Rachel Starr Thomson

“Living the Past,” the first of three articles I’m writing on the role of Christians in the arts, has been published on Boundless.org.

I’d love to hear from you on this subject!

Today things are rapidly coming together. In the course of this work day, Seasons should see its final tweaking finished. A ministry newsletter I’ve been collecting material for should be written, edited, and laid out. My Web site should be ready to launch. And my summer road trip should be fully planned.

Most days are a tangle of work, putting in hours on this project and that one, emailing people, writing hundreds and thousands of words. Every now and then the work culminates. Those moments are beautiful and rewarding.

In this case, I’ve been working my head off because my cousin, co-author, and co-dance tour coordinator, Carolyn Currey, arrives at the train station tomorrow at noon. We do of course have a lot of work to do once she gets here, but we also have a lot of relaxing to do. Just relaxing. Just being.

Solomon said “There is a time for every purpose under heaven,” and he was right. There is a time for work and a time to lay work down–to live Sabbath. The balance is so important. Just as all work and no play sucks the luster out of Jack’s life, so all play and no work makes him useless, weak, and unfulfilled.

I’m glad and grateful for the balance in my life–work that won’t be ignored, projects worth being passionate about, and rest worth taking wholeheartedly.

Last week’s to-do lists had several major projects marked for finishing. For finishing, that is, that week. With a performing arts tour coming up in July and various Soli Deo Gloria Ballet matters to focus on, I really wanted to get the biggest writing, editing, publishing, and formatting projects wrapped up and safely tucked away where I no longer need to think about them.

Well. Life is not generally so tidy.

I didn’t actually finish any of the major projects I had listed. But that doesn’t mean my lists failed! On the contrary, I got so much work done on all of these things that they are now all teetering on the brink of finished. I didn’t meet my self-imposed deadlines, but I’m very, very close.

In a funny way this reminds me of the Peculiar post I wrote about the virtuous woman last week. My good friend Alexis read it, and we discussed it a bit one day. We’ve both heard Christian women who openly resented the Virtuous Woman of Proverbs 31, sometimes even mocking her. That, I think, is sad. It’s true that this woman’s industry and faithfulness make most of us look bad–they certainly convict me. But if we didn’t have ideals–crazy, far-off goals to shoot for–we’d never get anywhere.

If nothing else, at least we will have lived in the light that ideals give. If we shoot for the moon, we may never reach it–but at least we shot for the moon! How much better than to live always in darkness, hiding away from the light?

Ideals are worth holding, and trying to reach, and writing about.

I’m not sure how I ever functioned without to-do lists.

On days when I don’t make them, I get very little done. On days when I DO, life–and especially writing–moves forward at a healthy pace.

Today’s to-do list includes answering email, editing articles for clients, formatting Seasons of an Irish Hermitage, blogging, writing newsletters, researching literary agents, designing a new Web site, planning a road trip, and revising Burning Light. It is broken into bite-sized time chunks: I can easily accomplish all this in a day, provided that I stay focused.

Furthermore, each item on the list is a bite-sized chunk from a bigger list: the list of projects and commitments I need to finish this summer. Each morning, I refer to that list and make sure that every project is moving ahead at the pace needed to finish on time. Of course, a few things will end up cut from the list entirely–I’m not superhuman. But having everything written down helps me prioritize.

A to-do list provides me with direction for the day, a record of what I’ve accomplished, and peace of mind–I know when I can take a break and when I can’t, because I know exactly what needs doing and what can rest for now. As a self-employed writer/editor/writing coach, I know I couldn’t function without one.

Lists are one of the major tools in my writer’s arsenal. How about you? What tools and techniques keep you on track?

It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we even come that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Breezy, sunny, 78 degrees, and I’ve spent my entire day working on the front porch with trees waving overhead and the river cresting in whitecaps at the end of the street. I sip a cup of tea and think, God saw that it was good.

I love being self-employed!

On an entirely other note, I’m making notes for (yet another) redesign of my Web site. I’ve already revamped the book page format (you can see the only currently-live example for Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe), and I want to add a new page for free stuff–ebooks, the occasional short story, things like that. I’m planning to transform the side bar links, widen the whole site, and maybe do away with the Catalog page (because it’s redundant).

The trouble is that I’m such an amateur when it comes to Web site design, a wide-eyed explorer with no real experience, like a kid who figures he’s qualified to go on safari because he can catch a lizard in his backyard. So I always redo my Web site with fear, trembling, and probably way too much wasted time.

Ah well. Anybody out there who’s a more qualified explorer than I am–care to offer suggestions?

The book is out! I sent out the official announcement this morning, as you can read below .

* * *

Dear friends,

Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled is now available for pre-order! You can purchase your copy of Tales at www.littledozen.com/thh.html. Pre-orders close June 30. As a special thank-you to those who order before June 30, we are offering a free Ebook Edition of Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, the novel Rachel wrote when she was 13!

