Thirty-six Hours from Now . . .

That’s about how many hours are left until I and my two traveling companions set out for Minneapolis and the writers’ conference. Someone warned us about last minute tensions and panic, and I thought at the time that I was doing pretty well. But the panic started setting in today. You know those last-minute jitters you get when you start wondering if you’ve remembered everything?

For a writers’ conference that is multiplied because I have all those strange things to think about such as whether my pitch is good enough, and whether I’ve printed everything I need off the Internet, and whether I will remember everything I need to get copied to the flash drive before I leave. Hmmmm.

Then there is the matter that came up Saturday about whether I need to consider restructuring the beginning of my story. I committed it to the Lord and told Him I was sure He would give me the right answer in His own time. I didn’t have to wait long to know what I need to do and to have peace about it.

No, I’m not tearing into the story and starting to chop it up. That would be foolhardy. Instead, I’m going back to exactly what I was doing before Saturday. I’m continuing where I left off in polishing and applying what I’ve been learning. That’s my first priority. Deciding what to do about rearranging anything is not something to be rushed into.

Part of what comes with the conference is one appointment with any editor of your choice and one with an agent. You submit four choices for each, and when you get there, you find out with whom you’ve been scheduled on both counts (possibly your first choices, possibly not). That’s another area you commit to the Lord for His perfect will and direction. There are additional chances to meet and talk to editors and agents at meals and informal encounters.

So there is a lot of anticipation stirred together with a lot of unknowns. We’re told our best preparation is being well “prayed up,” and I’ve been working on that. I’ll be grateful for the prayers that anyone else wants to add to mine. It’s hard to believe that next week at this time I should be freshly arrived at home. I’m confident I’ll be loaded with some rather amazing memories.

What? Make It the Beginning?

We had an interesting time at our monthly writers’ meeting this morning. The agenda for the meeting was to offer each other critiques on two pages that anyone wanted to submitted. Five of us were brave enough to do it, though two of them ended up sick and couldn’t come. (If you want to be a writer, you have to learn to accept input and even criticism from others, so this was a good practice opportunity.) Of the nine of us present, at least three were published authors.

The two pages I chose were a scene with an emotional conflict between two main characters (twenty-year-old girls). Near the end of the scene, one of the girls hauls off and slaps the other one because of something she said. The scene ends with the slapped girl saying caustically, “All I’ve got to say is, you’d better not cause my brother any more grief!”

Since I hadn’t offered any background with the two pages, those reading it didn’t know what had gone before or that the scene comes about eighty pages into the book. Imagine my surprise when the group liked the scene so well that they thought it should be the beginning of the book! We discussed it around for several minutes, and I said I’d think about it.

And I have. It is just possible that, after all this time and all the work I’ve put into the first quarter of my story, I am going to need to restructure at least that much of it.

As you can imagine, you will be hearing a lot more about this.

Not a Hoax, Just a Long-ago Mistake

Nowadays all of us on computers are forever getting e-mails with great or dramatic news that turns out to be a hoax. Well, it turns out our Mayflower connection was not correct after all, but it was not a hoax. It was simply a mistake made a century ago which had been corrected in some records but not all, and not the one I was looking at that day. I have to admit it was fun while it lasted, but no real damage is done. I hadn’t even gotten used to the idea. Also this week I’ve learned that, while my ancestor William Compton had his jaw shot off and died fighting in the Revolution, the second Consider Tiffany, in a completely different ancestral line, was a Tory and on the side of the mother country, England.

Much more important at the moment are the preparations for conference. The two ladies and I who are traveling together have burned up the wire with a few e-mails about the trip--like route, whose care we will take (looks like it will be ours), how we will share costs of gas, what we like to do in the car, where we like to eat, do we get car sick? We all plan to attend our monthly meeting this Saturday, so we’ll be able to finalize things in person then.

I’ve made decisions about the outfits I’m going to take, keeping in mind that it should be cooler in Minneapolis than what we’re having in Nashville now. Probably time to put away the sandals and white shoes. I need to get my hair cut this week. Tomorrow I pick up my business cards from Staples.

