I am amazed today. It’s been getting a bit sloggy in the past few days with the writing. I get a good critique, get excited, and then get overwhelmed. So I write and then look at what I write and wonder, “Should I give up?” (I’m blushing to confess this.) Why do we try to give up so fast? Writing takes stamina.

Then a Friday night workshop and I enjoyed some inspirational help from the class on adding layers to my novel in progress (we figured out a leitmotif!) and I drove home in barely visible rain/wind conditions feeling exhausted, but good.

I was up early Saturday and rushing around. I had asked my friend K if I could stay at her place and then another friend A asked if we could do lunch. I was feeling rushed and frantic and exhausted and worn out. I drove through more wind/rain, hydroplaning my way through Everett and north to Bellingham. I felt like I couldn’t give anything to anyone. I was too tired.

And then A welcomed me into her place and we laughed and talked. I felt the tension of the drive and all my exhaustion fall off. Then K showed up and we all drove to the Olive Garden. I could wax poetic about the bread sticks and soup and salad and Italian platter of appetizers we got to eat. We laughed, everyone shared, A teased the waiter, we laughed some more, then dashed back out into the rain.

We said goodbye to A and then I followed K to her house. We curled up on the couches under blankets and talked about goals and dreams and writing and how scary it was and how much it would take of us. But something happened in that talking and sharing. The anxiety, doldrums, fear, exhaustion just fell off. It was a chance for my brain to reset, recharge, and reconfigure and wow, was it good.

In the middle of devastating news about a friend, I felt myself getting energy. I didn’t have to demand it from K (she didn’t have to demand it from me either), but we both felt stronger, more sure, more righteous anger at the devastation that hounds our friend. It’s good. Sometimes you have to get pumped up and righteously angry in order to move forward. In order to help. In order to heal.

If this sounds like I’m talking in circles and not being truthful, I’m sorry. For all the parties involved, I must be more secretive, but don’t you know the feeling?

Haven’t you also been in a place where you are so rung out you don’t think you have anything left? And then you meet a kindred spirit and you agree to move forward with her help and she agrees to move forward with your help and then that experience is welded by another friend who can’t help herself or anyone else.

Sounds mystical, probably, sounds like I’ve thought about it too much. Maybe so, but it’s powerful. It recharged me. No longer does my writing work seem sloggy. It matters. So very much. And maybe just to me. Maybe to just one other person that it can help. I don’t know yet.

But I am ready to go again. I am recharged. Thanks, K and A. Thank you, God.

1. It’s rainy and blustery here. So much so that I really don’t want to go anywhere. But the gym calls. I can do that. I have a date with a rowing machine there. But it makes me really grateful for a warm home and comfy couch. I am so blessed.

2. I’m doing Nanowrimo this year, but via Backspace. They run a Marathon concurrently with Nano since no one can ever log onto the Nano site (so many people participating). I’m able to write 2500 words each day and I’m happy with that.

3. I cleaned out the office yesterday, throwing away piles of old papers as if to make way for other projects. Felt great. I do need another bookshelf from Target. I know! Not sure how that happened. Found the surface of my desk and then promptly lost it again. Ah well.

4. Fun weekend planned up north in B-ham with K and A and perhaps A if she can catch the right plane tomorrow. I cannot wait!

5. I lost login information to one of my websites. This isn’t all bad, but it’s not good. I am going to have to call the hosting company and have them reset everything for me. Never again! Good thing I’m more organized as a full-time CEO than a part-time CEO.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Best advice I ever got as a writer was a few years ago from New York Times bestselling author, Ally Carter (she didn’t tell just me, she posted on it on Backspace) and it has stuck with me.

Ally says that to get more done (prolific writing, to-do list, etc.) that you have to be ALL there when you’re doing a task.

If you’re writing, you’re writing, not on the phone, not watching Scrubs reruns, not half-listening to a conference call.

If you’re editing, you’re editing, not also surfing the Internet, shopping iTunes, and jumping up to answer the phone every time it rings.

If you’re doing laundry, you’re not also trying to vacuum. Ahem.

