A couple of months ago, one of our priests, Father Andrew, a young, fairly new priest, announced that he was being transferred. It was very unexpected and in fact, he only had one more week with us.

This is very unusual because the general practice is that the new priests are ordained in May and around the end of that month, hew assignments are announced. Priests, as I understand it, are asked by the bishop every year if they are willing to move. It has been my experience that older priests tend to stay where they are for a good length of time. For instance, when we lived in Illinois and we became Catholic, the priest of that church had been there nine years and was still there when we left five years later. On the other hand, probably half a dozen or so associate pastors came and went in that time.

Father Andrew had only been with us a year when he was asked to take another parish and it wasn’t during the normal assignment rotations.

What he announced set my imagination and that of my husband whirling in our heads.

Father Andrew said that he was being transferred so quickly was that in this small parish in a little town I never heard of one of the priests took a leave of absence and the other had a nervous breakdown.

Well, as a fantasy author, and the writer of a Catholic vampire short story that has yet to find a home, I have to wonder.

What’s going on in that parish and why are we sending beloved Father Andrew into it? What will happen to him??

I have a theory. It might be bunnies!

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I think God is really trying to get my attention, possibly because I haven’t been paying attention before!

Well, I feel like this is happening a lot lately and I’ve started looking around to see what He’s trying to get me to change. Because, ultimately, He wouldn’t be trying to hard to get me to listen if I were doing all the right things in the first place.

I keep hearing a song on the radio by Steven Curtis Chapman called Do Everything. I’d post the video here but experience has taught me that it wouldn’t work anyway, but go to YouTube and look for it if you don’t know the song.

The basic message is to “Do Everything You Do for the Glory of God.”

Years ago, I tried to figure out how that’s even possible. At the time I was the wife of a graduate student and the mom of a little girl about four or five years old. We were living in a trailer and seriously had no money. I was thinking about being a writer and people would suggest that I go to a book store and buy the kinds of books I wanted to write and study them. They just didn’t get that I literally didn’t have the money to buy books!

Doing my daily chores and life stuff for the glory of God just didn’t compute. How did defrosting a freezer or folding clothes glorify God? Didn’t I need to be praying endless Rosaries or going out and finding the homeless and bringing them back to my house to feed and clothe?

We actually did take care of a homeless guy for awhile but frankly, he wanted to drink and break windows more than he wanted new clothes or food.

Now it’s years later, and I’m older and I hope, more mature in my walk with Jesus. Last summer, when I went to RWA Nationals, I got a very strong feeling that God was reaffirming to me that He wants me to write. The speakers all seemed to be telling me that and even the missal at the church I went to Mass on Sunday morning had a picture on the cover labeled, “Jesus the Storyteller.” I felt like God was sitting next to me, saying, “Look, I gave you the talent and the desire to write. What are you going to do about it?”

A year has gone by and I’ve finished my book, sent it to an agent, and am still looking. I’m also working on the second book in the series along with a middle grade fantasy novel based on stories my son tells.

But if I’m getting this message that I need to do everything for the glory of God, what am I missing?

Well, of course I know. I’m not working hard enough on my writing. I waste a lot of time on computer games, Facebook, whatever.

And there’s more.

This was the year I said I was going to meet my weight loss goals, and that’s not looking so promising now. I hate tracking my food and I love ice cream.

But, I’m starting to get a new perspective. Today’s second reading this morning was Romans 12:1-2 and as I followed along in the missal I felt that 2×4 to my head (or my heart, maybe) again. Verse 2 especially:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Okay, so I’m now seeing things a little differently. When I want to do something, I’ve started asking myself, “Does this bring glory to God?”

If I’m folding clothes or cleaning the bathroom or emptying the dishwasher, I’ve started to realize that those things bless my family and I’ve been called to be a mom so if I do mom things then I bring glory to God.

If I sit down and write my word quota, then since I’m called to write, I bring glory to God.

If I spend an hour playing Word with Friends or Frontierville, I’m not bringing glory to God if my other tasks are being neglected. Games and pasttimes are not evil but they’re not my calling.

Sundays are a day of rest and I can play games then. I can also sew for my family and that’s renewing to my spirit, too, so I can bring glory to God by blessing my family with clothing or lovely things to look at or quilts to keep them warm. I can make gifts to bless others, too.

If I’m eating healthy food to nourish my temple of the Holy Spirit, I bring glory to God.

