March 2009

Michal: A Novel has a fan page on Facebook. Right now only a handful of people are aware of the page, so I’m running a contest from now until April 14, 2009. If you add your name to the fan page between now and then, you will be entered in a drawing to win an autographed copy of Michal. Two winners will be picked and there are only a few fans so far, so chances are good. :) You might have to join Facebook to add your name. If you can add your name without joining, please email me to let me know so I know where to contact you if you win.

There have already been contests on various blog sites and may be more in the future. One recent interview and contest was on Amber Stockton’s blog. A winner hasn’t been announced yet, so there may yet be time to enter there as well. Scroll down past about three recent posts to reach my interview. I should have announced it sooner – time seems to slip by me these days!

I’ve spent some time studying Bathsheba’s story this week, searching the Bible and outside resources to get deeper into the characters. I had written over 40,000 words of the first draft, then sent the first chapter to my wonderful critique partner, Jill Stengl. She had some great insight that saw what I didn’t. Her comments made me rethink where to start the story and how to better show Bathsheba’s character. I will scrap a lot of what I had already written because I started the story over again. But that’s a good thing. Jill Marie liked my second try and tonight as we chatted, she had more insightful comments that give me much to ponder. I thank God for good critique partners!

Of course, part of the fun of having a critique partner is getting to read what they are working on before the rest of the world sees it. :) I’m looking forward to reading more of Jill Marie’s work and hope to soon see that work in print!

Tomorrow I have a phone interview, and the rest of the week is shaping up to be a busy one. I’m itching to get more work done to replace much of the 40K I’m scrapping. That sounds like a lot of wasted work, but it’s really not. It’s back story for me and in the end it makes the story stronger. Some authors can discover those things in less time with different means. This works for me. At least I hope so! :)

Happy reading – and I hope you’ll enter the Facebook contest for a chance to win.

In Bible study tonight, the group leader made a comment that got me thinking. We were talking about Judah and Tamar (see Genesis 38). Judah was the fourth son of Jacob by his wife Leah. I’m not sure why I like Judah – he’s not the nicest character when we meet him earlier in Genesis. It was his idea to sell his little brother Joseph into slavery. Maybe he thought he was protecting the kid since most of the rest of the brothers wanted to kill him, but selling him as a slave doesn’t sound like protection to me.

To top it off, the brothers devised a scheme to lie to their father about Joseph and let him believe he was dead. I kind of doubt they realized just how much Jacob would grieve over Joseph’s loss. The guilt could have been what led Judah to leave his family and go off to live among the Canaanites for a while. A long while in fact, as Judah married and had three sons and saw the oldest one married during this time.

I’d like to think Judah learned some lessons from his own father in how not to treat his kids, but whatever he taught his sons, the fact remains that at least two of them were evil enough to get the attention of the Lord. The Bible tells us that the Lord killed them because of their wicked behavior. Their actions involved the first son’s wife Tamar, leaving her a widow without a kinsman redeemer.

Judah made grand promises to Tamar, telling her to go home to her father and wait for his youngest son to grow up to fulfill this unwritten law of levirate marriage. (Levirate Marriage was when a brother married the widow of his brother or close relative to raise up a son for his dead brother.) It was practiced by other cultures of Judah’s day and was later written in the Law of Moses. Somehow Judah knew this was what God would have him to do. But he failed to obey.

So through a scheme of her own, Tamar ends up pregnant with Judah’s child. (He did not know she carried his child and wanted to see her burn for it – but I’ll let you read the whole story in Genesis 38.)

What I discovered tonight was that Tamar did not conceive a child during her marriage to Judah’s son, but conceived during a one-night stand with his father Judah. Judah, Tamar, and their twin sons, Perez and Zerah are mentioned in the genealogy of Christ.

That got me thinking about the other women in Christ’s genealogy. Rahab was a prostitute but there is no mention of her having children until she marries the Israelite Salmon. Ruth is married to an Israelite for 10 years without children, but when she marries Boaz, she conceives a child. Bathsheba was married to Uriah for an undisclosed amount of time and apparently also has no children, but in her affair with David becomes pregnant. That child dies, but her next son Solomon is also in the line of Christ. Mary is the exception, though she is betrothed to Joseph but conceives by the Holy Spirit’s power.

