by Roseanna White | Aug 4, 2017 | Fridays from the Archives
This week’s Fridays from the Archives post takes us all the way back to October of 2011. I enjoyed rereading my musing from when my kids were 3 and 5, and the lesson I’d observed then still rings true. When I saw the title of the old post, I thought I was going to have been talking about being abandoned. But no. Not at all. Hope you enjoy the musings of a young mom!
We love to torture our kids. And by
torture I mean tickle them, “eat” them up, chase them around, pretend
our hand is a monster . . . you know. Torture. The sweet kind. I
imagine that’s a fairly universal love of parents the world over, and
it’s no great secret why. We do it because we love to hear that belly
laugh, hear those delighted shrieks of “No, no! Hey, why’d you stop? Do
it again, do it again!” We love to see those huge smiles on their faces.
We love their abandon.
My hubby will tickle me, too,
but we often get a good laugh out of how he does the same “gobble” to me
he does with the kids, and I just look at him. And usually say, “Um . .
. sorry. I’m not as much fun as the kids, am I?” Which yeah, makes us
chuckle. But it’s not a belly laugh. Those same simple things don’t
result in such instant
Joy once we grow up.
Man . . . I sure wish they did!
The abandon of a small child has
its ups and downs. It results in those moments of unbridled bliss, and
it results in equally unbridled fits. Laughter and tears in equal
measures,
Joy and frustration, love and rage. I’m sometimes amazed at
how my kids can go from total contentment in their game with each other
to hitting each other and screaming at the top of their lungs, then
straight back to fun.
It’s something we learn to control as we grow up, something we teach
those kids to do. Self control is important, especially when it comes
to those negatives. And those who never learn it . . . end up with
reality shows on TV??? 😉 Seriously, that control is a must, yes.
But what are some of your best
moments from adulthood? Are they when you’re sitting there, perfectly
controlled? Are they when you don’t react to something? No–our favorite
moments are the ones where we regain a moment of childhood abandon and
embrace the
Joy of life. When we scream our heads off on a roller
coaster. When we laugh until we cry. When we let it all go and just
live.
Sometimes it’s hard to do that,
especially in this stage of my life where I have to keep the Mommy
turned on. Oh, I can laugh with my kids. But I’m also trying to make
sure knees don’t collide with heads as we wrestle, that things tossed up
in
Joy come down in one piece. I’m trying to protect and nurture and so
can’t give my full attention to the game. I
have to do this. I
love to do this.
But sometimes I just wish I could let loose a belly laugh and not care.
And that goes for my prayer life too. That should be the one place I can
let go completely, but even there I’m usually trying to
protect–myself. I find myself praying, “Lord, you know I hope . . . you
know I fear . . . I’m trying not to hope too much because then I fear
I’ll be disappointed . . . I’m trying not to expect disappointment
though because that would be faithless . . . I don’t want to assume your
will . . . I don’t want to miss your will . . .”
But there I need to let go of
the control. With the Lord, I need to be unafraid of the extremes. I
need to show him the highs and the lows. I need to be unafraid of
letting that kid inside me out before my Father.
I need to embrace the abandon.
by Roseanna White | Jun 2, 2017 | Fridays from the Archives
Time for another Fridays from the Archives! Today, we’re jumping back to 2009, right before I went to my second ACFW writers conference. This was right as I was planning to re-release A Stray Drop of Blood in paperback. Before I had any readers. When my agent was advising against pitching historicals. Kinda fun to look and be see how much has changed in the last nearly-8 years! Check in at the bottom again for my Now thoughts on Yesterday.
With
the ACFW Conference in Denver only a week away (woo hoo!), my thoughts
have inevitably turned to the dual hope/fear of finding that perfect
editor (or not) for the book I’ll be pitching.
Up until two days ago, I didn’t even know what
I would pitch. I have a few books that were possibilities, but my agent
systematically eliminated them all. “No historicals this year,”
followed by “too sophisticated to break in with” followed by “needs
work.” I sent her my ocean book, now titled Yesterday’s Tides
thanks to y’all, with a cringe. As close as I feel to this book, I
groaned at the very thought of getting another “Not the thing” on it.
