Category Archives: writing life

Reprise: Why I Turned off the Comments

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In view of my references yesterday to this decision — made in June of 2007 — I am reposting it here today.

Why I Turned off the Comments

Thursday, June 14, 2007

In a phrase, because God told me to. In rather stern and shocking terms. I know that sounds wacky, but… guess I’ll just have to sound wacky.

It has little to do with the quality/nature of the comments themselves and everything to do with my motivations and the fact that I am too easily led into the wrong ones. When I started this blog it was something I was doing as unto the Lord, something I believed He was moving me to do for His purposes and not my own. But then came the comments and my own predilection toward fretting about them. Writing something, posting it, then wondering if anyone said anything. Worrying about what people might think of certain topics, and then sometimes hesitating to write what I was feeling led to write. And then, regardless of what I wrote, checking a bunch of times to see if anyone had left something — when I was supposed to be writing. If no one commented, then I might feel dismayed, and that in turn disrupted my mood and confidence for writing, and pretty much annihilated whatever concentration I had before I broke down and checked.

In short, it became a distraction. To make matters worse, the absence of comments would often lead me to start surfing, reading blogs, even checking Amazon, heaven forbid. And if none of that yielded anything, then I would fall into unending repetitions of the entire process. The upshot was… I wasted a lot of time with it all, last year and now. The Lord pulled me through it last year — got the book done in spite of me — but now that I see it happening again, I am convicted of the need to make a change. And I have to say that so far I’m pleased with the peace and the ability to focus that has been restored to me because of this.

I’ll admit that at first I was afraid of offending people because, after all, the accepted, generally publicized reason for a blog is to get out there and start conversations, generate all this cross linkage, interact with readers, draw a lot of attention. Turning off the comments would stop all that and possibly chase readers off. Ultimately though I had to bow to what the Lord was telling me to do and not worry about that. If that’s what happened/happens, so be it. It’s not my intent to offend, and if you wish to comment on a blog post you can always email me through the address in the profile in the side bar. You might even generate a new blog post with your emailed comment!

With WordPress, I’ve not turned off the comments, because I haven’t had the same problems with them that I described in this article. The other stuff though — the likes, the idea that I must go and read other blogs, the supposed requirement of all the cross posting, and etc., so far that’s been the stuff of distraction for me. So, while I’ve not turned off the comments, I have turned off the function that sends an email to me every time someone “likes” a post (an email which then encourages me to go to their blog out of gratitude and leave a comment or like in return).

It’s not that I’m ungrateful, just that I don’t have time or as, Sherlock Holmes recently put it in the new show Elementary, not enough “attic space.”

LOL.

I’m Back

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Quigley wearing free dog antlers from PetCo

Quigley wearing free dog antlers from PetCo

Hi everyone!  And a happy 2013 to you all!

Yes, I’m back. Not necessarily back from physical travels, though we did get over to Southern California to visit the kids and grand-daughter, as well as my 92-year-old stepmother. I am back from that, and also, apparently, from my recent and unexpected blogging silence.

I have no explanation, other than that I had neither  motivation nor words with which to generate a blog post for almost a month now. I haven’t even kept up on my emails. In fact, I’ve done very little on the computer since last I posted, except for Bible Class.

Part of that was the shingles and the fact that it was hard to even look at the screen for a while. Plus I had a regimen of eye drops and pills to take there at first, and kept going back to the doctor for them to gauge my progress. This, added to Christmas preps, demolished my normal routine, which had been suffering anyway. I was also consciously trying to avoid the computer, not only to rest my eyes but in hopes of getting a handle on my addiction to reading blogs and news articles.

Pastor John spoke about this awhile back, how reading the things on the web — things invariably from the world — mess up your mental attitude and make it harder to go back to your work — in his case, studying the Word and preparing his lessons, in mine, working on the book. I had already noticed that effect on my own, but didn’t really give it the attention it deserved. I thought it was just me having no discipline as opposed to information and enticements from the world registering with my sin nature, which in turn agitated for “No More Struggling With that Lame Book! Who’s going to like it anyway? It’s not going to be any good, and you have no discipline…” or…. “You’re just not into it today. Tomorrow will be better. Why not take a break now and go do something else?”  To which I answered “Okay” far too often.