If I stuff my face with cake and cookies, to the exclusion of good food, I don’t.

I don’t know where this all will lead me but it’s a journey I’m looking forward to.

Besides their good looks.

Steve is on a business trip so Noah’s been sleeping in our bed. This morning I woke him up for school.

Noah: I’m Mommy’s little skunk.

Me: Because you stink?

Noah: Oh. I’m Mommy’s little hedgehog because I snuggle with her at night.

Me. More like you kick me in the night.

Noah: Me, Daddy, and Bumpa are skunks because we stink.

Me: You stink?

Noah (looking at me knowingly): Because we have G A S.

There you have it.

My husband is on a business trip and will be out of town until Sunday. Life tends to loosen up a bit when he’s gone. I suspect some things slide when I go away, too, but he won’t admit to that. More ice cream and pizza in the freezer when I get home tell a different story, however.

Not the point.

Anyway, last night Noah was playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii. He’d been grounded from the game for some time because of grades and behavior but so far this school year he’s got an A in math, so I let him play.

It was bedtime and he was playing. I told him it was time to brush his teeth and stuff, but he did his normal, “I’m almost done, Mom.” I know because I get addicted to games, too, that this means, “Leave me alone for another hour or whatever.”

I sat and watched for a bit and he insisted that he just needed to get to ONE PLACE and he’d finish that section or the game or something.

I decided to let him go for a bit, but it became clear that he couldn’t figure out the last piece to the puzzle and it was getting very late.

I told him Daddy wouldn’t be happy and he’d have to figure out the rest the next day. He was frustrated anyway and as he huffed into the bathroom to brush his teeth, he asked me to find out who made that game and tell him that it was impossible to finish.

I put him to bed and went back to my desk to work for a bit. After a few minutes I heard a random noise or two coming from the living room area.

We have a guinea pig who sometimes chews on the bars of his cage or knocks his dish over so I thought maybe that’s what I heard.

The second time I heard something, I started out toward the living room. I could see a reflection in a window of Noah moving around. He turns the sound down and leaves all the lights off so as not to alert any parents that he’s out of bed.

WHen I confronted him, he said, “I figured it out!” Apparently as he lay in bed after prayers, he’d figured out what the last piece of the puzzle was.

He happily handed over the controller after I told him I’d let his score finish tallying and ran back to bed.

My son, the gamer!

Life is getting exciting here but a little baffling at the same time.

Last March, and I may have blogged about this, I went to the Jambalaya Jubilee conference in Houma, LA. It’s a small conference held in a public library, and this was the second time I went.

This year I pitched Sword & Illusion to agent Cherry Weiner. She told me it was too long and I should cut about 29,000 words. (Yikes!) When that was done, I was to email her.

Well, Monday I did just that. I had spent hours cutting words from my book. I cut out several characters and, for a lot of writerly reasons, ignored that Attack of the Queen had ever been written. Ms. Weiner told me to “think series,” which was something I already was, and again, for those writerly reasons, I’ve chosen to make Sword & Illusion the first book of the series.

It will mean that the story that was told in Attack will move to later in the series and possibly will change appearance. I have promised my best friend (and inspiration for Adazzra) that eventually she will get her husband and children back. At this point, I’m not sure how that will all happen, however.

When I was first writing the book – We’ve been calling it S&I at home, but that’s going to be confusing because all of the books will be Sword & something beginning with I – I had seen it as the second book, so deciding to make it the first one meant that a lot of things changed, and everything was possible.

I was assuming Attack would be the second book, now titled Sword & Inferno, but events in Illusion make it necessary to deal with some things before I can get to Adazzra’s world and save it from the Vlaad.

My husband and I went through a list of I words to come up with some other titles. He doesn’t think Sword & Immunocytochemistries is a good title. However, right now I think book two will be Sword & Infidel due to how Illusion ended.

Now I’m faced with writing a book I have no plot for yet. I think this must be what successful writers face. I have never written a book that I didn’t have a story in mind for before I ever sat down.

However, it occurred to me this morning that people like Rachel Caine, Jim Butcher and Alyssa Day, who have long series of books with the same characters or related ones, probably don’t know all their plots before they begin. Heck, my friend Jo also pitched to Cherry at the conference and had synopses for three books requested and she had only written one and a half. She didn’t even know the plot of book three.

But she does now.

