Greetings! I’ve been very slow at updating this site, as you can see. Life, on the other hand, has not been slow, and a lot has happened since I posted last summer.
The complete Daughter of Arden Trilogy is out in the world! Promise, the final book of the trilogy released last November, and I’ve been thrilled with the feedback so far. It’s been lovely to see readers finding it and enjoying it.
Much of the end of the summer was spent wrapping up edits and finalizing the artwork for Promise. That kept me and my daughters busy, all the while prepping and then taking our eldest daughter to start her first year in college. She’s had a great year so far, and we were happy to have her home over Christmas. In March, our second daughter, Evie, and I will fly up to join her for the Square Halo conference near my parents in Lancaster, PA, and then Evie will visit Clare’s campus.
I was happy to get to the Rabbit Room conference, Hutchmoot, again last October. Bandersnatch Books were sponsors, and we had books available at the conference, a special treat after years of exploring the beautiful books of other authors! We also had an author event at Landmark Booksellers in Franklin, TN.
I started a Substack newsletter! That’s where I’ve been putting my writing energy lately. If you haven’t seen it, you can check out and subscribe Sun Shafts here. I’m putting up a post each week, ranging over all sorts of topics.
That’s it for writing and book news! I’ve updated links on my “Published Works” page here.
On June 13, book 2, of my Daughter of Arden Trilogy, Wandering, released from Bandersnatch Books. It’s as beautiful as Exile. Every time someone picks up these books, they admire the covers, but then often say something like, “This feels so nice!” The books really do feel good–they have a matte cover that feels good to the touch, and the quality of the paper is clear. Also, when you line up the books next to each other, the pattern on the spine is continuous. That was a touch that Rachel Donahue of Bandersnatch Books has worked hard to make happen.
Anyway! I could keep gushing about that, but I’ll refrain.
I also had two podcast interviews, and they went up over the past couple weeks. Both were interviews with friends, which made them extra enjoyable to record, and both are podcasts I’ve enjoyed following.
The first podcast is a new one, “Leaf by Lantern,” created by Alicia Pollard of Stories of Yearning. Alicia has hosted numerous writing projects on her blog, and she’s now launched this podcast to talk about retelling fairy tales in the light of scripture. Her ability to research and then communicate what she’s learned is beautiful to see, and I’m thoroughly enjoying the episodes from this podcast. She asked great questions about different elements that made their way into Exile. I’m also biased toward this podcast because the cover art for the podcast is by my daughter Ev (based on a concept of my daughter Clare).
The second podcast showed up last Tuesday on “Dwell,” a podcast for homeschool moms hosted by Renee Mathis and Karen Kern of Circe Institute. I’ve gotten to know Renee through The Habit writing community, and we encouraged each other through the November Poem a Day challenge last fall. This conversation was another good one, with great questions that made me think back through all the years of when the kids were little and somehow a lot of Maid Maleen’s story emerged, too. How did I write when they were little? It’s all a bit fuzzy!
No more interviews are on the horizon, but it’s nice to know these are out there. This month will involve final edits on Promise, and Clare and Ev are busy putting the artwork together. In mid-July the Realm Makers Conference will converge in St. Louis, and we’ll find out if Exile will make it past the finalist stage for Fantasy novel and Debut novel. I won’t be able to go to that conference, but my Habit friend, Katie Williams, will be there, and she’s offered to be my award receiver stand-in if for some crazy reason Exile wins. Wouldn’t that be wild?
Last week my cousin Stacy asked me if I typically made New Year resolutions or had any particular goals. I admitted I didn’t—I tend to shy away from specific plans or resolutions. I’m not sure if that’s because I hate to do what’s traditionally expected, or if it’s because I’m not very intentional about making plans or setting goals. I have a feeling it’s a bit of both.
“How about a word for the year?” Stacy asked. “Do you have those?”
Again, not really…
But her questions stuck with me. A couple days later, as my family drove miles and miles from visiting extended family in Michigan and Pennsylvania, back to our home in East Texas, I read a friend’s end-of-the-year letter describing her method for taking a day to assess the year past, and look toward the year ahead with intention. I have to admit, I read it feeling partly overwhelmed. Every time I hear people describe their methodical process of organizing life I get fidgety. It’s not that I don’t want to get organized and plan, but the thought of sitting down and working through specific questions always sends me running away to something else. I have a book to read! Dinner needs to get made! There are so many things to do rather than work through diagnostic questions!