(Yes, I’ve done all of this as CEO of my corporation. This is my true confession.)

It’s what I’m struggling with this week the most. Now that I work for myself, I tend to fly furiously through a to-do list and get upset when a piece of writing takes longer than it should. Last night I got an incredible critique on a chapter of my novel (I mean INCREDIBLE; it was chopped to pieces) and driving home from West Seattle, I realized that my default drive as a hyper-driven CEO of my teeny corporation was harming me in the long run.

Running my own business requires that I slow down and focus. It requires that I reconfigure my office space, my work day, and my responsibilities to make sure that what I have to do each day doesn’t look anything like my last day job (me working for someone else). Sure, some days may still feel like I just work for someone else, but a CEO has to do a lot more in a day.

Thank you, Ally Carter. Thanks for saying it, simple as it is, and for saying it so well that it stuck in my head all these years. And that it may finally pay off in my work regimen in the rest of 2009 and into 2010.

Are you moving too fast? Do you multitask too much?

S-L-O-W. Down.

So this blog was passed on to me last week from a dear, dear friend and I really took it to heart. It seems to fit me right now too. I’m writing multiple projects for writing groups, writing for this blog and Skirt magazine, and taking huge strides to build my business in 2010. Lots going on.

Everyone’s doing something scary right now. Multiple friends have quit their jobs to run their own businesses, even husbands have left their jobs to help their wives build a business. Two of my siblings are in school, I’m working on my CLEP tests for school, other friends are sending out their work to agents and publishers.

All this is scary stuff!

So how are we doing?

I think this doing scary stuff thing won’t be a straight uphill march. I slip and fall back down into mud, I trip on branches, lose my nerve and sit down. Anne Lamott, in her now-so-very-dear book, Traveling Mercies, talks about this. One day, she and a friend were out hiking. It had recently rained so it was mucky. She was wearing sandals and tried to climb up a shallow hill. She made it about halfway up and then slid back down, falling into the mud.

As she sat there, she realized this was what it was to be a believer in Jesus Christ. We are human, we fall down, we get dirty, we get stuck in the muck and mire of our lives trying to do it ourselves. God reaches down, pulls us up out of the muck, sets us back on our feet to try again.

Anne Lamott lives her faith. She isn’t afraid to have opinions or ideas that others might think are odd or even “unChristian.” That’s why I love her. Sure, she’s human, she’s made so many mistakes (and she never covers any of them up), but she trusts Jesus. She loves Him. She follows Him. And then she falls down.

The scary stuff is life. It’s getting out of bed in the morning to do the mundane, boring, repetitive things. It’s stepping out in faith. You have no guarantees whatsoever that what you are attempting will even work. But you have one absolute guarantee: Jesus picks you up out of whatever muck you’re in and He sets you back on your feet to try again.

There are no last chances, lost causes, or wrong turns. If you love Him, all roads lead to Him. Don’t think you’re so smart that you can actually escape this love. Once He’s got you, He does not let go.

So, what scares you today?

Do it. Do it now.

And trust that God won’t ever leave you in that muck. Even if you are like me and tend to sit in it for a while because of fear, He’s right there holding out His arms.

How I love a British murder mystery.

You know me. I’m the person who watches every episode of Poirot, Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Lewis, and Foyle’s War without shame as many times as I can because they are just fabulous. American murder mysteries (most of them) are hard-boiled, criminal, and dark thrillers that are fine, but I burnt out on Patricia Cornwell books like at around the letter F.

The newest mystery series coming from England are the Ruth Galloway Mysteries by Elly Griffiths (I’m still reading all eleven of Phil Rickman’s Rev. Merrily Watkin Mysteries; they are fantastic!) and I got an advanced reading copy of Ruth’s first adventure courtesy of Bookbrowse.

I inhaled it over the weekend. Delicious setting, wonderful mystery, fantastic and plucky heroine and lots of possible “bad guys/gals.” A bit cliche at times. The chase across the marshlands and the prisoner held in a cement room seemed just a tad over the top and a ten-year-old murder mystery? It just didn’t hold for me. But I loved Ruth Galloway. Smart, sassy, comfortable in her own skin. I will read the next book she appears in. The author won me over. I simply have to know what happens next.

