God Knows Best

After Bellevere House was written, I realized I had a lot of books published, unpublished, and in need of republishing. For a while, it looked like my writing career had stalled. After all, with such a disorganized backlog of material and no promise yet that any of the stories had much of an audience, I felt little encouragement to continue. So I just spent some quiet time putting those old stories in order while I waited for the next thing to happen. The Bible talks about “waiting on the Lord,” and it’s a phrase often heard in Christian devotionals and Christian living books. But it’s not easy to see it in action. Patience is, as Lloyd Alexander put it, one of the more difficult virtues.

Waiting was the right thing to do, though, and patience is called a Virtue for a reason. It’s yielded far more fruit than jumping ahead would have. Not only did work on those old publications help me find their audience, I learned much about that audience. I found it wasn’t all the same person. Each book grew under my eyes like pottery, taking shape, until I saw different people in each book. A lot of authors write steadily for just one reader—they become a “go-to” for that reader, a safe place where the reader knows to expect a tried-and-true. That’s great for many people, but you don’t have to write that way. It’s also okay to have many different readers.

And the best part was that taking a couple of years before I worked on anything new allowed many ideas to start flowing into my mind. I now have 4 or 5 exciting concepts that are growing rapidly and each of them is different from what I’ve written before. And different from each other, as all my previous books have been. Without taking time with my older books, my creative juices might have died out. You can over-write, you know. But instead they are getting stronger and in the process, so are my older books.

Waiting means you don’t have all the answers yet. And it also means God does know them and will soon share them with you.
​
And there will be more updates.