Rising with the Day

 

Bread is such an amazing food, isn’t it? Take a handful of ingredients—salt, sugar, flour, water, yeast—maybe some olive oil and rosemary—combine it, then watch as it does its magic.

I woke to snowfall on Thursday. We’ve been expecting this storm, here in Calimesa, hoping for snow because we rarely get real snow. When I opened the door to take the dogs out at 4:00a.m., big, fluffy flakes were falling. Did the dogs mind? Not a wit. They had to pee! Out into the yard they raced, returning to me on the patio ten minutes later, their coats dusted with flakes that were already melting.

It rained and snowed on and off all day—a good day to hunker down and produce some good work.

So after breakfast, I started some bread rising. The night before, in anticipation of the storm, I’d plucked some sprigs of rosemary from my back yard shrub, washed it, and minced the leaves. (The entire house smelled like fresh rosemary, and I remember catching a whiff of the scent as I went to bed.) I added salt, sugar, water, flour, yeast, and some olive oil, stirred, mixed, and kneaded until a dough was formed. (When people ask if I have a bread maker, I always answer in the affirmative as I hold up my two hands. I’ve been making bread this way for 50 years. No reason to change it up now.)

With the dough in the bowl, rising nicely, I opened my laptop. I know I don’t talk about it much—I consider it bad form to do so—but since I retired, I’ve been working on a series of children’s books. (Not a Young Adult novel, as I’ve done before, but a Middle-Grade series, for kids 10-12.) The idea came to me years ago, when I lived in Mt Baldy. I intended to write one fun book. Then I heard a fellow writer talk about the advantage of writing a series—in order to sell more books.

Huh, I thought. I could make it a trilogy. (Which is how it started, but well into the second book, I knew there had to be four, as it follows the seasons.)

But finding the time to write it was nearly impossible while I was still working. (Though I did write the first 30 pages and hand them off to one of my favorite brilliant ten-year-olds, Matthew Confer, who read it and gave me the best feedback I’ve ever gotten from a first reader. Matthew is 19 and in his second year of college now.)

One week before our rainy snowstorm, I finished the last chapter of the fourth book. All that was left to write was a short epilogue. But some things happened… some good, some bad… and I didn’t get back to it until Wednesday night. After I chopped up all that aromatic rosemary, I wrote the first half of the epilogue.

On Thursday, while the bread was rising, the house now filling with the scent of yeasty dough, I put some soft music on for the fur kids, then, as I mentioned, opened the laptop. And cried. And wrote the final words of the book. And cried some more.

It may seem like a tired trope of egocentric writers, so forgive me if that’s the case, but I absolutely love my characters. Writing fiction is damn hard—you have to create lives and back stories and scenarios out of thin air—truly like pulling a rabbit out of a hat where none existed previously. But a decade ago, when I had the idea, one snowy, wintry night in Baldy while I lay in bed in the loft with my tiny cat, Sugar Plum, curled beside me, I began to tell her a story. A story about a cat… and a dragon. And in the years that passed, the story took shape in my head. And I knew exactly how it would end. Ten years and four books later, that story ended exactly as I had envisioned it.

To celebrate, I took a long nap. When I got up, I shaped my lovely mound of dough into four smaller mounds, let them rise one more time, and then put them in the oven.

Imagine the joy in my house: The quiet snow falling… the scent of fresh baked bread… the satisfaction of seeing a vision come to fruition….

Storytelling is much like making bread. You only need a handful of ingredients—a few characters, a setting, a bit of conflict to get the story churning—and, with patience, you can produce something wonderful. Something magical.

Now the hardest part of all begins: Finding just the right publisher to get these books out into the world for kids just like me who love to read books with cats, dogs, dragons, and a wee bit of fantasy.

While we wait, here's a tiny sample from Book One, just to give you a taste: (FYI: I have this section printed and thumbtacked to my writing board.)

"Little one." The dragon stopped, turned, and spread her enormous wings to embrace the small girl who had halted in the middle of the path. Softly, she continued. "Here is my blessing of peace to your heart. It matters not whether this person at this time chooses or does not choose you. Let that be the furthest from your mind. It has been asked of you to sing. This is a sacred gift. You honor us all--your ancestry and yourself--when you do so. At the time given, let go of 'what if' and celebrate what is."