The beginning of 2020 promised miracles.
A new decade. Clueless, happy people in the foreground. Surrounded by strangers from many countries. Smiling from a country we’re not allowed to enter. A giant covid dinosaur preparing to rampage everyone and everything.
I started to share lists of everything I accomplished in 2020. A glass-half-full, reframe-the-experience in a positive light approach. Look back and carry the good forward.
In the end, I scrapped my stupid list because only one thing matters:
WE MADE IT TO 2021.
Riddled with bite marks, maybe. Traumatized from a long gaze into that crazy eye. But you’re here. I’m here. I’m grateful to be here. With you. Together.
The Evangelicals: A Novel Update
Eight early readers gave me loads of helpful feedback. As encouraging as they were, in between the lines they told me what I already knew in my heart: The book isn’t ready. It needs a bigger rewrite than I wanted to tackle at this stage, and I’m up to that challenge. I want to get this story right more than I care about making it available by a certain deadline.
I’m in the process of remaking an entire plot point, bringing a more obscure part of the story forward, and weaving the novel back together. Readers are always harder on female protagonists (in books AND in life), and my female protagonist still isn’t strong enough to withstand their scrutiny.
I probably struggle to get readers to pull for female characters because I don’t understand what makes a female “likable.” I never cared about being likable until I started my blog and social media, and I made every mistake one can name to be liked.
I’ve also got more work to do on my villain. Because writers CONSTANTLY hear that things have to happen fast, I made my villain too evil too early. I’m building the right character arc this time.
While none of my characters are me, I draw them from compartments within myself, experiences with others I store replay dissect reinterpret. I refract and reflect through my unique lens, determined to build a politics-and-religion story that is unputdownable.
Speaking of politics and religion…….
A throwback to a time Dad punished me. It was Christmas, and I broke out in hives from sheer excitement. We were Presbyterian back then, because my mother refused to become a Baptist when she married Dad. She was Methodist and believed anyone could lose their salvation.
When they moved to South Carolina, they joined the independent evangelical fundamentalist Baptist church where I grew up. For the first two decades of my life, I heard liberals were elitist socialist depraved snobs who laughed at us simpletons while robbing us of our freedom. The media was packed with liberals who wanted to outlaw our right to worship. Separation of church and state meant protecting the CHURCH from the STATE, not vice-versa. Judges were all liberals intent upon destroying the one true faith – our version of Christianity.
We were supposed to believe the men in the pulpit, plus anyone they endorsed. Everyone else perverted true faith, caused us to question things we should accept as fact, and made us worldly.
It took almost two decades to rewire my brain.
But imagine those who chose to remain. Who have spent fifty years, perhaps their whole lives, hammering this dogma into their heads. They worked strategically for forty years to infiltrate every American institution. They own most state houses. The judiciary. The Supreme Court.
How do we defeat them? Read my upcoming novel The Evangelicals to find out.
Recent Reads Friday: Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
Hailed as one of the preiminent nuclear disaster novels, this story from 1950s cold war America imagines what might happen if the Russians launched nuclear warheads on multiple US cities.
In the aftermath of the attack, the action follows a small Florida town. They adapt to living without a grid, supply chains, or fuel-powered anything.
A sobering, thorough take on why we need to keep itchy fingers off red buttons and away from nuclear codes and keys. Get your copy HERE.
➡️ I purchase every new book featured with my own funds. I do not offer endorsements in exchange for a feature. My opinions are honest assessments of books I read, enjoy, and believe worthy of your time. Creators cannot create if people fail to support their work with actual money. I am doing my part to support worthy writers in many genres and career stages.
Tell me: What are you reading right now?
During 2020, I worked daily meditation into my life.
I resisted meditation for decades because of my upbringing. I was taught that stilling my thoughts, emptying my mind, made room for the devil. According to evangelicals, blank space is fertile ground for demonic possession. Therefore, I should never, ever quiet my brain and give Satan a foothold.
Meditation may not work for everyone, but it works miracles for me. Sometimes, prayer is my mantra.
Thank you for making me broken. Thank you for making me whole. And thank you for making me ME.
Do you meditate? Do you have a favorite program or teacher? Please share!
This place was supposed to give me miracles.
Austrian alps. 2017.
We hiked to a shrine in the rain. Through fields of grass bowing with wet. Curious cows clanging their bell symphonies. Up up up we followed the zigzag of a ski lift, cars frozen overhead. Past a carpenter’s shack staked by a thousand wooden trolls.
I stood in this building of promised miracles. Whispered my prayer. Bathed my face in holy water as instructed. Considered myself whole.
