Wherein I am sarcastic to God and God is good to me

An image of the cover of The Giant Slayer by N A Hart with a quote superimposed on top. How long would it take? A few days? Until the new moon? Could Adonai keep him in suspense for a whole season?

One of my favorite moments in The Giant Slayer is when young David, having just been anointed by Samuel, who won’t tell him why, wonders,

How long would it take? A few days? Until the new moon? Could Adonai keep him in suspense for a whole season?

It’s adorable. His disbelief that God might make him wait a whole season.

Of course, it’s not nearly so cute when God is making me wait.

Back in November 2021 I was at a retreat at The Transforming Center. It was a gift to the staff and church leaders from my boss and pastor who was about to retire. And it truly was a gift. After a year and a half of doing ministry during COVID, I needed a retreat. They actually gave us time to listen to what God might be trying to say to us–like, hours, not just a token 10 minutes before a session. 

One of the best things I did there was grieve: grieve what COVID stole from me, from all of us, grieve the upcoming loss of my pastor. I needed a good cry and I got it. The retreat gave me the space and time to get out of management mode so I could recognize what emotions I needed to process, and then begin to process them.

But then I sensed that God was promising me rest–not just rest for that day, but capital-R Rest. My response,

That’s adorable.

Other than those few days, I would get no chance for rest in the near future. In fact, I knew that the near future would be busier than ever. What a hilarious thing for God to promise me.

With the pastor retiring and me on the celebration committee, I’d be going full steam ahead on all the party plans as soon as we got back, and that was on top of my normal 5 part-time jobs. And then once he retired, I’d be on the transition team tasked with searching for and calling a new pastor. And the children were finally coming indoors for ministry so there was extra COVID-planning and -proofing to do. And the middle school youth group was finally going to start up. That was just what I knew. I didn’t anticipate that fewer people would return to church and that even fewer would want to come back to volunteering so finding people to do ministry things would become even more torturous. Or that the worship director and associate worship director would leave the church. That more and more and more responsibility would fall into my hands.

Jim Gaffigan tells a great joke about what it’s like having 5 children: “Imagine you’re drowning. And then someone hands you a baby.” Here’s a church-staff-coming-out-of-COVID version:

Imagine you’re doing everything normal plus extra to try to connect everyone virtually and hold the church together. And then some people come back and are so excited for what you were doing and so glad to be there, but you wind up with more to do and nothing taken away. And the thing is that you love these people. They are your church family. You know they’ve had an exhausting pandemic, too, so you don’t want to burden them or ask too much of them. So you shoulder it yourself.

I began to see that a new job could be part of God’s promised rest. The end of July 2022 I traded one part-time job for a full-time job with benefits. The end of December I left my church, my denomination, and two more of my part-time jobs (the stress of which brought me 10 additional pounds and three vertigo attacks in 6 weeks). I’ll free myself of one more tiny job by the spring, and I’ll keep one that is faith and justice related and only a couple of hours a month.

It took 14 months since God promised me Rest for me to reach the conditions that would make it possible. I am so grateful.

But here’s the thing I’ve realized: I’ve been running on adrenaline, in emergency survival mode, since the three police officers walked up my porch steps to arrest my now-ex-husband for a sex crime. Over 7 years ago. That’s why I managed COVID so well — I was already in a state of emergency, so I could just fold that in.

I know how to escape, chill out, have fun. But capital-R Rest? No idea. I had a tiny taste of it last week on Tuesday evening and I cried.  

How long until I re-learn Rest? How long until I step out of the high-alert pathways? Until I no longer constantly clench my jaw, my stomach, my glutes, my legs? Until my left eyelid stops twitching? My heart stops randomly beating hard?

A few days? A month? A whole season?

That’s adorable. I think it’s going to take a long time.

Plausibility is the name of the game

A bouquet of tulips and the book The Giant Slayer on a black table.

One of the major difficulties in writing an imaginatively expanded version of the story of David from the Bible (and trying to still keep it biblical) is the utter lack of precision in the source materials when it came to time. When did all this stuff happen?

