End of the Month/End of the Summer

I know that summer officially ends on September 21 or there about, but really it ends the day after Labor Day. Labor Day is a week from today so we are unofficially at the end of summer. It has been a busy one, a good one. We attended a sweet wedding in Birmingham, I traveled and was with friends and all four of our children, not all at once. Mandy and Lucy and Jack came to see us as did James and Rawlins. The only more a mom could ask for would have been visits from Katie and Kenn.
The garden is getting tired of producing and Ken and I are both tired of picking and canning and freezing, but the harvest has been bountiful and we will be so grateful come winter.
I am making progress in Righteous Acts and have entered String Weavers in a competition. The winner gets a publication contract. Persistence pays, so I am told, in publishing. I am persistent and I work at improving everyday.
I am glad to have this blog to talk to. It clears the mind and gets me ready for the day to come. Off to exercise, meditate, pray for our world, and write. Oh, and I have a friend coming for lunch, a treat.

Harvest Bounty

Ken's garden has produced far more than we can use. He has enjoyed giving away the extra, to our children, to our neighbors, to the church, and to the food pantry in the county. That is wonderful! I am glad his labors have brought him such pleasure and pride. However, I have not been such a willing participant in using the bounty. I have canned and frozen my part and I'll enjoy it next winter, but I want to be writing. I want to dance and sew and organize and visit and entertain company. This is what I am supposed to be doing. This is living my life, not living Ken's which is what I have done all our married life, except for a few brief years in Dothan and a year or two before we moved here. It is frustrating to have to bump against his expectations for me, frustrating for him and for me. I am a pleaser, but the time has come to please God and me, not necessarily anyone else. Back to rereading DON'T MURDER YOUR MYSTERY and rewriting RIGHTEOUS ACTS.

Time for Guests

Summer is time for company in the mountains. This summer has been especially hot everywhere, even here, but here we still have cool nights and the occasional cool day to make the heat dome tolerable. Because of this and a backlog of people who have been meaning and wanting to visit, we have been and will continue to enjoy lots of guests. I love it!

Living Your Life

A friend said to me, "I just want you to live your life." Wasn't I? I got up every morning, took care of my family, taught school, took care of my family, graded papers, sometimes emailed friends, and started all over again the next day. Wasn't that my life?

In KING OF LIES by John Hart, Work discovers that he has been living the life his father wanted him to live, down to who he married, not just what he did. Sometimes now I feel like I am not living my life. I am not sure about the days when I took care of my family, taught school, and sometimes communicated with friends, but now I understand what my friend who wanted me to live my life was saying.

I canned 21 quarts of beans yesterday and cleaned and broke a bushel before I canned them. I will be grateful for all those beans next winter, but I am not sure that spending a whole day doing them is how I was supposed to spend my time.

As I grow older, I realize how precious every minute is. I ask for Guidance every morning and yesterday all day I felt the pull of my computer to get back to writing. When I feel pulls from elsewhere, I am not living my life. People are imprisoned by many things and in many ways. Mostly we imprison ourselves with false beliefs or anachronistic assumptions. Today I write and visit with friends and have my hair cut. I think that will be living my life.

Waiting

In writing there is much "waiting to hear." I am in one of those periods. My manuscript for STRING WEAVERS is with a publishing company that publishes Young Adult novels. I think SW is a good Young Adult crossover, which means its audience is teens to adults. My husband, one of my toughest critics, thinks it fits well there and he doesn't even like most novels, being a biography man. I hope the publisher, who has read it before and asked for changes in the point of view, will want it for the company's line of teen books. If not, maybe it will be my "book under my bed" for awhile. I am discouraged about selling it as an adult book and I think it fits better as a crossover.

I have begun outlining Book II in the series, WHITE HAIR. In it Michael meets an ancient Cherokee who becomes his mentor teaching him lessons on how to be a man. There are elements of WWII history and the part the Cherokee played as Wind Talkers in both WWI and WWII. The conflict comes when Michael discovers that some poachers that he and White Hair meet have ties to Hitler's anthropologists who were sent to learn the Indian tribes' languages between wars.

Also, I continue to work on RIGHTEOUS ACTS. During my trip to Birmingham and my walks around Mountain Brook I clarified in my own mind the part Jill's inner conflicts will play in the story. Stay tuned for more.

Writing group

I've been traveling. This past week I went to Birmingham, Alabama to visit my eldest child, my son, and to see as many friends as I could fit into a week. That turned out to be a lot. I had a wonderful time.

One of the people I saw was a friend who I met through Sisters in Crime, the Birmingham Chapter. We decided to exchange some of our writing by email for edit. I respect her opinion and her expertise at editing, so I am excited about this partnership. We ate lunch with another friend who is a school librarian. The two of them make a great pair. They both are avid readers so we had much to say about our reading list this summer.

When I arrived home, one of my classmates in Vicki Lane's "2nd 40" class wrote and told me she also wants to be in a writing group with me. I am thrilled. I like her writing style also and she made some very valid comments to me about my writing during class.

I feel grateful to have so much help ahead.

Working on the Plot

It is not the plot of a book that makes me tremble. I have the plot from beginning to end in my head long before I even put it to paper as an outline. However, the execution of the plot, fleshing it out literally, so that the players are real and reacting as humans act, not as players, is what causes me to stay up late at night writing and rewriting. Fortunately, when I get beyond my panic, I love going with the flow. In fact, I don't want anything or anybody to dam up the flow. I'm in the fear phase right now, but I feel my self-confidence reemerging. Look out Righteous Acts. Your creator likes your characters and is ready to make them real for everyone else.