A Hard Writing Day

So, my writing day today was a hard one. Hard days contrast with good writing days because there's less joy in the writing.

I have found over the years that hard writing days happen when my outline needs work. It always takes me a while to admit it; I slog through a half chapter thinking that it will straighten out. For my writing method, though, what really brings me through the rough spots is a good outline. And my outline for this novel is not yet good enough.

So this evening, I will persist with my outline work. I think I have the solution, so now it takes a little bit of elbow grease and a lot of faith.

Thanksgiving Meal

We had a great Thanksgiving with friends. First, we went to our church to help serve a meal that was open to anyone.
While waiting for the meal to start, we also had time to play a game of Loot (pirate card game) with our friends Joe, Linda, and Sheila

After the church meal, we went home and had our own family Thanksgiving meal. In the evening, we went over to our friends' house to play boardgames. Brandon won for the first time! The game took three hours and was the fiercest battle ever fought in Cities and Knights of Catan.

Language Barrier

I read a very good novel some months back in which the hero and the heroine meet by looking at one another across a river. The first part of their relationship develops in a pantomime style of sign language. This novelist's creative development of relationship without language calls to mind one of my own personal quirks; I am almost obsessive about watching body language and facial expressions.

When I meet people, I watch only their faces and bodies. If you ask me after the meeting what Nancy was wearing, nine times out of ten I will have no clue at all. Maybe a general impression of color, but that's about it.

I contrast my focus on the language of faces and bodies with some other women I have met who are hyper-aware of clothing and shoes. What does it mean that I watch the way people behave, and they watch trappings that adorn people?

Both systems of reading people can tell the witness a great deal. That's why in my novels, I consciously strive to use clothing as an indicator of status or emotional condition. By contrast, I don't have to make any effort to write about facial expressions or body movements. Those descriptions, I have to pare down!

Although for the sake of variety I try to balance my description in my novels, in reality, I won't ever be a woman who remembers clothing. I'm too firmly convinced that what I see in people's faces and in how they move is really important information. I'm always looking for character, in the Victorian sense. Who is this person inside? Is she someone who will be loyal, or fickle? Does she watch me while I talk to her, or do her eyes flick around the room to see if someone more important is present? Is her gait light and free, or does she walk with a slow step and stooped shoulders?

There's a huge quantity of internal stuff constantly revealing itself through the language of the body. My full-time pursuit of reading that language means that I just don't have the time or the inclination to focus on what economic bracket a person occupies (shoes and jewelry) or where she shops. The only interesting character trait revealed by dress is how much a person cares about the way others perceive her.

Someone Else in History

If I could not be myself and had to choose to be a well-known historical figure instead, I think I would choose to be Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Three reasons:

She did work that made a great difference in the world: work that nourished her own spirit and the spirits of others.

She had a full life, including a marriage and seven children (though only three of them survived her). While it may have been terribly painful to lose so many children, I consider it preferable to the spinster life that other literary women sometimes led.

She lived in a time that was beginning to be reasonably comfortable (no drafty medieval castles for me!). I think this final reason is a sign that I am just around the corner from middle age. :-)

How about you? Whose life would you choose?

Ornament-of-Silence

We now have a tradition that my daughter chooses one Christmas ornament a year for herself. I was delighted when this year, she chose one of the red wooden cardinals I've been eyeing at Michael's.

When I was growing up in my parents' home, my twin sister and I would always race to hang what we called the "jeweled bird" ornament, a clay bird encrusted with tiny mosaic fragments of mirror. Bird ornaments have held a favored place on my tree since then. My parents even gave me my own version of a "jeweled bird" as a joke, but it's like a wind-up nightingale compared to the magnificence of the original jeweled bird.

I've already inherited a fair number of ornaments that date back to my girlhood. When I unpack the ornament boxes, I find embroidered reindeer from our time in the Philippines, Beefeaters made from clothespins collected in England, Celtic crosses, brass ornaments engraved from 1982, and crystal angels that radiate light through their delicate curves.

Each year, there's at least one ornament that brings me to a complete halt. I sit silent for some time with that ornament in hand.

The year we were married, 2001, we took a picture together in front of our tree and stuck the photo in one of those "Our First Christmas Together" ornaments. That ornament became my Ornament-of-Silence this year. As I held it, I contemplated my bright cheeks, my foot-long blonde hair, so glossy and well-groomed in those pre-child days. My husband was equally young and shiny-faced, back then. Regarding that old picture, I felt neither nostalgia nor sadness for the passage of time. Instead, I felt honor. Honor for our years together and the many changes that have come to us, both internally and externally. Honor for surviving the rough times that we have already experienced, and gratitude for the good times.