It did prompt me to pull out my copies of Sally Wright’s Ben Reese mysteries that starts off with Publish and Perish, then Pride and Predator, and Pursuit and Persuasion. I also found out she’s written more after those initial three that I will have to find at the library (her fourth mystery was disappointing a few years ago).

See, told you I was a British murder mystery addict!

Happy Tuesday!

For those who have been following my story the past few months, you might be interested in Vyckie’s blog at No Longer Quivering. She’s asked for stories of survivors (like me) and is posting the stories this week. She’s writing a book (as so many of us are) and her story is particularly telling.

Thank you for the notes and comments. Writing down my experiences has been so good for my soul (and my faith in God) and God continues to “up the ante” day by day. The more I follow Him, the more unstable everything I trusted in before becomes. Praise Him for that.

Have a wonderful first week of November!

In July 1991, after I had already been convinced that my skirt was too short (see this post), the head of the Advanced Training Institute, Bill Gothard, and several “example” apprenticeship students (as we were called) talked to us about physical and emotional purity.

This was a main feature of Mr. Gothard’s Basic Seminar that I had attended the year before with my family (see this post) and where my friends and I had been horrified to discover that this middle-aged, unmarried preacher wanted us all to give up dating.

Give up dating? We were aghast. We had all been raised in church our entire lives and had waited not so patiently to be 16, the magic age when most of our peers (and ourselves) were allowed to date boys. Picture us at 16 and 17 years old, listening to Bill Gothard talk about giving up dating, just when we were finally old enough, and finally had it semi together!

It went over like a lead balloon in 1990. We scoffed at the thought, laughed at the fact that Mr. Gothard had obviously never been on a date in his life, and went our merry way.

A year later, I sat in an auditorium with my parents, sister, and brother and heard the same message again.

“What is the definition of dating?” Mr. Gothard asked the question, but didn’t wait for an answer.

“Singling out one person of the opposite sex and cultivating interest through thoughts, looks, notes, talks, or events.”

He had an overhead projector and the definition of dating was neatly printed out on a transparency. I stared at it, feeling a knot in my throat. I had made it through a day and a half of the conference without really having to consider what I was giving up. And now that Mr. Gothard had moved the apprenticeship students in with the adults for the week (at least he had mercy on our lack of air conditioning in the theater), my parents sat right beside me hearing the same information. I felt cornered. This was what our family was going to do. I couldn’t run. There was nowhere to hide. So I listened.

“Why dating causes conflict.” Mr. Gothard went on.

His transparencies changed as he talked.

“Wrong motive = getting vs. giving. Wrong goal = pleasure versus commitment. Wrong idea = license vs. self-control. Wrong results = hurts vs. edification.”

Whoa. I felt numb in my chair, the burden of my entire teenage angst on my shoulders. Was I wrong about dating? I had been so looking forward to it now that I was old enough. But now it seemed the truth was, if I dated, I only cared about getting something for myself, and about having fun without any consequences.

My mind flashed through scenes from my life back home: choir tours with friends, boys and girls, that required long bus rides all over California. My Christian high school friends. My classmate who picked me up every morning for school week after week in his car. He had dated one of my best friends that year. Were they all wrong? Were we all that selfish?

I struggled to reconcile what I was hearing with what I knew. We were good Christian kids, we obeyed our parents, we stayed in school, we didn’t do drugs. And sure there were kids that slept around while dating, but you didn’t have to. You could date and not go that way. I had friends who were dating and not going that way.

But I was fighting a losing battle. The argument presented to me was solid.

“How far can you go on a date?” Mr. Gothard asked. He looked out at all of us sitting in the arena. “Nowhere.”

Suddenly my 17-year-old brain clicked in, like an obedient servant signing over my life. I couldn’t get out of this without acknowledging what he was saying. As I read the words again and copied them carefully in my journal, I began to doubt. My skirt had been too short, my music was wrong, my dating goals were wrong. My massive church youth group had steered me wrong. We had all been deceived. My better judgment tried to argue, but the burden of what was on that transparency overpowered me.