Or… “But I really want to find out what happened/why he did it/more on this subject! I’ll work on the book later…”

On another day, in another lesson, he talked about how sometimes God will shut us down in the operation of our spiritual gift in order for us to realize that it’s His power that’s doing it, not ours. That really resonated as well, but I haven’t really been able to get my arms around it all enough to write about it in any way that makes sense.

A third concept that keeps floating through my awareness is the fact that all this with the blog… specifically the call to do a post 5 days a week, was really more than I could handle and actually write a book, too. Add to that the notion that since this was supposed to build my readership I should be trying to do posts that people would like, and keep track of the numbers and all that… and it only piled on more pressure. And, I see in retrospect, drained energy away from whatever it is in me that comes up with my stories.

Long ago I had determined that God was not calling me to be a marketer — He would do the marketing, and the promoting and publicizing, and my job was to concentrate on writing the book (which He would also do, but that was where I was to focus my attention, not the other stuff).  He told me that in a very vivid and compelling way, and I immediately obeyed and stopped thinking about the marketing.

But the world is relentless in promoting its positions, and after ten years, I became infected with it again. Maybe I had grown enough, I thought arrogantly, that I could handle it now. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to at least try it out, see if it was what I was to do. After all, everyone else is doing it.

No. Not what I’m to do. All the things they suggest one do to build a readership distracts me from my calling. It takes away my time, changes my mental attitude and focus, really seems to mess me up when it comes to my primary calling, which is to write my novels. I learned that once, but as with so many things, forgot the lesson and went back to try it again.

If I’m honest, I have to admit I like the idea of me doing stuff to get folks to read my blog and books. Well, no, actually I don’t like it at all, at least not the actual doing of it. I just like the idea of having some control over it and that’s probably the main issue right there. That I’m going to control things, when God’s the one in control.

Anyway, I’m not going to be doing five posts a week, but 4, and that may not be all the time. I’m not going to be trolling about various strangers’ blogs to see if I might “like” them. I might like them, but I don’t have time to read them. I’m not going to be going out to comment on other folks’ blogs, like they tell me to, in hopes they’ll visit my blog and like it. I’m not going to be trolling about on the internet looking for good ideas for content that will bring in a lot of readers.

I’m going to go back to what this all started out as: me writing my book, posting thoughts that spring primarily out of that and my life and lessons and research. The book comes first. The blog second.

And if the world thinks that’s dumb, I’m okay with that. If I only have six readers, I’m okay with that, too. As our recent lessons on spiritual gifts have taught me, God is the one in charge of the results of my gift, not me.

“For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised (or unknown), God has chosen, the things that are not (ie, humble) that He might nullify the things that are (ie, proud), that no man should boast before God.”   ~ 1 Co 1:26 – 29

Quote: Recover and Recharge

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I can only give thanks to our God that He has allowed me to have a case of shingles almost “in name only.” Its physical impacts have been so minimal, that except for the fact that two doctors have made confident diagnoses that I do in fact have it, I would feel embarrassed to even claim I did. The medications have worked flawlessly so far, their side effects also minimal.

The rash is nearly gone, and my eye looks and mostly feels back to normal, except for occasional zings of nerve pain in the left corner now and then.

But in spite of all that, things have conspired to keep me from the blog and the book. More on that in another post. For now, it’s late, so I’m doing another reprise from my old blog, this quote relevant to my current creative situation:

“Creativity comes in cycles. One month you’re churning out piece after piece, everything you put your hand to comes out fabulous. It seems like it’ll go on forever. You are the Productivity Queen! Next month you crash and burn. You can’t even bear to look at your studio, let alone make something. This is when you need to recognize the signs your body is sending. After a time of great creative work, your brain, spirit and body need a break. You’ve spent your creative energies and your well is dry. It’s time to recharge.”      ~ from Alexia Petrakos’s “How to Recover and Recharge from Creative Burnout” on Collective Creatives – a cooperative artisan blog

He is Not a God of Confusion

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Sea Voyage: Leaving the Land Behind

I think the thing that most helped me from the discussion on the open ended writing process wasn’t so much doing the process itself, but realizing that what I am doing IS hard, and DOES take a lot of time and I WILL feel chaotic and disoriented, even frustrated with all the choices, but that it is okay. It’s actually the point.

