I was with a wonderful group of people last weekend who came together for a house-warming. A circle of friends, new and old, gathered around a large dining room table to talk and warm this space. On the table sat a landscape blueprint for the large backyard that the former owners of the home had left undeveloped.
Throughout the afternoon all of us, at one time or another, picked up the 11 by 17 inch piece of paper and studied the collection of circles and squares that would be lush vegetation and an ultimate oasis in the sunny, hot Colorado summers. We seemed to know all the work that would be involved to turn the current “blank slate” to the plan on the paper.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” I said at the time, “if we all had this kind of design for our lives.” People responded enthusiastically; “Sign me up!” a few burst out.
What if life could be designed and drawn out for us? Not only the places where we would find shade and comfort, but also the places that would be hard and require a lot of weeding and persistence. How much easier these places would be if we knew it was all just part of the “design” of our lives and that even the labor-intensive things would eventually lead to something beautiful.
When I started writing over ten years ago I would have never put in my design that I would self-publish a book. To me, forgive me for saying this, it meant that I had somehow failed. My quest has been for all these years to not only learn to write and write beautifully, but to publish the books I write with a traditional publisher, the bigger the better, to fulfill my desire to be a “legitimate” writer. I’d be a writer who daddy Zeus, the publishing god, approved of, and paid handsomely. That may still happen. In fact I have a literary agent who is certain of it. But it hasn’t happened as of this writing.
The book that I am introducing in this blog, Seeking Sara Summers, is a story that I have worked on for 8 years. It came close to being bought several times by different publishers, big and small. And all along I have been revising and rewriting (the constant “weeding” of the writing world), honing in on the best story I could possibly write.
It is my illegitimate child, if I look at it in a traditional, patriarchal sense. But it is still a child that I love dearly and one that I have devoted many, many hours of my life to. Now it is time to put this creation out into the world and let it go and reach whoever it is meant to reach. Perhaps it will be someone who is searching for a more authentic life, like the main character is, and the book will encourage them to go for it. That would be my hope. To write something that both inspires and encourages.
I am convinced that Life has a much bigger imagination than we do. It is designed, in a way, that we can’t begin to comprehend. Our jobs, it seems, is to simply trust the process.
