and am still learning) to be firm in declining requests that I just don’t have the capacity to meet. It frees me to focus on the more important tasks, and saves me the embarrassment of having my husband follow right behind me to scratch my name off a volunteer list I just signed. (That has happened.)

Expect setbacks. Ever heard of a backup plan, plan B, or the alternate route? Those phrases exist because plans–no matter how meticulous we are in making them–get interrupted. When I went to the ACFW conference last month I had hoped to return home with a couple of proposal requests to work on. Instead I came home with a request for a proposal and a request for a full manuscript. Great deviation from the plan, right? Amazing. Only I came home to a son with pneumonia. I couldn’t take care of him the way I needed to without setting some healthy expectations for how soon I could submit my materials. It’s tempting to forego rest when there’s a hitch in the agenda. And if it’s for a night or two, I don’t think there’s any harm in that. But when we find ourselves getting just three to four hours of sleep on average, it’s time to make some schedule changes. Exhaustion breeds sloppiness. Consistent exhaustion is a health hazard.

Set aside quiet time. Again, rest is not all about sleep. It’s also about peace of mind and a restoring of the soul. For me this means prayer, or just stealing away to the place where I pray most often. I know when I go there, I’ll get some uninterrupted time to myself (except for the time when my youngest came in, misread my humble posture and hopped on my back with the command to “Giddyup!”)

Trust in the Lord. God doesn’t call us to sleep our days away, but He does call us to rest in Him, and to leave room for Him to show up in our endeavors. When we cram our days with activity, obligation, and busyness–and never give our bodies and minds the time to recoup energy spent, or our spirits the means to refuel in God’s presence or through His word–we are in a sense putting trust in our own efforts.

And God, who alone never sleeps, commands us to take time to be still.

Your turn: How do you manage getting the rest you need in the midst of all your obligations?

 

Falling Off the Writing Wagon

07 Sunday Sep 2014

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wagon wheel

“Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” ~ Confucious

Quite an inspiring declaration. Too bad “inspiring” is not synonymous with “truth.”

I love to write. The process of weeding out an idea, then turning that idea into hundreds of pages, is beyond rewarding.

But make no mistake about it. It’s work. And writing is never harder than when there’s a break in the process.

Circumstances in the past couple of weeks have pulled me away from a consistent writing schedule. And while much of it was beyond my control, I still fretted daily in the back of my mind: “You need to write. You need to write.”

Now that I’m free to get back to my current work in progress, the chasm between what needs to be done and what I think I can do seems to have widened a mile per day spent not writing. I agonize over closing the gap.

Getting back into a rhythm will be a grueling process; a mental strain akin to standing up, dusting off, and limping to catch a wagon that I fell from, before it picks up speed and barrels down the trail without me. The prospect of giving up becomes as tempting as a cold drink in a dry desert.

All the more reason to push through.

Writing is a part of me. I do it because I love it, but it’ll always be work. Whoever coined the phrase “labor of love,” knew what they were talking about.

Now I’ve got a wagon to catch.

Your turn: Do you love what you do? Has it ever been hard for you, despite how much you enjoy it?

Deleted Scenes

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

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200401076-001Ever watch the deleted scenes of a movie? Better yet, ever watch the deleted scenes of an animated movie? If you’d asked me that question ten years and three kids ago, my response might’ve been an incredulous, “What on earth for?”

Nowadays, however, it’s an all-wise sounding, “But of course.”

In the world of writing (an ever incredible, tortuous, rewarding, baffling, coffee-chugging existence) deleted scenes are a constant.

Watching them in movie form provides a much needed perspective change.

While standard movies are typically cut because of length issues, animators delete for reasons we writers can easily relate to:

  1. The plot has taken a different direction and the scene doesn’t fit.
  2. The character behaves in that particular scene contrary to the character as represented throughout the film.
  3. The scene is just…garbage.

But the creators of the script didn’t let a weird spot halt their progress. They pushed ahead, scene by scene, drawing by drawing, until the work was completed.

Then they cut out the bad, cheesy, gag-me portions, leaving excellence worthy of a blockbuster.

That’s a lesson all writers can use.

Every story hits a rough spot. A dreaded “this sucks” epiphany. And it’s there we’re tempted to sulk away from the laptop and drown our sorrows in fresh-baked cookies over a Netflix marathon.

But we need to press on.

Even if our imagination is so strapped that the best we can manage in the heat of a lover’s quarrel mid-chapter is, “Please! I beg of you! Oh, please don’t leave me!” Sow that cornfield, sister! Lay out that cheese, brother! (As I’m doing this very moment.)

It’s all fixable, if we’ll lay out the broken pieces.

Let those awkward scenes serve their purpose in getting us to The End.

Then let’s keep a few tucked away. Not to remind us of our shortcomings, but our ability to overcome.

Your turn: What’s your favorite animated movie, and have you watched the deleted scenes?

The Phoenix Rattler

27 Sunday Jul 2014

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rattlesnake

A rattlesnake is a fascinating (albeit formidable) creature. A mixture of strength, mystery, beauty and stealth, this unpredictable reptile has earned the awe with which humans regard it. For when least expected, it strikes. And its effects on the subject are not soon forgotten.

The Christian Writers of the West (CWOW) are in search of entries for our Phoenix Rattler contest. Stories that live up to the legacy of the rattlesnake. Tales that strike the heart of the reader and leave indelible impressions on the mind.

Are you an unpublished* novelist with such a story? One characterized by strength, mystery, history, or love? Maybe even danger and suspense?

You are invited to enter the first fifteen pages of your unpublished novel in The Phoenix Rattler. rattler

The contest opens for entries on August 1, 2014. For more information, please click here. Finalists in the contest will have their entries judged by prominent editors and agents in the Christian publishing industry. The grand prize winner will receive a Kindle Fire HD or a gift certificate of like value.

Send in your entry, and discover if your story has bite!

*Unpublished fiction writers, or those who have not published in the last five years. See site for more details.

A Review of Vow Unbroken by Caryl McAdoo

11 Friday Jul 2014

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Vow Unbroken

Widowed at a young age and left with the care of her daughter and nephew, Susannah Baylor has grown accustomed to fending for herself on her Texas farm. When a local buyer attempts to cheat her out of a good price for her cotton, Susannah finds herself in unfamiliar–and unwanted–territory. She must hitch her mules and take her cotton to port, and she must solicit the help of a shiftless bachelor named Henry to get there.

In Caryl McAdoo’s Vow Unbroken, readers are taken on an adventurous journey through historic Texas, where danger and trouble lurk along the trail, and personality clashes create enough spark to ignite attraction.

McAdoo’s characterization is excellent in this debut novel. Susannah’s headstrong sassiness and Henry’s wise patience make for great romantic tension and enhance the situations of conflict throughout the story. The children Levi and Becky, and Henry’s faithful dog Blue, work together to make this traveling band loveable and interesting.

Susannah’s character is realistic. She has both flaws and positive traits. Her love for the children and her drive to accomplish her goal make her an admirable character that many women can relate to. As a young woman who widowed shortly after marrying, however, she has little experience with people who are not like her. She’s quick to resist advice, and carries some biases inherited from childhood. But her experiences along the journey, and her desire to please God, help Susannah learn and grow throughout the story.

What she cannot change, however, is the vow she made to herself and to God to never marry again without her father’s consent. And of all the trials she faces on the trail, her vow–and keeping it unbroken–become the greatest.

McAdoo’s debut novel was a joy to read, and I gave it five out of five stars.