Oh, What a Tangled Mess I've Knitted

A few weeks ago, I posted about my new passion for crafts, like knitting and making beaded jewelry. I talked about losing much of my enthusiasm for writing, and about the peace and contentment that comes from making things with my hands.

Well, God may be trying to tell me something. I tried to follow a knitted shawl pattern and, after a few days of working on it, realized I needed to rip it out and start over. Easier said than done. I was using a tricky ribbon yarn which refused to ravel back into a nice, neat line. Ever tried to unravel about 50 feet of tangled Christmas lights? Yeah, it was like that.

I hated to just give up and throw the yarn away, because it's expensive, but eventually I decided to just give it to Wendy to play with.

She didn't want it, either.

Then I turned to beading. We went on one of our camping trips, and I sat out under the trees at a picnic table, working on a necklace for my mom for Mother's Day, then another one for myself. Ah...sweet tranquility.

The necklace for my mother came apart three times while I was working on it. (When it was almost finished each time, of course.) My necklace waited until the day I wore it to work, then fell apart. Thirty-three inches of beading, mostly tiny seed beads. Did I mention it came apart in my car? There will be beads rolling around in those floorboards until that little Mercury is scrap metal.

I haven't done much beading lately. On the positive side, I'm starting to enjoy writing again.

I love my writing.

Waiting and Hoping

A few years ago, I decided to brush up on my Spanish language skills, so I took a couple of continuing education classes. One night, a student was struggling through a Spanish passage and translated the word "esperar" as "to wait." The instructor corrected him. Although "esperar" does mean "to wait," in that particular sentence, it meant "to hope." The student remarked on the fact that the same word had both meanings. The teacher shrugged and said, "Why not? To wait is to hope."

As I retell this story, I realize I may have it backwards. She may have said, "To hope is to wait." I don't think it really matters. If you're hoping for something, you haven't attained it yet. You wait, and you hope. You hope, and you wait.

I made a similar discovery when reading a Scripture passage recently. One of my favorite verses is Isaiah 40:31. I learned it in the King James version: "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."

Then one day, I ran across a different translation (NIV): "but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint."

What a beautiful promise! It's so tempting to print the whole of Isaiah 40, which starts off, "Comfort, comfort my people." Just before verse 31, we're assured that God never grows weary or loses strength. Even youths will grow tired and fall, but God has an unending supply of energy, and He will renew us if our trust is in him. (And oh yeah, still another translation of verse 31 begins, "Those who trust in the Lord…")

So it all depends on where we place our trust. Where we place our hope.

If our God is the Lord, to wait is to hope.

New Contest Announced!

It's Friday, so I feel like doing something fun. How about announcing a new prize give-away?

Thanks to all of you who let me know what you'd like to win. After giving it some thought, I decided to run a contest from now through the end of July. On July 31, I'll have a drawing, and the winner can CHOOSE THE PRIZE from among the following:
--a $50.00 gift card to Bath & Body Works
--a $50.00 gift card to amazon.com
--an iPod Shuffle.

There will be three ways to be entered in the drawing:

--ALL who are subscribed at the time of the drawing will be entered.
--If you refer a new subscriber (in other words, you're the reason they subscribe), you'll get an entry in the drawing. Just email me and let me know who you referred.
--As before, each comment you leave from now until July 31 will get you one entry.

So as you can see, there are ways to get multiple entries in the drawing. Isn't this fun?! It is for me, anyway. I hope you folks will enjoy it, too. My personal goal is to have 50 subscribers at the end of July. If I can manage that, I'll really enjoy this contest!

So help me spread the word. And again, thanks!

Research Tip: Making the Most of Google

Okay, if you're on a computer, writing and reading blogs, chances are you use Google. But did you know there are some extra things you can do to make it work even better for you?

There are several more "focused" Google search engines. Each one in itself is pretty nifty. The U.S. Government link will let you search within government sites. So if you want to do a search about space, you'll come up with NASA web pages, for example, minus all the web sites put up by individuals or folks trying to sell you an opportunity to name a star after yourself.

Google is in the process of putting the full text of thousands of books online. Through the Google Book Search, you can search within the full text of those books--and then read them online once you find them! Other books that aren't available in full text can still be searched, and you can see "snippets" from them, showing where your search terms are found. Then there are links to help you find the book in a library or online store.

