I spent almost a year fighting myself over one Christian novel I was writing. In the past seven years, as a retirement hobby for the Lord, I have written eight novels about difficult situations and how faith in God has enabled people to get through them.
I would work on it, give up, work again, give up….until I finally told myself I just didn’t like it and put it aside. At that point, I did a Christmas novella and finished another novel I’d started. I was done with that book and didn’t think about it again.
Until one day, after a time in prayer, I was watching a video podcast, and one of the pastors on the podcast stopped, looked at the camera, and said something like, “I don’t know who you are, or what this is about, but just finish it!”
That kind of thing I rarely see, and I wondered, is that for me? What do I need to finish? Laundry? Dishes? I wasn’t writing anything except occasionally on here, so I didn’t think it was my writing. So much of that had been a struggle, I had all but decided my writing life was over.
Then I pulled out the laptop and found myself thinking, God started this blog so long ago, who am I to stop? So I upgraded my plan and started planning how I could get back to regular blogging.
That done, I pulled up a file on my laptop and saw Dumpster Dilemma, the book I’d given up on, in a list of Word projects I’d started. And I heard the words again, “just finish it.” I opened the project, not thinking I could just finish it. How do you work on something you don’t even like? And I was reminded of that period in my life when I was working on it, when there wasn’t much I truly liked, so I decided to at least read it. After all, it was almost 50,000 words, book-length already.
With a sigh, I sat down to read it, and hours later, I shook my head and asked myself, “Why did you quit? This isn’t bad. It has a few chapters that need total rewrites, the timeline needs adjusting, and some cutting is needed to get it back to the faith focus you desire. So I began working on it again.
I wrote and edited as I went, and when I finished, I put it aside for a while, then read the whole thing again, made more changes, and finally submitted it, as always, as an independent author.
And at five o’clock this morning, I got an email saying Dumpster Dilemma had been published.
I write to share God, be it here, on Facebook, with novels. However God can use me at this point in my life; I want to be used. So, you will see posts about all areas of my writing as we take this journey together. The blog is still in progress, but a new, but still simple version is once again live.
And for those interested in my novels, I’ll post a link for the latest book so you can find it, since I write under the pseudonym Ellen D. Miller.
A Life of Faith 