Remembering the season's purpose

What are the most important gifts you've received in your lifetime?

Every Christmas Eve of my childhood, I lulled myself to sleep with memories of all the Christmas mornings I could recall.  I pictured my parents as they urged my sisters and I into our bathrobes and slippers.  My mother stayed with us at the top of the stairs while my father turned on the Christmas tree lights.  At last our parents let us rush downstairs and take down our stockings.  After we discovered the candy canes with their handmade stick horse head covers, my parents made us sit down and take turns opening our presents one by one.  Later I understood this meant we could appreciate each other's gifts and not just focus greedily on our own.

I continued my Christmas Eve ritual well into my teens, until my childhood Christmases blurred together.  Certain exceptional holiday mornings stood out, like the Christmas my sisters and I got a gift that did not fit under the tree:  Freckles, our first pony.  Difficult to gift wrap something with four legs!  (Especially a creature as hard to catch as Freckles turned out to be.)

With Love is the Thread just beginning its second week of publication, you may expect me to feel most grateful for the gift of becoming a published author.  Yes, that gift is very close to the top of my list.  But as the seasons shift toward autumn into winter and the longest night of the year approaches, I'm contemplating gifts I've received that cannot be wrapped any easier than Freckles.  The gift of Kristine's friendship, which inspired me to write Love is the Thread.  The gift of every relationship that brought me to her door in the first place, and all the friends who have grown into my life because of Kristine.

The gift that allows me to string words together, and the thoughts and emotions they represent.  The gift of sharing those words with you.

Eyes, Mind, Heart

This morning an event took place that I have imagined many times during my life.  All right, I always pictured tearing open an envelope as opposed to clicking open an email, but aside from that little detail . . .

I opened the message.  It read:  "I had to force myself to put your book down last night so I could get some sleep."

As a reader, I'm very familiar with the bleary-eyed moment when I close the book I've just finished, blink at the gray light pressed against the windows, and realize that I've read an entire book in a single night.  As a writer, I've spent many nights hunched over the keyboard while my characters whispered or shouted in my ear and I tried to keep pace with what they had to share with me.  But this is the first time my words kept another human being awake because the reader just had to know what happened next.

Last week when I learned that Love is the Thread was already available on Kindle, with the trade paperback soon to follow, I felt thrilled.  At last, years of work had resulted in a book in readers' hands, in their minds.  And on Monday morning when I opened the email, I felt more than thrilled.  I felt the joy that my words had passed through a reader's eyes and mind and into her heart.

Diction

I was the kind of geeky kid who took extra long to finish my spelling homework because I got distracted by words glimpsed on the dictionary page, words that had nothing to do with my assignment.  (I took extra long to complete math homework for other reasons too embarrassing to describe here, but all too easy for you to imagine.)  When I read the first of Terry Pratchett's delightful Tiffany Aching novels, The Wee Free Men, I immediately identified with Tiffany.  She read the whole dictionary from front to back.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, a new computer has entered my life within the last ten days or so.  A couple of things irk me about the new hardware; if there's a simple way to print a single page from the middle of a manuscript I've yet to discover it.  (By simple, I mean a button that reads "print current page."  I can print according to page number, but for reasons I won't go into here that can be a little dicey.)

Today I discovered an unexpected quality in the new 'puter that made me laugh outloud, so loudly I scared Gizmo, my little whippet, clean out of his nap under my chair.  He actually shot out of the room for a minute, then crept back in with all due caution.  My former computer's thesaurus function was easy to use and sophisticated enough in its offerings that a critique partner of mine once forbade me to use it for a week.  "I can tell when you've looked up alternative words," she scolded me.

Occasionally I bewailed the fact that old 'puter had a rather formal stance when it came to language options.  Today I discovered that my slick new machine has no such qualms.  I looked up the word "pricked" on the thesaurus in an attempt to select a more accurate word for what happens when a soldier holds a sword point to someone's throat.  Apparently my computer mistook the word for a noun rather than a verb.  A shockingly long list of slang terms popped up.  (Puns intentional.)

I'm warming up to the new computer.  Gizmo has started to eye it with suspicion. (And yes, I chose the title for this post on purpose.)

Deep in the past

Elsewhere on this site I've described my earlier (false) belief that I would never write a work of nonfiction.  Not false, exactly, just later proven untrue--witness the upcoming publication of my memoir Love is the Thread.  I never thought I would write a work of historical fiction, either.

One of the key members in the first writers group I ever joined wrote historical fiction.  I admired and respected her.  Her books carried me back into the past.  Because of her, I read other historical fiction, from mysteries to the occasional romance novel.  (Without realizing it, I had savored a historical mystery fairly early in my reading career.  Agatha Christie's Death Comes as the End, set in ancient Egypt.  Quite a trend setter, Dame Agatha.)

But I recognized the weight of research needed to underpin that type of story.  Delving into my characters and their feelings, drafting, revision and editing provided me with more than enough work to do.  That was my opinion.

What happened?  I found the women of the Apocrypha fascinating from the first time I discovered they existed, one rainy day when I was nine years old.  Stuck inside the house all afternoon, I tugged an old book out of the shelves built beside the fireplace, and the heating duct my sisters and I always fought over when the weather turned chilly.

As I turned the stiff, oversized pages I had no idea I had just embarked on the research for my first (only?) historical novel, to be written a number of decades later. I only knew these women from long ago, in a time and place I could barely picture, set my imagination alight.

Today I walked beside one of those women as she approached the encampment peopled with her tribe's enemies.  Judith and her friend and maidservant Abra left their village to weave their way past hundreds of Assyrian soldiers.  Would they reach the safety--and graver danger--of the general's pavilion?

Even though I spent a week in a university library earlier this year studying the type of swords, the kind of armor worn by the Assyrians, and even though I am on the seventh or eighth version of the chapter, I trembled along with those two ancient women, and had to squint at the clock in the corner of my computer screen when an incipient headache and rumbling stomach brought me back to the present era.

I don't know why I ever doubted a foray into historical fiction.  I love my character.  And I love traveling with her deep into the past.