Tag: Winter

Spare Time?

Rocks at Okines Beach, Dodges Ferry, Tasmania, Australia

It is winter here in Tassie. Much too cold to go to the beach today, but I can dream of warmer days as I sit here at the computer 🙂
For the past few months, my Saturdays have been devoted to recording, editing, and publishing videos to YouTube so that my small church community could have a shared online Worship experience.

Tomorrow we will be meeting face to face for the first time since CoVid19 restrictions came in. Which means Saturday has become my own again.

So what will I do with
all this spare time?

All I really want to do is write, write, write.
Book 5 is nearing the critical point,
and I am impatient to get there.
And I have three more story ideas for a spin-off series
featuring Marco Fontana, the pizza-devouring teenager who has become a favourite.
Plus there’s the final book in my fantasy trilogy…

Alas, there are other tasks that must have their turn first. One of them was right in my face when I opened up my computer to start this post. A big red ! warning me that something technical was “out-of-date” and “unstable”. I had a quick look at the accompanying information and then hunted out the password to contact the Help Desk. Problem solved, and it didn’t cost me more than half an hour.

Plus there was a bonus opportunity to have a little laugh. The Online Helper said these kinds of red warnings were “normal”, and if my web page was working okay, I could leave it…

Would you? I didn’t think so. Neither did I.

It has been a busy week. The first shipment of paperbacks for Book 3: When Freedom Is Promised came early. I’ve made some hand deliveries and put a few copies in the regular mail. Here is Ezra, my helpful assistant, checking that I put the right addresses on a few books. With the borders still closed, he was tempted to mail himself to Queensland.it…

Help, please

I am keeping this short today. The final topic is a request for your help. Before I can start planning the Marco Fontana series of books, I need to invent a pizza menu for Papa Benito and Mama Rosa’s restaurant. If the choices were left to me, it wouldn’t be a very long list. I’m not very adventurous – give me meat and cheese and I’m happy.

So I am putting out an invitation to my readers. Please send me your menu suggestions in the comments section below. If you have a fancy name to go with your topping description, even better. If I include your idea in Marco’s menu, then I will credit you in his books.

Talk to you again soon,

Chrissy )i(

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(