Not having the exact dates is fine for general Bible study or children’s worship purposes; we don’t need to know what year David was anointed to teach about how God isn’t impressed by the things our culture is impressed by, but by what he sees in our hearts. But when you’re trying to immerse people in a particular time and place, TIME is a crucial part of the equation. A teenager might be vague about when they’ll be home from hanging out with friends, but I wasn’t even going to try writing a story that was vague about how old David was at any point in the story. How can you immerse yourself in someone’s life if you have no idea, for 300 pages, how old they are?

So that meant making choices based on very little concrete information.

The Bible is clear on few things:

  1. David and his band of followers (600 strong) “lived among the Philistines” for one year and four months–this is how long he was a mercenary/pretended to be a mercenary at the end of his time on the run from Saul.
  2. David was 30 when he became king of Judah.
  3. He became king of all Israel and reigned from Jerusalem 7 years after that.
  4. He ruled for a total of 40 years (7 from Hebron, 33 from Jerusalem).
  5. He was 70 when he died.

Because there was no standardized calendar, all timekeeping was relative: this event was 3 years after this other event, that happened in the 5th year of So-and-so’s reign. So biblical historians do a lot of approximating from events that are both mentioned in the Bible and have additional evidence that allow us to give it a date.

But even this is an imprecise science. See the list below of dates that various experts have assigned to David’s life and rule:

Ancient History Encyclopedia c.1035 – 970 BCE
Encyclopedia.com ruled 1010 – ca.970 BCE
Jewish Virtual Library ruled 1010 – 970 BCE
Chabad.org lived 2854 – 2924 (907 – 837 BCE)
Wikipedia “Historians of the Ancient Near East agree that David probably existed around 1000 BCE, but that there is little that can be said about him as a historical figure.”
My Jewish Learning ruled c. 1009/1001 – 969 B.C.E.
NIV Study Bible lived 1040 – 970 BCE

Some sources are only willing to give dates to when he reigned in Israel; others will give other dates, admitting that they are approximate. The NIV Study Bible goes so far as to give a date for David’s anointing, although there are no textual hints or clues as to his age, only that he’s the youngest of his siblings and that he was in the hills with the sheep. This one clue has led some children’s picture book authors to imply that David was as young as 10 when he was anointed, because kids that young would be given responsibility over a flock. Others argue that David was probably already of military service age when he became a musician for Saul and was anointed by Samuel, otherwise why would Saul have been so threatened as to want to murder him?

Frankly, both are plausible. As is my timeline.

  • I went with the majority and had his death date at 970 BCE, which makes him born in 1040 BCE.
  • I like the idea that he was anointed young but not too young, at 13. He may have gone through a cultural rite of passage to manhood, but his life is not significantly different.
  • He goes into Saul’s service at 14, but gets sent back home when Israel goes to war because he’s not yet at fighting age (which burns after awhile).
  • He kills Goliath at 16.
  • The Giant Slayer ends with him at age 20, when he’s finally figured out why he was anointed seven years earlier, and starts his 10 years on the run from the murderous King Saul.

Each one of those is a choice that I have to make plausible. Not to mention other crazy things like making it plausible that Saul has to be introduced to David right after he’s killed Goliath, despite the fact that David has been his musician for some time. And that David remained in Saul’s service after Saul had tried to kill him with a spear.

I think I managed to give solid character-seated reasons for each of those, but only my readers can be the judge of that 🙂

Speaking of which, if all that intrigues you, you can find information about where to order The Giant Slayer here.

The Giant Slayer is available for purchase

A 3-d rendering of the book cover of The Giant Slayer.

It is official: I have perseverance.

This has not always been true. I used to get my mother to finish all my sewing projects. As someone for whom many things came easily, I’d routinely abandon things once they became difficult, because that meant I was “bad at it”–classic fixed mindset. My basement storage room was clogged with half-finished craft projects until one January when I made it my discipline to finish them or get rid of them. The balance on the scale of Great Ideas vs. Ideas That Have Seen the Light of Day leans so far on the Great Ideas side that it’s laughable.

