My New Cat Philosopher

I’ve written frequently about my various Himalayan cats, and the life lessons I’ve learned from them. (Just check out the “cats” tag for previous articles, if you’re interested.) While I was on my blogging break, my last Himalayan baby, Wendy, died of cancer.

I was a little afraid she might be my last pet for a long time. My poor hubby isn’t really into pets, but two cats came into our marriage and lived a LONG time, and then we ended up fostering Wendy. But fortunately, I’m married to a wonderful, unselfish man!

So about a week later, I ended up with Minerva Pearl (a.k.a. Mini, or Mini Pearl).

My mom has always had a colony of feral cats on her land, and when Wendy died, there was a litter of wild kittens out behind her house. They were probably ten or eleven weeks old. One evening I went out to my mother’s after work, and Dave was already there. He told me to go look on the back porch, and when I did, I found a cat carrier with a very scared tabby kitten inside. He had caught one of the ferals for me!

Like her predecessors, Mini is constantly providing me with spiritual lessons. For example—how did I end up with her instead of one of the other kittens? Because she was the one Dave managed to catch with a fishing net! None of them wanted to be caught. They all thought we humans were evil, just intent on hurting them or ruining their lives.

But now I compare her life to that of her litter mates—especially when I leave my mom’s house on a frigid winter night and know they’ll be sleeping outside, while Mini will most likely be snuggled in bed with me. She has constant attention, safety from predators, the best food and medicine, people to love her and play with her. Not to mention her own personal doorman who lets her out on the screen porch and into the house, back and forth, about a million times a day.

And yet, she fought it for all she was worth. Which, of course, makes me think about my total misunderstanding, so many times, of what God is trying to do in my life. I wonder how many times I’ve mistrusted Him, or thought my way was better—when I might have missed out on something wonderful because I was too afraid to go through that scary moment when He put his hand on me.

Mini isn’t quite two years old yet, so I’m sure she has a lot more to teach me. I’ll keep you posted!

I Set Another Waiting Record

I can't swear this is a record--but if any of you have ever waited longer than two years to hear that you placed in a writing contest, please let me know.

Seriously...God obviously wants me to learn how to wait!

A couple of years ago, I wrote on my other blog how I discovered the Harry Potter books in 2008, and credit them with reviving my imagination and my writing. I have to confess that, even at my ripe old age, I started reading fan fiction at Mugglenet--which led to my deciding to try my hand at writing it. Way, WAY back in my youth, I used to write Star Wars fan fiction, and I have to tell you, writing fiction for appreciative fans was in many ways a lot more fulfilling than trying to write stuff to sell.

In June of 2011, Mugglenet had one of their frequent contests, in which they had "prompts" for the entries. As I recall, the prompt I chose was for a mystery story, which had to include the following: an item missing from a locked room, and the only clues are mugs on a table and blue beads on the floor. (It's been so long, I can't remember exactly, but something like that.)

The entries closed, and...the wait began. And went on, and on. The judging never happened. I forgot about it.

Two days ago, I received word that my entry came in second!

Somehow I have a feeling that if The Queen hadn't entered, the judging would have happened in a month! In fact, the judge apologized and said that they have contests all the time and this kind of delay had never happened before. I hope she doesn't find out what the difference might have been this time around.

Anyway, it's still fun to find out that an old lady like myself could write a story those younglings over at Mugglenet liked. If any of you like Harry Potter and want to check it out, here's the link to my story, called Funny Business. (By Chocolate in the Library--that's me!)

MLIW

MLIW—that means “My Life is Weird,” right?

A younger cousin posted that as his Facebook status a couple of weeks ago, and it took me a while to figure out what it meant. If I got it right, I think I could keep that as my permanent status.

Case in point. I was offered a book publishing contract, and I turned it down. Well, sort of.

Here’s how it happened. I read an essay by a writer who had recently published her first novel, after a long and frustrating journey that sounded a lot like mine. Secular publishers didn’t like her book because it was “too Christian.” Christian publishers didn’t think her work was appropriate for their readers.

I’ve had exactly the same responses to my writing, so I thought I made a brilliant move. I looked to see the name of the company that finally did publish her book, and I submitted to them.

