Dream Chasers

It's been a while.
But, while my blog has been bare for the past few months, my life has overflowed. I finished writing my tenth novel--one that took every piece of my heart to write. The journey of writing that story was a healing one...which, if it is ever published, and you read it, you might understand why.

In my non-writing life, I've been the mother hen ushering kids this way and that, giving pep talks, volunteering, working, wondering, considering, and everything that goes with being a human in this day and age of social media onslaught, biased news filtering, and noisy opinion-makers crowding my ears.

But, there has been a steadiness, and I find it in these things:

My mediation on what God is up to in all of it
The dreams brewing beneath the roof of my home
The hearts needing fostering during those dream chases

And today, I am inspired to declare that because I have been a dream chaser with each and every newly written book for publication, I have suddenly discovered my dual purpose in mentoring my own son--a dream chaser like his mama.

His dream is different than mine, but his heart, his passion, his motivation is probably more than I have ever felt--and if you know me and my tendency to be overly passionate about my dreams, then you know that it's a great feat for my son to outshine my dream pursuit with his own.

When I think of dream chasing on an optimistic day, I see speed gained, the tunnel light growing like the newborn sun. But when I think of dream chasing on a pessimistic swing (these happen way more than I care to admit), I think of the leap and the face flat crash, the light is snuffed like a flame extinguished between the grubby fingers of reality.

For me, even the latter is bearable. I can swallow my disappointment and focus on the present. Push aside the dream, chasing for the very real joys and triumphs of life as a mom, a friend, a wife. Yet, when it is my own son whose dream plays hard to get, whose effort is outstanding but not enough by his own measure, I am willing to bargain with God and trade my dream-coming-true for my son's.

Perhaps this is the very crux of the gospel. Christ gave up his life so that we might live outside the darkness. And in this lenten walk of mine, I know that to be true...that a parent's journey is never triumphant if their child's left in despair.

I would give up my dream so my son could fulfill his. There really is no doubt it. And in this realization, I am grateful for my own dream chasing because while I once gave it credit as growing me and teaching me perseverance in God's calling, perhaps another more selfless purpose is to align me with my son, to give me understanding of his deep passion for something bigger than himself, and to keep me his steady encourager during those optimistic days, and his gospel whisperer during his disappointments.
For the gospel is sweet, it's true, it's the ultimate dream come true, and every dream chase can find hope in what lies ahead because of the gospel. The first dream-come-true.

Everyday Stories

We tend to seek out the extraordinary, the glamorous, the miraculous to discover a greater meaning to this life we're living. Personally, I find myself slipping into the blues when I think about how my life in the present is leaning toward the mundane-twenty-first century-task oriented-daily ritual of running kids around, cleaning floors, washing another load, and trying to consider exercising when my body is just too tired from my late night Netflix binge.

Yeah, everyday life is nothing to post about on social media. Hmph. And yet, I do...and everyone cheers me on, and I think we've all relented to the fact that this is it, and we may as well celebrate the likeness we all share--even if it's about hacks for getting that dirt stain out of our kid's baseball pants. 

This morning, I sat and read Philip Yancey unpack the facades history and people have piled upon the first century Savior in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, and I came across this:

"...I doubt I would have left any encounter with Jesus feeling smug or self-satisfied. I would have marveled at Jesus' parables, a form that became his trademark. Writers ever since have admired his skill in communicating profound truth through such everyday stories. A scolding woman wears down the patience of a judge. A king plunges into an ill-planned war. A group of children quarrel in the street...There are no fanciful creatures and sinuous plots in Jesus' parables; he simply describes the life around him."

I wonder what parables Jesus would use if He chose this century to share the love of God to the world? How great it would be to have Him come into each encounter and mold it into a truth-bearing lesson. What if I took my everyday and made it extraordinary--not by forcing extravagance or manipulating success--but by simply living it with a keen eye for deeper truth? Maybe deeper truth as simple as this--I am living and breathing by the grace of God.

As a fiction author, I often brainstorm how to hook the reader, and how to create the next unique plot twist. But, as my writing friends and I often lament, there really is nothing new under the sun (pardon the cliche). While it's all been done before, as authors we can only share the same stories with a fresh perspective, thus imprinting our story as unique in the eye of the reader. One Great Storyteller, far greater than anyone before or after Him, told stories that have lasted through wars, cultures, eras, and billions, and they were just ordinary stories with an extraordinary perspective.

Yancey goes on to say, "The parables served Jesus' purposes perfectly. Everyone likes a good story, and Jesus' knack for storytelling held the interest of a mostly illiterate society of farmers and fishermen...years later, as people reflected on what Jesus had taught, his parables came to mind in vivid detail."

Vivid detail.

To have a reader remember a story told with vivid detail is a great feat. It's what any author strives for. But to have a story of everyday life be so impressive and heart-changing that centuries later we can apply them to our modern lives, is something only an annointed Savior could possibly do.