So, if I’m going to be a successful fantasy author, I need to be ready to figure out a plot from the ground up.

I’m excited but scared, too.

I’ve been working on Sword & Illusion for a long time. I remember being at RWA Nationals in Atlanta in 2006 while my husband read the first draft. He said “Three or four hundred more pages and you’ll have it.

I thought he was joking.

Well, here it is, five years later, and the book has been “finished” for over a year. Finished means I added, cut, added some more, cut the story in HALF and tied up those ends and declared it DONE!

It ended up being about 134,000 words.

Which, as it turns out, is too long for any agent to even look at.

I sent query after query after query to agent after agent after agent, and the ones that got responses were generally form letters. No one bothered to tell me that it was too long.

I figured, you know, epic fantasy novels tend to be long. Look at Tolkien, Jordan, even Rowling. I’m not comparing myself to them except that they wrote long books and so do I.

It would have been nice if someone had just mentioned in their rejection, “Hey, I’m rejecting you not based on the story, which I won’t even read, but because it’s too stinkin’ long.”

I would have gotten that.

In March, I pitched my story to an agent face to face and I KNEW it was the length that kept her from asking even for a chapter. She said I had to cut it down to 105,000 words at most.

Okay, so here I am, over a year later, 56 pages from the end of the book and I realize I still need to cut FIFTY SIX pages (by word count). For a moment, I wondered if I could end the book right there and call it good.

I’m re-reading every sentence and trying to figure out how to cut a word here or there and I still need to cut 14,000. I’m now back to the beginning thinking about cutting whole scenes, but even then it’s 1,000 words here, 1,200 there.

I know this story is good. I KNOW it.

On the other hand, I’m editing a book for the small epublisher I work for that should never have been accepted in this form. The characters’ motivations don’t make sense, they jump to conclusions on the faintest evidence and assume everyone agrees, the heroine gets injured over and over (even getting a concussion and nearly dying) but she’s never seen a doctor. I have talked to the acquisitions editor I’m working with and I understand what happened here, but I don’t think it is fair that this book is under contract, and no one will even give my book a chance!

I dream of seeing my books on a store shelf one day, and every day that I still have to cut words is another day I won’t see that dream fulfilled.

It kinda ticks me off, but there’s nothing I can do but plod forward, praying I’m not cutting the heart out of this book.

Parents know there are some milestones your child will go through. You might not expect that sometimes they feel like walking through a door that slams shut behind you and you can never go back.

First words.

First steps.

Start of school.

Those are things we expect and sometimes look forward to. They’re signs that our child is growing up and moving from a baby dependent upon us for everything to a maturing child who begins to love us not because he or she needs us but because they CHOOSE to love us.

It’s pretty awe inspiring.

Then there are unexpected milestones that not only slam a door behind us but smack us in the face as we walk right into them, not even realizing they were coming.

I hit one of those yesterday.

It was the first day of school and as usual, the principal said it was perfectly okay for parents to walk their child or children to their classrooms. Noah said he didn’t need us to do that.

I said fine. If he wanted to be a big kid, then I would totally respect that. He did change his mind when we got to the school and no one else was just dropping their kids off.

However, that wasn’t the milestone. That came later.

He’s been going to this school for four years. I get how carpool works. I know when to leave the house to get my favorite spot (someone’s unsecured wifi reaches the street there and I can use my computer to surf or chat or research something for my book). I got this.

I even was so together this year that I had his supplies labeled as the teachers asked and all that. I figured I was going to be able to hold things together this year.

Pride goeth before a fall, baby.

I got to carpool yesterday and sat in my car, a little behind where I usually sit, but it was okay. When the line began to move, I noticed it was a little slower than last year, but I figured new moms and we had to get back into a routine.

I got to the pickup line and they called his name.

He wasn’t there.

The teacher or mom who was helping asked me if he was in third grade. I said yes and she told me he was in the OTHER carpool line now!

The big kids’ line! The one I don’t know how to work.

I drove around to find that the line was extended farther back than I had anticipated and I ended up “butting” in as I came from a side street into the line.

Now, I don’t know when to leave the house or any of that, but the bigger thing to me is, he’s in the big kid line!!!

This school goes from kindergarten to 8th grade, so I had anticipated another year or so before he’d move. I thought they stayed in the “Front” carpool line until 4th grade, at the very earliest.

Nope.

