While in the middle of the vigil required of all incoming knights, Tiuri hears a voice outside the church. He is forbidden to speak or to leave the church during the vigil, but the voice cries for help. What should a knight-to-be do: obey his king and remain seated, meditating upon his impending knighthood, or…
Today at lunch, my seven-year-old summed it up neatly. “Is the virus going to last forever?” she asked. I took a few meditative bites of leftover tandoori before I answered. “No,” I said. “It won’t. I don’t know how long it will last, but it won’t last forever.” Meaning: eventually Jesus will come back. The…
One of the bits of writing advice I absorbed during college was “Show, don’t tell.” Show me the character gnashing her teeth; don’t tell me she was angry. Show me the geriatric cat holding his ground against a pit-bull; don’t tell me he still had spunk. It’s good advice for writers, but I find that…
“I couldn’t put it down.” “You won’t be able to put it down.” “It’s unputdownable!” I recently read our local bookstore’s monthly magazine, and the reviews were littered with phrases like this. This seems to be the highest praise we can give a book now: it was so good it made you forget you were…
“I absolutely adored The Little White Horse.” J. K. Rowling That sentence alone persuaded me to purchase The Little White Horse, a book I knew nothing else about by an author I’d never heard of. If this story fed the imagination of young J.K. Rowling, I wanted to save our family a seat at the…
A few months into quarantine, I started keeping a list. This is nothing new—I keep dozens of lists. Hundreds! But this particular list didn’t contain a single task or idea. I wasn’t planning for or brainstorming about anything, but simply making a note each time I noticed something our family gained because of the quarantine….
I love many moments in The Wilderking Trilogy, but one of my favorites happens outside the story, on the faces of those hearing it for the first time: it is the Moment of Revelation, when that niggling feeling that there’s something about this story, something familiar . . . But how could that be? The…
After reading a picture book that praised Eve for standing her ground against God, I almost abandoned my quest. But the stories of so many women are sown quietly throughout Scripture—I loved the idea of compiling those stories. I loved the idea of reminding our daughters, in a time when Paul is derided as a…
One of my favorite illustrations of the writing process comes from Madeliene L’Engle’s book Walking on Water. In it she compares writing books to cooking dinner: she adds a bit to one pot, a bit to another, until one story starts simmering madly and needs her whole attention. Then she pulls that pot to the…
When I was a child, I loved checking the mail. I hoped, with a hope that renewed every morning, that inside our mailbox I’d find an envelope addressed to me: a letter from my cousin in Iowa, perhaps, or a chain letter from a classmate. Or, better yet, a mysterious package whose contents would jump-start…
Some might consider what I’m about to do cruel. First, I’m going to rave about The Mistmantle Chronicles. I’m going to tell you that they are everything I look for in a book. They are: a) a delight to read b) beautifully written c) shaped by a deep and rich Christian worldview And then I’m…
At 9:30, my daughter comes downstairs—she can’t sleep. She’ll be seven next month and the world is expanding around her, I can see it. She’s more aware of other people now, more aware of adult conversation, more aware, in this instance, of volcanoes. “Volcanoes?” I repeat, settling down next to her on the couch. “What…