The point of the sea voyage is to leave the old “wrong” ideas behind and find a new vision. New ideas, something based on the old, but not the old.

All that was on Tuesday. On Friday I listened to a Bible class from summer 2011 about how the spiritual gift works. I’ve been slowly working my way through those classes as time allows and it had been awhile since I’d listened to this particular series. I can’t even say why I chose to do it that day, but the content fell right in line with what I had been learning about the writing process. Again I found myself transcribing quotes into my journal.

From my entry last Friday:

(This Lesson from Sunday, July 17, 2011) is speaking directly to me!

“The power that flows through my spiritual gift and the results of its function are up to God.”

In my case “results” can mean what I’m seeing as accomplishment, as acceptable “progress.” So even when I can’t see anything, it’s still Him.

“So what does that leave for us to do? We’re merely to nurture a willingness to do the work (write the story) and be prepared. And to put ourselves in the place where the gift can operate. We let Him pick the right time for its operation.”

Which means for me, when the story “emerges” when things finally begin to come together, whether plotwise or world-buildingwise.

“This is new! This is different! This is not the way you’ve been trained (by the world) from birth to get things done.

 “The results are up to God, not you.”

“Therefore, don’t judge your effectiveness in your spiritual gift by the results. Be faithful to what God has called you to do, whatever it is. Just trust that He knows what He’s doing. Don’t freak out. Don’t get depressed, despairing, thinking that maybe you’re not doing what you’re supposed to. If you’re following the Word of God, hearing the Word of God, and being obedient to it, God’s gonna get you where you need to be.”

This on the surface relates to physical position, like at the corner where there’s a person waiting to hear the Gospel from you. But lately I’ve been reading about writing in terms of a journey – the sea voyage. You set out, leave land behind, get lost, don’t know what you’re doing and then gradually you come to a new land…. God will get you where you need to be.

This all SO applies to my circumstances right now. I’m looking through notes, reading various writings, doing open-ended writings and nonstops… trying to figure out/decide whether to have a more direct parallel to our situation today as a nation ( with other nations in my created world, covert ops, war, military actions… ) or make it a more abstract, even stylistic allegory, without all the grand political arena and dispensational stuff…Except I’ve already started both in the prologue, at least hints… And here I’m conflicted again. I feel like I’m getting nowhere..

But in all this mess I must stop and reflect: God will get me where He wants me to be.

Oh! And another message in today’s lesson:

“God is not a god of confusion. This is a very important principle when it comes to your spiritual gift because there’s a big temptation for them to get out of hand, lead to chaos rather than clarity. And God is all about CLARITY. Making things clear.”

So trust Him to do just that. Trust Him to show you the way you should go and believe that He is, even if it doesn’t look like you think it should look.

The Open Ended Writing Process

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Things are looking up! Last week I came into the office and actually worked a minimum of 2 hours a day, and usually more like 3 or 4, on The Other Side of the Sky! For 6 days in a row!

YAY!

Okay, so maybe my use of the word “work” might be giving you the wrong idea. The first few days I came in and wrote in my writing log, walked laps around the house, walked laps around the yard, lay on the bed and thought, did nonstops and all too often caved to my desire to read the news, which after all, is only a click away.

But each time I fell into that made me more desirous of not doing it again.

I also made a point of closing down the computer around 9pm and getting to bed earlier. Not being sleep deprived helps tremendously in being able to control one’s sudden impulses to do other than what one has decided to do for the moment.

And after a week I have learned that it really is true: I can not do as much as I wanted and thought I could. But I am liking that. I am feeling uncluttered. More able to breathe. More focused on the work.

