When Promises Are Broken – Page 2 – Chrissy Garwood

Consecrated things

Matthew 6:21 (NIV)
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

I have finally fallen under the influence of my first winter illness – as I work primarily with children, and in two different communities, my previous immunity is a miracle in itself. While I have been unwell, the calendar has turned and officially it is Spring.

Finding the mental stamina to write has been a struggle and I spent the recent weekend in bed, only surfacing long enough to go to Church. I have been praying about how I would meet the vows I made to write regularly.

When I turned on my computer up popped this reminder to read a post from my Facebook page Butterfly Prayer House, which was written a while ago, and published to a schedule that allows me some breathing space. The post was published on September 2nd 2018. Here is an excerpt from that post:

Today I am wrestling with a couple of challenges. Firstly, I want to fulfil the vow I made to God and set aside enough time to write more posts in preparation for another busy week of life. One day a week is my dedicated writing day…

I turn to God in prayer, frustrated that all my attempts to bring him the ‘consecrated things’ and to fulfil my vows have taken me to this place of emotional upheaval. My sense of failure overshadows the truth that it is God who has brought me here.

To read the rest of that post, click here

T
o build on my habit of sharing some of my research, here are a couple of quotes that I found very helpful.

* The first one is from Steve Lauble’s blog:
https://stevelaube.com/embedded-writing/

“Many can write about God and live a fairly righteous life by all appearances. Fewer can write from within an experience, portraying lessons learned from the battlefields of life as they worked out their faith in relationships and service to the Creator.”
This quote came from a blog post:

* Here is a second one from the same blog: “So, next time you open up a Word document and start to write about something, ask yourself how deep you are embedded in the topic, whether you are writing from deep within it…or whether this is just a surface connection.”

* The most exciting resource to land in my email Inbox this week was from a renowned author Ted Dekker. I had only spoken to some children the evening before about how they would enjoy his work, but I knew that the adult format would be difficult for them to manage. He is self-publishing a four book series for children. I was disappointed to find Australia wasn’t on the current pre-order list, but it is very encouraging to find that an author with many published works to his credit is making a similar journey. Here is the link to the pre-order information: Ted Dekker’s Dream Travellers

I have spent my sick days writing about storms and floods. One of my characters escapes their difficult situation by returning to memories of summer at the beach.
Do you enjoy building sandcastles? I have many happy memories, both from my own childhood and from summers since.
The delight of standing back and viewing the creation.
Then comes the reality, the tide turns and the waves come crashing in.
There were times when we worked to try and protect our creations, but more often we acted to speed up the process,
to build channels that would entice the waves to come further forward and flood the moats we had dug.

My final topic for today is to tell you about my Works In Progress (WIP).
I have received advice from my Copy Editor that White Rose of Promise will return to me on the 24th of September.
The first draft of my second manuscript When Promises Are Broken is almost complete. All the dramatic scenes have been written and now I need to wrap up the story to satisfy the readers who want a Happy Ever After ending. This week I discovered that 21st-century readers are sometimes content with Happy For Now endings, which is where I am at the moment, but I am looking for that special something that will transform the heroine’s situation into something filled with more hope )i(

There Is A Season…

My mood is as changeable as the weather.
Sometimes I grow impatient.
I am still learning to relax and enjoy
whatever opportunities God places before me. )i(

Water is one of the references I am exploring in my River Wild Series.

It is winter here in Tasmania, and it will be a few months before the weather is warm enough for me to contemplate going to the beach.
I am one of those mortals who rug up at the first sign of a cool wind and hide away from the colder weather. Yet I also struggle in the heat of summer and could not survive in a hotter climate.

Whenever my mind turns to seasons, I find myself singing an old song, which is based on an Old Testament Bible passage from Ecclesiastes.

Click here for a link to the song ‘Turn, Turn, Turn,’ by the Byrds

Ecclesiastes 3:1-10 (NIV)
There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

Virtual Gallery Installation, 2017 Windmills of My Mind Series
inspired by the song Turn, Turn, Turn

Here is one of my Butterfly Prayer House images )i(

This week I have been researching an exotic location for my second manuscript.
My heroine is flying to Thailand. That inner critical voice has been asking how I could ever write a convincing account of her experience when I have never travelled there myself.

In a moment of doubt, while I was praying about my anxieties and fears, God brought me three memories.