Last year, we held a costumed Victorian Christmas party, and I wanted the ornaments on my tree to be as historically-authentic as possible. The Victorian tree looked very nice with its gilded walnuts, its pinecones, and its gingerbread men, but nothing can take the place of my ragtag collection of ornaments.

A Good Writing Day

I'm posting late today, so I thought I would take my opportunity to continue the blog chain on "A Good Writing Day" begun by Kat Harris and continued by Gwen Stewart and Lynn Rush.

A good writing day is a day on which I have already written a chapter by 11:00 am. On those days, I am content and serene as I go about the rest of my business.

Writing balances me spiritually. My mind is always grabbing materials and sorting through them, rearranging them, casting one aside as too awful to linger on (Phillippians 4:8), treasuring another as true, honorable, and lovely. I don't throw out all sad or disturbing events in my meditation. Often in order to see what is honorable and lovely we also have to see what is evil and ugly. The important part is that I avoid meditating on the evil and ugly alone, instead always remembering the virtuous and pure, the candle in the darkness.

After my constant meditation on history, memory, God, other people, music--whatever happens to come my way--the process of writing hones my thoughts and releases them, renewing my mind.

All too often, the press of everyday duties means that I have not written my chapter by 11:00 am. I've been adjusting to my new schedule, now that my daughter is in kindergarten. For the last couple of months, I've been volunteering too much. Volunteerism is both a wonderful addition to my life and a threat to my writing. It's easy to see the need for my volunteer work. When I spend the morning at my daughter's school labeling books by grade level, I know my donated hours will be a major help to the teachers as they try to recommend books for each child. But volunteerism can eat my novel, if I'm not careful. It's too easy to say yes in the face of the need. The approach of the holidays also brings scores of tasks that sneak up in sheep's clothing ("This will only take ten minutes!") and end up revealing wolfy teeth.

It's time for me to get medieval on the things that interfere with my writing. Preserve my mornings, adhere to a strict schedule, slim down my list of volunteer tasks, and make every weekday a good writing day.

I have the utmost respect for my friend Gwen and others like her who are holding down full-time jobs, mothering their children, and writing novels. If you check the time-stamp on some of Gwen's blog posts, you will figure out that she writes her novels the way I wrote my dissertation, getting up before dawn to find her precious writing time. If you've ever done this, you know that it is a lifestyle that requires discipline and true passion for one's work. Here's a toast to all the writers who sacrifice sleep in the early hours.

Wednesday Night Headache

This is the second Wednesday night in a row that I have fought a headache starting before the class I teach and continuing until bedtime.

I would like to argue that this headache is caused by food sensitivities or hormones, both of which have been known to give me headaches. I'm afraid that it may actually be a tension headache.

I don't like to admit that. This week's challenge for our small group was to cast all our anxieties on God. The headache may be my body's way of betraying my failure in this department.

I really like co-teaching this class. It is a potentially-stressful topic, however, just because I don't want to step on toes, and I also want so badly for it to be a positive class for everyone involved.

Next Wednesday I am going to try to ward off the headache in several ways. I'll pray more during the day to keep myself focused. I'll do the Holy Yoga video I ordered after my agent mentioned it several times. (Holy Yoga seems like the perfect relaxation method.) Finally, I'll try very hard to avoid my food triggers just in case that's a contributing factor.

How did I ever end up sounding so Californian? That's what happens to you when you move West. :-)

Anyone else have trouble with headaches or other stealthy stress symptoms?

Slumbers With Wolves

When I read to my daughter at night, I often get very sleepy.

I love to sleep. I usually need eight or nine hours a night to function well. I sometimes wish that I only needed four hours of sleep a night, like my father. I would get a lot more done! Nonetheless, I do enjoy the experience of sleeping.

The first home that we lived in here in this city was quite nice, but the master bedroom was on the first floor. I couldn't handle this layout; it messed up my sleeping experience. The beauty of sleep is in entering night's dark den with the warm bodies of those we love breathing softly near us. With our master on the first floor, and my little girl's bedroom upstairs, she was too far from us, all alone there in her room. I needed to have all of us sleeping as a pack, all of us on the same floor, only steps away from one another. We moved to a different house--one designed for pack-sleeping with a traditional all-upstairs bedroom layout. Now I'm content in my dark den.

