Writing thoughts

This is — for me — the waiting time, when I've written my story and now it's gone to my editor to read through. I am very blessed that my editor is my husband too. He was my editor long before he was my husband, the best editor I've ever worked with by a country mile. He asks the right questions, and he has the unusual ability of being able to both see the bigger picture and notice detail. Most people can't do that. Either they get what you're saying and lose themselves in terms of story and miss repetitions and inconsistencies, or the other way round. And there are many editors who are really frustrated writers and want to wrench your text into the image of what they'd have written if they'd been you. But my husband starts out with the approach that it's not his book; he's just there to help it be the best version of itself that it could be. Which is exactly what you want, isn't it?

So he has St Luke's Little Summer to read through, and then to edit and copy-edit. 

Since I got free of traditional publishers and have been able to write more according to what's in my own head, I think my stories have got odder. They come from the realm of weird; I just feel into it, through the membrane that separates us, and find what I can and bring it back here into the normal, organise it and write it down. 

At the beginning of a story, I don't even see where it's going or what it wants to do. When I began St Luke's Little Summer, there was just an image.

So I get all the bits and arrange them on the ground and look at them and see how they fit together, and write that down. Then I go back for some more bits and look at those and piece them in until it's done.

When I read it through at the end, it's more like reading someone else's book. I was surprised and relieved, reading through St Luke's Little Summer, to come to the end and think, yes, I do believe that's worked. I think it is an actual story. Because my idea in writing isn't entertainment or prowess, it's more like ministry — I'm aiming for the transfer from my soul into your soul of a way of being, a way of looking at things, that makes life more possible and helps us chart a way through this terrifying mess we've all been born into, left here trying to do the best we can. But I know there is the invisible realm in which there is the help we need, a place of grace and wisdom very close to us; and in writing I'm trying to make little holes in the membrane that separates us, so that some of its peace and kindness can leak through like liquid gold into our wilderness here, for hope and transformation.

I think I've managed what I set out to do in my new story, but I always get a bit nervous at this stage. Generally speaking, novels are meant to have plots — with twists — and action, and some kind of shape and direction; and I can see that mine . . . er . . . don't. All they do is let you go to the place where my mind and soul live, and walk around in it for a while. 

St Luke's Little Summer is about coming home (to oneself and to one another), and about understanding how to hold a vision by strengthening practice, which is achieved through habit; and it's about how the small circles and rhythms that characterise our life are part of a larger whole. 

So just now I'm waiting to see what my editor thinks, and waiting to see what my artists come up with for the cover. A limbo time.