I still haven’t decided whether I’m taking the laptop with me, but I’m guessing I will. I still need to print out the file I’ve collected with names and brief sketches of those of us who are first-timers (we’ve been getting some great online advance orientation). I also need to print out my proposal and synopsis again, as well as the bios and pictures of the agents and editors who will be at the conference. I’ve been studying them, trying to get a head start on recognizing them.

I think it is all coming together.

Freight Train Bearing Down

The American Christian Fiction Writers’ annual conference was a long way off when I first wrote about it back in May (“Minneapolis Writers’ Conference” and “Learning Craft at a Conference”). Those blogs are in the Archives down the right side of this site; click on the little triangle beside May.

Now the conference is bearing down on us like the proverbial freight train. An endless number of messages have gone back and forth, forums have been buzzing, and advice—good advice—has been available on every side. Everyone is talking about one sheets, pitches, and appointment etiquette, not to mention clothes, business cards, and a lot more.

To get to the conference, I’ll be traveling with two ladies from my local writer’s group and sharing a hotel room with them. Two weeks from now, on Wednesday the 17th, we’ll be on the road all day, getting as close to Minneapolis as we can, then finishing up the next day.

The conference starts on Thursday afternoon with a special session for first timers, otherwise known as newbies. Then we’ll have the first of three keynote addresses by Angela Hunt. There will be panels to introduce the agents and editors who have come to the conference. Part of the evening program is worship and devotions, and at the end of the evening, the first round of late-night chats. The next morning we’ll begin with the classes, and in the afternoon the workshops.

Volunteers do a lot to make the conference run smoothly. Some time ago, a call went out for volunteers to introduce the presenters at each class and workshop, and I jumped in. I got my assignments this week, and I am delighted. I’m going to get to introduce an author who helped me a huge amount with one aspect of my writing—Susan May Warren. I haven’t met her in person yet, but her first book in the Noble Legacy series, Reclaiming Nick, helped me see the way to do “back story,” compared to all the advice I had previously heard on how not to do it. I hope one of these days to tell you more about it. Of course I’m going take along Nick and the one about his brother, Rafe, and get them signed . (Lord, will I ever get to sign books for folks?)

I’ve also been assigned to introduce Gail Gaymer Martin, the teacher for the Level 2 Continuing Education class I’ll be taking. In ten years of writing, Gail has signed forty fiction contracts and has more than two and a half million books in print. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from her.

The Mayflower?? You're Kidding!

It has been my impression, in the years I’ve been interested in genealogy, that the gold standard for prestige was if you descended from someone who came over on the Mayflower. That was fine, but it didn’t have anything to do with our family. In 2000 we discovered two ancestors who were involved in the Plymouth Colony during its first twenty-five years, and we figured that was as close as we would get. One of those was Anne Hutchinson, who made her way into the history books and to an expressway in the Bronx, as well as her daughter Susanna, the only one who survived the family massacre by Indians.

This past spring my fellow genealogist in the family, my nephew Matt, discovered a new branch of ancestors that we hadn’t known about. I wrote about them in my July 2 blog entitled Of Roots and Names. You may remember it was a line with the unusual name of Consider Tiffany. Matt has been working hard firming up the research on the line and getting it entered in our database.

This afternoon I was browsing back through the tree, noticing some of the female lines that brought other names into the tree. Suddenly, a name caught my eye. Ruth Brewster. Brewster?? There was a Brewster on the Mayflower. Surely not…. But one click and two generations later there it was – there HE was. Consider Tiffany’s wife Naomi was a great-granddaughter of Ruth Brewster, the grand-daughter of William Brewster who came on the Mayflower! He not only came on the Mayflower, but he became a top leader of the colony.

I’m still shaking my head over it, and fascinating stories are already coming to light…Ruth’s young father losing his first wife and their three children before the Mayflower ever sailed, and William Brewster’s children who came with him on the ship being two boys named Love and Wrestling. Now there are some names for characters in my Tangled Strands story -- NOT.