A couple of steps (query, then full manuscript), and a few weeks later, I was being offered a contract.

Trouble was, they explained that they had several publishing “levels.” The first two are a traditional model, but in levels 3 and 4, they ask for a financial investment from the author. They had decided to offer me level 3 since this is my first book.

Now, honestly, I knew about these levels fairly early on in the submission process, but I thought I had a good shot at getting one of the first two levels (if I were offered a contract at all). Their guidelines stated that unpublished authors with endorsements from published writers usually get level 1 or 2 contracts—and I have good endorsements. Also, I don’t mind the idea of contributing a bit to the process, if this company was on the up-and-up. According to them, they publish books that other companies won’t because the book might be worthwhile, but fit a small niche market, but have to ask for an investment from the author to be able to afford to do this. That sounded reasonable to me—and hey, the “contribution” they ask for is much cheaper than self-publishing, which I’ve also considered.

The trouble was, I started to wonder about this company. The level they offered me didn’t seem to fit with their guidelines. They seemed to move too quickly. I looked at some of their books on Amazon and didn’t like the quality of the book descriptions and covers. But the clincher was, I contacted the original author who got me started on all this and asked her about them. She told me she’s not happy being published with them and frankly thought self-publishing might be better.

As you can imagine, that did it.

So…Glass Houses is still languishing out there with a couple of “traditional” editors. I’m working on a second draft of Jordan’s Shadow. And did I mention, my life is weird?

Just Try to Top This!

Last week, I finally—I can hardly even believe I’m saying this—FINALLY finished a complete draft of a manuscript called Jordan’s Shadow. I have been trying, off and on, to write a complete draft of it for, let’s see…approximately 30 years. Yes, that’s right. Thirty years. I just dare any of you to top that record for persistence. Or procrastination. Or insanity. One way or the other, that’s got to be some kind of record.

The idea for Jordan’s Shadow actually came to me more than 30 years ago. I was casually thinking about time travel. (This reminds me of a Stephen King quote I once heard. He was talking about being in a grocery store and thinking what it would be like if pterodactyls were flying around in the store, because, according to him, that’s the kind of thing he thinks about.) Anyway, I was thinking about going back in time and meeting my parents when they were teenagers like me. As I was mulling this over, another thought occurred to me. Suppose I were able to time travel and become friends with my mother, but she didn’t know who I was—she  thought I was just another girl from her neighborhood. So then what would she think when she had a daughter who started to grow up and turn into a carbon copy of the girl who was her friend in her youth?

This may not do much for you, but it gave me chills. I went even further with the idea. What if the mother-daughter hadn’t been friends, but enemies? What if the poor time-traveling daughter never made it back to her right time, because she died in the past—and maybe Mom was even implicated in the accident that caused it? And now, Mom sees her darkest secret from the past revealed in the face of her adolescent daughter!

Not long after I started playing around with the idea, I heard that a movie called Back to the Future was planned, and I got discouraged and thought about scrapping JS. The ideas sounded too similar. But after seeing the movie, I knew there was no problem. First, for some reason, Marty McFly’s parents were too dense to recognize Marty as the boy they knew twenty or thirty years earlier. Second, Jordan’s Shadow is definitely not a comedy. Maybe I could bill it as Back to the Future done as a creepy gothic.

I realize I’m writing Jordan’s Shadow spoilers in this post and hope I don’t ruin anything for you assuming it ever gets published. But hey, who really reads my blog, anyway?

None of the above explains why it took me so long to write a complete draft. I think, partly, because the way I started this story was so different from the way I usually write. It started with a premise, but aside from the fact there would be a mother and a daughter, I didn’t know who the characters in the story would be. And I really had no plot aside from the premise.

The plot has evolved over the years and has become as convoluted as one of the latter seasons of Lost. Actually, I’m hoping Lost has trained a generation of readers to be able to comprehend Jordan’s Shadow.