Even The Giant Slayer–I started writing this with so much hope and excitement. In 2011 or 2012. Before that, I’d been writing romance and learning a lot, but no agent or publishing deal. And then, in my read-the-Bible-all-the-way-through project, I reached the story of David in 1 Samuel. It was thrilling. I was a big reader of middle grade and young adult fiction (Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Benedict Society), and I kept seeing echoes of those stories in David’s story. I wished that my then-12-year-old son could see the Bible as exciting as I was seeing it–David was the original Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Percy Jackson! But the Bible is written in formal language without the level of detail that kids connect to.

So I thought I might take my love of middle grade fiction, my love of the Bible, my love of research, and my skill in telling Bible stories to kids and re-tell the story of David, adding in some of those feels-like details, some of the dialogue, some of the things that would make it feel like a fully fleshed-out story for contemporary kids.

I thought it might take me 6 months. Ha! The more I wrote, the more details I craved, the more precision I needed. It took two years to write, and then another two years of submitting to agents and publishers and dealing with rejection before choosing myself and deciding to independently publish it. In mid-2015 I was ready to go. I had ISBNs, the manuscript was edited, I had my Facebook author page and I was executing my marketing plan, I had contacted book cover and interior designers, I had a publisher name and logo.

And then my husband of 21 years was arrested for a sex crime.

I’ve written generically about my marriage imploding and things being difficult, but what happened was not generic; it was huge and shocking. It meant a complete reordering of our lives and our expectations. Even that feels like an understatement. The Giant Slayer was the thing that always got pushed to the back burner while I dealt with all the financial, legal, medical, educational, emotional, psychological, and physical needs I was negotiating for myself, my children, our extended family, our friends, and our church.

Now and then, I’d take a baby step toward picking up this book project, but it’s hard for a single mother who is no longer married to a web developer to do tech stuff on her own. But I kept trying and I kept praying for perseverance. Somehow, I decided that 2019 would be my year. In 2018 I made a few tough decisions and decided to pay for the things I could–including that gorgeous cover by Jessica Bell. I spent a crazy amount of time asking my friend Mr. Google many questions about what I wanted to do. I yelled at my computer, and sometimes I cried. But I kept going.

Three and a half years after I was on the verge of publishing, I have published. I am so proud of it. I think I have managed to present David and Saul without nostalgia, as if they do not know how their stories turn out (which is my pet peeve in so many biblical presentations).

Whether you read Mary Loebig Giles’s wonderful back cover blurb (following), download the first two chapters, and order the book or not, I thank you for reading this far. I’ve talked about this project for so many years with so many people: thank you to all of you for listening. May you keep persevering at something you think of as a too-big hurdle: may you slay your metaphorical giant, just as I have.

Born to serve, destined to lead…

Twelve-year-old David, a skilled musician and bold risk-taker, tends his flocks in a rural backwater of ancient Samaria, eager to prove himself and join his brothers on the battlefield. A youngest son who would never have a household of his own, no one is more shocked than David when a powerful prophet summons him for a cryptic blessing, hinting that he–and not his brothers–is destined for greatness. So begins David’s epic adventure. As the nation readies for war against an age-old enemy, David secretly trains as a soldier. He soon comes face to face with a terrifying foe and ultimately finds himself in the center of a life or death struggle that will alter the course of history for Israel–and the world.

A hero’s journey and young adult coming-of-age novel, The Giant Slayer imaginatively retells the Biblical story of David’s meteoric rise from shepherd boy to fearless warrior and future king.

Amazon (print and ebook)

Apple Books

Barnes & Noble

Kobo (Canada)

My to-do list. And my dilemmas.

a monkey lays on its side, clearly overwhelmed
My poor monkey brain is tired of going around and around these issues. Take pity on it.

