I Heart Jane Austen

Okay, I must confess: while I did "nothing" yesterday I also watched the BBC's mini-series version of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice.  All six hours of it.  This is, at least, my 1,000th time to watch the DVD's.  I'm an addict.

While watching I was also doing homework in the Writer's Market book for Children's Books Illustrators and Authors.  I read the chapter that included a Q&A with several agents, outlining what they do and do not like to see in the submissions that cross their desks.  One agent said (I'm paraphrasing): be authentic; write what you know; there's nothing more unique than your own experience.

That's when it hit me: this is why I love Jane Austen (one of the reasons...I could go on for days).  She was true to herself, her perspective, her experiences, even the banalities of her daily life.  How refreshing. 

I don't know why this struck me as so inspirational.  Perhaps it's because...well...I can do that.  I can be who I am.  I can write what I know.  My characters can laugh at the things I find funny and cry at the things I find sad.  I don't have to overcomplicate; I just have to write.

So, for those of you who are interested, here's an update on my writing career:

• I have submitted five children's picture books and received two rejections & one offer (which I rejected).  I'm waiting to hear on three of the five, and I need to resubmit the other two. 
• I have started a middle-grade fantasty fiction novel.  I'm very excited about it and plan to finish the outline, story plot, and first three chapters during a writing retreat to Marfa, Texas this spring.  I want to be able to submit it to agents beginning in May (feel free to hold me accountable to that timeline!).
• I'm submitting a decade's worth of poetry to a publisher this month (wish me luck!).

Now I must put down my computer and take up my pen (my preferred way of writing).  And, of course, raise a glass to Miss Austen.  Here's to you, girlfriend!

True Lies of Motherhood (or Womanhood?)

It's Thursday, a writing day.  Typically I drop the kids off at 9:30 (at their preschool), head to my favorite writing spot, and write for at least two hours.  This is my Tuesday/Thursday routine - the only time, truth be told, that I focus exclusively on writing.  The rest of my days and weeks are filled with kids, home, husband, general household stuff.

This week I've had a hard time getting back into the swing of things post-holiday.  My house is back together, but I still feel a little upside-down.  Graciously, I've felt the Holy Spirit prompt me to use Tuesday & Thursday to rest this week.  There has been no pressure to be productive.  No pressure from Him, anyway.

Here's how my day has gone today:

• 6:20 a.m. up with my youngest
• 7:00 a.m. both kids up and eating breakfast; husband wakes up to help
• 7:15 a.m. husband is changing diaper of oldest while youngest eats and I make lunches
• 7:30 a.m. husband sits with oldest as he starts breakfast; I load youngest into the car along with everything we need for school later - we head off for our weekly blood draw
• 8:10 a.m. we finally arrive at the lab (across town in rush hour traffic) for our blood draw
• 8:40 a.m. we leave for home, making my husband late - argh!
• 8:40-9 a.m. call Lily's doctors (two of them) regarding certain testing; call my dog's Vet to discuss the two tumors we found in his mouth last week; return a friend's phone call
• 9:00 a.m. arrive home, load oldest into car, double-check 'provisions', kiss husband goodbye, head to school
• 9:15 a.m. stop by Starbuck's on the way to school to treat myself to a hot chocolate
• 9:30 a.m. drop kids at school; hugs and kisses all around
• 9:45 a.m. back at home, I ask God how to order my time...there's a lot to do.  I start the laundry while thinking.  I put away stray toys while thinking.  I make beds while thinking.
• 10 a.m. brief Quiet Time
• 10:15-11 a.m. pay bills, balance our budget, return emails, keep laundry going
• 11-12 eat an early lunch, bake brownies, continue laundry, clean kitchen, research a property we're trying to sell
• 12 noon I pick up where I left off with regard to researching how, when, where to submit the four finished picture books I currently have in my reservoir
• 12:30 I can't resist actually writing, just a little, as I think in my head..."I'm a sloth...I've done nothing today.  Am I dishonoring my husband by making him work so I can sit around and be a kept woman?"
• 12:35 p.m. I start this blog post, laughing at myself and wondering how many of you can relate to these thoughts

"Kept" woman?  If I stop and think, I never sit around and do nothing.  Even if I'm watching TV with my husband, I'm also going through the mail, running the dishes, keeping the laundry going (a never-ending task), reading a book, or writing in my journal (often I do more than one of those things at once).  How many of you, my female friends, are exactly like this?  How often are you still?  And if you ever are, how guilty do you feel about it?

This week I've been struck several times by how fleshy I am.  I don't feel condemned - not at all.  Instead, I feel sad.  The moments where I've witnessed my sinful nature have been full of regret and desire for change.  I know I can do nothing to change myself.  This must be a work of the Holy Spirit; He must engage my flesh and transform it into His image.  My job is to allow Him.

