Creativity comes out of me in many different ways. I take photos. I garden. I create crafty home decor items. I sing and write songs. I even create furniture. Mostly, though, I write.
Writing allowd me to access my creative and my intellectual sides. It lets me share what matters to me, sometimes behind the buffer of fiction, and sometimes right out there in the open with non-fiction.
I didn't expect to be writing about spirituality, though. I can't even fully tell you how that came about.
I used to be a church attender, but I lost my faith in church in 2016. I'd been leading a worship band that broke up. I'd become aware of several churches where there was adultery at the leadership level. And, Donald Trump became the American President, largely due to the support of the American Evangelical church. I couldn't understand it, or stomach it, so I started getting my faith needs met outside of church. Then the pandemic happened, and my spilit with church only deepend, although, I was grateful to our local Trinity Baptist church for making their building open as a vaccine site.
That said, I had no interest in writing against the church, so I started writing novels instead of exploring any of my ideas about faith. I met God at online services, met him out in nature, met him in conversations one on one with others who found their faith in transition. I was happy enough just to step out and let the Evangelical Church go their way and me go mine. And I don't exactly know how to pinpoint when my desire to write about faith began.
It did, though. So, I came up with a title I thought was fun and indicated that this book would be about God, but in a non-traditional way, and then I created the cover for that book. I decided to write under my maiden name so I could separate my spiritual thoughts from my ummm, not PG romance novels, and then... nothing. I knew I was going to write the book someday. I didn't know what it would be about, and I didn't set any time frame. I just kept working on the projects I already had going.
On thanksgiving weekend, I learned that a young man who had been the drummer in a band I was in had died. He was a friend to my sons, and they told me the rumour was that he had committed suicide. This seemed wrong, but then again, it had been ten years since the days of that band. Still, it was hard to believe. Not this guy. We attended his funeral, and it was confirmed. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. I came home and wrote the first chapter of the book.
I wrote the next chapter pretty much right away, and then I was done again. I decided I needed to be fine with that. You know that song, tell me all your thoughts on God? Well, my thoughts came to me gradually, and I decided to let that be how the book came together.
That worked for awhile. The problem was, the book was consuming my thoughts. It was keeping me from writing other books. I might not know what I wanted to write in the book, but I knew it was the book I wanted to write.
I sat down and jotted a list of topics I could write about. They were hardly mainstream 'Christian' topics. One, for example, was about trees. Another -- birds. Bit by bit, the book developed and got written, but I grew more and more uneasy. First, I had to admit, there was a lot more potential exposure to writing a book like this than a novel. This was me, and I wasn't so sure I was okay with that. Second, this was me, and I was a little bit worried that the current version of me had some thoughts that would be considered heretical. I wasn't comfortable with that either. I wasn't even sure why I wanted to write this book. Still, I couldn't seem to stop.
I was three quarters of the way through before I realized there was a theme being developed. I was in the editing phase before I knew the book was good. And I was recording the audiobook before I realized that I wasn't a heretic after all, just a girl sharing some thoughts about things that mean a lot -- at least to me.
Beer Drinking God Talking Girl will be available to buy June 8th on Amazon. You will be able to get it in Paperback, Ebook, and eventually in audiobook formats.
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