At the same time, as I read through the letter, another part of my brain stuck with it, and I thought, “Maybe I could do something like this. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take the time to sort through some things…”
We’re home from our journey now, and we have a week before all the school things start back up. While I know some of this week will be organizing details for the school semester, there is more time available than usual, and I want to take some of that to think through questions and possibly plan. I know to hold my plans loosely, that’s no question; I’m happy to let God do the work he needs to do. But being organized and intentional is not a bad thing.
This morning I woke up and had some extra time before the family emerged. My one year Bible beckoned me from my side table. I finished it up yesterday in the waning of the year, a ritual I’ve managed to go through in the past three years. My edition is one my dad gave me back in high school for a challenge, and I’ve come back to it off and on over the years. It’s the one method of consistent Bible reading that’s worked for me. There’s something about having each passage laid out specifically each day that keeps me turning the pages throughout the year. When I miss days, it’s easy for me to catch up—the dates are all right there, and I got over any guilt in that area years ago. Three years of reading through the same edition has led to emerging associations, too: I can remember events of life when I reread certain passages, and I look forward to parts that I know will come at certain times of the year. I know I’ll start off fast with the Genesis narrative and the Gospels, that I’ll be hanging out with the kings of Judah and Israel in midsummer, that Isaiah will kick off the new school year along with the Epistles, and that the prophets and John’s Revelation will be a clarion call to wrap up the year. (There’s something deeply satisfying to read the final prophets and Revelation during Advent.)
The other day, though, as I started to think about sitting down to plan, I pondered if I wanted to try something different this year for Bible reading. There are lost of options: I could take a passage and read it until I’d memorized it, or work through a book inductively. Maybe I could actually get through more of the spiritually challenging nonfiction books I’m always wanting to read, but never get to. I didn’t have the time or mental energy to come up with a plan between Friday and today, though, so when my trusty one year Bible waved at me this morning I decided it certainly wouldn’t hurt to start with that. And so I did, and the familiar words flowed through me: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…” There is something so absolutely grounding about those words. Day one covers the first two chapters of Genesis and of Matthew—the creation of the world and the birth of Christ. I can’t think of a better place to begin the year.
I don’t know exactly how things will flow this year, or if plans I make will come to pass, but it’s nice to have one thing settled.
Oh, and I think I have a word for the year, too: Light. Why “light”? I’ll ponder that some more to see if I can put my thoughts into words, and come back to it in another post.
Twelve years ago I discovered The Rabbit Room, an online community created by singer-songwriter (and now author) Andrew Peterson and friends. I felt like I had opened a portal into a world full of light and beauty, and God used it in major ways to bring comfort and strength and meaning after the death of Kraig and my oldest daughter, Keren. The Rabbit Room blog posts and comments sections were a place of rich conversations, ranging from art to theology, humor and nerdiness to serious discussion. It was a community I didn’t know I needed. After all, it’s not like I was starving for friends or community. I was surrounded by a strong, loving family and friends who comforted us in our grief and gave us hope. I had friends I could trust and talk to about all sorts of things. Yet even with that, The Rabbit Room provided a touch of magic that made the world more vibrant.
Generations: Clare, me, & Carrie, 2022
Two years after that, my sister Carrie and I held our breath and took a plunge into the in-person Rabbit Room conference, Hutchmoot. Suddenly we were able to put flesh and bone on the names we had grown to appreciate, and we found more beauty and love. There was sorrow, too, and as time went on, we came alongside each other and grieved, and comforted. Time passed, and those I had seen as sitting on unattainable pedestals of glory became more human, not because they fell, but because I saw them more clearly. Their flesh and bone was like my own, a work in progress with strange kinks and creases, places God was massaging and molding. It was a beautiful thing to see. Friendships deepened and grew, not just because we had shared interests, but because we became more like family with a shared core and experiences.