Today we drove to the front line with no problems, but I’ll have to see how it works this afternoon.

I think I hear a door slamming somewhere.

Our second day in Nashville started a little slow. We went to the Belle Mead Plantation which is a working farm and an antebellum southern plantation. It was okay, but I’ve done plantations before and I get confused over all the names and dates. I guess I’m not a history nerd.

The good thing about Belle Mead was that there is a winery there, and I love wine tastings, so we did that. It’s the only winery in Tennessee and I loved the wines so I bought two bottles to take home.

Yes, I realize that bottles of wine take up more room than mugs but I’m going to be okay with my suitcase!

Then we went to a mall that the tour book said was over a million square feet of shops, which might be true but it seemed like a good quarter or more of them were closed. We finally found an O’Charley’s and had lunch.

After lunch, we decided to go to the Grand Ole Opry and it was a great decision! We loved the backstage tour so much we decided (or rather Elizabeth decided, as she’s the one who paid) to stay and see a show!

We had about an hour and a half to two hours to kill so we went to the Gaylord Opryland Resort to look around.

Last year, before the big flood, RWA was holding its annual conference there so I was supposed to stay there and even had a reservation already. I wanted to see what it was like.

It is, of course, magnificent, but I wonder how long it would take to figure out how to get in and out and where to go if I had gone to a conference there.

We ate dinner, which was super expensive, but super yummy. Elizabeth paid again and I had gotten her some music jewelry as a thank you for this trip and all. She is a bell ringer so the music symbols were appreciated.

Then we went to the show. Fabulous. We had third row seats and had a wonderful time. I signed up for a Opry Visa (which I do not need) but I got a free t-shirt and a chance to go backstage during the show. Didn’t win, but I have some new and old stars I think I will be following.

Tonight, I’m tired, but we have one more full day here so I think we’re doing another mansion and then the Country Music Hall of Fame.

About a month ago or so, my sister-in-law sent me a message on Facebook wondering if I would be interested in the two of us (JUST the two of us) meeting somewhere about halfway between Akron, OH (where she lives) and Baton Rouge, LA (where I live) and spending just a few days doing touristy things and hanging out.

It took a little planning and logistics but yesterday we both flew to Atlanta and got on the same flight from there to Nashville. We rented a car and drove to our hotel in downtown Nashville. After we got settled and all we walked down one of the main streets (5th Avenue, I think) where there were small little restaurants/bars and some little shops, all geared to country or at least live music. This was mid-afternoon, around 3 or 4. Several of these places had their doors open and you could hear and sometimes see live performers performing.

I’ve never been much of a country music fan, although my dad and mom kinda were. I did grow up watching Hee Haw, so many country stars from the 70s and 80s are familiar to me, and I do know some of their songs.

We went into a little rib place and ate something. Then we walked around some more. We came back to our hotel and then, around seven we headed out to a nearby mall and ate at a Ruby Tuesday. Not super exciting, but fun.

Today was our first full day. We went to the Ryman Auditorium which is the former home of the Grand Ole Opry. It was built to be a church in the 1800s and it’s lovely inside. In fact, it is called the Mother Church of Country Music.

We had our picture taken on the stage holding guitars and saw lots of memorabilia from country music stars. I may just find myself buying some country CDs!

Then we at lunch at Panera Bread right next door. We don’t have Panera’s in Louisiana so I eat at one whenever I can.

Then we went to Fontanel, a magnificent log mansion built by Barbara Mandrell’s husband. It was their family home for years and it was amazing. We got there about an hour before the next tour so we went into a small family-style restaurant (Farmhouse) that is at the parking lot for the tour. On the ceiling were about a dozen or so old quilts and both Elizabeth and I remarked how it made us miss Mom, who would have loved this trip and had a blast with us.

After that we went to the the Parthenon. I had promised my son I’d go as we’d seen it in the Percy Jackson movie. Turns out that the movie must have used a set or something because what I saw didn’t jibe with the movie but was more impressive and beautiful. Elizabeth took a bunch of pictures and I got a mug and a T-shirt.

Speaking of mugs, I collect them and I got three(one in each place we visited) before I thought possibly putting them in my suitcase was going to be a problem if this continued. So, no more mugs. I loved the Parthenon so much I also got a t-shirt!

Then we went to the Hard Rock Cafe down the street from our hotel and I got a souvenir glass with my drink! My last drinking vessel this trip! I promise!