time to relax

Today things are rapidly coming together. In the course of this work day, Seasons should see its final tweaking finished. A ministry newsletter I've been collecting material for should be written, edited, and laid out. My Web site should be ready to launch. And my summer road trip should be fully planned.

Most days are a tangle of work, putting in hours on this project and that one, emailing people, writing hundreds and thousands of words. Every now and then the work culminates. Those moments are beautiful and rewarding.

In this case, I've been working my head off because my cousin, co-author, and co-dance tour coordinator, Carolyn Currey, arrives at the train station tomorrow at noon. We do of course have a lot of work to do once she gets here, but we also have a lot of relaxing to do. Just relaxing. Just being.

Solomon said "There is a time for every purpose under heaven," and he was right. There is a time for work and a time to lay work down--to live Sabbath. The balance is so important. Just as all work and no play sucks the luster out of Jack's life, so all play and no work makes him useless, weak, and unfulfilled.

I'm glad and grateful for the balance in my life--work that won't be ignored, projects worth being passionate about, and rest worth taking wholeheartedly.

ideals

Last week's to-do lists had several major projects marked for finishing. For finishing, that is, that week. With a performing arts tour coming up in July and various Soli Deo Gloria Ballet matters to focus on, I really wanted to get the biggest writing, editing, publishing, and formatting projects wrapped up and safely tucked away where I no longer need to think about them.

Well. Life is not generally so tidy.

I didn't actually finish any of the major projects I had listed. But that doesn't mean my lists failed! On the contrary, I got so much work done on all of these things that they are now all teetering on the brink of finished. I didn't meet my self-imposed deadlines, but I'm very, very close.

In a funny way this reminds me of the Peculiar post I wrote about the virtuous woman last week. My good friend Alexis read it, and we discussed it a bit one day. We've both heard Christian women who openly resented the Virtuous Woman of Proverbs 31, sometimes even mocking her. That, I think, is sad. It's true that this woman's industry and faithfulness make most of us look bad--they certainly convict me. But if we didn't have ideals--crazy, far-off goals to shoot for--we'd never get anywhere.

If nothing else, at least we will have lived in the light that ideals give. If we shoot for the moon, we may never reach it--but at least we shot for the moon! How much better than to live always in darkness, hiding away from the light?

Ideals are worth holding, and trying to reach, and writing about.

Making To-Do Lists

I'm not sure how I ever functioned without to-do lists.

On days when I don't make them, I get very little done. On days when I DO, life--and especially writing--moves forward at a healthy pace.

Today's to-do list includes answering email, editing articles for clients, formatting Seasons of an Irish Hermitage, blogging, writing newsletters, researching literary agents, designing a new Web site, planning a road trip, and revising Burning Light. It is broken into bite-sized time chunks: I can easily accomplish all this in a day, provided that I stay focused.

Furthermore, each item on the list is a bite-sized chunk from a bigger list: the list of projects and commitments I need to finish this summer. Each morning, I refer to that list and make sure that every project is moving ahead at the pace needed to finish on time. Of course, a few things will end up cut from the list entirely--I'm not superhuman. But having everything written down helps me prioritize.

A to-do list provides me with direction for the day, a record of what I've accomplished, and peace of mind--I know when I can take a break and when I can't, because I know exactly what needs doing and what can rest for now. As a self-employed writer/editor/writing coach, I know I couldn't function without one.

Lists are one of the major tools in my writer's arsenal. How about you? What tools and techniques keep you on track?

can't see the forest for the apostrophes

Today (being the day I am writing this post, and not necessarily the day I am posting it) I spent well over an hour formatting Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, my very first novel, so that I may release it today (being the day I am posting this, June 13) as an ebook on my Web site.

I had less formatting to do than I thought, because I apparently worked on it sometime in the past that I have forgotten all about, but one task demanded most of my attention: I had to go through the manuscript and turn every single straight apostrophe into a curly apostrophe.

I have discovered that continually hitting "Find," then hitting the actual text window, then hitting the apostrophe key, over and over again, is probably the best and fastest way to develop carpal tunnel. Also that I don't care for curly apostrophes in Georgian font.

And yet, I am geeky enough to have found the job somewhat glamourous and exciting purely because it involved a book.