I know these are obscure little details that probably don’t fascinate anybody but me, but in one sense I think it shows God’s sovereignty. He chose each of those women to bear those particular children by those men to be part of the lineage of His Son. Did He condone the methods by which some of these relationship came about? Absolutely not. Scripture is clear, especially in the David, Bathsheba, Uriah situation that God was not pleased at all. But He still worked all things to His purposes.

Tamar’s wrong was righted, Rahab’s faith rewarded, Ruth’s faithfulness satisfied, Bathsheba’s sin forgiven, and Mary’s obedience honored. All because of God’s grace and sovereignty. Right down to the last detail.

I love Sundays. I didn’t used to feel that way. Saturdays were more of a favorite because we still had one more day in the weekend. Sunday is too close to Monday and work starts all over again.

My feelings changed when I started to view Sundays in a different light. Last summer during an event called 40 that our young adults (and my kids) participated in at our church, I discovered a greater desire (as an outsider looking in) to spend more time with the Lord. Sunday afternoons seemed the most logical time to do that.’

Of course, as Christians we try to spend time daily in His Word and in prayer, but on Sundays the pace is slower, and there is more time to sit down with an open Bible and get to know Him better. I began by reading whole books of the Bible in one sitting and now I usually complete my weekly Bible study all at once rather than a few minutes each day. That frees me to study other things during the week. But it also gives me that more uninterrupted time to dig deeper into whatever the study is covering that week. Right now we are studying the book of Genesis.

I think what I love most about Sunday afternoons, is that they give me the closest thing I can come on this earth to a Sabbath rest. As a kid, Sabbath conjured up ideas of boredom. I remember reading The Little House on the Prairie books and feeling Laura’s frustration over having to just sit and do nothing after church on Sundays. I think her parents and the pastors of her day didn’t quite get Jesus’ teaching when He said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

But I also think there is a deeper meaning to what Jesus meant here. He wasn’t suggesting that God created the Sabbath for men and women to just live that day as they pleased or on the flip side, to sit around and be bored. I think God created the Sabbath for men and women to have a whole day where they were free to rest from their work, free to spend time getting to know Him better. A whole day to love Him, to walk with Him, talk with Him, listen to Him, praise Him, and to let Him pour His love over us in return.

In Genesis we learn of a man named Enoch. It is said of Enoch that he walked with God and then he was no more because God took him. Enoch understood the Sabbath rest. He took advantage of that whole day (and probably more) to spend time with the God who had made him. The Sabbath was made for intimacy with God – something we can’t get in just a few minutes a day in a cursory reading of Scripture or a glance at a devotional.

God made us for a purpose and from the very beginning He has longed to be with us. When intimacy was broken, He went to great lengths to see it restored. And He even set it up so we could have a whole day to be with Him without feeling guilty or worried that we might not get our work done. He knew if we honored Him, He would bless us in return. Rest is His gift to those who love Him.

Sundays may not be restful for some of us, and technically the Sabbath is observed on Saturdays in Jewish cultures. I think the day is less important than the principle here – a day to take time with the Lord, to truly enjoy Him and to rest. The more often I obey this principle, the stronger I grow to face the troubles of each new day when the work starts all over again.

It’s a blessing God planned from the beginning – if we will only accept it!

Shalom~

This week has been interesting. New experiences tend to be that way though, and everywhere I turn I’m running into something new.

Today I had my first live radio interview. Actually, there were two interviews but one was taped, so the radio host had time to talk with me beforehand and kind of prep me. He was a great guy to talk to and made the interview enjoyable. You can download it first and listen to it here.

I wasn’t able to listen to the live interview as I spoke. That was a little more nerve-wracking, but I only lost my train of thought and forgot the question once! :) So I think I did okay.

Also, the phone interview I did with CBD.com is now up on the page where you can purchase Michal here.

Last weekend Randy and I went to three local bookstores to take pictures of Michal on the shelves for my scrapbook – should I ever get around to actually making one! I am collecting everything “first book” related though, so I hope so. We stopped at a local Barnes & Noble where a woman had just been looking at a copy of Michal. I hope I didn’t scare her away with my picture taking! :)

Then we stopped at a Family Christian Stores. So fun to see it in a store I frequent! Often during my 20 years of waiting for this moment, I have dreamed of walking into this very store and seeing my book on the shelves. The reality is even better than the dream, though I will say the whole thing is pretty surreal. The pictures tell me it’s true, but it seems like I’m someone else. I know this is my book, but seeing it and holding it and signing it for friends and family – the whole thing hasn’t sunk in yet.