Last week, Tuesday, actually, sometime around the end of my daily work period, I opened one of the books I keep on my shelf, that I have referred to often during the course of my writing “career.”  That book is Writing with Power by Peter Elbow.

I have a paper on doing “Open-Ended Writing,” one I prepared from concepts taught in this book, and I had been trying to do some, but they didn’t seem to be working out. So  I decided to look up Elbow’s original writing on the matter.

Here’s the first thing I found, most of which I copied into my journal:

The open-ended writing process… is a way to bring to birth an unknown, unthought-of piece of writing — a piece of writing that is not yet in you. It is a technique for thinking, seeing, and feeling new things. This process invites maximum chaos and disorientation. You have to be willing to nurse something through many stages over a long period of time and put up with not knowing where you are going. Thus it is a process that can change you, not just your words.

As the most creative and unmethodical writing process, I associate it with poems or stories or novels…”

This blew me away when I read it. For two reasons, one, because it’s exactly what I’ve been experiencing… chaos, disorientation, taking a long time, not knowing where you are going… YES!  That’s exactly what it’s been like.

I have hit a wall because I am trying to take the story someplace it’s not supposed to go. I know that sounds weird and esoteric, but it’s the only way I can describe it. It’s happened before.

Years back in writing The Light of Eidon, I wanted there to be a fire in Southdock. Abramm was supposed to run in there and help put the fire out as I recall. I couldn’t get myself to write it.  Kept trying. Even forced myself to write it until I couldn’t stand it any more….

And then I realized that I was trying to take the story in a place it wasn’t supposed to go. I backed up, rethought and came up with a new line that worked perfectly. Later, there actually was a fire in Southdock… I think that was in book 3, Shadow Over Kiriath. But even in that book Abramm was not involved in fighting the fire, it was just one of those things you want to “have happened” but not that you want your protagonists involved in.

Anyway, I think something like that is happening now. It may not be as major of a course correction as “don’t have that scene at all” but it’s set me on a new line of thinking. One that has suggested perhaps I need to change the whole world as I’ve developed it.

The reason this is such a difficult proposition for me is that I don’t just sit down and by fiat say, “This is how the world will be. There’ll be this single nation and this floating city, and it will be inhabited by these people and…”

Because that never works. I need the world and the characters and the doctrinal analogy and the plot all to come together and I have never been able to do that by taking one part of the story and developing it rigidly and then heading on to the others. Just. Can’t. Do it.

The biggest problem I have with all this is that I keep forgetting that. Keep wanting to take control and try to get my mind around at least one piece so I can develop that, and have at least SOMETHING that won’t change when I think about it. And that’s not what God would have me do.

Here’s the rest of the quote from the book on this subject that I transcribed into my journal, plus my response after copying it:

“I think of the open-ended writing process as a voyage in two stages: a sea voyage and a coming to new land. For the sea voyage, you are trying to lose sight of land — the place you began. Getting lost is the best source of new material. In coming to new land you develop a new conception of what you are writing about — a new idea or vision — and then you gradually reshape your material to fit this new vision. The sea voyage is a process of divergence, branching, proliferation, and confusion; the coming to land is a process of convergence, pruning, centralizing, and clarifying.”

MY JOURNALED THOUGHTS:

YES! This is what I’ve been doing! Haltingly, reluctantly. Thinking I’m failing instead of S-L-O-W-L-Y  progressing. All these whirling ideas, things that appear in my head but I can’t see how they fit into the whole… It frustrates me, and yet it’s exactly the work I’m to be doing. It’s the same process Pastor John’s been teaching in the spiritual life. I have all these papers and cards with notes on them, these half-formed ideas regarding the world and as I’ve encountered before, I can’t just start deciding stuff because it’s not linear, it’s holistic. It comes together all at once seemingly out of nowhere, not piece by piece.

This is kind of how the spiritual life goes as well, the chaos, the blindness, not knowing, the crazy stuff and where is God… and all the while, like in the Artistic Coma, He’s there, beneath it all, inside, so deep we can’t see it, can’t feel it, can’t even tell, but He’s working on us.

