Rachel Starr Thomson

I’m back in Niagara this weekend doing Soli stuff — this time, coming up with two new short poetry/dance pieces to perform in Vancouver during the Olympics and continuing to work on the productions for Easter and the summer tour (which is actually a spring tour, but that confuses me because I get Easter and spring muddled in my head). Today I spent two hours staring mournfully into the air, flipping through songs on iTunes, and trying very hard to be brilliant.

It is hard to be creative on command.

Several hours, two drives, and talking with other people later, I think I have one of our Vancouver pieces mapped out. Three songs picked, a concept to hold them all together. Tomorrow I get to try and make a narrative for it. Pray for me, if you think of it; this one will actually be shared with people, many of them people who are not believers in Christ, and we want this to be a witness that really touches people where they’re at.

About this time of year I see a lot of “great gifts for writers” posts on various blogs and in magazine articles. But one thing often missing from those lists is an essential tool used by many of us: good writing music! I write to movie soundtracks, Celtic and other world music, ambient, and sometimes folk or rock, though less often because I can’t concentrate if the music has words I understand.

The Advent, which is nearly finished, has relied heavily on the music of Engima, Amethystium, E.S. Posthumus, and Last of the Mohicans.

I’ve been thinking for a while about creating a review site/e-book that would list and review great writing music in many different styles. Do you write to music? What are some your favourites?

On good days, I’m stimulated, fascinated, and fulfilled by all the callings God has placed in my life. On bad days, I’m discouraged, overwhelmed, and downright dry.

Some folks amaze me: They wake up in the morning, drink their coffee, and sit down to create. Out of their minds come skyscrapers and symphonies, poems and paintings, clothing styles, chemical formulas, computer programs, entirely new flavor combinations, and whole imaginary worlds. With God-like creativity, they bring something out of nothing, day after day after day.

To an outside observer the creative process seems little short of miraculous. Notes, lines, hues, flavors, formulas, and codes; characters, quatrains, and the very keystrokes I’m using this moment: Where does it all come from?

My online friend and fellow Boundless writer Elisabeth Adams wrote this insightful piece on nurturing creativity, in particular on nurturing creativity as a Christian, recognizing God as our ultimate source. Check it out: http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0002174.cfm

Have you read any of these books?

A Dark Orange Farewell by George L. Duncan (OakTara Publishing)
All My Holy Mountain by L.B. Graham (P&R Press)
Cyndere’s Midnight by Jeffrey Overstreet (WaterBrook)
DragonLight by Donita K. Paul (WaterBrook)
Havah by Tosca Lee (NavPress)
Hero, Second Class by Mitchell Bonds (Marcher Lord Press)
Hunter Brown and the Secret of the Shadow by Christopher and Allan Miller (Warner Press)
On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness by Andrew Peterson (WaterBrook)
Shade by John B. Olson (B&H)
Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy by Theodore Beale (Marcher Lord Press)
The Battle for Vast Dominion by George Bryan Polivka (Harvest House)
The Book of Names by D. Barkley Briggs (NavPress)
The Infinite Day by Chris Walley (Tyndale House Publishers)
The League of Superheroes by Stephen L. Rice (The Writers’ Cafe Press)
The Restorer’s Journey by Sharon Hinck (NavPress)

If you have, vote for the best Christian spec fic of the year in the Clive Staples Award! The voting page is here. Let’s let these authors know how much we appreciate their contributions to Christian speculative literature.

P.S. I voted for Jeff Overstreet’s Cyndere’s Midnight — a book I also nominated.

I think I should set up a new feature on this blog and have people guess where I am at any given time . Lately I so often post that I haven’t been blogging because I’m traveling! This week I’m in West Virginia, visiting a dear friend and her family. She has a month-old little girl who shares my name, and I’m delighting in her! However, being in the mountains with a slow Internet connection means little chance to blog or keep up with e-mail. Today I’m in town at a Starbucks, taking advantage of free WiFi and the free food and drinks I earn through my credit card.

And life is good .

In the midst of a very busy week, hence the relative quiet around here: marking papers, finishing a manuscript edit, writing The Advent, rehearsing Behold the Child, formatting a new Irish book, and running Soli errands takes up a lot of time! But there’s always time for thought . I’ve been reading II Corinthians this week (an epistle from a very busy man, the apostle Paul), and am struck by this mark of his lifestyle:

And whether we be afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation . . . or whether we be comforted, it is for your consolation and salvation . . . For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God. (II Cor. 1:6, 4:15, emphasis mine)

It’s humbling to realize how much Paul lived for others. Yes, everything he did was ultimately for the glory of God, but he realized that serving God meant building up the church. “For we preach not ourselves,” he declares in 4:5, “but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.”

