Tadpoles

Oh my goodness! Is summer over yet? I’m so ready to say good-bye to summer 2012.

It’s been a rough week. My husband was in a rollover accident coming home from work last Wednesday. He is fine, amazingly, but the car was totaled. Kory stayed home from work on Thursday, went to the doctor at my insistence, and made the necessary insurance phone calls. I went about my normal day, but I kept thinking, “I could be in the hospital with him right now.” I couldn’t bear to think of the worst-case scenario.

Then came the tragic events in Aurora on Friday, July 20th. It’s mind-blowing to think that my husband survived a rollover and twelve people didn’t survive a night at the movies. This is not the sort of thing you can make sense of. Everything we tell ourselves—that God had a plan, that death is part of life—none of it reconciles the gut-wrenching wrongness of a psychopath murdering innocent people.

The outrage and grief stirred in our hearts is the only natural thing about such a tragedy. The heated debates about gun laws and access to mental health care are examples of our need to express the splitting deep within our souls. We have a collective need to cry, “This is wrong! This is not how it should be!” We point to different reasons for the tragedy and offer scenarios of how it could have been avoided. But all of the words and the arguments can’t fill in for what we can’t express.

The truth is that death is at odds with the eternal nature of our souls. Death was never in the design. Yes, I truly believe human beings were created to live forever. Death entered our world with sin, but before that, we were immortal. Of course C.S. Lewis put it best. “Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.”

This juxtaposition of our condition is one reason I’m drawn to paranormal stories. I think the genre allows for that schism we all feel. It’s a relief for me to read and write books with both human and supernatural characters. My mind fits more easily into a story containing elements outside of the normal “human” experience.
I sometimes wonder if there are components of speculative fiction that are more real to our souls than anything found in realistic fiction. But no matter what we write, read, say or experience, we are not much more than tadpoles navigating our world in awkward bodies while peering through the water’s surface at an existence we can barely imagine.

This summer I deliberately put my work in progress on hold with the intention of establishing a healthy summer routine for my boys. I mostly failed. I am handicapped in the area of organization. We’ve been going to the pool, reading sporadically, and practicing math facts on a sort of penance model. And I’ve been drifting. Every writer is familiar with that evil voice that whispers, “Who do you think you are, pretending to be a writer? You don’t have anything worth saying.” At one point, I realized I couldn’t even remember the name of one of the main characters in my current project.

Then I went to bed one night last week and I couldn’t sleep. I suppose it was either Wednesday or Thursday because it was after Kory’s accident. To my surprise the characters from my WIP started speaking. The antidote to that pesky voice of doubt is a character who pops into your head every time you close your eyes. In my case, he’s a boy with high cheekbones, brown eyes, and copper wire woven into his dreadlocks. His name is Blaise, and he’s trapped in a city full of beautiful porcelain people and wind-up creatures called Tocks. He tugs on my imagination, begging me to leave behind one level of existence in order to explore another. And so I guess I’ll return to the life of a writer, wriggling and flopping along in between story world and reality. Not fully at home in either. A tadpole. A human. A spirit. Something in between. Something other.

Where are you this summer? When do you feel split? What experience causes you to slide between the two planes of existence? Is it uncomfortable? Terrifying? An awakening of sorts? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For info on how to help the Aurora victims, click here

Stuck Alive

Is it selfish to go to church because it inspires you to write? That’s not the only reason I go to church, but I confess I often find myself walking down the aisle on Sunday morning (late as usual) and thinking, “Man, I need this.” And it never fails. Something in the music or the pastor’s sermon starts my brain whirring with ideas on character, plot, or theme. Then I have to struggle not to zone out, thinking about my Work In Progress, for the rest of service.

Last Sunday was no different, but who would have suspected I’d find a correlation to my WIP in Luke 2, the Christmas story? And who would have suspected that we’d be studying Luke 2, the Christmas story, in October?

Despite my church’s apparent calendar confusion, the following passage was very timely for me:

At that time there was a man in Jerusalem named Simeon. He was righteous and devout and was eagerly waiting for the Messiah to come and rescue Israel. The Holy Spirit was upon him and had revealed to him that he would not die until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. That day the Spirit led him to the Temple. So when Mary and Joseph came to present the baby Jesus to the Lord as the law required, Simeon was there. He took the child in his arms and praised God, saying,
“Sovereign Lord, now let your servant die in peace,
as you have promised.
I have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared for all people.
He is a light to reveal God to the nations,
and he is the glory of your people Israel!”
Luke 2:25-32

Cool, huh? God would not allow Simeon to die until he saw salvation, the Messiah. I wonder how old Simeon was. Did he wake up every morning and wonder if that day was the day he would see Christ…and die? Did he get tired of waiting? Did he ever feel like going to look for redemption instead of waiting for the promise to come to him?

We get the sense from the passage in Luke that Simeon was a good guy, and the promise of living to see the Messiah was a gift, even if somedays he woke up cursing his arthritic knees.

But what if you resolutely refused to see the Messiah, as many do, and God decided to keep you alive until your stubbornness ran out? Talk about extreme octogenarians!

That--minus the gray hair and degenerating joints--is the concept of my book, The Immortal Heathcliff. Although at the end of Emily Brontë's classic tale, Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff recognizes that his elaborate revenge has left him hollow, he still goes to the grave unrepentant. In my novel, he climbs out of the grave still unrepentant and wanting nothing more than to die for good like normal folks. Instead he’s stuck in an immortal state, searching for deliverance, atonement, and release from his unnatural life.

But what he views as a curse is actually a gift. He will not die until he sees redemption. He sets about looking for it, trying to earn it, instead of waiting for it to come to him. After two hundred years of failing to obtain his freedom, grace breaks down the barriers he's constructed. Now all that remains, is for him to finally open his eyes and see his salvation.

The idea of being stuck alive fascinates me, and I hope it will fascinate readers as well.

Question: What would you do with immortality on earth? Would you accumulate wealth? Visit every corner of the globe?

Me? I'd read. Everything.