It’s weird the way all this fits together for me… But that’s gotta be Him as well.

More Problems with the Space Time Continuum

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***

Last week, back before the election I wrote a post about the need to find a place for my mind, a “space that is free and uncluttered during the day” and said that I had come round to the renewed conviction that I really do have a need for a writing routine… a schedule.

The problem is, I never seem to be able to keep it, once I start it. So what good would it do to set up yet another schedule to follow, knowing I would fail yet again? And what about all those promises from God that He was going to do things? How do I factor that in? Is it me or is it Him? And how can I know the difference?

So I went to Him with these questions and He’s been answering me, though perhaps not in the way I expected.

My first realization was that I’m trying to do too much. In addition to walking the dog, daily Bible class, and the routine basic chores of housekeeping and personal hygiene, there have been all these other things that have come to my attention that I’ve been thinking I’d like to do.

Things like read the Bible through in a year by doing daily chapters; like doing a sketch a day, spending 15 minutes a day decluttering, practicing the piano every day. This in addition to taking care of the small garden I’ve inherited from my mother. It’s not enough to simply care for the two potted roses… I have to fantasize about finishing the brick patio, and doing many other things to improve the look of the yard.

Then there are the projects… the sewing things… if I could just schedule in half an hour a week. And there are the cards. And some paper-crafting scrapbook type projects I’ve been wanting to do with the Psalms. I’ll need to set aside some time to attend to those.

And don’t forget reading. I have a stack of books I’ve slowly accumulated through my readings of the various blogs… all of them waiting for my attention. If I just devoted fifteen minutes a day to them, I could get through them.

Then there are the long-term tasks about the house that need a place on the schedule — shampooing the carpet, washing windows, cleaning out closets…

And of course all the things that need to be done relative to the holidays.

Oh and baking! That’s fun. I love scones and coffee cake and cookies… I can always squeeze some of that in.

Finally, there’s all the TV I’ve started watching — six shows now, six hours a week. At minimum. But this is time with my hubby… so I can’t eliminate that.

Um…

I’m beginning to see some space-time continuum violations here as I’ve laid all this down (well, I saw them when I laid all this out last week, as well). Clearly I cannot do all that stuff. Even if I didn’t have to sleep, I wouldn’t be able to do all that. It’s… lunacy.

Plus trying to break up your day (more like shatter it) into fifteen minute increments provides NO time for any kind of substantive thinking. And I think it’d just be frazzling, having to change gears every half hour.

I think all this may be an artifact left over from my reading of The Artist’s Way  a couple of years ago with its encouragement to think of all these things you’d like to do and then go do them. That is probably not exactly what was advised but that’s the way I took it, and it’s not been good for me.

Furthermore, with all these “projects” or endeavors that I’m intending on constantly doing, I was leaving most of the materials needed to do them out around the house where I could see them and be “reminded.” Well, I was reminded all right and it wasn’t pretty: Oh yeah, I gotta do that wedding card; oh yeah, I want to scrapbook all those pictures; oh, right, I want to do a sketch today. And there’s those books I want to read. And the patio that I want to fix and the closet that needs to be cleaned, and the piano — I need to call the tuner, before it gets too out of tune again and if I’m going to do that, I’d better start playing it, too.

Before long I’m feeling anxious and condemned, wanting to do all the things on my mental list, in some way thinking I should be able to, not really accepting the fact that

THERE IS NO WAY I CAN

and just muddling my way through each day trying to do the impossible. And when I inevitably fail, I heap on the guilt.

So. I decided to make some changes.

First, I acknowledged and accepted that I cannot do all the things I want to do to.

(Yes, I know:  DUH!!!)

Second, I put away all those half-done projects, so I’m not continually reminded that I want to do them. If there’s time, I might do a card. If not. Oh well. I have a book to write. I can do cards later.

It turns out that “Out of sight, out of mind” really does work!

That alone made a significant difference.