But here’s the thing: I was whole when I walked into this space. Whole when I splashed my cheeks with frigid water. Whole on the uphill slog and downhill return. I was always, always whole.
What we tell ourselves matters. Tell yourself that you are whole. Perfect. Sacred. BECAUSE YOU ARE.
Life-altering, mind-bending, society-changing things start with miracles of imagination. Someone, or many someones, nurture the seed of an idea until it germinates, stretches roots through soil, slurps water, reaches toward the sun. A reality represented by work toil time rejection failure setbacks starting over ten thousand tries.
Few understand what it means to put themselves out there unless they actually do it. Hiding one’s light is easier because it keeps imagination inside. Stifles it. Snuffs it out. And in the process, the ultimate gorgeous reality dies before it has a chance to live.
Your imagination makes miracles, dear soul. Don’t fear making it a reality. Shine your light. Be blinding like a lighthouse fireworks spotlights.
9 Comments
Oh so much to say to respond to so much brought into one post. So much! This could have been five separate blog posts ? so I’ll just choose one question to answer. I too just started meditating as a way to calm my brain and heart while I find myself again in my gigantic personal restart. So far I love Insight Timer and specifically David Ji. His voice, words, pace, and overall purpose of the meditations he guides work for me. Well. Best of luck to us both.
I’ve heard a lot of great things about Insight Timer. Please tell me more about your “gigantic personal restart.” If you want.
I was raised Methodist and wasn’t baptized until my freshman year of high school because somewhere in between having my two brothers and baptizing them at birth and having me nine years later she thought it best we made the decision for ourselves. To be honest I think she forgot to have me baptized but I’m very much OK with that. I thought it meant something until it happened and the strange overzealous joy a friend had, like she was so relieved her friend wasn’t going to Hell now, made me criticize it all finally. Strange thinking on that now.
I grew up evangelical Baptist. Not much surprises me about what some think it’s okay to say to another soul. Like “you’re going to hell” or “you’re not going to hell now.”
Reading. Hmm. I am reading Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse series in order, first to last. I am also reading Reinhold Niebuhr, whose insights into human nature are, I think, right on. I don’t agree with his theology, but it does clarify why I don’t.
I first heard of Niebuhr when James Comey used his name as a Twitter handle. Because of course in my Protestant evangelical upbringing, a guy like Niebuhr was WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Faith is a tool to cope with being alive. It gives many people hope to believe this isn’t all there is. I don’t have a problem with another person’s faith when it doesn’t speak to me. Nobody knows what comes after this. We can speculate debate daydream challenge, but nobody can irrefutably prove what comes after we die. I try very hard to avoid “this particular faith is right” discussions. Rightness is the antithesis of faith. But I’m more than happy to take the Bible and build characters to represent who Jesus was and wasn’t. Not to convert anyone. I don’t care what you believe as long as it doesn’t hurt people and it speaks to you. But Jesus was pretty simple: love people; serve others; be humble. He would be at the border trying to free children from cages and reunite families, not cheering their torture. He would defend Black and Brown people from being shot and discriminated against and unlawfully arrested. He would make sure every soul in his orbit had food and shelter. He would minister to the dying rather than blaming some unnamed sin for their plight and saying they deserve God’s judgment. BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT HE DID IN LIFE. I’m not sure I’ll ever get this story right, because so much of its current problem is tied up in my utter bewilderment with when and how it’s okay for women to be vulnerable. We need more of Pearl’s inferiority, but society sets the “appropriate” amounts. Too much and she’s needy and whiny and attention-seeking and too hormonal/emotional and self-pitying. Not enough and she’s too perfect and steely and unfeminine and unlikeable. Part of my own personal development with this project (because writers always have those objectives) is to solve that riddle.
*interiority* damn autocorrect
Wishing you the best in your rewrite, Andra. I know that it will end up as a spectacular novel because you are spending time to get it right before getting it in our hands. I am currently reading “Then She was Gone” by Lisa Jewell. Almost halfway done and can’t wait for the entire story to unravel. It’s one that’s hard to put down.
I don’t meditate, but I do take time in the morning to write down three gratitudes and either a prayer or scripture that speaks to me. It starts the day in a positive way and I suppose that’s some form of clearing my mind of anything negative.
Thanks for sharing the message that we are whole. It’s a message that we often forget because we often focus on what we are not and what we don’t have rather than count our blessings and acknowledge the good people that we are.
Thank you. I’m trying to get it right. But as I told MTM the other day, I’m not sure getting it right will make it unputdownable. I think my next book needs to be a cotton candy feel good escape. ?
Lisa Jewell weaves good tales.
To me, quiet time is whatever our souls need. I like your quiet time rituals.
Comments are closed.