To escape the pressure, I succumbed. I believed. I took the mantle onto my shoulders.

Everyone asks me why now. Why did you do it? Why did you believe it? Why didn’t you run?

Because it sounded worthy. It sounded good. It sounded like a plan. As I said yesterday (in this post), believing in Jesus Christ is taking a huge risk. We’re about to step out into this world and say that we have nothing to fear. That takes faith. Huge faith. And we get weak sometimes. We concoct these massive religious structures out of fear that we will miss something. We create legalistic rules because we fear that we’ll get lost in this overpowering love that is Jesus Christ dying on that cross.

As human beings, we simply can’t bear it. It’s too much. It’s too overwhelming. In a world that claws its way through a dirty, dark existence, simply believing in Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world almost seems too easy.

In Luke 23 it says:

³²Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. ³³When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. ³⁴Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

³⁵The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One.”

³⁶The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar ³⁷and said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”

³⁸There was a written notice above him, which read: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.

³⁹One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!”

⁴⁰But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? ⁴¹We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

⁴²Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

⁴³Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Being a Christian is not easy. Believing that a God of the universe willingly died to save me is a hard one to swallow. It means that I have choices and that God won’t strike me dead for those choices. He covers them all: the good, the bad, the wicked. Covered. 100 percent. Not 80, not 99, but 100 percent.

In that seat in an air-conditioned arena with thousands of other families in 1991, I believed that I had to do more. I had to earn my salvation by staying pure, by letting go of everything in my life to that point. But what I believed was a lie. God doesn’t demand we live as nuns. God doesn’t demand we do anything, except one thing. It’s the first commandment. With it comes a Christian life, full of joy, but also full of hardship. There is no easy way through.

In Exodus, God gave Moses the law, what are known as the Ten Commandments. The first commandment is:

³ “You shall have no other gods before me.”

I don’t know what I called it then, but now I see that the god that came before God was purity. It was more important to me than anything else. I changed how I dressed, how I dealt with boys, my thought life, my music, my movies, my books. All in the pursuit of purity.

It took a decade after that hot summer day in 1991 for me to finally let the mantle fall off. In September 2001, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in New York City, through circumstances that still astound me to this day, God freed me from pursuing a false idol.

Why did the attack on the World Trade Center affect me in such a way? I don’t know. But I met my God there. I saw Him. I saw that He loved us all and He loved me. And I didn’t need a bunch of extra rules anymore.

True, I didn’t immediately go out and dress like a hooker. I didn’t go sleep around. I didn’t go date every man I could find. I just gave up on that god. I started to talk to the God of the universe. I told Him everything and He quietly, but with great power, took His rightful place in my life. The pressure disappeared instantly. I dated, I cried, I got a crush or two, I got my heart broken, I put up with sexual harassment in the workplace at my job, I watched FRIENDS and realized I wasn’t the only one completely lost in my twenties. It was me and God and it was good. And then 2003 rolled around and there was my husband.

Yes, the pursuit for purity wasn’t all bad. I missed about ten years of angst and sorrow and sadness, but more importantly, I also missed out on God. For ten years, I didn’t even see Him. That’s the real tragedy here. And oh how I missed Him. But God loved me so much that He waited, patiently, for me to come running back.

I’ll be blogging twice a week starting in November for Skirt magazine. I’m thrilled to be a part of their fantastic team.

I’ll link to my blogs so you can check them out. I’ll be talking about being real, pursuing your passion, doing what scares you, finding freedom from overbearing religious traditions, that sort of thing.

As my blogging grows, so does my commitment to be real and honest. When I see someone writing from their heart–the raw truth that they feel–I want to stand up and applaud. It is hard to be real. It is hard to step out and say to the world: I messed up here. I believed a lie here. I failed here.

This week I’ve also accepted a challenge by another blog to do one thing every day that scares me. Yesterday I realized that I scare me more than anything. I was taught for so many years that I could keep control over my life by following these certain steps, that if I got a, b, and c, I would get d:

If I gave up a college education to pursue character, I would succeed.
If I gave up dating to pursue purity, I would overcome.
If I gave up independence in order to submit, I would become wise.