Third, make daily writing a priority. That means, “No, you can’t check the email before you start. And no, you can’t take just a minute to check Drudge. You know it won’t end there. And just forget about the blogs ’til later. Really, what do you think you’ll find there? The powers that be will spend all year sorting through Benghazi and the Petraeus thing and you’ll likely still never find out what really happened anyway!”

I haven’t yet decided on what kind of schedule to follow with the writing itself.  I’m afraid if I don’t get in and write immediately upon getting up, I won’t do it. But my hands don’t always work right when I immediately get up. (the CREST syndrome makes them go to sleep if I try to type for long; later in the day there’s no problem)  So I’m still working on that. I think I’m going to go day to day and let the Lord lead me into the one that works best.

Four, cut back on the TV!  Tonight is my first cut: Hawaii 5-0.  Much as I like Alex O’Loughlin in the role of McGarrett, I’m finding this season’s changes annoying. I don’t like McGarrett’s relationship with Catherine (which seemed to come out of the blue), I can’t stand his mother, and Danny’s been driving me increasingly up the wall. Plus staying up for a show that in Arizona ends at 10pm results in me not getting to bed until around 11 and that leads to either a later rising time, or me be awakened by Hubby when he leaves for work and then I get shorted on sleep. Getting shorted on sleep has a direct impact in my ability to withstand the impulses of my flesh to go do whatever tickles my fancy at any given moment.

Finally, I’m going to follow Flylady’s method for establishing a new habit (work every day on the book) and according to her that takes a month of consistent practice. So I get a star for each day I go into the office and get some work on Sky done.

Today was my first day of full implementation. I got into the office at 8am, and actually did get some work done on sky. Maybe about 3 to 4 hours worth (I forgot to note the times). I did not finish my weekly household chores, but I’m hoping to do so tomorrow.

And once I publish this post I can do my stretching and then head straight to bed. And it’s not even 10 o’clock yet!

A Place for My Mind

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Well, I’ve been on another journey, I think. A thought journey. A life journey. I’m not sure what to call it.

For some time I’ve wrestled with should I have a routine or shouldn’t I? Should I try to force myself to write or just let it come? Set up a schedule and force myself to keep it or not, seeing as I always fail.

Then pendulum has swung back and forth. I look at old notes from the “schedule” stage and am repelled, certain they are all wrong. Whenever I try to do the schedule thing I start into the control mindset and it only ends up in failure and guilt. So I’ll just relax and let God the Holy Spirit guide me. But then my life unravels and I never seem to get to the book. So then the pendulum swings back, I go back to the notes and start over. Is self-control a fruit of the Spirit? Or something I’m supposed to do?  Didn’t God say that he would work in me “both to will and to execute for his good pleasure?”

It seems to me I’ve gone back and forth and back and forth for over a year now. Maybe longer than that. But I think perhaps there’s been a couple of small changes in my thinking that might make a bit of difference.

Last Friday I listened to a message by Pastor Farley delivered last summer on spiritual gifts that shed new light on my confusion.

“When we’re living in our gift, it’s because of the ongoing work of God the Holy Spirit through us. That’s a great comfort. There’s nothing worse than when you get to any point in the spiritual life and think it’s up to you; when I get the idea that yes, at the moment of salvation God the Holy Spirit gave me a gift but now I gotta run with it. I gotta do something with my gift.

NO!

God the Holy Spirit will continue to do things with that gift as you allow him to, as you say yes to Him, as you put yourself in the place of being available (99% of these things is showing up). You say, “I’m available. I know my gift is (writing) and I’m gonna put myself in a place where that gift can function  and I know the rest is up to the Holy Spirit.”

The Bible says you’ll be promoted at the proper time, when God says so, and that whenever it is you’ll be using your gift, God will provide both the will and the power to do it. So it continues to be the Holy Spirit’s operation and ministry all the way throughout our lives.”

That really zinged me. Especially the part about putting myself in a place where I know my gift can function.