Here are the things I need to do in order to (finally!) finish The Giant Slayer:

  1. Hire someone to do a few fussy fixes on the cover and add some things once I make decision #2.
  2. Decide what the series will be called.
  3. Finish formatting the print version (and finish making fussy little changes to the text).
  4. Transfer the final version from InDesign back into Word, and format it for the ebook.
  5. Decide on what the second book will be called (so I can insert a teaser first chapter, and include a “hey, if you want to find out when Name of Book 2 publishes, sign up here” kind of page on my website).
  6. Get another author photo done, since I look very different from the current one taken a year and a half ago.

Since two of these are decisions with no clear answers, I’m stuck. But I’m putting the list and the dilemmas out here, both for accountability and to solicit input.

2. Name of series.

My instinct is to call the series “First Kings,” so The Giant Slayer would be First Kings, Book One. But my issue is two-fold.

You can only have one First of anything. My dad was particularly nonplussed by how both Saul and David could both be a first king. My explanation is that Saul is the literal first king of Israel, but David was the first king in terms of what we think of as a king: he established a political, cultural, and religious center that wasn’t attached to any one tribe, lived in a grand place and had wealth (sometimes from conquered countries) that Saul could only have imagined, organized the military and developed Israel’s first permanent fighting force, brought back the Ark of the Covenant, and unified the country. If I explain that somewhere in the book, in a charming, sort of amusing way, is that enough to justify both the two firsts problem, and the slight confusion some readers may get that I am not, in fact using any material from the biblical book also called First Kings?

If not First Kings, then what else could it be?!? Feel free to brainstorm in the comments. I’ll give you credit if yours is chosen.

5. Name of second book.

The first book is The Giant Slayer, and the third book will be The Shepherd King. The second book is about David’s years on the run in the wilderness, building the men who come to him into a unit yet refusing to enter into any kind of fight with King Saul (who is hunting him down). He’s attempting to solidify support among the people, and he winds up as a mercenary for Israel’s arch-enemies, the Philistines. The one title I can’t let go of is The Reluctant Rebel. But that’s too many syllables compared to the other two books, and reluctant is too complicated of a word. But I like what it gets at. Yes, David became a rebel, but only because Saul treated him like one by constantly trying to kill him. So to survive, he had to act like one (although he drew the line at fighting fellow Israelites and killing Saul). So he was reluctant.

What else can I call it?!? Please brainstorm in the comments. I’ll give you the glory of a shout-out in my acknowledgments if your title is chosen.

So there you have it. My to-do list and my dilemmas. I really do hope someone who is better at names than I am can hook me up.

But I’ve never been there

a dog sniffs the air with its head out the car windowPlease pronounce the been in the title with verve and so it rhymes with seen. This is so it will take part in an event that I didn’t witness, but have heard about enough times that I might as well have. A Canadian friend was in a play at his U.S. college in which he had to utter the line, “Canada! I’ve never been to Canada.” He apparently said that been in as Canadian a way as possible, to the high amusement of all his friends–so much amusement that they still tell the story some 30 years later.

Given that this post is about writing a book (series) set in a place I’ve never been, it’s a fitting anecdote to start with.

Also, that isn’t quite true. I went to Israel when I was nine. I remember being shocked at the soldiers walking around with automatic weapons, being weirded out that they searched my kid luggage at the airport. I lost a ring a friend had given me as a goodbye gift. It was very hot and very dry and there was one really straight road that felt like it was out in the middle of nowhere.

These are not observations to build a fully-fleshed world out of.

And that’s what I have to do in The Giant Slayer (and subsequent books): recreate the world of 1,000BCE in Israel. Youtube is a glorious friend; all I have to do is search for people hiking in any part of Israel and someone out there filmed it and put it online, so I can get sights and sounds. I can read a lot of books that contain snippets I can use about flora and fauna, camping in the wilderness, what it’s like inside a cave, what a shepherd’s life is like in countries where the kids still take the flocks out. But there’s one sense none of these help me get at: smell.