Then there's the Google Scholar search, for journal articles. And the Google News archive search.

Want to find out what people are saying in their blogs about Pirates of the Caribbean? (Okay, that's probably just me, but it's still a good example.) Go to Google Blog Search.

If you don't want to try out all these new sites, there are plenty of tricks you can use to enhance your search at plain old Google. Start by clicking the "Advanced Search" button next to the quick search box. You can do all kinds of strange and wonderful things from the advanced search screen.

The first boxes let you control how Google looks for your search terms. The boxes are pretty self-explanatory. In the first box ("with all of the words"), you can put terms that absolutely must be in your results. In other words, if you're looking for web pages about The Color Purple, you don't want it to return results that only had "purple" in them. The most popular site could be about eggplants, in that case! Of course, for a search like that, you'd probably want to put "The Color Purple" in the box that says "with the exact phrase."

The box that says "with at least one of the words" is handy when you're not sure which word the authors might have used, and you don't want to miss any good sites. For example, you could put in "illness sickness syndrome disorder" and it would pull up sites that have even just one of those words.

Maybe you're looking for information about flea treatments for dogs. In the box "without the words" you could put "cats," if you want to avoid having to plow through info on felines.

You can put in limits on dates if you want to make certain a site has up-to-date information.

You can tell it to either leave out certain domains, or search ONLY in certain domains (like .com, .org, .edu., .gov, etc.) Maybe you're looking for some academic or scholarly information, so you might want to exclude .com sites, because they can be more commercial. Maybe you want to only search .edu sites, because these come from educational institutions and you could find out what academics are writing on the subject.

I'd tell you more, but it's making me tired just thinking of it all! Check it out and let me know what you think. I'm playing around with it all myself, and will probably cover each of these more in-depth later.

Lessons from Mozart

It's been years since I saw the movie Amadeus, but I have to remind myself of some lessons I learned from it at least once or twice a month.

If you haven't seen the movie, here's a brief synopsis. In the beginning, Salieri is an up-and-coming composer who thinks he is writing beautiful music all for the glory of God. Enter Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a vulgar young man with few morals or redeeming qualities--but with talent that Salieri knows he will never have. Streaming from Mozart, Salieri hears the kind of music that he wanted to write. But why would God give such talent and success to this horrible "creature," instead of to him, who wants to dedicate his music to the Lord?

That question eats at Salieri, until he eventually declares himself God's enemy. He manages to ruin his own life and Mozart's through his bitterness.

It's easy to condemn Salieri, but I have often felt the seeds of those same bitter thoughts starting to grow in me. Have you ever read a book or seen a movie that affected you so deeply that you were astounded by its beauty? That you went around thinking of it for days, feeling it resonating inside you, and yet--you knew it wasn't really worthy? You know the kind I'm talking about. The stories that leave you grabbing for the Kleenex and rooting for the man to "follow his heart" and leave his wife for his mistress. Or maybe the story is noble, but the writer is an appalling mess.

Sometimes I want to ask God--okay, sometimes I do ask God--why do you allow people with such harmful messages to have such talent? I would love to serve you with my gift, and yet it's so paltry by comparison. Why would you allow "them" such success?

And then I remind myself of Salieri. I have to wonder, if serving God had really been his desire, would he have reacted the way he did when he couldn't be the best? Did he really desire God's glory, or his own? And then comes the really tough question--are my motives any more pure than his?

Do you ever ask yourself these kinds of questions? How do we have the necessary drive and ambition to succeed in this writing business, and still keep our focus on God? Have you ever experienced something similar, when you felt that God was clearly choosing the wrong person to carry his message? (In other words, not you!) How do we respond if, even temporarily, God holds us back and chooses to gift someone else?

Speaking of Fires

Tiffany Colter recently shared this inspiring story on the ACFW writers email loop. It's exactly the kind of encouragement we writers need, so I asked her if I could pass it on to y'all. Here's Tiffany:

Last night God did an illustrated message for me right in my back yard. When I shared it with my husband he said I should tell some people we knew were discouraged. Writers get SO discouraged sometimes I thought I'd share it with all of you.

Those of you on the prayer loop, Naners, Cheryl, Pam and Amy know that lately I haven't been my usual bubbly self. LOL. Well, if you're going through a "why not me?" moment, month or decade keep reading.