We stopped last at a Borders, but I won’t bore you with the rest of the photos. And I won’t visit every bookstore in the city hoping to find the book. :) This was just to prove to myself it was there and it’s real. :)

I’ve heard that Michal is making the rounds on Christian Fiction Blog Alliance this week! Thank you to all of the bloggers who are giving Michal such great exposure.

Work is coming along nicely on Bathsheba. I think I’m finally getting a handle on organizing my life! Until next week… :)

I’m being featured on Favorite PASTimes Blog this week. Oh, and if you want a chance to win a free copy of my book Michal, stop on over and leave a comment there by 8 a.m. Friday morning EST (I think that’s the right time zone) to be entered in the drawing.

I was asked during the interview how my life has changed since I became a published author. I won’t answer the question completely here, but one thing I did say was how much busier I am. That probably has something to do with life in general being busy at this time. I’m in that sandwich generation between aging parents who need me and adult kids who don’t need me as much, but whom I still want to enjoy when they’re around. And I still have all of the chores I always had, plus writing deadlines. (I am NOT complaining. Just explaining.) :)

But with all of the busyness, I’m finding writing time harder to come by. Tonight I didn’t get started until nearly 10 p.m., but I wrote a whole scene and feel much relieved for having done so! There is something wonderful about completing a word count or finishing a chapter or scene. Even if I know it will need rewriting several times, just getting that first draft down on paper is freeing – and invigorating.

I had intended to write much sooner today, but we had a refrigerator delivered (a replacement for a broken one), and I also had a hair appointment. So this morning I ran several loads of food to the basement freezer and then the delivery men came too early – an hour ahead of their promised time. I was late for my hair appointment, then had to come home and put the food back. By then it was time to make dinner, go to Bible study and we finally got home by 9 p.m. Thus my late writing schedule.

But some days just don’t go as we plan. I did decide to put all of my errands on one day (hopefully) so tomorrow I will couple three days of plans from previous weeks into one. That should free me more time to work. We’ll see how it goes. But I’m already feeling better about the prospective change.

One other interview I had this week was posted here – if you get a chance to visit – check it out. :)

I have two radio interviews this Thursday. Little nervous about those. Prayers are most appreciated!

Time to go read…and sleep! Tomorrow probably won’t go as planned either, but it’s worth a try!

I think it was first grade. We were making a map or something and the teacher asked us to draw a picture of the house we lived in. She wanted it to look just like our house, but it couldn’t be a photograph. Trouble was, I couldn’t draw well. The best I’d ever done was a box with a triangle on top for a roof and another square inside for a window and a rectangle for a door. But we lived in a house with two stories with a garage attached and many windows and shrubs and grass and…

Why did she want all of those details – to make it look just like our real house? And why couldn’t it be a snapshot? I worried about such things and was a perfectionist at heart. I was the youngest in my family and yet the years apart from my brother and sister made me also a firstborn with obsessive, “got to get it right” tendencies. So I did the only logical thing any six-year-old would do. I asked my older sister to draw the house for me. (She was a much better artist than I!)

I took the picture to my teacher the next day expecting praise or at the very least acceptance. I did not expect to be reprimanded for not drawing it myself. How could she tell? :) Apparently, she wanted the box with the triangle roof, square window, and rectangle door. Shrubs optional. How was I to know? All I heard was “it has to look just like your real house.” And I knew I could not draw such a thing.

I learned some lessons from that teacher though:

1. Don’t ask others to do your homework for you.
2. Give it your best effort and accept what comes.

Perhaps that experience helped make me the stickler for honesty and detail I am today. Maybe not. Maybe that experience had nothing to do with my current idiosyncrasies. :) And I don’t mean to suggest I obsess about these things. But my tendency is to care about honesty and details.

We never know what truly shapes us into the people we are today, but I will say one thing – I never cheated in school again. Some people only need to be embarrassed once, however small, to do all they can not to repeat the feeling.

But I still can’t draw much beyond a stick figure. I’ll leave the art to those who can. :)