I wonder how much more this might happen if I actually chose to be still?  (Psalm 46:10)  I wonder how I would be transformed if I ceased to indulge in guilt and self-reprimanding, if I stopped acting as my own judge.  All morning long I've been plagued by the ghost of the thought: "you're not good enough.  You need to do more, be more."  The thought was not that clear, but that was the heart of it.  That's what is behind my need to feel productive, my fear of disappointing (in this case, my husband, by making his sacrifice seem like it's for naught).

The struggle is cliche.  It's been written about countless times, yet I still wanted to share.  I wanted to put it out there to say to all of my mommy, housewife, career women friends: you do enough.  You love, you inspire, you produce.  You are plenty good enough.  I'm not sure what else to say, other than: I hope these words speak to your heart.  I hope you feel the deep approval God has for you in them.  I hope you are encouraged, dear ones.  With love, Jenny

The Stripping

It's really hard to becoming something when you're already something else.

This is the thought I awoke with as I asked God what to write about today.  "What are you doing in my life right now?" I asked.  "Stripping," was the thought that returned.  "So true," I responded in my mind.

I'm in a process of stripping, sometimes intentionally and sometimes I watch as God takes things away that I no longer need.  It's happening in all areas of my life: relationships; old patterns; lifestyle choices.  It doesn't feel like a change or a transformation.  I literally feel like he's sloughing off dead weight.

So often in life we take on things that don't serve us well.  More precisely, we pick up things - relationships, activities, commitments, ideas - that don't serve Him, not just well, but at all.  Perhaps we intend to simply pick up things for a while, perhaps we don't even mean to pick them up at all.  Eventually we not only wear them, we become them.  They seep into our identity, our fiber, our skin.  And we wonder why we feel so heavy at times, why life weighs down on us to the point of exhaustion, or worse, depression.

The picture that came with the words this morning was that of a rose.  To keep a rose healthy so that it can keep blooming, you have to strip it.  Take off the dead weight of blooms that have outstayed their usefulness in order to make room for new growth.  What do you need to "dead head" in your life today?  I'm clear about some things and still wondering about others.  I know that it will be interesting to see where this season leads.  I look forward to a lighter way of life. 

I'm linking up with Soli Deo Gloria today - check them out!

Making a Change: Part 5 in a 5-Part Series

This is the last in a series from Christian author and blogger Michael Warden.  Enjoy!

5 of 5 Essentials for Change: You Need Love

"If I...do not have love, I gain nothing." ~ 1 Corinthians 13:3b

In his book, No Perfect People Allowed, my friend John Burke offers a beautiful metaphor for understanding what it's like to be a human being. We are, each one of us, a unique and beautiful masterpiece, says John, a glorious work of art crafted by God for his pleasure and our delight. But, he adds, we are masterpieces splattered with mud...mud that hides some of our God-given beauty and distracts us from the beauty beneath.


If you came upon a masterwork of art—say, a Picasso or Van Gogh—coated in mud, you wouldn’t judge it harshly or scrape haphazardly at the unsightly mud in disgust, would you? Of course not…because it is a masterpiece. You would treat it with care. You would treat it with love. You would be careful. You would be gentle. You would know that the thing you are holding is priceless, and the mud does nothing to diminish that fact.

And yet, many people try to change, not because they love the masterpiece of who they are, but because they hate the mud. This is a self-destructive fuel for change, and though it may produce some results, they rarely last, and the damage wreaked on their soul is far greater than any external benefit that may be gained. You cannot change the world by hating the world. You cannot change yourself by hating yourself. For real and lasting change to come, whether in your life or in the world, love is only fuel that matters.

Love sees the masterpiece beneath the mud. And this is what drives it to act. There is no greater power than this. There is no more effective means of change.

“Love…always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” ~ 1 Corinthians 13:7-8

Love is inexhaustible.

We’ve covered in previous posts the other elements you need for change: Anger, A Crystal Clear Dream, Faith, A Solid Plan. But for change to truly come, love must cover it all. Love for yourself. Love for the world. Even love for the mud you are working to remove. Love, above all other things, is key to change. Because there is no obstacle, there is no weapon, there is no pain or injury or injustice in the world, that Love cannot overcome.

There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer;
no disease that enough love will not heal;
no door that enough love will not open;
no gulf that enough love will not bridge;
no wall that enough love will not throw down;
no sin that enough love will not redeem . . .
It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble;
how hopeless the outlook;
how muddled the tangle;
how great the mistake.
A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.
If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world…

Emmet Fox

So let love lead the way. When in doubt of the path, or lost in the competing motives at war in your soul, ask: What would love have me do? And do that.