I did succeed without ever going to college, not because of character, but because God blessed me.

I did overcome, but only because of grace.

As to the third thing, I don’t know when I will become wise, but I did submit . . . for a long time. That part didn’t hurt so much. What hurt was having to make decisions for myself afterward. It is still hard to make the call on certain things. I wasn’t trained for it. And I really believe that the only submitting that really matters now is to the God who holds my hand and walks with me through all this. If I’m submitting to He who gave everything for me, that’s all that matters.

And it leaves me plenty of room to screw up. This is what I fear. I no longer can lean on what I’ve earned from my good behavior or rely on an authority to tell me yes or no. I can’t blame anyone for anything I am doing to self-sabotage myself. It’s on me.

I stand alone. But not really alone. By letting go of all the “principles” and the “rules” that I clung to so desperately for so long, I now stand on a very firm rock. But I can climb down from that rock, I can jump off at any time, and I can gaze longingly over at another prime piece of rock real estate (ignoring the fact that it’s on sand that isn’t too stable).

And that scares me. I scare me. My goal in November is to deal with it. Ignore me and push past to do what I need to do.

Wish me luck.

I’m really looking closely at how successful authors are using the Internet to help their sales. Everyone runs in a pack as we all do what everyone else does to sell more books, spread our name around as an author, attempt to figure out how to blog, Twitter, and Facebook to get folks interested in our story.

It’s actually quite a feat. I started working on my fiction platform with this blog almost a year ago now. Have I accomplished anything?

1. I learned to write faster and better. Blogging does that. However, blogging is a frenetic sort of writing, not the narrative craft that fiction (and memoir) requires. Blogging flexes different muscles. I’ve had to work hard to not get stuck in my writing as just a blogger.

2. I have met a lot of great people. That’s the best part about building a platform online. You meet just incredible people. Who said they were bored with life? Um, get online already. Read blogs, read books, learn from these folks. There is no time to be bored. Seriously.

3. I learned how to niche the blog properly. This blog was a lot of stuff about a year ago. I just dumped everything I wanted to write about here. I had to divide it up last winter. And then this summer I realized I needed to niche it down even further. It has payed off. When you are brave enough to cut out just random thoughts you have, in order to stick to what really matters, well, the blog can soar. So, for writers wondering if they should focus on the topic that they are writing about, yes. And be careful which topic you pick, because you’ll be living and breathing it for a few years.

4. Fiction and non-fiction are very different. I think this blog really solidified in my head when I picked a non-fiction niche. My fiction work is a nice side show (perhaps it will be better when I sell a novel). It’s obvious that people want to know about my true story, not my fiction story. That’s interesting.

5. Finally, the online community is really cool. Everyone’s trying to figure it out together and it’s a fun group. I tend to be a trend watcher, thus I keep my finger on certain groups of people online. I’d encourage you to do the same with your chosen topic. Find out everything you can and meet the major players. Watch what they do and try to emulate what works. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel, right?

So last week’s unveiling of the B&N’s Nook as the “Kindle killer” made me laugh. I don’t think we’re to that stage quite yet. First, we need several e-readers on the market and in use by a lot of people (Kindle’s got that already and is building their program as fast as they can) and Nook, well, they have some catching up to do.

Once we’ve got some competition going (and the dust settles), then we can check out which e-reader is going to stay. I’m a Kindle person, but I’m certainly not discounting the Nook. There are several things about the Nook that appeal to me, even though I already own over 1,400 Kindle books and use my Kindle every single day. (The above picture is me, in Italy, using it. Yes, I read while in Italy. I read was reading a European history book. Highly appropriate.)

Disclaimer: Amazon is currently looking to fill two strategic positions for the Kindle publishing program in Seattle. I applied for one of them. But I still think we should wait and see how the Nook gathers a following and how it affects growth of the Kindle market.

ps — I’m reading Don Miller’s new book A Million Miles In a Thousand Years: What I learned While Editing My Life, and I’m loving it!