I'm not sure why I kept going back to this manuscript. Maybe I've worked on overcoming my tendency to start things I don't finish to the point I'm now obsessive about letting projects go. But I've also always felt there was something to this story, something unique and worthwhile, even though writing it has been about as much fun as a 30-year root canal. And of course, I still have major rewriting ahead of me, but now that the plot is laid down from start to finish, that seems like a breeze by comparison. 

Maybe that will only take five or ten years!

When You Don't Know What to Hope For

Well, I came back from my long blogging break, wrote one in-depth post, and then disappeared again for a couple of weeks. But I’ve had a very good—or very bad—reason.

I had already started my next post. It was going to be called “When You Don’t Know What to Hope For,” and this is how it was going to start:

In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda has some pretty tough criticism of Luke Skywalker’s potential. “This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away…to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph.”

That was always me. Trying to dash through the boring routine and get through the waiting. Thinking the good stuff was out there on the horizon. We always tend to think of waiting and hoping for something good—like publishing a book and becoming a successful author, for example. But now, I’m faced with waiting through a situation with no good outcome, at least not in the earthly sense.

My dad has been getting more and more frail and sick, day by day. He and my mother can’t be left alone, which means my sister and I are either at work or taking care of Daddy about 95% of the time. Sometimes it feels as though it’s been going on forever…and will continue to. Even though we’re happy to do all this for our dad and mom, it’s exhausting and sad, and sometimes we feel trapped.

And yet…what do we hope for? We’d like some normalcy and freedom again, but we don’t want to lose our precious father. With him being 85 years old, with an incurable and progressive condition called microvascular ischemia, there don’t seem to be any good possibilities out there.

So that’s what I had started writing. And then suddenly…the wait was over, and my dad was gone.

Daddy at home in 2008.

Isn’t that the way of this life? Sometimes it’s hard to remember that nothing is permanent. Life is change, even when it seems as though we will wait forever.

It’s too soon for me to say anything terribly profound about all this. I do know that—most of the time—I valued those times with my dad. There were many days I was able to enjoy his sense of humor, his gratitude, his sweet smile even in the midst of all we were going through.

I believe the secret to the days ahead will be to focus on the eternal, the good things that really are out there on the horizon, beyond this world, for those who love the Lord. And my daddy did love the Lord.

I’m not there yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

New way for me to reply to your comments!

I've been wishing this blog had a feature so I could hit "reply" and write you back when you comment on one of my posts. And finally, I figured out how to set it up! Your comments are really important to me, and I intend to make every effort to reply when you leave one. You should also be able to reply to one another's comments so we can have good discussions, and even subscribe to follow-up comments from one particular post.

Looking forward to talking with you!

Happily Ever After Takes Work!

This past weekend, Dave and I celebrated our twenty-third wedding anniversary. We went to Hilton Head Island, which was also where we spent our honeymoon. Even though it rained all weekend—until the morning we had to leave, of course; isn’t that always the way?—we had a wonderful trip. We walked in the rain, climbed to the top of the lighthouse, ate fresh seafood, and in the evening built a fire and ordered pizza.

Getting married was another one of those dreams of mine that seemed to take forever. I was a few weeks shy of thirty-one when we finally walked down the aisle. At the time, I thought I was ancient. I thought ice ages could have come and gone in the time I spent fretting over whether I would be single forever!

You know, in fairy-tales and movies, getting to the “I Do” is the happy ending, but in the real world, that’s just the beginning. Dave and I had both been single and independent for a long time, not to mention we’re both very stubborn people. So the adjustment was extremely difficult, and I don’t mean for a few weeks or even a few months. Sometimes I think back on the years he had to put up with my attitude and am amazed he’s still around.

Truth be told, if we hadn’t both believed that marriage is forever we probably would have separated in those early years. But we hung in there, and miracle of miracles, today we’re best friends. Happily married—ever after, I hope. But I know it’s easy to slip, and we have to guard our relationship constantly.

I try to remember all of this when I start to despair of my other dreams. I try to remember that each day is a gift the Lord has made, and that if and when I manage to cross over that magic line into fulfillment, well then…that day will have its joys and challenges just like the others.

Then again, I also know that dreams are worth working for. Even on the days when you’d rather throw the whole mess out the window. Looking at my best friend and husband of twenty-three years makes me remember that.