Change Continued: The 4th in a Series About Moving Forward

From visiting blogger Michael Warden.  For more on this series and Michael himself, visit http://www.michaelwarden.com/.

4 of 5 Essentials for Change: You Need a Solid Plan

"If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten." ~ Author Unknown

I loved watching reruns of the old TV show "Get Smart" when I was a kid. The series highlighted the adventures (read that: slipshod shenanigans) of Secret Agent 86, Maxwell Smart. Talk about a man without a plan! Max wouldn't know a good plan if it called him on his shoe phone. He wouldn't know a good plan if it screamed at him under the Cone of Silence. He wouldn't know a...okay, I'll stop. The point is, what made that show funny was that most of the time, Max didn't have the slightest clue what he was doing, but he did it anyway, and so went bumbling into every situation with the bravado and confidence of a complete boob. It was his faithful partner, Agent 99, who generally won the day and kept Max from danger, but because she had a thing for the guy, she always let him take the glory.


Of course what makes for funny TV is not nearly so fun in real life. Not having a plan, or worse yet, having a plan that doesn’t work but trying to follow it over and over again anyway is absolutely no fun at all. Yet all too often, that’s what we do when we try to make change real. Like Sisyphus we push against that boulder again and again thinking, This should work. This really should work! And that’s the problem, because it should. Or rather, it could.

See, that’s the thing about plans: There are lots and lots of them out there that could theoretically work. I mean, some are ridiculous of course, but most are…well, pretty feasible. They make sense. They could work. Whether you’re looking for a plan to grow your business, get out of debt, find the love of your life, change careers or get in the best shape of your life, you are, right at this moment, one Google search away from finding a dizzying array of pretty reasonable, fairly believable strategic plans to help get you there. So what’s the problem?

In my experience, there are two reasons most plans fail us. We think the plan is all we need and neglect the other essentials of anger, having a crystal clear dream, engaging our faith, and letting love lead the way (which I’ll talk about next week). But the other reason is this: To really make a significant change real in the world, you need a plan that does more than simply make it possible for you to succeed; you need a plan that makes it difficult for you to fail. And that sort of plan is much rarer…not because it’s harder to create, but because it takes a lot more courage to do (and thus, it’s harder to sell).

So, here you go, time for some truth telling. If you want a plan for change that’s actually going to work, it needs to be built on a foundation of SMART Goals. Each step in the plan needs to include ALL of the following elements:

• S—Specific: Not, “To lose weight” but “To go biking 5 times a week for 1-hour at a time, and practice healthier eating habits by eating vegetables or fruit at every meal and recording everything I eat every day until I drop drop 10 lbs of fat.”
• M—Measurable: If you’re goal is specific enough, it will be measurable. But basically, you need to be able to answer the question, “How will I know that I’ve reached my goal?”
• A—Accountable: Without question, this is the most important element of a successful plan, and the hardest for most people to employ. You need to make yourself accountable to at least two other people, and your accountability needs to have real rewards for success and (possibly, if it works for you) real costs for falling short of your goal. Some of my clients reward themselves with a professional massage each week or month they meet their goals, and pay their accountability partners a chunk of money each week or month they don’t reach their goals. (The partners generally pass the money on to a charity of their choosing.)
• R—Realistic: You have to do your homework. Research how long a change like the one you’re proposing actually takes. Avoid magical thinking. If you’re going to err, err on the side of giving yourself more time than you think you’ll need. Set yourself up for success, not failure. Make each step easily achievable, and let them build on each other gradually over time. Realistic also means you need to get some honest feedback about whether your dream is really feasible. You may want to be a professional singer, but before enacting a plan to get there, you need to get some honest professional feedback about whether you genuinely have the level of talent required for that job.
• T—Time Bound: In other words, you need deadlines. You need goal dates. You need actual mile-markers on an actual calendar that give you something specific to aim for and tell you that you’re actually making progress. For those who prefer to “feel” your way intuitively through a process of change, okay, go ahead. But know that it will take you three to five times longer to reach your goal than it will those who employ accountable deadlines, if you ever reach your goal at all. Honestly, I find that most people who say they work better without deadlines are really just trying to avoid the risk of failing.

To make change real, you need a solid plan. And that plan needs to be SMART, not DUMB. SMART plans are not harder to set up, but they are harder to do, because they commit you to change. They make it difficult for you to bail or fail. But isn’t that what, deep down, you actually want?

“You see, idealism detached from action is just a dream. But idealism allied with pragmatism, with rolling up your sleeves and making the world bend a bit, is very exciting. It’s very real. It’s very strong, and it’s very present.” ~ Bono