Pre-orders help us cover the costs of publishing–and they get the book into your hands early! Your books will be ordered and sent to you in the first week of July, when the book is just becoming available to the world at large.

When we started writing Tales as a series of emails to each other, we didn’t really imagine how much you’d share with us! We thank you for your friendship, encouragement, and support as we’ve worked to bring Tales to print. It’s been a marvelous journey!

Blessings,
Rachel and Carolyn

authors, Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled
www.littledozen.com/thh.html

“Listen up!” I say, shout, reply, recommend, plead, mutter, adjure, announce, articulate, and vent. “I have some advice for you.”

Writers, like everyone else on earth, can get bored doing the same old thing over and over again. Hence the temptation to stop writing the letters s-a-i-d on every page and use other, more colourful words instead. Sometimes abandoning “said” in favour of other dialogue tags is a good thing. Often, though, it is not. When dialogue is dogged by them, descriptive tags quickly become distracting, annoying, or just plain silly.

Don’t believe me? Perhaps I’ll let a conversation speak for itself:

“Stick to the word ’said’ in dialogue tags,” the professor crooned.

“Why should we?” the students shouted.

“Because it’s invisible,” the professor muttered.

“I don’t know about that,” Tom doubted.

“I also disagree,” his girlfriend hissed.

Any minute now, that classroom is going to break into a fistfight over word choice, led by the girl who sounds like a snake–or your readers are going to fall over laughing. But while they’re duking it out, we should note that the professor was right. “Said” is invisible. Readers will hardly even notice it as they read. “Asked” will also fail to blip on their radar–and that’s good.

In any piece of fiction or narrative writing, your goal is to immerse readers in the scene. You want them to hear the words spoken, to feel the underlying emotion, to be doused in the atmosphere of your setting. “Said” will help you do that because it’s so low-key. Readers won’t notice it, so their attention stays where it should–on the story itself. Obtrusive dialogue tags, on the other hand, will yank them out. Fancy writing for its own sake is rarely effective.

Make use of the Amazing Invisible Word, I say, and let your story spring to life.

Today (being the day I am writing this post, and not necessarily the day I am posting it) I spent well over an hour formatting Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, my very first novel, so that I may release it today (being the day I am posting this, June 13) as an ebook on my Web site.

I had less formatting to do than I thought, because I apparently worked on it sometime in the past that I have forgotten all about, but one task demanded most of my attention: I had to go through the manuscript and turn every single straight apostrophe into a curly apostrophe.

I have discovered that continually hitting “Find,” then hitting the actual text window, then hitting the apostrophe key, over and over again, is probably the best and fastest way to develop carpal tunnel. Also that I don’t care for curly apostrophes in Georgian font.

And yet, I am geeky enough to have found the job somewhat glamourous and exciting purely because it involved a book.

By the way–Theodore Pharris is available on my Web site! You can read more about it or order it here.

I just finished reading Being the Body by Charles Colson and Ellen Vaughn. A friend lent it to me months ago, but during the school year I don’t get much chance to read.

Anyway, the book’s central theme is the Church in its worldwide (“the church universal”) and local (“the church particular”) incarnations. Colson presents a small host of principles, purpose statements, and stories, all focused on what it means to be the Body of Christ in the world and how we can live that out.

He has some good things to say, but to me, the best part of the book was the stories. I couldn’t actually tell you what most of his overall points were, but I can relate most of the stories in detail. They’ll stay with me for a long time–the stories of Rusty Woomer, the murderer who became a Christian on death row and shone the light of Jesus till the minute he died, the Christians in Eastern Europe who helped bring down the Soviet empire from within, the priest who volunteered to starve to death in Auschwitz so another could live, the Russian girl who found God in novels, snow, and logic.

These stories are inspiring and powerful and will stay with me. It occurs to me that storytelling is so powerful because it takes us past principle and purpose and says, “Look, here’s what love looks like. Now go out there and love.” And the stories themselves go so deep into us that we can’t not hear them and be changed.

As a writer, I was also challenged (and encouraged) by these words in chapter 26, “Being Salt”:

“Being salt demands an understanding of our cultural environment and the use of innovative strategies for infiltration and influence. Writers have been doing this for centuries, with the result that much of the classic literature of the past three hundred years contains Christian truth. The great Russian works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, for example,with the Christian message salted in their pages in such a way that the Communists forgot to ban them, were the books that led Irina Ratushinskaya toward Christ.

“In many ways, literature has the most lasting power to shape ideas. Great books are read, reread, passed around, discussed, debated, and then passed on to succeeding generations.

“Today, many writers reveal in their work the incoherence, shattered logic, and relativistic chaos that mark a culture that has lost its understanding of order and truth. So when a writer who is a Christian crafts words and stories that spring from a world-view informed by truth, he or she is salting modern culture.”

And that, in large part, is why I write.