By the way--Theodore Pharris is available on my Web site! You can read more about it or order it here.

thoughts on "Being the Body"

I just finished reading Being the Body by Charles Colson and Ellen Vaughn. A friend lent it to me months ago, but during the school year I don't get much chance to read.

Anyway, the book's central theme is the Church in its worldwide ("the church universal") and local ("the church particular") incarnations. Colson presents a small host of principles, purpose statements, and stories, all focused on what it means to be the Body of Christ in the world and how we can live that out.

He has some good things to say, but to me, the best part of the book was the stories. I couldn't actually tell you what most of his overall points were, but I can relate most of the stories in detail. They'll stay with me for a long time--the stories of Rusty Woomer, the murderer who became a Christian on death row and shone the light of Jesus till the minute he died, the Christians in Eastern Europe who helped bring down the Soviet empire from within, the priest who volunteered to starve to death in Auschwitz so another could live, the Russian girl who found God in novels, snow, and logic.

These stories are inspiring and powerful and will stay with me. It occurs to me that storytelling is so powerful because it takes us past principle and purpose and says, "Look, here's what love looks like. Now go out there and love." And the stories themselves go so deep into us that we can't not hear them and be changed.

As a writer, I was also challenged (and encouraged) by these words in chapter 26, "Being Salt":

"Being salt demands an understanding of our cultural environment and the use of innovative strategies for infiltration and influence. Writers have been doing this for centuries, with the result that much of the classic literature of the past three hundred years contains Christian truth. The great Russian works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, for example,with the Christian message salted in their pages in such a way that the Communists forgot to ban them, were the books that led Irina Ratushinskaya toward Christ.

"In many ways, literature has the most lasting power to shape ideas. Great books are read, reread, passed around, discussed, debated, and then passed on to succeeding generations.

"Today, many writers reveal in their work the incoherence, shattered logic, and relativistic chaos that mark a culture that has lost its understanding of order and truth. So when a writer who is a Christian crafts words and stories that spring from a world-view informed by truth, he or she is salting modern culture."

And that, in large part, is why I write.

sabbatical

Last week was crazy.

I'm not even sure why it was so bad ... I had a lot to do, yes, but I've had that much to do every day for a long time! The weekend came, the weekend went, Monday was even worse than the previous week. My stress levels were through the roof.

So yesterday I did something unusual: nothing.

I slept in for a very long time. I prayed, I read my Bible, I took a long walk in the sunshine and felt the glorious breeze. I talked to a friend. I prayed some more. I sang hymns while washing the dishes. I sat on the couch and read a book (Being the Body by Charles Colson and Ellen Vaughn, if you're curious.)

I did all of that nothing on purpose, because I felt very strongly that I couldn't take another week like last week. I really needed to refocus, rest, and seek God. Today I am up bright and early, with a to-do list a mile long and my perspective and energy fully restored.

Last Sunday at my wonderful church, Pastor Aaron talked about God's idea of Sabbath, which simply means ceasing to work. Yesterday I knew God wanted me to take one, even if Tuesday isn't exactly the day of traditional observance. He takes good care of me, and I'm grateful :).

people pleasing

I just wrote a post over on Peculiar about the need, as a Christian, to live life for the purpose of pleasing God only--of being so focused on loving Him that it doesn't matter if people get what you do or totally misconstrue it. I remember being absolutely shaken a few years' back when I read the Gospel of Luke and saw how clearly Jesus set Himself up to be misunderstood--He had to, because He had to follow God even though He knew everyone would see Him as some crazy blasphemer for doing it.

But He was right, after all.

It shook me so badly because I'm a natural people-pleaser. Of all things in life, I hate being misunderstood. Conflict makes me sick, even friendly conflict. And I realized, as I read, that as a follower of Jesus I couldn't just go on living my life to make people like me.

God has spent the last few years toughening me up in this respect. Oh, I still hate it when people misunderstand me! But by His grace, I am learning to focus more on pleasing my Saviour than on making sure His people approve of me. As a writer who has more of a platform now than I did when I first quaked in my boots at those accounts in Luke, I'm realizing the wisdom of God in putting me through some of these situations. I will write, doing my best to write things that are true, pure, and lovely--and some people won't get it. Some people will not like what I have to say or how I say it.

And I can't write for those people.

As a Christian, as someone who has been saved by grace and captured by the love of God, I must write to please Him and Him only. If I do that, He will use my words somewhere, to help someone, to encourage His people in some way. But that can't be the primary goal, or any effectiveness I might have had will drown in a sea of people-pleasing.