But I have been seriously thinking, once again, about making name changes to some major characters—thinking about it but not yet generating courage to do it. At least two of the changes need to be made, and I’ve come up with nice family-history names that would work well. But the changes I’m thinking about would be HUGE because they are three of the most prominent names in the story. One family member is still trying to get used to the last such change I made a couple of years ago.

These would be changes to names I started out with forty years ago. Could I adjust to them? Even if I could, what about others who have been closely involved with it in recent times? One thing for sure, if I’m going to do it, I must decide and do it before anyone else reads it. Like an editor or a publisher.

Which brings me to an invitation I already have. But this blog is long enough. I’ll save that for another one. And I'll keep you posted on what I decide about the names.

The Waiting Game

No one likes to wait. In our American culture, we have become very bad wait-ers. We honk, we holler, we stew when someone makes us wait. We look for shortcuts and the fastest way to get somewhere or get something done. Just look at what a thriving and integral part of our culture fast food has become. Meanwhile, inventors produce a steady stream of products designed to do things for us faster.

Most of the time, however, our God is not into “fast.” Part of that is because time doesn’t exist for Him. With a thousand years being like a day, waiting as we know it has no meaning for Him. But He does know something about waiting because waiting is one of His special tools. Because He is God, He understands what waiting means to His children. The good news is that, because He is God, He knows exactly how to use the waiting for good.

Writers, especially those of us who aren’t published, know a lot about waiting. We wait while we learn the craft, we wait to find the right critique partner, the right agent, and we wait for responses from publishers. Most of all, we wait for that illusive piece of paper called a contract. Even after that, we wait through all the steps of the publishing process. Finally, we wait for that incredible moment when we hold that published book in our hands.

So why, if God is so powerful and can do anything, even in the blink of an eye, does He elect to make us wait? You know the answer, don’t you? He lets us, makes us, wait because He knows that what He will accomplish in us during that wait is more important, in light of eternity, than whatever it is we are waiting for. When people make us wait, it may or may not have a worthy purpose or outcome, but when God makes us wait, we can be sure that He will have a divine and worthy purpose. God uses waiting to accomplish in us things He knows will deepen our faith and strengthen our character.

Our task is to stay in tune to His voice and to trust that He knows exactly what He is doing.

Oh, Good! A Comment...

I’ve been watching for an opportunity to talk about comments to blogs, and with this last blog, I got one – first a comment (thanks!) and then an opportunity. More than one of you have said you made an attempt to add a comment but didn’t succeed. So you’re made your comments by e-mail, and I much appreciated them. That hasn’t been a problem and still isn’t especially one. However, it could be a problem in the future, so I’d like to see more of us figure out how to do it.

Up until now, I’ve been writing this blog mostly for my friends and for myself, but if publication ever does loom on the horizon, the blog will be a major way to publicize my writing efforts. I’ve even heard that in this age and age some publishers, when they are considering publishing you, they check out what you already have online, whether it’s a blog, an author’s website, a ShoutLife site or other such. From that they not only get a taste of your writing, but they get an idea of how much of a “public platform” you have, how well you are known, and the like.

Right now, looking at my blog, most could only conclude that not very many people know me or are reading my stuff. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not putting pressure on anyone or worrying about this. The same thing happened to me when I tried here and on a couple of friends’ blogs. But I tried a couple more times and got the hang of it.

What you have to have is a Goggle “account” with username and password. If you don’t think you have one, click on “Sign up here” and put in an e-mail. You probably don’t want to use your main one, so open a gmail one or some other free one. It isn’t something anyone but you needs to know. Then choose a password and type it twice also.

Yes, they give you the bit of hassle about copying the letters you see, but that is a precaution so that I don’t get dumped on with tons of automated spam. You do have to give a name, but not your last name. If you want to develop a profile with picture, more fun, but not necessary.

Come on. Be brave. I look forward to hearing from some more of you. I’ll notice—and I’ll reply to you.

Later: for a clearer explanation of all this, check out the long comment written the day I posted this.