A Lil’ Bit of Everything

Recently I finished a series that I have been working on for the past six years. Well, I’ll have to go back and do dozens of drafts, but my heroine’s tale has finally come to an end. It’s an odd feeling. Usually when I finish a book I’m in tears, but this wasn’t the case. I was relieved, as if a heavy burden was lifted from my shoulders. Like I said, there will be many drafts to come, changes, omissions, additions, etc. But someday (God willing) I’ll be published and then I’ll say good-bye to this heroine (for a little while anyway ;~)). I already have another series in mind and am in the midst of preparing for it. It’ll be refreshing to write from a new perspective, a different setting and a unique personality. Not only that, the thought of working on something new is exciting to me.

Yesterday we had our picture taken for the church directory. The photographer was asking what my sister and I did for a living and we replied that we were unpublished authors. Sis said that she wrote about the 101st Airborne and that I wrote about the holocaust. He was impressed and we had a passionate discussion on how important history is to our future. He commented on how young we were to be interested in that sort of thing and was also curious as to how we ended up writing about these topics. My sister and I explained how our grandparents were part of the Great Generation, that they were born at the end of WWI, and lived through the Roaring 20’s, the Great Depression and into WW2. That we grew up hearing about the past and enjoyed listening to their stories. My interest in the holocaust stems back to Anne Frank. I received her diary for my 12th birthday and had absolutely no idea why she was in hiding. I don’t recall the schoolbooks mentioning the holocaust and the concentration camps until high school. So I did research on the Frank family and the whole situation in Europe during the 30’s and 40’s. Later on in middle school I was required to read “The Hiding Place,” which is about Corrie ten Boom and her family hiding Jews, but the curriculum itself never went very in-depth. For awhile there reading about Anne Frank and the holocaust was just an interest… until 2003.

That’s when I began to write about a teenage rescuer in Poland. From then on I read everything about the holocaust that I could get my hands on. My story has went through like hundreds, maybe even thousands of revisions and I pray to God that it gets published. But I’m living on His timing. In the past when I’ve tried to submit it to agents I took God off of His throne and made an idol out of my work. My story is important to me, but God forbid it ever becomes more important than Jesus, my family or my friends.