Call of the Creator: Fantasy Writing from a Christian Worldview

I got a bee in my bonnet the other day because of a convergence of faith-oriented circumstances that simply made me incredulous. The first was a conversation that happened at once of my workplaces between two coworkers, who were talking about how they have a desire to find a community of faith, but how stringent rules around divorce, annulment, and baptism left them feeling sneered at and "unfit" for certain congregations they visited. (Honestly, I'm about as big an opponent of divorce you will find, especially when the family has children. But this post will go way off into left field if I start down that road, which isn't what I'm hoping to talk about. The point is, the church's attitude about previous divorce in people's lives, and the fine lines between what they recognized as a marriage and what they didn't, too often sours a person's perception of faith in general.)

On my drive to work today (the place 40% of my ideas come to me, the other 60% arriving in my shower) I got this bee in my bonnet to start teaching an animation class. No, I don't mean Maya or Renderman or Flash ...because I don't know any of that. What I do know is the old-school, draw it on paper and flip between the frames sort of animation. Stuff that look s like this: (Granted, this needs some cleaning up, but you get the idea.) Someone might ask, "Who needs to know this? Isn't it just a novelty, this day and age?"

Just sayin' Happy Thursday, everyone!

As many of you know, I’m not much into the whole Santa Claus part of Christmas. I’m not in the vehement camp of “Santa is an evil lie we should not perpetrate on our children!” (OK, well, being honest here, not anymore) but neither do we play make-believe with our children that maybe a jolly man is going to sneak into our house and leave gifts. But the spirit of Christmas miracles is alive and well in our house. More years than not, we have feared there would be nothing under the tree on the morning of December 25 th , but this year was particularly precarious, given unforeseen increases in our expenses that outstripped our two modest incomes—even with a generous raise that should be taking effect for me soon. In the early weeks of December, we had not even thought about Christmas shopping, because the core of my being will not allow for pleasantries when the bills aren’t paid.

Life is messy for all of us, to one degree or another, whether on the surface, or carefully hidden. Today's blog post is mostly about allowing some of the mess to be on the surface, because sometimes grappling with it is therapeutic--if not for you, for me. The closer we get to Thanksgiving, the harder November always gets for me, especially on those grey, dreary days we often have in Pennsylvania, where the trees are mostly bare and the air is a little raw. It makes me think of the day, 15 years ago, when my sisters discovered the body of my mother, who had died of a massive heart attack some time in the wee hours of the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Though the date was November 23rd, I always remember it as the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

Today marks a nerve-wracking moment in my author journey. To many, releasing one little short story on Kindle Direct Publishing probably sounds like a bit of an “And…?” milestone, but it marks something of a turning point for me, at least in my thinking. For months now (really, ever since the rights to Curse Bearer reverted to me) I have been in a writer funk. A quagmire of doubt about the future of my writing. I am mid-series with everything I am writing at the moment, and I don’t have anything brewing in the back of my mind that is independent of The Risen Age Archive or The Windrider Saga . This puts me in a very bad position in terms of growing my author platform through traditional publishing.

I made it a little over half way through Inktober. And then I quit. It wasn't one of those "petering out" events, where I just got tired of the activity and didn't make time to do it. In fact, I actually drew more during the second half of Inktober than I did in the beginning. Just not in ink. And why? Because I discovered, via the Inktober challenge to draw something in ink every day, that I am not very good at making finished pieces in ink. I really only like it for the sake of hashing out a thumbnail idea. It's actually great for that, because something about sketching quickly in ink prevents me from noodling unnecessary details into the concept stage. But when it comes to finished pieces that I really feel good about, pencil is my medium of choice. It just is. It's my first love.  Now, it's not that people didn't appreciate the ink drawings I was doing, even while I was struggling to do them. In fact, the Asian-inspired villain I drew got the...