The Ready Writer

Get ready folks, this is gonna be kind of a long one. Also, for those who only prefer to read about my writing and not so much my political and spiritual life, scroll down.  I'll get there eventually. So I've been thinking a lot about water lately.  My dreams have been full of it, I've been drinking a lot of it, and since it's January in Oregon, there's just a lot of it around. Water has a lot of symbolism. America's new President was sworn in earlier this week and as it was happening, it started to rain.  Many people thought it was a sign from God.  A positive thing.  Of course the reason behind this wasn't something divine.  It has to do with precipitation and clouds, I remember at least that much from public school science class (I also did an interpretive dance about the water cycle in Outdoor School when I was in 6th grade). But even so, the first thought I had was a divine one.  I thought about John 11:35: "Jesus Wept." Counter th...

O God You are in the flowers And also in the weeds. O God You are in the sunshine But also in the demolishing storm. I was told to write a Psalm for Praise Or A Psalm for Lament But even honeybees have stingers. Why not write a Psalm for Always? Even parents can praise their children in one sentence And discipline them in the next. This goes the same for you O God I love you when I see the good. And there is so much good. But I cry out “Why O God?” when I see the bad. And there is so much bad. Why not write a Psalm for Always? For just as we cannot have light Without dark. We cannot have a God that only allows the good. For even honeybees have stingers. Just as so many of your followers strive for heaven outside of Earth. There, where there is so much good. They need to strive to create Heaven here on Earth. Because here, there is so much bad. And you are not just “there” O God In the good....

In light of the tragedy in Orlando a couple of weeks ago, I thought I would write a little something here to combat the hateful religious rhetoric that is all over the place lately. So I have been secular for most of my life.  My parents never raised me in a church, and other than going to the churches that my friends went to after a slumber party, I never really went, or had much interest in going.  I considered myself somewhere between spiritual and agnostic, and loved the history of the earth based religions (like Paganism) because they showed value of the Earth that we live on. I honestly can't say when I became a Jesus Follower (I have a little trouble calling myself a Christian because of the baggage and drama around it), it was probably around 5 or 6 years ago, and it wasn't until this last October that I wanted to start going to church. I'm going to say here that I don't think you need to go to church to be a good person of faith or a good person, it was j...

THE FIRST PORTION OF THIS POST IS FROM THE UCC SUNDAY BULLETIN PRINT OUT. THESE IDEAS ARE NOT MY OWN I JUST LIKE THEM AND I'M NOT MAKING MONEY ON THESE THINGS.  MY THOUGHTS WILL FOLLOW. "God is still speaking! God is a god of thunder and wind and rain. But we also know that God speaks in a still small voice whenever and wherever hearts are open and there is a cry for justice. That experience of a still speaking God, addressed by our denomination's identity materials, has given the United Church of Christ an unusual brand: the comma! Of course, that comes from the Gracie Allen quote, "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." The good news is we are not uni-punctuational. Just as Elijah experienced God in a new voice on that mountaintop, there is more than one punctuation mark that might express how we feel about this still speaking God. The question mark is always a faithful witness to every question we ask from the heart in our seeking and wonder...

Hello Readers! I know I have been gone for a little bit, but I was on vacation!  I had brought devices to blog as I was there, but then decided once I was on my vacation that I would enjoy being with loved ones and not worry about blogs or even writing.  So this post is sort of going to be a quick 3 for 1 blog post: Stats, Writing stuff, and Faith. I won't go into specific writing stats for the week of May 30-June 4 but here are some major updates: I typed up Chapter 2 of my Haunted House project.  The chapter itself is 1667 words but I want my chapters for that project to be 2000 to 2500 words so I have some work to do on that chapter. I also did some more work on the handwritten draft of Chapter 2 of my Haunted Hotel piece, but haven't finished chapter 2 or anything. There will be NO stats blog tomorrow, as I didn't really do much writing over my vacation.  The only writing I did do was on a short story.  The prompt was given to me from a fun fact th...

So I am going through a bible study for writers, and it asked me to read Matthew 1 thru 17.  As I was reading through it I kept trying to figure out what this all had to do with writing. I'm pretty new to all this Bible stuff, and although I've read and analyzed a lot of literature, this piece is a toughy. But this book has Parables.  Simply defined, a parable is a simple story to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. Well that's not just in the bible.  A lot of stories do this.  Fables. Fairy Tales.  Children's books.  They all use story to illustrate lessons. And isn't that the point of fiction? Not only to tell a good story but to teach....something? Obviously, you don't want to beat people over the head with moral.  Readers don't want to be lectured.  But they should come out of your story a changed person.  Even a little. I write speculative fiction..closer to the horror genre than anything.  And even I want people to le...

So last Sunday, I finalized a decision I had been wanting to make for a little while now. I got baptized. My parents never baptized me as a child, and I am grateful for that because it allowed me to make that decision on my own.   For me, baptism wasn't and isn't about washing away the old me.  I liked the old me.  I was still a good person without faith, before faith, and after faith.  For me, baptism was the same as watering a flower.  Having the water flow down into the roots to feed it.  It was also a physical act that would prove my faith.  Before I got baptized, Pastor Christina asked me if I wanted to say a few words, and below is what I said in front of the congregation: "I like to think of people as gardeners.  Every time we accomplish something in life, we plant a seed, and our experiences, and the people around us help that little seed to grow.   For example, in 2013 I graduated from Southern Oregon Universit...

I'd like to take some time here and chat about WHY I write and how I came about being brave enough to call myself a writer. I've been writing my whole life.  I remember writing stories as a young kid.  I had Barbies, but rather than play with them, I would dress them up, and then write stories about them.  I was also in love with dinosaurs.  A lot of my stories revolved around a paleontologist type character (who just so happened to resemble me...a lot) who somehow brought dinosaurs back to life and was friends with them. Later, I wrote angsty teen fiction and poetry, which isn't unusual for most teens, and was often a reflection of the types of things I was feeling inside.  Writing was therapy. Writing was a hobby.  Writing wasn't a job. I wanted to be a paleontologist, a counselor, a teacher, a librarian.  I never wanted be a writer.  Being a writer wasn't a real job.  But it was always something I did.  I took creative writi...

I was really moved by the Easter sermon that my pastor, Christina (yes, my church has a female pastor, its awesome) gave on Easter. She began by telling the story of when Mary, the other Mary, and Johanna went to tend to Jesus in his tomb.  They were just planning on paying their respects (as you do with the dead). "But something happens at the tomb that goes against everything they know to be true." The tomb is empty. There are 2 sparkly messengers there, telling them that there is dead among the living. The women go rushing back to the disciples telling them what they have just heard.  And the disciples considered these "idle tales", and they did not believe the women. An Idle Tale. The Greek word is Leros, usually reserved for the ramblings of someone who is suffering from delirium. And this is when I started thinking about my writing. We as Christians believe in this "Idle Tale". We believe in a lot of them. "The dead come bac...