Head down. Work to do.

I came home this afternoon from our church parish weekend away. A very successful weekend from the point of view of the church, a bit traumatic from mine. A series of small happenings, remarks, emphases, things said and not said that added up to a lot. Sigh.

In the morning I must be up early. Tomorrow afternoon I am responsible for the funeral of somebody I loved dearly, and I have to prepare. The whole world will be a little less rich and less bright without her. Fanciful self-indulgence spins fairy-stories that when we die we turn into stars. In her case it is probably true.

I also must call the plumber urgently because our water tank has sprung a leak and is gradually soaking the carpet and floorboards in Hebe's bedroom and seeping through to the studio underneath. Double sigh.

Last week I sent out an SOS to dear friends to read through double-quick the manuscript for my new book (to be published in January, The Road of Blessing. It's to follow the same format as In Celebration of Simplicity, so requires a question-and-answer section at the end. I wanted the questions to be real questions that real people really asked when they read it, not posers set by the publisher's editorial staff. What a brilliant team my readers made! They have come up with some cracking good questions. Just waiting for a few more to come in then I will get into the answers, and that will be that one put to bed.

Also oozing into the Urgent Pile is the revison and expansion of my
Spiritual Care of Dying and Bereaved People, again for the beginning of next year. The revision of the old text is now complete, and I have written one of the three new chapters which will be about the death of my previous husband Bernard, bereavement from causes other than death, and how to take a good funeral. Finished manuscript due in by the first week of August. Meanwhile I am determined that when my beloved takes his holiday this year (19th - 30th July) I shall not have my nose in a book manuscript working against the clock.

You will have cunningly detected that I have some brisk and sustained action to take.

If I come up for air I shall post here in the meantime - or I may just see y'all again in mid-July.

After that, things just about calm down again. I got my three-book contract with Crossway (hooray!!) for three new books following on from The Hawk & the Dove trilogy. The first is written and on their desk, the second three-quarters written, the third half-written. All to be done and dusted by the end of October. So that's my project from the end of July into the autumn.

Interspersed with that I hope I'll have enough space to work on my online Wabi-Sabi Jesus.

Waving to you my friends, then - see you intermittently as the summer goes on. To those of you who pray, let me say your prayers make an amazing difference to my output, in terms of quality, focus and protection from the constant and relentless interference of every conceivable variety (kind of crazy spiritual radio crackle) that sets up the minute I begin to write - you name it, it happens! I appreciate you have lives and needs of your own to attend to, but your prayer support is always, always most gratefully and deeply appreciated. (The Lord Jesus says 'Yeah, believe me - she needs it!')