Life's Detours and Blessings & Book Giveaway is back!

It's been a week since I last posted. In that week I finally completed the wallpaper stripping and painting of our living room, celebrated our youngest daughter's eleventh birthday with a slumber party, wrote a short piece that clarifies what I see in festive trimmings, and discovered that getting up in front of a group of adults to lead adult education isn't near as nerve-racking as the anticipation of doing so felt. Wow, I guess I did accomplish a few things, after all.

And here I was worried that I wasn't doing enough to keep up with my NaNoWriMo responsibilities, and my blogging. It's true as they say, you can't do it all, but I'm blessed to have accomplished all that I did. It's good to be back blogging and writing The Unlikely One, though. So here is a picture of my newly painted living room. Yahoo, it's finished. Well, not totally. I still have to cut, stain and varnish the new oak window trim. But I'll do that over a bit of time as well.

Other Blessings for me:

I received the warmest compliment today when I opened my e-mail after the girls headed off to school. One might view the question "Did you write this piece?" as negative or positive feedback. But considering what followed in that e-mail I take it as a positive, and it gave me a real confidence boost and eagerness to get back to work on my next story, The Unlikely One.

Never before have I submitted anything to our Church Newsletter. I know, that seems really bad when I consider myself a writer-in-training. But the truth is that a few people at our church know what I've been studying for several years now, and so I continually worry that what I submit will dissapoint them greatly. It's that old "I'm not good enough yet, never will be" syndrom that's buried deep inside of me.

If you've studied the craft of fiction writing for as long as I have, or even half as long, I think it's natural that the writer assumes that there's certain expectations from those who have knowledge of what they've been doing. A real fear develops that we may not meet our friends' expectations in our attempts at writing and so we instead hoard our writing to protect our own self-esteem.

Many who know that I write, though, also know a few other things about me. Two of which are that I'm addicted to "stuff", seasonal trimmings included in over-abundance, and also that I seriously get riled when I smell injustice or misunderstanding prevailing. [I feel my heart pounding just thinking about a few of those sticky topics right now.] Anyway, our dear newsletter editor hit on one of my sticky points with her request for the November/December church newsletter submissions, and my need to explain my actions won out over my fear of not writing well enough. It would seem that she actually liked my piece, and what's even better is that in her response, she revealed what I aimed to show in that short compilation of words that I submitted.

There is no better feeling to a writer at any level than realizing that someone "got" what you were trying to creatively paint with your words. So, if you're reading this dear editor, Rebecca, I thank you. You made my day!!

On another note, I was tagged last week by Kalea to post seven random bookish things about me. I will follow through with this sometime this week. It should be a fun post, I hope.

For today, I offer to you readers, a similar question to what Rebecca posed to our congregation. [I'd offer the actual questions, but they went out in the recycle bin which in turn was dumped into the waste collector's bin this morning, unfortunately.] I'd love to hear your responses, and some day after the newsletter is released I'll post what I sent for submission in response to this topic. So you'll get my view on this, too, I promise!

How do you bring Christ into your way of celebrating Christmas?


BOOK GIVEAWAY Information:

In honour of my dear critique partner's book being next months ACFWBOOKCLUB selection, I will be drawing a name from the comments left this week until Thursday at noon to win a copy of Patti Lacy's An Irishwoman's Tale. Since the above question is especially interesting to me, I'll put two ballots in for each response given to it. I hope to hear lots of ways that we can bring Christ into the way we celebrate the Christmas season.

Blessings,

Eileen

46 days left to reflect and celebrate our Saviour's birth.