My kids have grown up on my stories of Hutchmoot, and have known the artists and their various work for years now. Most of their formative years, really. Naturally they’ve wanted to attend Hutchmoot as well, so when our daughter Clare hit eighth grade we said we’d try to have her come the following year. That year was put off due to the costs of a kitchen remodel, but in March of 2020 we were gifted with two golden tickets. Ah March of 2020! That month that changed all of our lives…
Hutchmoot went virtual for Fall of 2020 and then 2021, and in true Rabbit Room form, the staff created an incredible online experience. But Clare and I still had our tickets, and last weekend we hopped in the car and pointed our noses north to Hutchmoot in-the-flesh.
Bandersnatch Books connections at Hutchmoot
I could go on and on about what an incredible reunion it was—the blend of reconnecting with old friends, meeting friends I’ve known a few years only online, and making brand new friends. I could elaborate on the refreshing sessions I attended, and the thoughts I came up against and had to ponder and evaluate. I could talk about how the core of The Rabbit Room is still solid, and how that gives me continued hope for this beautiful creation.
But it was Clare’s thoughts as we wrapped up the weekend that have stuck with me.
“It was good,” she said, “but it wasn’t as incredible as I thought it was going to be.”
Clare chats with the daughters of friends of mine
Her words weren’t shocking. The poor kid ended up with a head cold just before we went that left her with a stuffed head and the ignominy of having to constantly blow her nose—never a great thing, but worse in this post-Covid world. I was immediately drawn into conversations, but she didn’t have folks she knew personally, and while I could include her a bit, she didn’t get a chance to really forge forward on her own till the second day of the conference. But as we talked about her feeling, we started to see that there was more to it than that.
Clare said, “I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t really new. I have a lot of friends back home who are into the same books and music I am, and they like a lot of Rabbit Room stuff.”
Clare consults Joe Sutphin at a gathering of the artists
I realized that when I first found The Rabbit Room I was living in something of a desert. I didn’t have a community that inhabited the deep areas of beauty and art and suffering, all the while exploring how God works through these. I didn’t have books and music that fed that part of my soul. Clare, on the other hand, has been exposed to these resources for twelve years now. The Rabbit Room community has grown exponentially in that time, too, so its resources are more readily available. In the more nerdy communities of the world—and we happen to hang out in one of those—more people are likely to know about The Rabbit Room. Clare gets to experience something like Hutchmoot every time she goes to her youth group.
We chatted about this for a bit, and Clare’s eyes lit up as she realized she hadn’t missed something just because she hadn’t experienced the same thing I had with my first Hutchmoot. She has something already that goes deep.
I can’t wait to see how God illuminates Clare, and what her own experiences will be. She is not me, but that doesn’t mean there’s no magic for her. God’s bigger than that, will reveal it to her in the way that will give her life.
This website has been in process for a couple years now. I decided at some point that I wanted to create a site using my own domain, and I had some vague ideas of some pages I wanted to include. My old Blogspot site had become trickier to navigate, and I couldn’t even figure out how to update my photo or rearrange things on the page any longer. So I took the plunge and bought a domain name, and put in WordPress because a number of friends have nice sites through WordPress. I got some good advice as to where to go for help setting up a site and so I headed that way…only to find myself stumbling again, and again, and again…and getting nowhere. To say the least, computer language is not my language.
At last, “wounded and sore bested,” I turned to a friend who has a degree in computer science, and with her help we have managed to push and pull this site into something along the line of what I first envisaged. I’m sure there is more work that needs to be done, and I’ll have to watch it for shake-ups as new updates happen, but for now, I have no excuse. It is time to send this creation out in to the world!
And not a moment too soon! One reason why I wanted to start this site is because I’ve been writing more, and I want to be able to share what I’m writing. Not only do I have some stories I’ve posted on a friend’s site, but I had two short stories published this year in The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad, by Rabbit Room Press. And in addition to that, my trilogy, Daughter of Arden is about to launch into the world, starting with Exile coming out next month from Bandersnatch Books. So yes, it’s high time I had a place to talk about this!
I’d love for you to come along on this new adventure with me. You can subscribe to my site on the homepage, or blog post page (or, I think, the story page–lots of possibilities).
