Head In a Box

I’ll be honest. I used to have a regular readership, and now, most days, you can hear crickets chirping at my blog. For a time I allowed dust to collect while I focused on my family’s needs. Lately the shift in this blog’s identity is cause for the quiet, as I find myself wondering what to write.

I spent years journaling our adoption experiences and advocating for orphans with HIV/AIDS. When the Lord first called me to step away and concentrate on improving my craft in order to share new messages I experienced a complete lack of words. Literally, I was speechless.

These days I spend most of my time pouring the few words I do possess into writing fiction. After a day of bleeding at the keyboard, I’m usually squeezed dry. All I’ve got to share is how I whittled down a current work in progress from 25, 000 words to 19,000 in a single day, after learning how talented writers make magic happen at the Christian Writer’s Guild Fiction Boot Camp — Hardly blog-worthy stuff.

I finally thought of something to share when I noticed a little square on my dashboard containing the head of Jerry B. Jenkins inside next to a comment on one of my posts. Immediately my mind wiped clean the idea for a post and all I could do was chide myself for forgetting that when I post crap here (yes, you’d think anything you wrote was crap too if you knew Jerry B. Jenkins read it. It’s called insecurity, and I’m SO NOT ABOVE IT.) people can actually see it on the other end of the Internet … even people I’d never imagine would be reading, like Jerry B. Jenkins!

That little head in a box freaked me out. Why? Because the reality that you can never know enough about writing, and that it will be a terribly difficult ministry if I choose to keep pursuing it, smacked me once again. That head reminded me of hearing Jerry B. Jenkins, Doc Hensley, James Scott Bell and DiAnn Mills share how they’re still growing and depending on God to show up on their pages, and highlighted once again the fact that there’s an element to Christian writing that demands spiritual submission.

At Boot Camp I realized learning this craft is daunting yet not impossible. Producing manuscripts worthy of the calling I believe I’ve been given, which is to love and challenge people with words that honor God, really stretches a person. And I’ve got a long  way to go.

Hopefully one of these days my head will be in a box on the back of a book I’ve written. For now, I’ve toiled just to reach 19,000 words in my second novel in-progress, and lamented every challenge. I’ve got to revamp the first four chapters of my previous novel and increase the word count by 30,000.

In light of all the labor ahead I figure now is a good time to celebrate an achievement. I’m happy to announce my first magazine article will be published in P31 Woman Magazine‘s September issue.