Building Sand Castles

I've sworn off face book for the summer. I had to. I have a deadline to finish my second novel. So one morning, I was perusing face book (yes, you read right) and found an entry from Authors Publish entitled "Best Novel Writing Advice." I clicked it immediately, and it opened to some wonderful posters with pithy and relevant advice.

I particularly liked this one: "I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles." Shannon Hale will probably never know how much I needed that gentle kick in the pants to just get something down.

I loved that quote so much that I shared it with my ninety-five year old mother who lives with me and who is coincidentally my biggest fan. Every day, my mom asks me how the book is coming along. And every day, I glibly reply, "Oh, it's coming, Mama. It's coming."

It's a good thing I write the old-fashioned way with a pen and a composition notebook. Comes in handy when I take Mama to the doctor. There have been a lot of doctor visits lately. Six weeks ago, Mama fell and broke her pelvis. That lady is amazing. My granddaughter says she's pretty "hard core." Not sure about teenage lingo, but if that means she has a lot of determination not to let things get her down, then she is indeed "hard core."

Thanks to Shannon Hale, I got some of my writing mojo back. Today, at yet another doctor visit, we were sitting in the waiting room, waiting rather impatiently for mama's name to be called. I sat beside her, my writing skills smoking hot for a change. tearing up that composition notebook.

Mama looked over and casually said, "Honey, it looks like you've got a lot of sand."

I stopped writing and stared, I'm sure with a stupid look on my face. "Sand?"

She nodded and pointed to the pages covered with chicken-scratch scrawl (some even sideways in the margins).

"Ohhhhh!" And I couldn't help but laugh. "But I'm definitely going to have to come back to it and make it into a castle.

So God showed up again. "Even there."

Thank you, God, for time well spent whether it's perusing the face book I'd sworn off, or in the doctor's office with my "hard core" mom.

By the way, if you liked (or loved) Saving Eric, stay tuned for the second book in The Redeemed Side of Broken Series. It's entitled Freeing Ellie and will, I hope, come out sometime in early 2016. God bless.