Not to mention it would leave me with nothing to try to sell. So you can
imagine my relief and Joy when my agent sent me a series of emails with
“One sheet is good. Interesting idea,” “Synopsis is good. I really like
how you handle this story,” and “Yes, pitch this one. I’ll have it read
by the time you get back, and we’ll make any tweaks necessary before
sending it to the editors who request it.” Whew! Step one down.
Now
for Step Two: finding an editor who loves this book as much as I (and
my critique partners) do. Never a guarantee, obviously. In the two years
since my last conference, I have sighed many a time over the fact that
the editors out there haven’t jumped at the Victorian series that
captured my agent’s attention. You just never know.
But said critique partners have done so much for me. Not just in critiquing my work, but in building me up. Stephanie
said once, “You know why you’ll succeed? Because you keep writing new
things, looking for that one that’ll break you in. You don’t sit back
and wait. You keep coming up with new stuff, better stuff.” The twenty
manuscripts on my computer prove the “you keep writing” part, lol. Then Mary said of Yesterday’s Tides
that she had a threefold prayer for it: that it would sell soon, that
it would be a bestseller, and that it would win a Christy. A dream for
everyone, for sure. And it really touched me that Mary believed in this
story enough to beseech the Lord for it in such a big way. And then Carole
made me preen by saying I was becoming one of her favorite authors–a
label she doesn’t give out easily. Could a writer have a better group of
friends and encouragers?
On one of my loops, we’ve
been talking about that place we all visit sometimes where the
not-knowing-where-we’re-going gets so overwhelming. Where the fear
outweighs the hope. Where you question your calling, your ability, your
everything. Roseanna the Optimist doesn’t often dwell on that, but I
wonder. I wonder if the encouraging news I got on two different projects
last week will come to anything–and if it’ll come in time for
conference. I wonder if all the work I’ve put into other projects will
ever amount to anything or if they’ll molder on my computer for all
time. I wonder if, when I finally do get published on a national level,
I’ll have any readers. I wonder if the re-release of A Stray Drop of Blood will actually sell.
All
things I can’t know. Things that could lead to those “Is this where you
want me, Lord?” questions. But as I’m getting ready to head to Denver
and pitch a project I love and believe in, I’m instead getting excited
about what He might have in store. The fact that I will even be
pitching this story, when I had assumed it off the table, is enough to
excite me. I finished its rewrites a year ago, but everyone kept losing
it, forgetting about it . . . it wasn’t it’s time. Now it seems to be.
Will that result in the “perfect editor”? I don’t know. But it gives me
hope.
Today Me again. One reason I loved rereading this is because I can at this point look back and see the winding but steady road I traveled from that conference to where I sit today, with 14 published books soon to be under my belt.
I pitched Yesterday’s Tides in Colorado, and the best reaction I got was from Kim Moore at Harvest House. She loved it. Loved the writing, loved the story, loved me. But a year later, I still hadn’t heard back from her on it, so I checked in with her. She’d lost the file–but I resent, and she ended up taking it to committee. They didn’t buy it, but Kim liked my writing so much that she asked me if I had any historicals (ha! full turn around on the ‘no historicals’ thing). In the meantime, I was also getting to know Rachel from Summerside Press, who also first said, “We’re penciling you in” to a contemporary and then asked for a historical, which became Love Finds You in Annapolis, Maryland. By the time that one was in the publication process, Kim had convinced Harvest House to buy my Culper Ring Series. All because of that meeting with her in 2009.
That said, Yesterday’s Tides still sits on my computer. I still love it. But it hasn’t been published, it hasn’t become a bestseller, it hasn’t won a Christy. My dear Mary (who passed away just a couple months before Annapolis hit the shelves) was wrong on the “soon.” But her faith in me kept me going. And I hope all I’ve accomplished would make her proud. I’ve now brainstormed how to turn Yesterday’s Tides into a historical, and we’ll see if that’s the way God wants me to tell that story. Who knows? Or it could be that He’ll have me sit on it a while longer yet. I don’t know. I just know that someday, that story that holds me captive every time I draw it out to work on it, will find its place in the world. I’m looking forward to that.