The first one was from 2000 when I volunteered at the Sydney Olympics. I was assigned to the Olympic Weightlifting venue in Darling Harbour – my husband is a coach, and I have been a State official for that sport for decades. This was my first solo trip to the mainland, and there were lots of new experiences. I remember struggling to get through the crowds to get to my venue. It seemed that hundreds of thousands of people were going in the opposite direction. On more than one occasion I was physically accosted by a stranger, and I had to learn how to speak up for myself and get myself out of trouble.

The second memory is also from the Sydney Olympics. At the last minute, I was invited to accompany some of the other volunteers to the Opening Ceremony. It was a wonderful opportunity and I was very thankful. Afterwards, in the crush at the train station, I was separated from my companions. I waited for hours for my line to get close enough to the platform for me to catch the train home. The conversations with my companions the next day revealed some strategies that would have saved my tired legs and blistered feet from all that shuffling in the wrong queue.

The third memory is from 1993. My husband and I had our one and only family holiday. We went to Queensland in January, not the best time for someone who struggles with the heat. We had with us our two boys. Both of them are on the Autism Spectrum, but that was a diagnosis we had yet to receive. It was a memorable holiday, for all the wrong reasons, a story for another time. Of course, we went to Movie World and this was my first real experience with a crowd filled with faces from many different countries. We arrived early, and stood in a line, surrounded by voices speaking in unfamiliar tongues.

From these three memories, I realise that I have enough connection with the kind of situations my heroine will face to be able to write convincing scenes. I have also discovered some very helpful information on the internet including some great YouTube videos to help me choose the accommodation and the special places my heroine will go on her adventure. I am looking forward to sharing the finished story soon )i(

Procrastination and me

It is time for my weekly update. So soon? What happened to the past week? Time seems to be passing much faster than it used to! I only have to look at how my morning has gone so far to find evidence of that.

I have spent the past hour working through the backlog of emails in my personal account. There are now only 15 unread messages, and they fit in the opening screen. No more having to search down through hundreds of messages looking for the start of an important conversation. I even found a 2017 newsletter from a missionary family I have promised to pray for. It sat there in the inbox opened, so the habit of marking things as important and then letting them disappear off the first page of notifications is nothing new… Welcome to my confession about procrastination.

Why was I looking at emails in what should be my dedicated Devotional Time? I have been checking for new messages at too frequent intervals for days, as I am awaiting a quote for a cover design from a local graphic artist. The five I have already received through an international referral service were alarmingly above my budget. My editor thought I could use my Fine Arts skills to design my own covers, but I had an attack of self-doubt and wanted some professional advice. I am also waiting for news from my editor about the Copy Edit progress. No news is good news, right?

Here are four experiments for one idea
from my own amateur attempts to discover what I might want
for the cover of Book 1: White Rose of Promise

Let me know what you think by leaving me a comment.

A year ago, this waiting period would have frozen me in place. Then, I was in the final stages of writing the graduating project assignments for my BA in Fine Arts and Visual Culture. The exhibition was over, and I had to write two reports: one covering the key influences from a year’s research and the other presenting the final images for the artistic work I wanted to be assessed towards my degree. The race was on but every day the designated tasks seemed to be taking so long. Procrastination became my new normal. I found out from my fellow students that this was a very common problem for them too.

Each time I sent off a request to my faithful study buddies I seemed unable to make any more progress until I received their feedback. At one stage, I realised I was spending more time looking for their responses than I was devoting to actually writing my report. I had to learn how to push myself to work on other tasks while I waited. That learning opportunity has served me well in my current ‘assignment’.

Here is my 2017 Artist Statement
Here is a link to my Bookworms To Butterflies facebook album for the exhibition.
I took more than 139,000 and still have to make time to look at some of them (I had timed cameras set up all around the room).

So what have I been doing this week? Revising the first ten chapters of the sequel – it still feels strange working on the NEXT book while the first one is still in the preparation stage. I have added the main characters to the Series Outline so I can cross-reference their details each time they appear in the story, and I have been looking at how each one expresses themselves in their scenes. It is easy (at the moment) to remember all the central characters from both books, as they are familiar to me, but already I have too many secondary characters to juggle. I need one person to secretly be an enemy, so I went back through conversations looking for clues to that ultimate betrayal. It is also essential to start leaving clues (and add these details to the Series Outline) for future manuscripts so that my readers already have a good understanding of the new heroes’ and heroines’ motivations before those characters get to speak for themselves.