But in Yancey's point about the tool of parables, I also find a lesson for me as a person sitting here, blogging for satisfaction of getting my words out, for hope that I am not just writing for myself, but for a like audience who understands me. The lesson isn't just for my faith or my own storytelling. But it's for my living too.

What details will I remember of this everyday life? Will I look back and see a striving, thrill-seeking, bored, wishy washy gal who grumbled about housework because she just wanted to be entertained?

I want to remember this time of my life with vivid detail--even in the daily routine. I am glad we celebrate the mundane together in Facebook statuses and happy tweets. I want to go one step further and discover what God could be telling me in those moments. What would Jesus say to elevate the simple to profound? 

 If I keep my eye focus on seeking out the extraordinary and successes, I'll miss the life that I've been given...the whole life, not just the shiny moments. But, if I allow my presence to be the gift, the simple place where deeper truth might be found, life might be a little more extraordinary with each step, and I might find God among the everyday stories.

Borrowed Heartbits: Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes was part of the literary elite during the 19th century, a group of poets and writers who shaped American literature as we know it. Think Emerson, Thoreau, Poe... writers whose work and abolitionist sentiments grabbed at the heart of my most recent heroine, Elsie Boswell.

My yiayia passed away almost four years ago. But the memories that keep dancing in my mind are from decades before. If I close my eyes and think long enough, I can smell the simmering butter from her kitchen door, mixing with the scent of saturated leaves and overgrown grass surrounding the red bricked house as I hunted fireflies. 

My memories are only a stilled moment away.

I breathe in deep the perfume of my yaiyia's cold cream and her laundry detergent and the settled scent of a well-cooked meal hours past, while I sit in 2018 with moisturizer, unscented detergent, and an unpleasant lingering of last night's take out. Yet, something triggers, coaxes my brain to trip and fall into the nostalgia of a warmer instance.

The memories enticed by smell, have been a catalyst for nostalgia beyond my own walls. These past days have brought word that a respectable first lady has passed, and that WWII vets are quickly leaving us behind for a heavenly existence, I have been overwhelmed with a longing for things of old. Maybe it's my mid-life blip of a crisis slinging my own mortality around to mourn the precious moments gone by, the loss of story-telling, and remembering, and the never forgetting. Not only did my yiayia conjure up warmth for us in her tiny home, but she was a prevailer, a hero who escaped Nazis and started life anew in my homeland. So many stories of those who were brave, so many testimonies silenced with the last breath. I fear that remembering is losing its traction against the terrifying future, as witnesses to all the history are leaving us. 

Even so, I will not forget. I think of my own heroes that printed upon my heart as a child, rendering my tiny part of this breathtaking whole that is humanity. What thread my life is in this great tapestry! How much I wish that I didn't focus on the knots and frays, but the secure stitchings of all my grandparents offered. I shall hold all close now. I shall treasure it all the more. And as I sit and breathe in deep, welcoming the memory, the scent of times gone, I am delighted to stumble upon this affirmation:

"Memories, imagination, old sentiments...are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel." 

Mr. Holmes has blessed me today with this borrowed heartbit. He has offered truth to what I've pondered so very much in these steps tracing back to a time long gone, now stirring aromas in my heart. I pray that we never forget those who've gone before us, and fought the good fight, raced and won, and grew us up and out to a world that needs our pasts to build thoughtful, secure futures--without forgetting.

A character('s) study: #amwriting

"when fiction dances with humanity 

"She'd trip up often, when she was aware of the absent obstacle, the soaring strength of her heart beating its steady, fluid rhythm even at the prod of old emotional bullies.

There was a frenzy only for a split second, as she checked herself to be sure the obstacle truly had disappeared. Her heart didn't wrestle like it used to, and she could hardly pinpoint when that change had occurred.

Her tears were nowhere to be found when old pricks tried to draw blood. One blink, two blinks, and she kept walking forward without another thought to the thing that once made her wretch, sob, and claw from her soul to her skin, feeling raw and beaten. It was only a brush of a shadow now, a flit of memory, a single cloud passing by on a rather cloudless day. For a second, the subtlety would usher up fear that her heart might be callous and hard, but then, she'd remember the journey, the growth, and the things that had died to give her a second chance to live with hope.

Maybe strength truly did arise from pain.

Maybe beauty was the treasure left after the ashes.

Maybe was too weak.

She knew. Strength was beauty, and beauty was left after the ashes fled to their rightful place again. With the wind, the breath of God blew them away to show the gem He'd never abandoned, He'd never forsaken, but the treasure He refined through the pain and sorrow."

Hope, not just an author's perspective.

This week, I guest posted on The International Christian Fiction Writers' blog thanks to a writer friend, Patricia Beal.