That's my lesson for today. Thanks for listening :).

stuff I did today

Wake up at 5:30. Hit snooze. Hit snooze again. Hit snooze three more times. Sit up, read from Daily Light for the Daily Path, greet God and say thank-You for the day.

Go back to sleep.

Wake up again at 7:00. Get online. My computer finally connected from my bedroom--hurrah! It's been insisting that I carry it all the way downstairs and sit uncomfortably in an armchair that early in the morning, but today it was kind. Talk to Carolyn on GoogleTalk. Answer a bunch of email, including a few business things.

Eat breakfast, study the Bible. Make a list of things to do today.

Stare, bleary-eyed and headachey, at the laptop screen. Do pretty much nothing for an hour while I'm supposedly revising Burning Light. Finally manage to get an hour of actual revision/editing done. Still trying to figure out Nicolas's part of the story--I wrote myself into some funny situations in the original draft, and now I want them all to make sense. Easier said than accomplished.

Write some promotional emails for Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled. Decide that I can't do any more until Carolyn (my co-author) gets back online.

The next part of my day is a mental blank. I was breathing, so presumably I did something.

Carolyn eventually did get back online, at which time she was too sick to think very well and I still had a headache. I messed around with autoresponders, Web pages, and incomprehensible templates until I finally figured out a way to get a free ebook preview of Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled to readers in exchange for an email address--yay! (You can make the Great Exchange here, if you're so inclined. Email addresses will not be used for anything sinister.)

After more than an hour of wishing I was more tech-savvy, I finally gave Carolyn the go-ahead to get to work. She started sending out our promo emails, with near-instant results--rather encouraging. The first result was an email asking us to be featured at a convention in British Columbia this weekend. Heavens! If they'll pay our expenses, we'll be there. Waiting to hear back on that.

Answered more business email.

Wrote a quick draft of an article for the Matthew House newsletter, Windsor branch. I'm serving as editor-in-chief starting this month.

Went over the manuscript of Seasons (I think this title will change), the latest release by the same Nun of Grace who wrote Tales From an Irish Hermitage. I already knew I was happy to be working with her again (I'm doing the formatting, some editing, and a lot of printer-guidance), but now that I've read some of the book I'm even happier.

Took a break. Walked by the river. It's gorgeous outside.

Came home and edited two articles for Boundless. They are driving me crazy (the articles, not Boundless), as articles often do, but I will overcome. Speaking of Boundless, one of the business emails I handled today asked for permission to reprint "20-Something Reasons to Live At Home." This article continues to garner the biggest response I've ever gotten to date, which is exciting for me.

Blogged. As you can see.

And that, my friends, is a wrap.

bad handwriting (or how to panic your patients in two words or less)

Medical professionals are famous for their bad handwriting. Last time I was in for a filling, my dentist handed me a photocopied article on amalgam fillings vs. the tooth-coloured kind, so I was just perusing it. He shouldn't have written notes on it! I could swear he's scrawled "Marginal Carnage" next to a bit on operating technique. I may never go to the dentist again ...

more about Prince Caspian

As previously mentioned, I didn't like the new movie version of C.S. Lewis's Prince Caspian. I felt that it missed the spirit of Lewis's book. My musings on the subject have helped me realize how much seemingly little things can affect a story.

Prince Caspian's age, for example. It was obvious from the movie posters that this had been changed. In the books Caspian is a little boy, maybe about 11. In the movie he is a young man, maybe about 19. When I first heard about this change, I shrugged it off as no big deal--how much difference could that actually make?

As it turns out, a lot! After our varying levels of disappointment with the new Prince Caspian, my friends and I gathered to watch the old BBC version we'd grown up on--a version which, while it lacks CGI or any budget to speak of, stays very close to the books. And there was Caspian again, the Caspian I remembered: fresh-faced, starry-eyed, and clinging to faith.

In Lewis's story, Caspian is a child. He thinks like a child. He's bold like a child. He's black and white as children are, resilient, and willing to believe in the impossible. He doesn't know for sure that Aslan, the kings and queens of ancient times, and all the mythical creatures of Narnia exist--but he hopes against hope that they do. Once he discovers two dwarves and a talking badger in the woods, nothing can shake him from his faith. We know Caspian will make a good king, even if he doesn't, because he glories more than anything in Aslan.