Paul was a single man who traveled, wrote, and struggled privately just like we all do. Yet he saw his whole life as service to the church, and he believed that even his afflictions and consolations were ultimately for others, not just for himself. In that, he shared the heart of Jesus Christ, who lived an intensely human life and died an agonizing death — for the glory of the Father, yes, but also for us.

That is, the James Street Night of Art did — and my reading at Williams Jewellers was caught briefly on camera . You can also see Carolyn warming up for our performance of Street Lullaby, a twenty-minute, two-person mix of ballet and poetry that I conceptualized.

Stop. Hush. You in the street.

Hear the feet rushing? Mouths speaking? Noise building? Stress pounding?

Hush.

Overwhelming, overbearing, overtiring world. Everything building as you stand in crowded places in this moment utterly surrounded.

Hush.

Hush.

Close your eyes for a moment. Listen well. Let us bring you a street lullaby.

Here’s the article and accompanying video: http://beta.stcatharinesstandard.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2134306

Reading out loud was actually quite a lot of fun. I found out that I can get all wrapped up in the story even while sitting in front of complete strangers talking into a microphone .

JSA was a secular event, so we went in with a goal of catching people’s attention and turning their thoughts toward God. As Street Lullaby begins:

This morning before work, Carolyn, Naomi, Elyssa and I (aka the dancers and writer/narrator for Soli Deo Gloria Ballet) were out in the studio rehearsing Behold the Child, our Christmas production, which is breaking all kinds of new ground for us. (We’re telling a story rather than illustrating a theme — and we’re using props — and the music is, um, less traditional than your average Christmas production.) Telling stories this way teaches me about life (like I expressed in “The God Backstage“), today, in a special way — it reminded me how important all the transitional bits are.

This morning we concentrated on smoothing out the places between songs where people enter or leave the stage, where props are introduced or removed, where dancers need to look alive even when they’re dancing. Transitions don’t look impressive and the audience won’t walk away talking about how smoothly we moved the fake pottery offstage, but without good ones, the whole production would become disjointed, distracted, and ineffective.

So, my life’s lesson for this morning? The little in-between stuff matters. How disciplined I am about things like rising time, prayer time, and bedtime matters. My “insignificant” interactions with people are more signifcant than I think. Like prepositions in a sentence or quiet entrances in a ballet, the small things I do matter just as much as the big things — in fact, without the small things, the big things would never take shape.

Katherine was kind enough to review Taerith on her blog, so I thought I’d share the review here . It begins:

First of all, I generally don’t like fantasy. And Taerith is fantasy . . . The fact the God is shown as Deus, the Only-Wise, makes it fantasy. And of course, the unicorn… even though I’ve never been totally convinced that unicorns weren’t real anyway. So, it is fantasy. But it is real. And beautiful. I love the imagery surrounding Deus. Psalm 91 is my favorite psalm, and the feathers and wings that fill the pages which speak of Deus are perfect . . .

Read Katherine’s whole review at the link above, and leave her a comment to let her know you stopped by . She did a particularly good job of summing up the plot and characters, and I really enjoyed getting a look at them from someone else’s point of view!

Taerith is a full novel available for reading on this site. You can read it here.

My apologies for the recent silence around here. I had a performance of His Faithfulness midweek, a visit to Toronto, and Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend, and I’ve got a dual performance coming up: I’ll be doing poetic narration for Street Lullaby, a twenty-minute dance production Carolyn and I put together, and in between performances of that, I’ll be reading from Burning Light in a jewelry store. Both performances are part of the James Street Night of Art in St. Catharines, which we’re really excited about participating in.

So between spending roughly 26 hours in the car getting to all these places and all the prep work and catch-up it takes to make up for those 26 hours, I’ve been kinda busy . In fact, I am currently typing this in a hurry between designing posters for the reading and leaving for Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother’s house.

About that reading — if you’d told me ten years ago that eventually I’d be memorizing my own narrations and delivering them to congregations and crowds of school children, or that I’d voluntarily stand up and read out of my own books to complete strangers, I would have laughed. I am a writer (read: introvert). But as it turns out, sometimes life surprises you, and sometimes you surprise yourself. I really enjoy taking words I’ve written and proactively getting them out there.

So you tell me. What surprises have come along in your writing (or other) life recently? And how are you surprising yourselves?