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The Story Behind the Story
Nothing is written in a vacuum. Words, even fictional ones, are connected to concrete days, circumstances, and memories. Writing YA The Girl on the Tube was no different than writing grown-up fiction Mother of My Son or The Ground Beneath Us. Here’s a little backstory of its publication journey: About three years ago, an editor who had come across an article I had written for a partner ministry inquired if I’d be interested in writing YA fiction. I crafted a possible plot synopsis and enjoyed a back-and-forth email conversation but didn’t feel settled about signing a contract. This was strange because typically when someone says write I say how many…
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The Stories that Shape Us
There’s something healing about story. Stories draw us in to draw us out. Story invites us to get lost, to fall under a spell, to leave our world and try out another. And then, like a nimble surgeon, Story delves inside of us and gently pokes around, opening up rooms we thought were locked, digging through drawers we forgot existed, holding out dormant hurts and dried-up desires and dusty memories if only to get us to acknowledge they exist. All kinds of revelations and difficult to swallow truths slip through the side door of story. But the real gems don’t leave us on the verge of narcissism. The best stories,…
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Happy birthday Mother of My Son
Forgive me for not chiming in earlier. But before the month of June has completely slipped away… Only four days left on a June Kindle sale for Mother of My Son! A digital copy can be all yours for the low price $1.99! Click here!! There’s my attempt at a sales pitch. Coincidently, or perhaps not, Mother of My Son is 10 years old, if a book’s birthday equates publication date. (Although the story lived in my head and giant early 2000 Dell computer years before then.) Ten years later, would I change some things about the story or writing? Maybe. We all grow as people, and as writers. But…
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What to Kill
It’s not often that the word kill moves us to buy something. Except when it comes to weeds. We want our weeds gone, not wounded, not rendered sickly, but dead. So much so that we may be tempted to reach for a bottle that boasts the promise killer. Even if a pair of gardening gloves and a sturdy hoe are our weapons of choice instead of chemical warfare, any gardener worth her seed knows the survival of wanted plants depends on destroying that which is unwanted, the weeds that persistently threaten to rule. Weeds must be killed. Otherwise, they’ll kill. This past spring, I planted my first rose bush.…
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Bins and Basements
Yesterday I met with my prayer squad: three British friends, me, and Jackie, a fellow American and native Wisconsinite. Somehow, Jackie and I got to talking about how moving to London forced us to sort and purge possessions and decide what should be stored in bins in our respective parents’ basements. “Different kind of bin,” I remembered to clarify. In the UK trash/garbage cans are bins. The ones inside the house are bins, the ones outside are wheelie bins, because they have wheels. Here, Bin it means toss it. Not store it. “What’s a bin then?” one British friend asked. “A box. A plastic box to store stuff in.”…
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It’s Christmas Day and my tree is dead
Sometimes Christmas doesn’t go as planned. Scratch that. Christmas never goes as planned. Not entirely, anyway. Our Christmas tree has been put out to pasture which, in this case, is our back garden. Undecorating it the day after Christmas – Boxing Day – was a bit gloomy but the poor thing had been refusing water for at least a week, even though Doug cut the trunk after it was delivered. In all honestly, with its droopy, needle-shedding branches shrouding our gifts, it should have been put out of its misery on Christmas day but who does that? So we kept the thing propped up and pretended it was alive, like…
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Open Kitchens
My kitchen is the opposite of ‘open concept’. With one door leading to our back garden and another that properly closes to the rest of the house, you could say my wonky kitchen boasts a closed concept design. Once inside with the door shut, no one can see what you’re up to. If you mistake chili powder for nutmeg, no one is the wiser. At least not right away. Three houses ago, in our former teeny, semi-private kitchen, I accidentally poured soapy water on the baby back ribs we had been cooking all day. (Unbeknownst to me, Doug had transferred the BBQ sauce to a bowl and filled the saucepan…
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Fighting Foxes
There are foxes in London. Shortly after we moved here, when I first glimpsed one slinking down the street, I actually cooed, like we all do over a puppy. I know, I know… All of my London friends are shaking their heads at this silly Yankee but in my defense, although plenty of deer visited our house in Wisconsin, including an eight-pointer that engaged me in a staring contest (and won), I was not as familiar with foxes. So, I was a bit intrigued by the cunning little faces that often appeared at dusk. During that same settling into London time when emotions were raw, one of the songs I…
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Buried Truth
What is truth? Such is the question Pilate, governor of Judaea, posed to Jesus, the very person who shockingly claimed, ‘I am the Truth’. History is full of sages who have grappled with the notion of truth: Socrates: Lies are the greatest murderer. They kill the truth. Buddha: Three things can not be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. Gandhi: An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained. Good stuff. I’ve been pondering truth lately and I’d venture to guess some of you have been as well. No matter…
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Mission Impossible
( originally published https://blogs.efca.org/posts/mission-impossible EFCA) I am not moving to London. At least that’s what I told God from our rented room on the top story of The Forester Pub in west London. It was the third night of our family’s vision trip, the culmination of months of praying, counsel-seeking, investigating and eventually applying and interviewing with ReachGlobal. This vision trip was designed to help us determine the fit; to help us answer the question, Is God calling us to join the mission field in London? Three days in and my answer was no. God was not calling us to the mission field in London. My emotions, common sense, as well…