What does it smell like in the morning during the dry season? During the rainy season?

How do their different bushes and trees perfume the air?

What does their honey taste like?

What is the difference in smell when you go from a dry area to where a spring is? How close to the spring can you smell the difference?

How does the ground smell up close?

What do the rock outcrops smell like after they’ve been baking in the sun all day?

Those are all tiny details that I don’t have access to that I’m desperate for. I can make it up, of course, and I do, but how much better it would be to have something to use as a springboard for my imagination. If you have been to Israel and have any memories of the smells you experienced, let me know in the comments. Seriously. I’ll thank you in the acknowledgments.

***

Today, a friend posted a poem by Billy Collins about “trying to manufacture the sensation” of being in a place you’ve never been and doing a thing you’ve never done. I think it’s lovely and evocative.

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
BY BILLY COLLINS

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one—
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table—
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

 

Cloaks and slings and the siren song of authenticity

Or, the pleasures and perils of writing about three thousand years ago.

As the publication date for The Giant Slayer gets closer and closer (I’ve declared it to be October 1), I’ve been taking care of what seem like thousands of details. Besides all the super-fussy stuff like registering ISBNs, I’ve written a glossary and a discussion guide, and started a Facebook author page (insert craven plea to head over and “like” it).

I knew I had to do a Facebook author page eventually, but I’d been dragging my feet. What would I do on such a page? I didn’t want to just repeat my regular Facebook posts, and, despite my recent posts here, I don’t want to talk about the process of publishing or even about writing (not because I think the latter is bad, but because there are already so many people who do it so well). And then I read Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work! and had my aha moment.

What better to do with my hundreds of pages of research and dozens of pins on Pinterest, than share them?

So that’s what I do. Every day, I share one tidbit about ancient Israel. So far, I’ve covered ovens, the unique properties of the white broom and white squill plants (particularly when one might be on the run in the wilderness), and how the clothing did not resemble Jedi robes.

I’ve been jazzing up my research tidbit with a photo, which has meant more research. Which has meant making adjustments in my manuscript. While there’s still time.

replica of ancient sling
sling from http://celticclans.oakandacorn.com/

For example, I’d been thinking of the sling as an open leather pouch with four lead strings, but it’s far more likely that it was a leather (or “skin” as David would have referred to it) pouch with two leads, one of which had a loop at one end to slip over a finger, and the other with a knot at the end, to hold onto during the revolution and then let go of in the launch. Here’s a video that demonstrates it quite nicely.

From Biblical Archeology Daily, photo by Seung Ho Bang
From Biblical Archeology Daily, photo by Seung Ho Bang

Ovens were totally different than I’d been imagining: they looked more like open volcanoes than like a wood-fired pizza oven. I’d had a soldier sitting on an oven while he watched David’s front door (while David escaped out the back), so I had to change it.

a homespun cloak/cape
The closest image I could find for how I now imagine a farmer or shepherd’s cloak to be.

And despite my research, I’d had firmly planted in my mind that tunics had sleeves and cloaks looked like Jedi robes — probably because I’d sewn too many costumes for church Christmas pageants. Also, in my defense, the few contemporary illustrations I found were of kings delivering tributes to other conquering kings, so there were sleeves and full-length garments. But people living subsistence lives didn’t have fabric to waste for sleeves, and a full-length garment would only get in the way during lambing or plowing. So I had to change the text again to make sure I removed any references to sleeves, and to ensure that cloaks were wrapped or draped around a person, not put on like a bathrobe.

So these are the perils of writing about 3,000 years ago: nobody really knows about daily life for sure, but we have enough hints that we can figure things out. Which means I can still get it wrong. Since one of my goals in writing this story has been to put the reader into 1,000 BCE, I need to get as much right as I can, with as many details as possible to make it feel like an authentic, fully-fleshed-out world.

Join me on my Facebook page or Pinterest board and keep me honest!