Just as I can look back and see that, yes, that conference led me to the editors I needed to know, so too do I know He holds all my stories in His hand. I love that feeling.
Happy Friday, y’all, and don’t forget to join me for my LIVE chat on Monday, to talk about Love Finds You in Annapolis, Maryland! I’ve heard from a ton of you that Annapolis was the first book of mine you’d read, and how much you love it; I’d love to take your questions and comments on it!
Jigsaw photo credit
© Aliaksandr Mazurkevich | Dreamstime.com – Hand inserting missing piece of jigsaw puzzle
by Roseanna White | May 12, 2017 | Fridays from the Archives
For my first Fridays from the Archives post, I’m borrowing one of my oldest “thoughtful” posts, from way back in 2009, just a few months after the blog got started. My daughter was, at the time, 3 years old. Rowyn was six months. I love looking back at these little snapshots of life with them then! And with Mother’s Day just a couple days away, I couldn’t think of a better thing to share.
There’ll be a bit from Roseanna Now at the end of this short little thing from Roseanna Then. 😉
~*~
My daughter has this thing. Instead of, you know, looking to see where I am, she’ll call out, “Mommy! Where are you?”
Now,
usually I’m about two feet away, just behind her. So I’m obligated to
give a silly answer, right? I mean, I can’t just say, “Right here.”
That’s way too obvious for someone with my caliber of wit (ha. ha ha
ha.). So I’ve taken to saying, “On the moon.”
Depending
on her mood, she might ignore me, she might laugh, she might insist,
“No, you’re not!” she might then pretend that the woman in the living
room is someone else and talk about her mommy, who is currently on the
moon . . . or she might pretend like she’s on the moon with me.
That’s
the most fun–to see the imagination come to life in my toddler. I’m
constantly amazed by her recall and the things she’ll put together. And I
get a little flutter in my heart when she tells me she’s going to write
books someday too. Yeah, she’s only three–chances are pretty darn good
her goals will change a few times, lol. But still.
Yesterday
she sat down at my computer, asked me to give her a blank page, and
just sat there typing. Most of it looked like this:
asdfahghasduoidfoivasrueioransdghosdb8ibf fsiorutawlktj
With
the occasional “xoe” thrown in. =) But it was so cool for me, because
my little girl’s sitting there trying to do what I do, saying as she
does it that she’s writing it for me.
It’s those little things that make it all worthwhile. That get my imagination going. Because you just never know what you might discover when you’re on the moon with your little girl.
~*~
One of the reasons this still makes me smile today is that Xoe is still writing–with considerably more skill. It’s a question I think any writer with kids gets: “Do any of your children want to be a writer?”
For a while there, I would just shrug. Because 3-year-old Xoe’s ambitions cooled as she grew. Oh, she wrote stories for her brother when she was 5 and 6, which was adorable. And would frequently say she was going to write a story in the years to follow, but mostly she just drew the pictures for them, made a cover, came up with a catchy title, and then never actually wrote. Which is totally cool–I’d praise the artwork and say it looked great and never pushed her or anything.
But I noticed that when we were all outside of an evening, Xoe would just walk around, clearly in another world. And I’d remember doing the same thing. And I’d wonder if she were perchance building worlds, building stories as I used to do.
A couple months ago she started writing again in earnest, working on a book that she insists WhiteFire must publish once she’s finished. I smiled and said, “Well sweetie, first you have to finish it. Let’s start there.”
Then she let me read it. And oh my gracious. The girl has wit. She has voice–something hard won. She made me laugh out loud. Oh, I could see where it needed to improve–I can never turn off my internal editor–but they’re small, doable things. The sort of things I’d ask any writer to work on.
My daughter is a writer. Who also wants to intern with me as a graphic designer.
Maybe I am on the moon–some people might think we creatives belong there, LOL. But if so, my girl really is right there with me, and it does a mama’s heart proud. I don’t know if she’ll really end up making a career of this crazy artistic stuff that holds me captive. But it has a place in her heart. And that makes mine go all kinds of soft and mushy.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.