That place is my office. It’s my couch. It’s walking laps around the house. It’s a place of the mind more than the body. Not a mind cluttered with all sorts of random thoughts, half-baked ideas, urges, to-do lists, etc.

So clearly the first thing to do is make a space for my mind to be free and uncluttered during the day. Hence my return to the schedule idea.

To be continued…

A Day in My Life

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Well, I wanted to put up another post on thoughts generated by my reading of America Lite, but I’m afraid I’ve reached the end of my day without sufficient mental energy to do that. Yes, I started the post yesterday, but there are so many thoughts, it’s hard to narrow them down into something that makes sense.

I’m also in the process of working on a Big Project that has nothing to do with writing, which is partly why I don’t have any energy. And, I’ve been making a point getting in at least two hours of writing work a day on Sky (I’m using a modified version of the pomodoro system I wrote about here) in addition to my weekly Monday house cleaning stint. I’ve been putting the latter off for a couple of weeks now… I run out of time, tell myself I’ll do it tomorrow and hey! Tomorrow never comes.

So today I just decided to do it first. I put on my mp3 player tuned to messages from Pastor John last week (which were EXACTLY what I needed to hear, last week and today) and went through all the chores instead of trying to split them up across 5 days. Worked much better and I was glad to just have it all done.

After that and breakfast, I did 8 pages of revision on chapter 6. Oh and I printed up the following, which I found whilst re-reading my old blog:

Really bad means REALLY BAD

I forgot about writing really lousy drafts! Or rather, I knew about it, and I even have a sign about it on my desk, but I’d forgotten about it. Kind of like I know the Lord has promised to take care of me and bless me , and that He is wise and good and kind and powerful, yet suddenly I am worried and fretful again. I know it, but it’s not registering. I’m not applying it.

Really lousy drafts are just that. Really lousy drafts. Bad, bad writing that makes me wince as I’m setting it down. Sentences and thoughts that provoke all manner of objections — No! It can’t be that way. It should come after this, or before that. Or, This is really cornball… Or melodramatic. Or off the wall.

I just have to plug my mental ears and keep on writing, one bad sentence after another.

I love these reminders from the past. Besides reminding me of principles and activities I’d forgotten about, they also remind me of how much I forget!

I spent the afternoon working on the project before more Bible Class, walking Quigley, making and eating dinner and then… putting in some time on the blog post before Hawaii 5-0 (Danno is really starting to bug me and this episode — he and McGarrett on the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad fishing trip — he was especially obnoxious. I wasn’t too fond of that character in the original series, either, though I think for different reasons.)

Well, if I want to have any mental energy at all tomorrow, I’d best stop this and get to bed.

Update: Writing Again

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Today I went into the office and worked on Sky. For at least five hours. In fact, I’ve worked on Sky for at least two hours every day this week. I finished a rewrite of Ch 5 and for the last couple of days have been working on rewriting Ch 6. Kind of amazing.

I also think I’m finally getting to a place of clarity relative to what’s been going on in terms of the distractions and such.  Regular readers may recall I have been waffling between “get control of your life, make a schedule, have a little self-discipline” and “relax and trust the Lord to see it done.”  Well, the answer seems to be… It’s both!

I am not clear enough on it to actually articulate it, but perhaps in time I will. I’m still testing out whether I really do understand what’s going on or not.

Anyway, I worked through a lot of questions and details of setting today. I’m hoping tomorrow I can move through more pages. We’ll see.

One Day At A Time

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Well, I’m tired this week. Still getting over a cold I’ve had for over 10 days now. And We had a big weekend — my hubby wanted to throw a party for friends who’d helped him with this Bighorn Sheep Hunt last year, and so I helped. It was an all day affair on Saturday that started at 7am and lasted until 2am the next morning. After a few hours sleep, we started in on the clean up.  I had a nap after that.

Monday I was good — worked on Sky for three hours! — but Tuesday I crashed entirely. Slept almost all day. Watched TV all evening… (Well.. they were the season openers for NCIS and NCIS:LA, so… I’d have watched them anyway. Probably wouldn’t have sat there for VEGAS though…)

Today I was in the blank, wandering around the house staring at things mode. Trying to make sense of the notes I had for Sky, feeling like the entire premise was absurd and fatally flawed and how had I ever thought this was remotely interesting?