A new metaphor for this stage

For years, when people have asked me how this writing/publishing thing was going, I’ve described it this way:

I’m doing everything I can to get hit by lightning. I’m out there in an open field carrying golf clubs and flying a kite with keys on it and anything else that might help me get published.

That was back in the day when I was still pursuing traditional publishing. I really liked that metaphor. It communicated both that I was working hard and that success was not guaranteed — after all, getting hit by lightning is fairly rare. Just as it’s fairly rare to get a traditional publishing deal, even with a well-written, engaging story.

But now that I’ve decided to become an indie publisher, I need a new metaphor. It took a friend asking me about my garden to get me there. My garden is usually a bit slower than other gardens in my neighborhood, so while everyone else’s peonies are in full and blowsy bloom, mine are like this.

fat peony bud in my garden

Fat buds.

That’s the stage I’m at in my publishing journey: the fat bud stage. Everything is there, ready to burst forth, but not just yet. The Giant Slayer is still with my Old Testament expert, but as soon as she’s done with it, I’m only three steps away from publishing it (edits, proofreader, book designer).* At the same time, I’ve got a picture book project brewing that we’re independently publishing through a Kickstarter campaign that will be live in mid-August. My words are all done, but I’m setting up the campaign and waiting for our illustrator for get me some art so I can get the website going and let everyone know about it. (There’s more information on my Books page.)

I’m SO CLOSE.

It could be driving me crazy, how close I am, but I spent too long wallowing in disappointment not to enjoy this stage of being on the verge. Fat buds aren’t as showy as full blooms, but they’ve got their own beauty.

Do you have a metaphor for an endeavor you’re in the midst of?

Edited to add: my expert is done! My bud just got fatter 🙂

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats — I Hope

forthcoming October 6, 2015
forthcoming October 6, 2015

Last week, I found out something that gave me both hope and dread: Geraldine Brooks, a bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is publishing a novel about Israel’s second king, David, this year. So am I.

Oh, the stew of reactions I had.

Dread. She will suck all the potential attention my book(s) could potentially get.

Vindication. I was right that the time is ripe for fictional treatments of biblical people.

Curiosity. Her retelling will be different from mine. Here’s the blurb:

The Secret Chord provides new context for some of the best-known episodes of David’s life while also focusing on others, even more remarkable and emotionally intense, that have been neglected.  We see David through the eyes of those who love him or fear him—from the prophet Natan, voice of his conscience, to his wives Mikal, Avigail, and Batsheva, and finally to Solomon, the late-born son who redeems his Lear-like old age. Brooks has an uncanny ability to hear and transform characters from history, and this beautifully written, unvarnished saga of faith, desire, family, ambition, betrayal, and power will enthrall her many fans.

I am aiming my book at young adults and she’s aiming hers at adults, which is my way of saying that she writes gorgeously, for a literary fiction audience; I don’t. I am using fewer points of view, just David and Saul, to her possible six. I am using Western English spellings. But I loved her novel, People of the Book, and I kind of can’t wait to see what she does with David and all those people in his life. Will her characterizations be similar to any of mine? Will any be polar opposite?

Hope. If people are interested in her book and they look it up on Amazon, maybe they will sometimes find mine, as well. Discoverability is a big issue when independently publishing, so this might bring a few more eyes to my project than it would otherwise have gotten.

Which brings me to:

Determination. Brooks’s publication is as good a reason as any to try to get all three of the books in my series published this year. Which would be crazy. But I’m going to try. So it will be crazy.

Right now, The Giant Slayer (Book One) is with an Old Testament expert to make sure I get matters of culture at least plausible. Then it goes to the final proofreader, and then to the book and cover designer. The Giant Slayer could be out by summer. Contact me to be put on the list of those who will find out first!

 

 

Spark My Muse: I’m on a podcast!

This is a brief post to alert my readers to my appearance on Lisa Colon DeLay’s podcast: Spark My Muse. (Click on the title of the podcast to be led to it; you will have to crank the sound on your listening device when the podcast gets to the interview.)

