Creative Life – Page 30 – Rebekah Lyn Books

Writing? Don’t Make It a Big Deal

Julia Cameron in The Right to Write, tells us emphatically that we will write better if we don’t made a big deal out of it. When we first take up writing seriously, we decide we’ll write perfectly. Ms. Cameron says that’s a mistake. We must be willing to write badly at least in our first drafts and then go on from there. She says wanting to write perfectly has kept many people from writing at all. After working with her books and protocols for over twenty years, I have not found one thing she says that doesn’t work.

For Julia, writing is a normal part of life. You cook breakfast, clean house, feed the kids, and the pets, go to work, meet with friends, read a book. But sometimes I get to working so hard on my writing that I can hardly think about anything else.

Recently I’ve been doing just that with a draft of my novel, Go West, and I’ve left a lot of things undone, both in the house and in the other creative parts of my life. For one thing, I’ve been allowing my painting to stagnate to the point that I was beginning to think I’d never get back into it. I had come to a place where I didn’t even know what kind of art I wanted to do anymore. My art studio was a cluttered mess and even though I had supplies available in a couple of other parts of the house it had all clogged up.

Now, I don’t know how many drafts of, Go West, are waiting in the wings, two or three, I would think, maybe more. But I decided that since my publicist and public relations rep are on vacation at Hilton Head, I’ll treat myself to a vacation too.

Yesterday, Bill was so kind as to take me to Sam Flax Art Supplies in Orlando before we went to lunch with our son. Before going I looked over my supplies. What a clutter! I went through a catalog to think about what I might like to buy, and gave some thought to what I might do as a project.

I only needed half an hour of wandering through Sam Flax to get inspired. The first thing I did was to look at all the art books: no, I don’t want to do wood burning, no, I don’t want to paint portraits, no I don’t want to learn to do Anime, oil paint, watercolor, acrylics. What do I really want? Eureka. There it is! And it’s exactly what I’ve been dabbling in for at least six years — art journaling or visual journaling. I found just the book I needed, and came home and ordered not only that one, but two more at a reduced price from the same authors. I’m so excited. This morning I got up at 5:00 a.m. to work on art before I went for my walk. When I got home I worked for three hours on de-cluttering my art studio, and delicious hours they were. The cat thought so too. She almost wore herself out trying to keep up with me.

Funny How it Turned Out~A Writer is Born Finale

Funny how things turn out. For a while after Bill retired I felt I should do everything he wanted me to do and go everywhere he wanted me to go. But, although we got along well, I harbored secret dissatisfaction with our life together. Eventually we worked it out so that we were both free to do what we really wanted to do, even you might say, what we were born to do. Him to travel, me to stay at home. Now he plans trips and goes on them. Now I stay at home and write, and live a very pleasant life. He doesn’t go for very long and he only makes two trips a year, but we’re both happy with the new arrangement, and guess what. As it turns out we are both writers. Who would ever have thought it?

I am happy to say that Bill is a weekly blogger on my blog Old Things R New. His posts and especially his travel ones are very popular both in the United States and internationally-Onisha

A Writer is Born~Part 4

Our little girl grew up to be sweet, successful, and smart and she married a good man, just as our son married an excellent woman.

I met Mary Harwell Sayler when she came to teach at a writer’s conference run by our church. Mary is a consummate poet and wonderful teacher and I drank poetry, the reading and the writing of it, like

Introducing Mary Sayler — Author, Poet Mary Sayler

a person dying of thirst. I signed up for Mary’s poetry writing correspondence course and as we got to be friends, she invited me to her home in DeLand, an hour away. I drove up once a month for about five years and we talked about poetry, nature, and our families and from there became associates and each other’s loyal advocates.

For another eight years I drove to Melbourne once a month to meet with Julian Lee Dulfer who taught a class in writing and copy-editing novels that I couldn’t have done without.

With all the writing I was doing I didn’t have time for much else, but then I read that writers need hobbies. That gave me permission to do something I’d always to – take art lessons. I was so excited the first night, I couldn’t wait to get my brush dipped into water and paint. I’ve been through four teachers and a lot of different kinds of art since then and I never lost the thrill of it. The gallery experience and the Art League workshop I was in were true highlights for me. I loved giving art lessons to my two grandchildren and they benefitted from them as much as I did.

