December and January have been busy months on several fronts.  The flow of life is back to how I like it. My day starts between 3 and 4:30 am, and I write until my wife wakes up. After I feed the two cats and make a pot of tea, I turn on some streaming music that stimulates my creative side, and I stand up at my desk and write. I observe sunrise from my perch on the second floor and see it happen earlier each day. Messaging and calls are non-existent at those hours, so I can really focus on developing the characters and the ideas. I try to get back to sleep for an hour before jumping back into “the real world.”

Fictional story writing is anything but real, but my mind tells me the characters are.  I think about them when I am riding my bike for three hours.  Romeo and Juliet didn’t exist, yet we all seem to know their story, don’t we?

My flow now works. In the last two months, I have finished two books. I decided to delay releasing this next series of books until all of them are written and have gone through first edit. Considering it took about seven years to get to the end of the first book, I feel like this new routine includes accomplishing something. My speed of content creation is faster, the content is richer, and the storytelling is more dramatic. Best of all, I have found a way to do that using fewer words. I like how each sentence can stand on its own, independent of what comes before or after. That used not to be true.

My three screens are my catalysts. I have a thesaurus, word processor, and web browser opened up all the time. It is easy and fun when I need a resource to look something up. I have a bookmark for each book’s background, so when someone asks, “how did you know that there were abortion clinics in the first century?” I can send them my references. I know I am living in a golden age as an author regarding resources.

I don’t know if this net statement is one of shame or success.  I completed my second-year of Hebrew last month.

Why the conflict?  When I look into the mirror, I both share my head and laugh. I knew nearly nothing about the old testament mysteries until I started learning the language. I am all but done hitting the table and announcing to no one, “I had no clue!” when I finally get it. It is a tough pill to swallow to tell others that I am a Christian author but am just now reading the actual bible for the first time and not an English translation. The greatest universities in our country started out as seminaries, so the brightest minds could come together and do what I have been doing these last two years-learning to read the bible! Remember, literacy was not common in the United States until the end of the 19th century, and these institutions owned the job of making sure that “the real thing” was taught. Now, they teach “enlightened” things.  Even as I write this sentence and look at the Ivy League Degree on my wall, I get more head shakes and chuckles.  Learning how little I knew just doesn’t seem to end in this lifetime.

I am thinking about another series when I finish this one.  I need the right place and the right people to sort out my plan.  I learned that there is a writer’s club in my home county, and I hope I can get my prayers answered and find someone who can help me with the hard work of picking a direction and taking my first steps.  Just because I have written eight books and published four doesn’t mean those first steps are any easier.

Cheers to another round of insight.  Thanks for letting me share it with you.