We talk about my upcoming book, The Giant Slayer, and I do a brief reading from the opening scene. We also talk about how we forget that the people in Bible stories don’t know the endings of their stories, and how reading the Bible with that lens can help us see ourselves in the stories. Lisa also asked me how I spark my creative muse, and I quite like my answer: listening both broadly and deeply. In the podcast, I confess that I relate much more to Saul’s struggles than I do David’s, although David is a much better example for me, especially in his response to his own failures.

To you, I will also confess that I do way too much practicing being interviewed when I’m driving around in my minivan, but I think it paid off. It was fun to do and I don’t think I sound either like a lunatic or like a bore, so I count it as a success.

I hope that you find something you can count as success (whether or not someone else would) today.

On opening the clenched fist

You know how you can take months (even years) to struggle through an issue, unable to move on or let go or make a decision or whatever the problem is, and then in one moment, the angst is sloughed away? I had that experience recently.

A friend was giving the children’s message at church to illustrate  Jesus’ interaction with the rich young man who wanted to know whether he was doing all he could to get into the kingdom. Jesus loves him — this is an important part of the verse, I think, and one we don’t often focus on, “Jesus looked at him and loved him” (Mark 10:21). Jesus loves him and, in a glance, knows him, and knows that he has a problem with the love of money of which he needs to let go.

The children’s message involved a raccoon and a jar.

my great-grandmother's jar

He explained that raccoons love shiny things, and if they spy a shiny object at the bottom of a jar, they’ll stick their paw in and grab it.

sticking my hand in the jar

But then, sometimes, the neck of the jar will be too small and they can’t get their clenched fist out. They don’t want to give up the shiny item, so they don’t unclench their fist — and they’re stuck. All they have to do is let go of the shiny item, and they’re free.

I can't get my hand out!

But they don’t.

This was me. I mean, the photo is of my hand and my jar, but also, in broader areas of my life, I was clenching something tight in my fist and I wouldn’t let go. I was good and stuck. The thing I was holding: the desire to place my novelization of the story of David and Saul with a conventional publisher. Or with an agent who would then find said publisher.

Some of this desire was practical. It’s a novel for young adults, and (as of this writing) they read paper books more than e-books. In addition, being traditionally published can put you in libraries (both school and public), which are a major discovery tool for kids. Besides, lurking around inside me, still, is the girl who wants the gold star: “I’ve done something good — now acknowledge me!” Traditional publication would be a great big gold star.

And then it didn’t happen.

At first, I looked deeper into the story (after whining for a bit), and discovered some holes that needed filling. So I filled them. Still…crickets. While I’m the good student who wants the gold star, I’m also the daughter of an entrepreneur and do-it-yourselfer (long before that term even existed). I read James Altucher‘s blog, who’s such a believer in the idea that he titled a book, Choose Yourself. I’ve been following news about self-publishing for years.

I wasn’t ready. I put off every decision deadline I gave myself, still holding out for that one more chance. Stuck. Unable to get any traction on revising the next book in my stuckness.

Until that children’s message.

I opened my clenched fist and decided to self-publish. Like so many big decisions, there were no fireworks or giant resolutions. Just a quiet, calm, “yes.” Since then, I found an editor who doesn’t know me and sent her the manuscript; as an editor, myself, I know the value of an outside eye. I’ll start talking to cover designers soon (one lives a block away from me). A Calvin Seminary Old Testament professor recently joined my church, so I’ll ask her to look it over (for an honorarium, of course) to make sure I haven’t gotten any of the cultural stuff wrong. I’ve booked a room in Alexandria, VA for 6 days while my daughter is at a youth conference there, to take a writer’s retreat and get cracking on Book 2 — the best advertisement for your first e-book is your second e-book, so I’d like it to come out about 3 months after the first one. That’s my list so far.

Even my fortune cookie agrees. Here’s this evening’s widsom: You create your own stage and your audience is waiting!

Do you have any advice for me? Any areas you’ve come unstuck from recently? Any areas in which you’re stuck?