So I didn’t work on the next blog post I’d thought to do for my impromptu Light of Eidon week. In fact, I couldn’t even decide which one of several to do.

So I got the idea to go looking again at my early newsletters… the ones I put out right after Eidon released and found this bit from one I put out in April of 2003, written while I was deep into the writing of Book 2: The Shadow Within.

It applies today as surely as it applied nine years ago, and was actually a comfort to me to reread in my current circumstances.

One Day at a Time

I’ve been writing for a long time, and have never been a fast writer. I have always tended to go three steps forward and back up two. Sometimes I have to rewrite and rewrite until I get the thread right, and only then can I go on with the story.

Often I may go for two or three days getting nowhere at all, blank and empty and even indifferent. Then the doors will open, the scenes will emerge and all will be well. Until I hit the next blank spot.

Over the years I have tried setting up various writing schedules according to the generally accepted advice that if you want to complete a big project, you must divide it into increments, then proceed to carry out each increment in its time. I would make up my schedule of how many chapters I wanted to complete over a certain period of time, and determine that I would be professional and disciplined and Just do It! It doesn’t matter if it’s good or not, you just have to write it. Except . . .

I couldn’t.

Never have I managed to keep one schedule. Always I hit a snag, go over the allotted time, then hit another snag and another until the deadline I had set for myself fades into dim memory. I have received much friendly and helpful advice on how to deal with this, but none of it ever works.

Over the last few months, as I contemplated the remaining time I had left before Book 2 (The Shadow Within) is due, I found myself increasingly disturbed that I still hadn’t reached the point where I could sit down, plan out a schedule of work, then embark upon that work and be confident that it would all be done on time.

Throughout all this, the Lord was reminding me that I should be trusting Him about it, but the voice was too still and small, and the message too familiar.

I was too busy thinking about how much time I had left and comparing that with how much work I thought I had left to do. Too busy harassing myself to get to work, to be more disciplined, to force the story out. Too busy getting upset over outside things that came in to steal my time. Too busy beating my head against the wall–for it was all to no avail.

The story wasn’t coming any faster than it ever had. But the idea of stopping that, and giving it all over to Him? How could I do that? To do that would mean losing all control over it.

It wasn’t until I had that last ridiculous thought that I realized how silly I was being. I had no control over it anyway, so what’s the big deal about giving it over to Him?

Clearly I had a choice to make. Was I going to continue to seek to control the what for me is an uncontrollable process, flailing myself for my lack of progress and worrying about what would happen in the months to come when the Lord clearly tells me not to? Was I going to continue refusing to rest in Him, and instead seek to use my own strength and ability (obviously lacking) to handle this?

Cursed (miserable!) is the one who puts her trust in man. Or woman, as the case may be.

Finally, that verse, one I memorized long ago, got through. The light went on and I backed off.

So from here on out it’s one day at a time. I WILL stay out of the future. Whatever progress He gives me, I will accept, without making a fuss about what hasn’t been given. If I fail to concentrate or use my time wisely on any given day, I can have confidence that He knew, way back in eternity past, that I would fail and He took it into account when He made His plan.

If something comes up that diverts my time and energy away from the book, I will remember that it is also part of the plan, and that He has everything under control, knowing precisely how long it will take to make this book what He wants it to be. This is His book, not mine, so He’ll have to see that it gets done in spite of me. (I especially like that part.)

Now, at last, I can rest, knowing that even though I am “dust”, inadequate and weak, He is completely adequate and His strength will be perfected in my weakness. I may bungle my way through my days and the writing of this book, but He who is wise and good and faithful and gracious is at work in me nevertheless. And His Plan is not only perfect, it’s brilliant!

“Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is in the Lord, for he will be like a tree planted by the water, that extends its roots by a stream and will not fear when the heat comes.” ~ Jeremiah 17:7