My dog wants to take pack-sleeping a little too literally. We have to close her out of our rooms at night, or she will repeatedly hop up on the beds to curl up with us. Once in a while as an indulgence is OK, but she's too big and bouncy to share our beds regularly.

Transparency

So, I did it again. For at least the fifth or sixth time in the last couple of months, I spent at least half an hour typing a post, then consigned it to the purgatory of draftdom, in all likelihood never to be seen again. (That is, unless you're subscribed to my blog feed, which occasionally traps these limbo posts and allows you to read them even though they're erased from my blog.)

It's a constant battle; I want to be transparent. I want to share my real joys and pains, especially with people whom I feel have become my long-distance friends. If we were in a small group together, I would have no hesitation in sharing some of these things. But I'm also aware that I'm writing in a public forum. And some of you have never met me in person. It's all too easy for me to give an impression that isn't accurate when seen through this narrow window of my blog.

Fellow bloggers, do you struggle with this? Am I the only one who has a dusty little pile of draft posts that sit there to remind me of the gap between what I would like to share, and what I think is prudent?

Why You Should Read March, by Geraldine Brooks

The novel March won the Pulitzer Prize not long ago. I have to thank my friend Jen for mentioning this novel to me after she found out that I'm writing nineteenth-century historical fiction.

I think every believer should read March. It's very well-written and a fantastic example of how to use research without letting it overwhelm your story. (You don't win Pulitzers for chopped liver.) Its literary merits, however, are not the reason why I particularly recommend it for Christians.

No, the reason for my recommendation is that the protagonist of March illustrates a negative example that is crucial in this day and age, when many in all denominations are urging that we adapt Christian theology to the relativistic worldview of postmoderns. Warning: this review is about to get very unacceptable as a result of my assumption that Christianity is actually absolutely true, not relatively true. If you find this belief unbearably offensive, read no farther.

March is the story of Mr. March, the father of the girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Geraldine Brooks tells his story as he works as a chaplain for the Union Army in the Civil War. In Alcott's Victorian-era classic, we only saw the March girls (Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth) and their mother Marmee as they kept the home fires burning during the privations of the war. Brooks tells the other side of the tale, and, as you would expect from literary fiction of this day and age, Brooks reveals the world to be darker and fuller of human entrails than Louisa May Alcott ever hinted.

So here's why this novel could be such an important read for Christians. With the rise of the postmodern emerging church, it's crucial for believers to understand what have been the historical and personal consequences of cracking apart Christian theology in the way that the emerging church would like to do once more. March portrays what happens when a man of very liberalized (read, vague) theology goes into a crisis. He offers the men to whom he ministers no real comfort, because he has no substantial faith. His faith, like the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, is a thing for intellectuals walking by frozen ponds in winter. It is not the sturdy faith of flesh, pain, and heart that brings a soldier through war and home again. March's faith cracks like a rotten egg against the events of the Civil War. Despite his official role as chaplain, he does not think about God much, fails to communicate any faith to the soldiers, and, in fine literary fiction style, returns to his family a very damaged man who does not believe he can preach anymore and remains traumatized by the sights of the war.

This is not real faith. March has no joy, no hope, and apparently no solid belief in an afterlife or in God's all-seeing Providence that stretches far beyond the limits of our mortal view. It seems that if March sees humans doing bad things, then life must be bad and God must not care for us. The things March sees are actually fairly tame compared to the experiences of many people in war-torn countries. Many war survivors come through scarred but with faith intact, and still capable of deep joy, despite their personal suffering from human brutality and tragedy.

My point, which I could make at much more length but will attempt to make briefly, is that if you want to understand why the liberalization of theology in New England turned those states into a post-Christian region, read this novel. If you want to know why a postmodern faith can easily become a dying faith when it encounters real crisis, read this novel.

Liberalizing theology is not a new phenomenon in history, as some emerging postmoderns might have you believe. There is a precedent and a record for what happens in a culture when relativism puts deep tentacles into the church. (Europe, anyone?)

Some may argue that a post-Christian culture is superior to a Christian culture because at least the remaining Christians are sincere. Having lived in both post-Christian and Christian cultures, however, I can tell you that despite its flaws and occasional hypocrisy, contemporary Christian culture is considerably more humane than the alternative.

