Growing

I love the way my house feels in the early Spring. It's so cool in the mornings with my windows open, that I have to run my little heater under the desk to keep my feet warm. Pollen or not, I can't resist opening the windows. Sometimes, I need hot cocoa or orange spice herbal tea to warm me from the inside out. By the afternoon, I'm closing the shade and turning on the fan. I switch to ice water and the glass sweats and so do I. Rivulets of water run down it and me. Winter to start, summer to end.
Most of my days begin with an early morning scripture study class with the teenagers at my church. It's dark and cold and hard to pull myself out from under the cozy covers. But there's nothing like the peace of the starlit morning. Teaching the Gospel and cute, sleepy teenagers that I love--it's worth it. By the time I leave church, the sun is coming up over Lake Benson and the birds sing me home. The tough start is balanced with the sweet calm of daybreak. Ah, each new day, a new start...
Writing is also full of opposition. Writing is hard. It's hard to pull it all together, to decide what goes where and who does what and figure out the transitions between. Which scenes and even which characters to keep--and which to kill off. Balancing showing and telling. Letting your characters have their way or reigning them in. Letting them suffer, adding one trial upon another, forcing them to grow before you bring them to the end and allow them a little moment of peace and comfort. And let's not even talk about the way we writers squirm during critiques and the pain of rejections after we've poured out our soul on paper for everyone to see and step on.
And then again, writing is easy. You get to participate in the act of creation. James M. Frey said, "When we read good fiction, we are witnessing the vast and wondrous river of life, and the river of life is ever-changing. It's no wonder writers love writing so much. We get to live so many lives, feel so many emotions, dream so many dreams." So achingly beautiful and true. There's just nothing like it in the world.
Sometimes, we think we might like a little less opposition. But would the highs be so high if the lows weren't so low? Probably not. I know, just like my characters, opposition makes me grow.
And there's always the happy ending to look forward to...

Beginnings

I named this blog "Writing Refuge" not solely as a tribute to my first book, but more as a description of what writing has become for me. I love taking refuge in ideas and characters, in creation and imagination, in plotting and prose. I never could have imagined the highs--or the lows--that writing could bring. For the most part, it's made me extremely happy. Struggling with plot points, with critiques that I didn't like, with characters who refused to grow or worse, who tried to take over, has been a delicious journey that I hope to be on for a long, long time. Who would have thought that middle age (okay, maybe a little past that, but anyway) would bring so many new beginnings? I surely never would have believed it. But as George Elliot said, "It's never too late to be what you might have been." And that applies to more than just writing...