What’s the question? In this hard life, whatever it is, my only answer is His name. Maybe that sounds naïve, or banal, or even just plain phony. “God is all you need”? Not true, since He Himself didn’t design human beings to exist as solitary creatures. And while it’s certainly correct that our God knows…
Once upon a time, a woman loved jellybeans almost as much as she loved bacon. Her husband, desiring to please her, returned from a trip to the Land of Milk and Honey with a gigantic jar of Jelly Bellies. She tried to make them last a long time by nibbling on only a few each…
Legends of a White Stag turn up in many mythologies and folktales throughout the world. The stag or hart (male deer, buck) symbolizes a variety of themes. It shows up in my Pursuit of the Pudú and turns in a cameo appearance in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The connections—historical,…
Dear friends and readers, I’ve never written a blog post this personal. I’ve never reached out with this kind of request before. But first I’d like to retell an obscure story about Prince Jonathan’s armor bearer, found in the historical book of I Samuel in the Bible. Jonathan, the son and heir of Israel’s first…
Love makes the world go ’round, and every novel is about love. That’s a bold statement. However, not only all the fiction I write but most of the fiction I read centers to one degree or another around love or a love interest. If it’s not a romance per se, it certainly weaves a romantic…
On a recent road trip across the Andes and the Argentine pampas, we brought back several kilos of yerba mate, an herbal tea commonly served in most of the southern cone of South America. A few months ago, I promised another post about my collection of tea tins. Like the “tea rites” of mate, many…
Lists are fun, aren’t they? Several of my fellow bloggers have recently shared their top reads of 2023, so I thought it was high time for my (more or less) annual list of favorite books too. Usually, it’s a challenge to choose just a few favs out of 100 (+/- again) books read over the…
It’s over for another year. Not the search, but National Novel Writing Month. I’m able to say now that I’m a three-time “winner” of NaNoWriMo, although I’m not sure what that means to anyone, even including myself. But writing 50,000 words in The Search for Rose Michaud at least started me on the path to…
Did you miss me? I’ve been living in the land of Overwhelm the last few months and need to get back on track, whatever that is. How I long to be able to snuggle into the sweet spot of Just Enough—of time and resources, rest, play, and work. My husband and I’ve been out straight…