Read March. It's worth the time, and very thought-provoking if you are interested at all in what's going on with the emerging church, particularly the branch of theology that wants to state that Buddha is as true as Jesus if that's what floats your boat. Just for the record: I agree with the emerging postmoderns that the church is not doing enough to reach out to the postmodern generations. I heartily agree that the church is behind the times. But the source of our faith is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and does not need to be transformed into a truth more tame and acceptable to the postmodern ear.

And the Winner Is...

Travis!

(My daughter picked your name out of the entries.)

So, send me an email at inkhornblue [at] hotmail [dot] com

and give me your mailing address. When you do, I will email you back a list of the nineteen books and you may choose three. What a prize! :-) They're all new and in good condition.

(I don't want to make everyone jealous by posting the book list here, nor do I want to make any of my giveaway authors think that I don't value their books just because I only have room for so many in my house.)

What Kind of Rewards Are You Offering?

Good morning! Hope your coffee is hot and your mind is waking up slowly and pleasantly.

In my search for a very good question, I have hauled out one that is potentially controversial, so I hope that any discussion will be bracing but encouraging.

Vince Mooney recently guest-blogged on Seekerville about his system for calculating "Rewards per Page" in romance novels.

Seekerville: Guest Blogger Vince Mooney

Vince's post really intrigued me because I have been doing a lot of silent meditation on the opposition between durable and consumable fiction that he discusses in his article.

Some authors, he says, are writing to create critically-praiseworthy novels that are "durable goods." Other writers are more interested in meeting the readers' needs by creating not a durable book but a consumable "intangible experience." For the consumable fiction writer, he argues, it is important to give the reader a high number of rewards per page.

The plain fact is that romance is the best-selling category in the publishing industry, and many of those romances qualify as Vince's consumable intangible experiences. Yet, at the same time that consumable romances are big sellers, CBA editors have occasionally called for a better caliber of writing in CBA novels. While there is no doubt that some writers combine terrific style with consumer appeal, it's also quite clear that consumer appeal is not always related to literary quality. In other words, some CBA editors may want great prose, and some writers may wish to write great prose, but not all CBA readers care about great prose. And that is their prerogative. We are asking them to part with their hard-earned cash, and if what they want is a consumable intangible experience, we need to respect that need as much as the need of the most literary reader in Christendom.

So here's my question for today: without bashing either the durable or the consumable variety of fiction, can we talk about what it means to be a Christian writer and try to give our readers "rewards per page?" What kind of rewards are we talking about, exactly?

Some types of readerly reward are simply out-of-bounds in inspirational publishing. There is no CBA erotica, or CBA thrill-kill fiction. But there's a big gray area in between completely-wholesome and completely-toxic reader rewards. I think the discussion is most interesting when we don't just stick with lust, which tends to be the dead horse issue here, but when we also talk about vanity and pride, revenge and anger, ambition, greed, sloth, and envy. Does our fiction occasionally offer rewards that cross these lines? For instance, at one point Vince mentions that one potential reward for a romance reader is the vicarious feeling of being envied, as when a heroine gets to walk into town with the hero, and other women notice the handsomeness of the hero. A professor-acquaintance of mine once referred to this particular kind of reader-reward as "narcissistic candy." Do you agree with my professor friend that there are certain types of rewards in a romance (or in any other genre) that cater to lower impulses in the reader? Or do you think that any given reader takes rewards from a novel depending on the level of maturity that particular reader brings to the reading experience, and that as novelists we cannot concern ourselves with the reader's level of maturity? (This might get particularly interesting when we talk about the difference between a Christian romance and a Christian YA novel, I think.)

Perhaps the moral issue isn't even the most interesting discussion. Maybe, instead, we should ask: what are the unique readerly rewards of a CBA novel that are usually not duplicated in mainstream novels? I don't just mean "getting closer to God," or other generic responses. I'm curious about specific plot incidents or episodes, and why a Christian reader would find in those episodes a reader-reward where another reader might not.

Leave a comment, and, as promised, I will enter you in a drawing to win three books of your choice from my list of ten or fifteen that need to leave my house. (They're good, too, and very recent--but I've already read them and I need to clean up some of my book piles.)

The Novelist's Empty Nest

The great room where my first novel once lived now sits empty and silent. That room in my mind is still perfectly arranged just as it appeared on the day my novel left home.