One day in Wal-Mart I met a young woman, Rebekah Lyn, whose mom I’d known for a long time. I knew Rebekah had started working on a novel and as we stood there discussing writing, we made a pact to help each other. For about a year, we each brought our efforts to a meeting and read aloud, she read my manuscript and I read hers. It helped a lot. She went on to publish with Amazon and I followed soon after with my Florida Springs Trilogy. Her mother, Onisha, is our publicist and another friend is our public relations agent. Rebekah Lyn started her own book website and now four writers are represented there, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet, novelist, nonfiction writer, and teacher, Janet Perez Eckles (who is blind and who has written an autobiographical book about her experiences with the living God) Rebekah, and me.

Rebekah has just launched, Jessie the story of a teen aged boy who grew up in Titusville, Florida in the early sixties during the beginning of the Space Program. It’s an excellent and timely book.

Presently, I’m working on a book that takes place in Colorado in the mountains. It’s historical, western, and has a strong love story in it.

A Writer is Born~Part 3

Bill and I got engaged and he continued with his plan to go into the Navy while I started college at the University of New Mexico.

I loved my history class because the teacher was a great storyteller. I dropped out of college, however, at the end of my freshman year to marry my soul-mate, Bill. We’ll celebrate our fifty-seventh wedding anniversary September 6, 2014. I can hardly believe it, we feel exactly like the same people we always were.

When Bill got out of the Navy we moved to Inglewood, California. I’d been in beauty school and I got a job with a branch of the Magic Mirror beauty salons and worked to put Bill through school. He worked part time, too, cleaning airplanes between flights. After we had our daughter, he went to school at night and worked days at Douglas Aircraft. Reading books kept me going during this time as they always did. I read to the children, too as small as they were.

Just before he graduated, Bill came home from work and said he’d been offered a job at the space center in Florida. Believing he was kidding me, I said sure, I’d go. I couldn’t imagine moving to such an exotic faraway place, and because I didn’t like news from TV or newspapers,(it was all bad) I honestly had no idea what or where “The Cape,” would turn out to be.

Then one day Bill and I started across the country with our three-year-old and our one year old in a Corvette with bucket seats, nobody wore seatbelts or had car seats in those days, so those adorable little monkeys were all over the car and they wore me to a frazzle, but I suppose it was better than going by wagon train.

The night we crossed the narrow St. John’s River bridge on the way into Titusville was dark and stormy, and we could have sworn it was raining frogs. They were all over the road and impossible to avoid squishing with the tires. When we moved into our house after three weeks in a small motel room we discovered how beautiful and exotic Florida really was—after the Los Angeles smog and sprawl. The same kind of frogs we’d met on the river welcomed us with their croaking from our back yard and by splacking themselves by the dozens all over the glass patio doors. We heard hunting dogs baying at night in the woods behind our house as well as the screech owl’s scream which was hair-raising until we found out what it actually was—a screech owl.

At first, I was terrified of the dragonflies, afraid they’d hurt the children. When I learned their chief purpose in life was to devour mosquito larva and that they didn’t sting I welcomed them.

In the late sixties, Campus Crusade came to our church and our Bible study teacher had us read through the small booklet called, “The Four Spiritual laws.” It starts by saying, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The ending tells us that it’s not enough to believe in Jesus intellectually, but that it is necessary to receive him into your heart. I thought, okay, why not? I prayed the prayer, it made a difference for me. Suddenly the air was sweeter, the sky bluer, the grass greener, and I had more love for my family than ever before, and shortly I became an avid fan of the Bible and an avid church worker.

Quin Sherrer, a reporter, was a member of our church who won the Guideposts writing contest and got to go to New York City for classes in the Guideposts way of writing. She taught us the simple, yet effective writing techniques that Guideposts has always been known for, and that served me well for many years when people asked for help with their writing.

The three most memorable times of helping someone write were when a young friend asked me to write a love poem to a boy she liked. Later I had two more chances to make a difference. One was when a Christian Cuban-American asked me to write a letter to his bosses because he’d been unfairly suspended from his job. Another was when a Christian African American, who had taken in a couple of his cousin’s children, asked me to write a letter to a judge explaining why it would be better for the remaining child to stay with him and his wife than for her to be handed over to her mother who had just been released from prison, but who was showing no evidence of changes.

We got good results from the letters, and I was glad to help with what I love most, next to reading and eating chocolate, of course.