The Caspian of the movies is far more adult. He's caught up in political machinations, desires for revenge, deep doubt, and competition for the throne. His story isn't a bad one--but it's not the story C.S. Lewis told.

As I've thought on it, I've come to believe that C.S. Lewis was painting the idea that "a little child shall lead them." He wrote about child-heroes not only because he wrote for children, but because for all of us, the way to the kingdom is by becoming--and believing--like a child.

The Creative Art of Conflict

I'm cleaning up superfluous blogs from my past and so am about to delete the "Little Dozen Press" blog. There are a couple of posts I want to keep, so I'm moving them here. This was originally posted December 2005.

Writers and readers all, weigh in on the discussion... leave comments!

The dragon pulled itself up to its full scaly height as the knight tightened his grip on his sword; the homesteaders barred their doors as the sound of war whoops filled the air; the little boy looked defiantly into the face of the bully. The mother prayed for her child as she fought the ravages of smallpox, and the family hid the Jews away while the Nazis pounded on their door.

Cliched? Probably. But if you're a reader, you know what moments like the above can do to you. They make your heart pound and your palms sweat. They keep you up reading until two in the morning. They make you skip your dinner.

They make or break a story, because conflict is central to every enduring piece of fiction. Think about it--have you ever read a story that didn't make use of conflict? If you have, you've probably forgotten it. Frodo had his black riders. Anne of Green Gables had red hair, freckles, and a desperate need to belong. The Greatest Story of All (that of Jesus and His followers throughout the ages) is riddled with persecution, hardship, and the struggle to keep truth alive.

I used to think that conflict appealed to readers simply because it gives us an adrenaline rush. We thrive on thrills. But nowadays I lean toward another theory. We love to read about conflict because, just as it makes or breaks a story, conflict makes or breaks us. It's the hard times that cement our character, drive us to God, open our eyes. Without the fight, the victory means nothing.

Good stories have the power to encourage those who are struggling, to give hope and remind readers that happy endings really do exist. The use of conflict is not only a literary device, it's a commentary on life and the amazing truths that lurk within every circumstance.

Love is stronger than hate.
Happily ever after is real.
In the end, there is no night so dark that it won't see the sunrise.

Leave a comment. What think you?

Narnian Tears

I'm cleaning up superfluous blogs from my past and so am about to delete the "Little Dozen Press" blog. There are a couple of posts I want to keep, though, so I'm moving them here.

This was one was originally published in December 2005, just after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe hit theatres.

First off, let it be known that I never cry at the movies. (That "never" is, of course, not meant to be taken literally. I shall now proceed to tell you about a movie I cried at.)

I've seen Narnia twice now, and both times I've cried. The first time I sniffled and blinked back tears; the second time I let tears stream down my face, and I just wiped them away now and again. No, I did not cry when they killed Aslan. I did not cry at the various reunitings among the siblings. I did not cry when everyone else cried.

I cried during the opening scenes. The bombings in London. Farewell at the station. Riding the train through unfamiliar places. The reality of World War II and all that it meant for so many hit me hard, and I couldn't hold back the tears.

Something else hit me, from a writer's standpoint: we write stories like Narnia because we've lived stories like the World Wars. In the previous post, I said that we're drawn to conflict in stories because conflict in real life is so significant; because it makes us who we are. In much the same way, we read and write stories like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe because they help us understand life. They help us come to grips with Hitler and the Holocaust. They help us understand crucifixion. And if they can't give us peace and total understanding, they have the power to give us something just as important--

Hope.

a new year

I like new years. I like the sense of beginning again, even though I'm in the middle of so many things. I have projects to finish and others to follow up; dreams to pursue and relationships to keep up. None of these things are really new. But they deserve to be treated as though they are. They deserve to be treated as though they're full of promise and yet-to-be-revealed secrets. They deserve my attention and excitement.

It's true of all my writing projects, of my spiritual walk, my family and friendships.

Has it ever struck you as funny that the new year comes in January--in the dead of winter? Here we are, during the darkest, coldest, most dreary days of the year. Yet we're asked to celebrate "newness." And we can do it honestly. After all, spring is coming... it's coming soon!

So too do all the worthy things in our lives have surprises and new growth waiting to shoot out and make our lives green when we least expect it.