My novel slept in a mahogany Victorian canopy bed with rich, light-blue satin pleating overhead. The quilt that covered my novel at night was expertly pieced together by a whole gang of Amish craftswomen. An old-fashioned hot water bottle warmed my novel's toes. In the morning, my novel's maid came in to poke the fire until it crackled cheerfully behind an iron screen.

My novel liked to sleep late. My dissertation, by contrast, was an early riser who awakened at 5:30am for his morning run. My indolent novel stretched, turned over a few times, waiting for me to come in with her coffee on a silver tray. My novel drank her coffee with cream but no sugar.

My novel left my home carrying a valise and wearing an emerald green walking dress handsewn by one of Philadelphia's finest tailors. She's young: she doesn't know the disappointments and trials that may await her. When she looked over her shoulder one last time, I wondered if she had derived her dewy skin from me--if, as I sat there giving her life, I began to wrinkle like the picture of Dorian Gray. If that's what happened, she's welcome to it. Age will not wither her.

I will keep my novel's room exactly the way it is for a while, to welcome her back if she should need to return for a short respite, as so many adult children do these days. Eventually, though, that room will start to change. The house of my mind has only so many mansions. I will need to allow a new novel to take up residence, and when it does, I will rejoice in the variety and splendor of its furnishings. Perhaps it will be a boy child, this time.

Turning Back the Clock

The Amish reject most contemporary technologies because they feel those gadgets interfere with dedication to family, community, and God. They do allow limited use of technologies that do not pose a threat to a traditional agrarian lifestyle.

I understand why fiction set in Amish communities can be very attractive. I often wonder whether we would be happier without certain contemporary technologies. The most obvious is the cell phone. We Generation X-ers will be the last generation to remember what life was like when we only had land-lines.

Do you all have cell phones? If so, do you take "cell phone breaks?"

I do find myself feeling nervous if I drive off and leave my cell phone at home now. If my daughter is not with me, I will always turn around and go back for the phone. But imagine all those years when sometimes, parents were just not at home, even when the school called!

The other contemporary technology with which I have a definite love-hate relationship is the internet. I love my internet friendships. I love all the things I've learned and the quicksilver flow of information to and from my fingertips. I hate the amount of time I spend each day in front of a screen.

My friends and I just finished playing a fun card game. The internet has no substitute for a home-cooked meal shared around a dinner table, followed by friendly jeering and cackling as the cards fall where they may. (In this case, the card game we played was about collecting pirate loot, so we spouted some pirate jargon too.)

I know that shared meals and board games have enriched my life by keeping me grounded in real human interactions, despite the many charms of my internet friends and clubs. That's why it will be really nice if I get the chance to sit down with my internet writing friends and play a real live board game with them. There are too many nuances of personality and character that the internet cannot transmit.

The Night I Met a Ghost

I've been reading a book of "true" ghost stories. Many years ago, I would have gently denied the existence of real ghosts. That was before I experienced my own true ghost encounter.

Fresh out of college, I was flat broke and responsible for my own financial support. I went to live with friends in Colorado Springs in order to make enough money to move to New York City.

The house where I stayed was lovely: it sat on the side of a hill across from Pike's Peak. There were acres of decks in back constructed on three levels; the beauty of the blue mountain view and the wandering deer were a sight for my city-weary eyes.

I was a skeptic. I remember listening to a friend of my host's that summer as she described her personal tragedy of losing her adult son to an auto accident. I felt great sympathy for her, but when she told me of feeling her son's spiritual presence in the weeks after his death, I chalked it up to wishful grieving. Little did I know that I was about to get a lesson in ghosts and presences.

It wasn't all bucolic refreshment that summer. I worked fourteen-hour shifts at a local chain restaurant. After fourteen hours on my feet, lifting trays my arms could barely support, I drove home at night and collapsed into bed. There were many nights when I was actually too tired to eat when I got home, though my rational mind knew that I could not afford to skip an evening meal.

On one of these nights, I arrived at the beautiful hill house to find that no one else was home. I made my way inside, kicking off my black tennis shoes and heading up the short, curved stairway to the upstairs bedroom hallway. As I turned that curve in the stairs, I felt a something like a cold wave move behind and against my back, like a downdraft. It was unnatural. It wasn't a shift in temperature caused by the currents on the stairs. It was like the warm feeling of someone standing only inches behind you, but cold.

I quickened my step. By the time I hit the upstairs hallway, I was running. I didn't look back until I hit the bedroom and the safety of the bed. Then I ogled the doorway for a few minutes, scarcely breathing. The feeling of presence was very strong.