Yesterday we had a rare beautiful day here in Michigan. It was in the 70s, sunny and beautiful. But since we live on a farm surrounded by half a mile in each direction of flat farm land it was, as usual, windy. One of our family's special treats is building a fire. Our fire pit is an old car wheel [the metal part] sunk down in the ground with bricks from our old chimney around it. It is situated in the 10 feet of grass between our ramp to our back door [built during Chris' cancer treatment] and the 'people' door to our garage.

Our six-year-old asked for a fire and Chris was on his way to a business meeting. I said I'd build a fire. It's been a rough month and this last week has been devastating but yesterday God gave us a day of refreshing and I wanted to celebrate with a fire. A time for mommy and her 4 girls to sit out back and smile and read board books and tell stories. [No this isn't back story, yes it is important.]

So I collected a chunk of pages from the old phone book, a toilet paper tube and sticks to create my "wick." [That is my own creation. You're welcome to steal it.] I put a bunch of twigs and branches down in the fire pit, put a couple of split logs around and stuck my wick in the middle. Usually the paper catches fire, carries it down in the wick through the TP tube and down to the brush on the bottom where the fire is protected from the wind. Yesterday the wind was not cooperating. Every time I got something to burn the wind blew it out.

For 15 minutes I tried various combinations of paper and sticks [I had no 'boy scout water' as my hubby calls it to start the fire]. Each time it would catch fire and the wind would blow it out. Once I got a little fire started so in desperation I grabbed some dried grass on the edge of the yard from when Chris mowed Friday but the weight snuffed out the fire.

Then I heard narration start in my head, just like when I'm writing. It was so clear. It said "This fire is like what you're doing in life." I looked in the pit and saw 4 corners smoldering with paper but nothing productive, nothing was burning to catch the logs. Then the narration continued in my head "The very thing that keeps blowing out your fire is what's going to cause it to ignite."
I kid you not at that moment I struck a match and a piece of paper burst in to flames. For some reason I started to run to our wood shack and grab sticks and throw them on the fire. I started jamming paper underneath. The fire ran down the paper underneath the sticks and out of the wind and ignited all the things I'd been trying to light. Something was stirring inside me. The fire jumped almost as high as me [I'm 5 feet tall]. I ran and grabbed a couple of big logs to hold down the twigs. The wind picked up suddenly and stirred the fire in to an all out tizzy. It was roaring and crackling and popping. I stood there and looked at the fire.

As writers we keep lighting fires with queries, magazine queries, editor/agent appointments, requested fulls and we get excited for that requested full until we get the form rejection letter.
But God said to me last night if we keep doing it eventually the right combination of sticks, paper, grass and matches will connect when the wind has slowed to a calm and it will catch fire. Then when that wind resumes, the thing that has been blowing out your dream will cause your dream to burn nearly out of control. At that moment you can throw everything you've got at it. All those dusty full MS sitting in a drawer, all those rejected articles aging on your hard drive, all those lessons from Writer's conference....You can start throwing them on the fire and it will burn.

Be encouraged today. Normally I would have given up on that fire last night but something inside me said no, it became a game to figure out how to get it to light. Let your pursuit of the "publication dream" become fun--a challenge, not a life or death struggle. Then listen for God to speak because the moment will come when preparation meets divine destiny and God will grab hold of you.

Don't give up....and go start a fire.

Tiffany Colter
Writers Career Planning Services
greatcommission2@aol.com

Contest Winner--I Swear it's not Rigged!

The winner of the May drawing for the $50 amazon.com gift certificate is...Kathleen Morphy.



Yes, that's right. The same Kathleen who won the book last week. Double congratulations, Kathleen! And all I can say to everyone else is, if you can get this woman to go with you to Las Vegas right about now, you would do really well.



I want to start up a new contest. I need help with ideas. (One idea could be to disqualify Kathleen for at least a month. :)



You can make your suggestions simple or lavish, although I'd prefer to keep things within the bounds of reason. I myself, for example, will jump through almost any hoops to try to win an iPod. (I still haven't won one.) I'm not saying I could afford to give away an iPod, although if it brought about really incredible results, like a mob of new subscribers, might be worth it.



What do you like to win? Gift cards? Books? Do you like lots of little contests? One great big one?



Let me hear from you. I love giving stuff away and will do it as long as I can manage it. Thanks for playing along!