It was a post that poured out from me as I sit in this weird place of limbo, waiting for the final few on my last novel, and brainstorming a new series for my next round of submissions. Honestly, I revert back every other week and think I need a writer's break. Hence, the few blogposts here. It's just been a bit of a soul-searching time of why I want to be on this journey, and how I balance it with life.

SIGH.

It is a vicious cycle, but writing is too ingrained in my heart to abandon it.

Anyway, I wanted share my words from my guest post. Whether you are a writer or not, I think everyone might find something from this post. So, moms, writers, readers, and passerbys, enjoy.

###

Over the past few years, I have understood the nature of hope, especially as an aspiring author. It's a funny thing—hope. It's an energy that might swell like a swollen ocean at one moment, or dissolve into a flimsy fragment that slips between your grasping fingers the next. Hope is ever-changing, and mostly, ever-present. And this ebb and flow is good, because it pushes us toward a dream, or calms us in the midst of a storm. 

During this writing journey, there have been a few times that I have felt hope vanish completely, only to realize it was hiding out around the next bend. It was still there. And the only way I could grasp it again was by moving forward. Taking those steps and finding my way toward it. Getting past the finite disappointment of this journey's pot holes, and remembering hope is infinite, as the good Martin Luther King Jr. once declared, 

It's difficult to accept and get past the disappointment, isn't it? The disappointment overwhelms me after writing that story that just misses the market, the one that I felt sure that God had placed on my heart and knew it was meant to be written. The shadow of a rejection chases my hope around the bend, leaving me breathless and unable to search for it again. 

What is the point of all those words, all that time? I don't want to accept it. 

The finite disappointment arrives in the sting of criticism, the harsh reality that I have a huge amount of work ahead of me, and I'll lose sight of the hope that flickers from beneath the effort needed. I grow weary and defeated. 

What is the point of wasting the energy now, after so much energy has been spent?  

Sometimes, I feel so completely hopeless that I wonder if it's this writing journey has come to an end. But, it's when I look back at all that I've learned, and then step forward toward that next bend, that I discover that pesky hope again, and all is not lost. 

Have you bought into the lie that once hope is out of sight, the journey is over? If this writing journey is truly ours, then our hope is infinite in what the future might hold for our words. 

If you are anything like me, clinging to hope, whether it be a kind word, a contest win, or a coveted request for a full manuscript, keeps me going forward no matter how small a glimmer. 

Hope is infinite. 

I look back on my ten year journey as an author and I don't just see baby steps and lessons, heartaches and rejections, friendships and business ventures, but I see a path chiseled and defined by that infinite hope. It's the fact that I got to that next page, the effort a friend took to critique my work as if it had potential, the agent taking a chance and adding me to her client list. It's the click in my brain when harsh contest feedback actually makes sense and pushes my story to a new level. It's the editor, who had turned down my book, and then decides to pick it up again and give it another chance (true story). 

I may not have arrived to the place where hope turns into that bright shiny future of publication that I expect, but I see hope all around me, and whether it growing bigger and brighter, or slips just around the bend, I am confident it is waiting for me to catch up. 

What more could a writer ask for, than hope? 

* MLK quote photo from Brainyquote.com. 

Foolish Dreamin'

When I was first inspired to write my last novel, I will admit that the seed planted was from an old movie. After watching Lady Jane as a teenager, I immersed myself in the history of the Nine Days' Queen. I read non-fiction books and learned the Tudor line and fell in love with the rich, mysterious, sometimes devastating history of sixteenth century England.

It was a mild obsession.

Lady Jane is a historical figure who I have some how felt kindred to, especially years after learning about her, when I had to decide my own allegiance to God through religion. When I had to cast off old ways and put on new, no matter how much it hurt.

And then, as an adult (dare I say, middle age?), her story inspired me to write my own story with her as the central figure.

And, it sits, completely written, three years later, without a home but my laptop and a friend's kindle. I dreamed of bringing her to life again in the hearts of readers. I dreamed of giving her an alternative story to her tragic end recorded in history.

And I still love the story of Lady Jane Grey, and the story of Lady Jane Lives by Angie Dicken.

I still dream of publication. No matter how tough the market, how difficult the break-in. And I dream

of writing more of her story-- some day.

Foolish dreamin'? Perhaps. I mean, it's been a long dry road, this trip to publication. And I am not even certain this road leads to that in the first place.

I will tell you a secret. Maybe even more foolish than dreaming of publication.
Every time I see a flock of birds,  I pray that some editor out there is considering my novel. 
Ridiculous, huh?
If you know the Lady Jane movie at all, you know that it ends with the Platonic quote in the above image, and a flock of birds reaching the heavens.

It's a quote I've memorized all these years. As I have most of the Lady Jane movie.

Wonder if one day, a quote from Lady Jane Lives might be memorized with such timelessness?

Foolish dreamin'? Maybe.