Whatever I sensed out there in the upstairs hallway was not exactly evil, but it was hostile. It didn't want me there. And I decided that I would oblige its wishes. Gathering my courage, I walked rapidly out through the cold spot and the sense of presence, jumped in my little truck, slammed the door, and sped off into the night. Despite my crushing fatigue, I couldn't stay at the house alone. I preferred to lie down on the hard seats at my friend's restaurant until that friend got off shift and could keep me company.

It wasn't long before we all broke down at breakfast one morning and shared our experiences with whatever this was in the house. Each person had a different experience, but we were all convinced that there was something there.

On a subsequent night, I was in the basement watching TV with my friend's twenty-year-old brother. We were the only ones in the house. After a few minutes, we both looked at each other, our eyes wide. He picked up the remote and switched it off very suddenly. In the hush, we heard clearly for a moment the odd rapping that had been going on under the noise of the TV. It stopped abruptly, as if to tease us. It was a knocking noise, like an intentional pattern of raps. There was no wind on that night, nor could we find any other explanation despite our search.

I might have become a skeptic again if that event fourteen years ago had been my only spirit-encounter. But after the sudden and tragic death of my beloved grandfather, I experienced a dream that was so unusual and so significant that I permanently renounced my disbelief in spirits. That dream took place almost a year after the car accident that took my grandfather's life, when I was still mourning deeply--crying almost every time I got in the shower. In the dream, my grandfather came to talk to me. It was not like an ordinary dream: there were no visuals and no setting, just him. His appearance was very brief, and his message was simple; he told me not to be sad, that it was all OK. I consider it one of God's mercies to me, at the time an agnostic without the comfort of heaven, to have sent comfort through a spirit by night.

Lyme Disease Epiphany

In 1996, during what I think of as the "agnostic period" (like Picasso's Blue period, only much, much bluer), I got Lyme Disease.

Lyme is a weird and notoriously difficult diagnosis. It shows up differently in each victim according to where the little spirochetes decide to hang out. In my case, they decided to hang out in my brain. This was no fun at all, because I lost a great deal of my short-term memory capacity. I was also exhausted all the time, and had to bend over like an old lady and hang onto a banister to climb even one flight of stairs. In New York City, the walker's paradise, that level of exhaustion was even worse than it would have been in a more sedentary suburban lifestyle. I was eventually cured by a very good doctor, a serious dose of antibiotics, and Providence, though I didn't believe in Providence at the time.

That Lyme Disease, like every other putatively bad thing that happened to me during those years, was a blessing.

One day during the Lyme treatment, I was talking to my father on the phone, and, in an unusually confessional moment, I said: "You know, if this hadn't turned out to be Lyme--if it had been something terminal instead--I would leave this city and go do something else."

It didn't take me long to realize, as my dad said in a subsequent conversation, that it should not take a terminal illness to get me to relocate and try to do something about my unhappiness.

That Lyme Disease epiphany was one of several factors that led to my departure from New York and the beginning of a personal journey that took me across the country geographically, and even further spiritually.

Blessings in disguise. They're just harder to recognize while they're in process.

Silence

I don't know about you, but I am really enjoying the fact that my television is off and my house is silent. Today has been a day full of talk--both the real kind and the "in your head" talk of cyberspace. Not all of it has been enjoyable, but we were never promised a life full of sweet nothings and harmony.

Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the election and some personal conversations I'm working through, I'm enjoying the silence all the more. And were it not for the fact that I still have problems to solve and tasks to do tomorrow that can't wait, I think I would have a day of silence and spiritual decontamination while my daughter is at school. I need to clean the junk and noise out of my head.

Maybe Thursday. But at any rate, soon.

The Magician's Nephew

I'm reading this C.S. Lewis novel to my daughter. I had forgotten how much I like it; it may be my favorite of the Narnia Chronicles.

Lewis fans, what's your favorite Lewis book (fiction or non)?

Christmas Giving, Part Two

This is my second and final post on worthy gift ideas that help people around the world.

You may remember my first reference to Made By Survivors, a charity that sells items handcrafted by survivors of sex trafficking. The proceeds from these sales allow women to support themselves in countries where economic choices are very limited.

My other favorite philanthropic gift source is Heifer International. Heifer gives animals or groups of animals to those in need across the world. Find their catalog here:

Heifer International

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Give a man a goat, and he milks it and gives baby goats to all his neighbors.