Ahh, Thanksgiving has passed. Christmas is coming. The hustle and bustle of the season—the mad rush in stores for bargain shopping, the decorating and baking, the family gatherings. What delightful images on which to dwell.
…as I sit at my desk.
Yes, that time of year so often crazed and crammed for the normal person is shaping up to be rather lacking here at work. The “busy” season apparently ends in early November, leaving in its wake a quiet, lazy atmosphere. This is all well and good if you’re quiet and lazy. I hope not to be lumped in either of those categories.
I chatted with the VWH on the journey back from Thanksgiving celebrations and he offered the most unlikely of suggestions for an activity to fill my time. I was expecting something along the lines of, “learn a new language,” or “improve your vocabulary,” or even “learn all the Bach cantatas aurally.” His answer? Write a Christian romance novel.
You have to understand that the aforementioned books are the subject of much ridicule in our household. My brother refers to them as “those dirty Amish books.” He further clarified that the mere notion of kissing before the wedding day makes them evil…to which my Mennonite-raised grandmother retorted, “You think that’s dirty? Haven’t you ever heard of bundling?!?”
Those dirty Amish books have been the source of many jokes in my family. The same brother came up with a number of Amish soap opera titles to reflect their dramatic effect. These include and are not limited to:
As the Buggy Wheel Turns
General One-Room Schoolhouse
Guiding Gas-lit Lantern
All My Children (that one needed no editing)
The Young and the Pacifists
So when VWH, with all seriousness, informed me that this would be a beneficial way to pass the time, I immediately jumped to the following conclusions:
1. VWH has no faith whatsoever in my intelligence.
2. VWH had a wee bit too much food and beverage on Thanksgiving.
3. VWH finally realized that if we pursue something other than music performance we might actually make some money.
Turns out that number 3 was the closest. “At the very least, you spend a few hours doodling around with some ideas and never come back to it. At the very most, Zondervan publishes it and you make thousands of dollars!” He has a point…
Still, it’s a compromise. I mean, the last book I read of the Christian novel genre opened with the text message, “Emergency, Parker! Come quickly!” Seriously…when it’s an emergency, who uses capitalization and commas?
But I don’t intend this to be a bitter diatribe against all Christian novelists. I shed me some good tears over quite a few of those books during my growing-up years, and I don’t mind saying that the average declaration of love in "Waiting for Love’s Deliverance" (made-up title) is probably much easier for mothers of such weepy adolescent girls to swallow. It’s just writing chapters and chapters of it that makes my head spin.
“Rebekah flew by Luke in a rage of unrequited love. How could he ask Rachel home from the singing bee in his new, shiny buggy after all they had been through? She collapsed in a heap under the largest maple tree beyond the eastern corn field and sobbed until her tears were gone. Then, after splashing cool water on her face from the brook, she readjusted her apron and returned to the Yoder farmhouse, where she threw herself into canning tomatoes with her five sisters, Mary, Martha, Deborah, Elizabeth, and Dorcas.”
As you can see, I’m apparently a natural.
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