Into the Mysterious Dark

The past year of my life has been one of the toughest I've ever experienced. I've moved four times, had three different jobs, and am currently unemployed. I was enrolled to attend graduate school in John Paul the Great University in California, but three nights before I was supposed to drive out, I was praying and the Lord told me outright, "I want you to have faith and trust me. I want you to unenroll." Needless to say, that was a punch to the gut, but despite the shock of it, I had total peace, so I unenrolled. That's when the floundering started. But I never felt without peace. It was maddening, infuriating, and still is. St. Paul summarizes it brilliantly:          "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present           your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding , will guard           your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."                          

There is more than enough banter online and in any number of Christian circles debating the ever-inflammatory topic of purity, sexuality, and chastity, that ever elusive rabbit everyone is so ready to define, and yet so few can actually describe without making their audience want to wretch from its clichéd and unfair analysis and definition. But what about for those whose choice did not matter? Who didn't give into illustrious passions let off into the distance and painted in brilliantly forbidden colors of stark and poignant reality? What about those who wished they'd had the choice but didn't? Ready to condemn for falling into delicious passion, chastity talks and the discussion of the virtue of virginity and sexuality fall woefully short of that hazardous territory of sexual assault victims, of all ages, situations, both male and female. She did not remember until her freshman year of college that it had even happened to her. Too small to understand its evil, her min

"I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony. So, I shall end an old maid, and teach your ten children to embroider cushions and play their instruments very ill."                                                                                        -Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice Like many women my age (and more men than most would admit), I am a huge Jane Austen fan and have been for many years. Whether I am re-devouring the books or sighing and daydreaming with the movies, her storylines are still so universally applicable to relationships and the longing people feel for them. They are clever, witty, sardonic, true. And I'm not going to lie, one of my favorite tools she employs is her biting sarcasm and her parody of the class system and the eternal struggle for a well-paying and bearable marriage. So, this is nothing new. Austen fans surround the world. But one such insistence placed upon her in her life in 1800's England t

To all the men actually reading this post, keep on reading. To all the women reading, hop on in. Although addressed to one, this is meant for both ends of the romantic sphere. I have recently begun reading Outlander  by Diana Gabaldon, a quite fetching read about a woman falling through time from WWII Scotland to its 1743 past, and having quite the run-ins with British Redcoats (deliciously called lobsterbacks, which cracks me up to no end) and Scottish Highlander warriors, fighting for their respective clan and their homeland. (SPOILER ALERT!) In the midst of her journey, Claire becomes entangled in the life of one Jamie MacTavish, a young Highland warrior, adrift from his clan. In a brilliant plot twist, the two of them end up being joined in marriage. Needless to say, the text is not for younger audiences (I hope that wouldn't be necessary to say, considering the violence alone would be enough to help readers differentiate appropriate ages), but it is positively beautiful a

I'll be plainly honest, I was planning on doing a bit of research for this post before writing it, because Joan of Arc is my favorite saint, my role model in my daily life, and one of my heroes who continues to inspire me. If I was going to write about her life in whatever capacity I chose, I wanted it to be accurate, and to have my facts straight. But tonight, in proper feminist indignation and outrage, I have decided to chuck that research list out the window, and write about who she was as she stood in history, as a woman, and a faith-driven Catholic woman at that, bearing a shield and making her way in a world so patently and dangerously masculine it had gotten itself entangled in a 100 Years' War over two monarchs sparring over genealogical heritage. Now, I will not make the argument here that masculinity in its true, God-given form, is evil in and of itself, but I will hazard to say that its mutations and overemphasis have created utter confusion and panic in a world alre

For those of you who don't know (or haven't seen any of my cryptic Facebook posts about it), I have been working on one of my creative babies, in this case being a Civil War novel involving the torture of memory, the bitterness of regret, new loves and old ones, mixing into all of it a love triangle that I neither intended when I first started and which I want out of desperately. Oh well. You've got to at least see where it goes before scrapping it, right? A newfound love between two of my characters has cropped up in my most recent draft that I was not expecting, and which I instantly fell madly and desperately in love with. For the sake of spoilers (and because I am planning on getting this published someday, and I hate spoilers more than most people know), I will not reveal who they are or how they have fallen in love, but I wanted to explore some ideas that have terrified me the entirety of my life as an author. Granted, most of these realities--love, life, death, mem

"Write hard and clear about what hurts."                             --Ernest Hemingway Okay, here goes... It took me 6 months to listen to your favorite band. They had become one of my favorite bands, too, but you were why I couldn't listen to them for so long after I ended it. When the song you did a YouTube cover on played on the radio, I'd turn it off because my eyes would burn. I didn't want to end it. As trite as that sounds, I really didn't want to. I had to, but everything in me burned to the contrary. One of the few times I've had to choose head over heart. Why couldn't it work out? Why couldn't you have just accepted me, all of me? I know, this sounds like emotional dribble, and even though I know you'll never read this, I have to get this out, because I've been missing you lately. You said things to me no man has ever said, nor did I think any man could say to me, or would even want to say to me. Those sweet mome