After a little soul searching, I have decided to do a little soul searching, reevaluating of my life, and/or praying for God’s guidance, however or whatever I need to do to fix a small dilemma I have been seeing in my life. I assure you it is a small dilemma. For the past three months, I have been having a wonderful time researching and writing for this blog. I have grown in my journey to holiness and hopefully spoke to other people’s hearts; yet, I have not been progressing well in my writing career. My monthly word count has been good at over 10,000 words each month, but all of those words have gone to the blog or an occasional journal entry. Maybe 2,000 words have actually gone to my fiction writing.
I don’t believe the blog has been the complete cause to my lack of fiction. Really my biggest problem is editing. I HATE IT. My novel, Pursuing Destiny, needs to be edited. One of my first readers gave me great insight in some major holes in the plot. Nonetheless, I would rather go to the dentist than work on the book. I have sent out queries on the book hoping to be rejected so I wouldn’t have to edit. Pathetic, but true! There are twelve short stories on my thumb drive that need to be edited or finished to than edit before I can begin sending them to markets I still need to research. I have a second novel with over 50,000 words done, but I haven’t touched that since November. Finally, I may have an idea of what I have been called to truly write, but with all this other stuff hanging over my head, I am overwhelmed. I could go on and on about all of this; plus, I could add my duties of motherhood, housewife, friend, crafter, and pending gardening season, 1st Communion and High School Graduation activities, but I think you get the picture.
Today at my 4th Day group (a Cursillo Bible Study), we continued Lesson 2. Hum, we all felt like we were being hit over the head with either a baseball bat or 2X4 to pray more. We also continued working with the analogy of our jars of life being filled with beans and rice. Beans are the big things in our life like faith, spouse, children, and jobs while the rice is the little things like housecleaning and such. During our time together, I was feeling pretty good about myself because hey, I don’t have a job. Life is chilling out with plenty of time. I can be such an idiot! Writing the paragraph before this one made me realize I have bean and rice issues. Do I make the finished novel a bean and the rest of my writing rice? I have been told one of the best ways to break into writing is through short stories first, so should that be the bean? I have a conference coming up in August. Should my half finished novel be the bean so I can pitch both novels? Or should I say to heck with all of that and work on the project I think (not know) God wants me to do as my bean? I am so confused.
Pray without ceasing. Praying in the predawn hours. Praying at night. Praying on the mountaintop…. We must have looked at 10 different spots in the Bible about praying this morning. Even in my quest for finding things about Saint Patrick last week, I found prayer in his writing. “…in a day [I said] from one up to a hundred prayers, and in the night a like number…” The neon sign is saying I need to pray. I need to get away from my computer, blogging, facebook, Bejeweled, and all the distractions. I have been planning on fasting from technology, so it is going to begin today with my blog and tomorrow evening with facebook. Granted, I will still have the family to distract me, but besides God, it is my biggest and brightest bean. I am going to enjoy them while I am praying. In fact, in the little book we are working from, I wrote down my beans as being faith, husband, and kids. My rice I wrote in as housework and writing. My rice can just take care of itself for the next little while. Watch out beans, you are getting my full attention!
Blessings to you all.
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