Thus Far

Picture Credit Recommended Listening 6:20 : My phone chimes, a gentle melody with a light buzzing—it’s the vibrating that shakes me awake. I turn quickly to stop the sound before it wakes my roommates (aka sisters), and then I lay for a few minutes, enjoying the cozy morning coolness under soft, sherpa blankets. It takes a little time to coax the sleep from my limbs and my body from the bed, but eventually, I make my way up. I pad across the room and fetch a water bottle, my Bible, notebook, and pencils from their place on my mantel. Wrapped in my favorite hoodie, I crawl back under the covers, arrange my pillows into a comfortable chair, and then open God’s Word to have some Just Us Time before the full day begins. I finished the book of Micah earlier this month (the prophets’ books are always so fascinating), and I think I have a new favorite verse from it. Picture Credit I turned that picture into my laptop background to keep that reminder close over these next few weeks. 🥰 7...

 Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of Abbie Emmons' videos , and one of the main things I’ve heard her talk about is why people engage with stories and what makes them matter. One of her claims (and this was likely hyperbole, so I’m not taking it fully literally) is that people don’t really care about the storyworld or gorgeous writing or anything extra like that, rather they come to a story to experience the characters and their internal conflict . To a certain extent, I think this is true. I mean, I definitely come to stories for the characters. Everything else can be chef’s-kiss wonderful, but if I don’t care about the protagonist, I’m going to knock off at least one star from the review. Vice versa, there can be any number of iffy sections with the writing and I might not even know what the what was the plot, but if I fell head over heels for the characters’ journeys, they’ll go on my favorites list till the end of time. So, while this statement is certainly true for me, I’m...

I wrote last fall about how I was starting over from the beginning, to learn to write again . I’d been writing seriously for almost 10 years, but my career didn’t reflect that. A lot of things had happened during that decade, from the personal to the global and back again, that had set me back and hindered my idea of success; I remember feeling that the only way I could move consistently forward was to start over and learn to write again from the very beginning. I thought it would be poetic, less actual learning , more just putting in daily practice, letting the words flow and the manuscripts form in a less-stress way. Perhaps, after a few months, I might even emerge with a masterpiece. But as I went back to study writing blogs and videos like I used to, I found that, despite the many things I do know about writing good characters, recognizing a strong plot, and the nuts and bolts of writing well, there is still so much I don’t know . Still so much I’ve been doing badly even, that...