Last night was the first time I experienced confidence in my ability to generate a marked difference in tone between the new story and the first. The heroine of the first book is a devoted Christian, and everything that happens is filtered through her prayer life. But her unbelieving sister is the central character of the second book, and when this sister reaches her breaking point, there is no filter for her pain. Spending so much time describing her emotional turmoil flowed out into my own life. My long-suffering husband decided I am currently overly-sensitive to criticism, which has sent me running to my prayer closet on more than one occasion recently.

As I become more engaged in my fictional world, I have increased the time I spend in prayer and meditation. I don’t want to become lost and irrelevant to the real world opportunities that God has given me. Last week, someone in my family had a real accident that could have been disastrous. As a writer, I can see the different narrative possibilities that would lead me into a valley of shadows (Psalm 23:4). I am thankful God was merciful and saved my loved one from suffering a long-term disability. They are still very sore and unable to function to their maximum potential and have succumbed to a viral illness while their immune system was weakened by the pain and extra medication. Another topic to add to my prayer list.

Here is an image I created using the text from Psalm 23:4 superimposed over one of my own digital drawings. I have a long-term project underway to create a digital image for as many inspirational texts as possible. These are shared on my Butterfly Prayer House facebook page, where I publish a personal reflection (almost) every day )i(

Research fills any gaps in my spare time, as I have been subscribing to newsletters and reading as much as I can about how to become a published author. Somehow I have ended up on a couple of mailing lists that now go straight to the bin, but otherwise, my email inbox is flooding with useful information. I have had to make the hard decision to let go of some of my other interests and to learn how to quickly assess whether an article contains treasure, or is irrelevant to my situation.

I have decided I WON’T be writing my own newsletter. My once a week contribution to this page, and sharing on my different facebook pages will be more than enough. If I were to add any more writing commitments to my schedule and this will be the ultimate procrastination towards getting my novels published. )i(

While I am waiting

My first manuscript, White Rose of Promise (WRoP) is away at the Copy Editor, but there seems to be a growing a mountain of tasks to continue with.

One of the first challenges seems to be the contemporary trend to constantly update and improve everything. Last week, I managed to combine text and images on this Blog without too many problems. Today, I come to my page to discover that I am ‘trialling’ new software. It has taken me a few attempts just to work out how to get started (again).

Time to add a peaceful little image here to restore my peace, which is accompanied by some quiet prayer.

I wanted a small image, with text beside it, like I did last week,
but this is the best I can manage )i(

Now that I have had my little panic for the day, I will get to the reason I am writing. I am currently halfway through writing the second book in the series. This one picks up the story of a Secondary Character from the first book and there is some overlap in the timeline. It has been a reasonably easy task to make sure that the concurrent events match up.

But as I already know some of the following unwritten stories will overlap both White Rose of Promise and When Promises Are Broken I begin to see the complicated web I am weaving for myself.

Blue Skies: Chasing Away The Blues Exhibition 2017.
Mixed media, site-specific installation. Photo credit Bookworms To Butterflies.

This immediately reminds me of the artistic process involved in creating my mixed media artwork. For my final Fine Arts university project, I invited participants to make a room weaving installation as the central performance piece. At first, it was easy to see how each of the participants wove their way around the community hall where the performance took place. But after a few hours, the tangle of connections was almost impossible to follow.

Three days later, and the tangled web had become a canopy and the child participants took up habitation for creative play.

In a similar way, my characters are weaving themselves a creative world where their adventures are played out. I started with a simple story, a tale of a lonely woman in search of family and love. As she navigated the challenges before her, she drew other people into her story. Her life became entangled with theirs in such a way that I found myself wanting to give them a story too.

My creative writing time has been devoted to placing the major events from White Rose of Promise into a timeline so that each character, as they come to tell their story, has a connection with all the other characters. This has raised some important questions about how much detail my readers will need in each story about what has happened before.

Another important task in becoming a published writer is to seek out advice from people who have already walked this journey. This includes subscribing to newsletters and following other writers’ Blog posts. I have been praying for specific direction, and this treasure appeared in my inbox this morning.

Thanks for taking the time to read my post. I pray you will move forward with your own social connections, weaving strength and success as you make your way forward )i( Happy reading (and writing)

Chrissy )i(