Wild and Wonderful West Virginia Book Festival

Well, it's Sunday night, and I'm trying to wind down from a way too busy week. But it promises to be that way all this month. I knew October was going to be extra busy. We're having revival at church through Wednesday and then my booksigning at Joseph-Beth's Booksellers in Lexington with Virginia Smith is this Thursday night. I hope I see some of you there.

That's just what's going on this week. I won't even think about the rest of the month. Anyway, that's why I was so happy to get my new book, The Believer, finished and off a month before deadline. But alas, while my editor did like the story and gave it thumbs up, she also wants a few changes. (Heavy sigh!) Actually her suggested changes aren't all that bad. The really bad part is that I had a couple of questions about the same things she's questioning now and I let it slide right on past me. That's not working the way I want to work. I was just so happy to be finished that I didn't want to see those little minor problems that I could have fixed to make the story better before I sent it in to the editor. Of course, who knows? Maybe then she would have found something else to need fixing. I've heard of some people - not necessarily writers, but anyone who has to write a proposal or draft for someone else's approval - leaving something they know is wrong in the proposal, etc. just so the boss or whoever has to approve it has something to fix. That's not me. I want my stuff fixed as good as I can fix it before anybody else reads it.

Unfortunately nobody is perfect. Certainly not me and that's why there are editors. To help us make our work better. Still I want to be perfect. In my writing at any rate. I know I have no chance of being perfect in my everyday life. I'm always flubbing up something or saying the wrong thing or not getting something that needed to be done finished on time. Praise the Lord for forgiveness. And second and sometimes third chances.

Guess that's what I have with my new book. A second chance to make it more near to perfect. I really don't mind editing - when it's my idea. It's harder when it's the editor's idea, because then I have to shift my thinking over to his or her perspective. Sometimes that's brain strain.

But back to my topic. Wild and wonderful West Virginia. That's the motto on their license plates up there in WV. There is a lot of beautiful country in WV. Mountainous areas, rivers that lend themselves to whitewater rafting, secluded valleys, and lonesome stretches where if you're traveling through on the interstate, you're glad you filled up with gas before you started down the road. And there are some cities. It was the city part I was in Saturday at the West Virginia Book Festival in Charleston, WV. My son's an attorney in Charleston and so I contacted the WV Book Festival committee to beg for a place on the program. Well, I didn't really beg. I asked politely, and they were kind enough to invite me.

My talk was "Writing about Shakers...and Other Odd Characters," and wonder of wonders, some people showed up to listen. I was worried about that. I mean I got up at 4:15 in the morning to drive three hours up there and I was really worried I'd get up there and nobody would come listen. I couldn't see why they would. I mean I'm not exactly famous or any thing. Then my program was at 10 a.m. That's sort of early on Saturday morning. And the sun was shining on a beautiful fall day plus WVU was playing football at noon. On t.v. I was lucky my son showed up to introduce me, seeing as how my granddaughter was playing volleyball at noon as well. But he did show up and did a great job introducing me to the nice group of people who decided to gift me with an hour and half of their time. Most of them seemed to enjoy the talk.

There was one daddy and his eleven-year-old son. The son was the writer. I admired the father supporting him enough to bring him to book events to try to help him learn the ropes. I'm not sure what I said about character development was helpful to him as I had planned my talk with adults in mind. But he made me think of myself at that age. Except I was a closet writer. I would have never had the courage to go out in public and admit to the world that I was a writer. I was, but I wouldn't have been able to say so at age eleven. Not to everybody. So he's ahead of me that way. Plus he said he had a lot of writing opportunities at his school. Not so for me. I used to wish the English teacher would assign themes for homework. I guess I had to come up with my own practice assignments. And as I'm always telling wanna be writers, the best way to learn to write is to read. That's doubly true for young people. It's something I certainly did as a kid. I always had a book in my hand.

But I had a good time in West Virginia and I thank everybody who came. Your kind comments made my day. And then I got to go to my son's house and see the grandbabies - all five of them. The twins are doing great, growing and growing. The two-year-old is having a little trouble adjusting to not being the baby. That's because she's still a baby too. But her mommy and daddy will help her through this adjustment time. That's the thing about a good mama's and daddy's love. It doesn't thin out to cover more children. It just gets thicker all the time until it wraps a warm blanket of love around each and every child.

Hope you have a blanket of love around your shoulders this week. And if you're having great weather the way we are that you'll breath in the great autumn air and enjoy.

Finishing the Race

Hi, everybody. Another Wednesday, but this one not the ordinary mid-week hump Wednesday. My daughter and her husband are visiting this week after a weekend in Texas where Gary, my son-in-law, entered and finished an Ironman race. That's impressive. It took him five hours and forty-three minutes to swim a mile plus, bike fifty some miles and run thirteen miles. The question he's heard most from us is "Why?" I don't think any of us could imagine doing one of those things. I might walk thirteen miles, but not run them. So we are admiring his endurance and perseverance in finishing the race. And shaking our heads as we ask "Why would you want to do that to your body?"

So since they're visiting we went to see the babies in WV today. And the rest of the family there too. The twins have almost doubled in size since I last saw them and I have no trouble telling them apart. Now if I could just get the right name to roll off my tongue. I do that trick of calling every name but the right one. They say that's a grandma age thing. Oh well. The grandma benefits are well worth a little aging.

But back to the perserverance of finishing the race. I've always thought perserverance was the greatest attribute a writer can have. It takes perseverance to finish a book length piece of fiction. It takes perseverance to finish any length piece of fiction and then go back and rewrite it until it's right. It takes perseverance to keep on trying when rejections come knocking on your door and editors aren't loving the work you're doing. Perseverance is what keeps you going when you entertain thoughts of quitting. It's perseverance that tells you the next book, the next story might be the one. So here's a quote or two about stiffening your writer's backbone and continuing to write what you know you must.

"The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one." ...William Strunk

"Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent." ...William Cobbett

"Even the woodpecker owes his success to the fact that he uses his head and keeps pecking away until he finishes the job he starts." Coleman Cox

I'll be in West Virginia at the Book Fest on Saturday, October 11 at 10 a.m. Hope if any of you are in the area you'll come on over and say hi. I just found out my oldest WV granddaughter has a volleyball match at noon, so there goes my one sure attendee. The rest of the grandkids are a little young to care about hearing grandma talk about developing characters. They're too busy developing their own characters. So wish me luck and a few interested participants in my workshop. I'll be sure to catch you up on the good and the bad (hope there's not much of that) of it all on Sunday.