Today is my twenty-fourth birthday, and I am still learning.
There are more questions now than answers, and I know that the insight that has
been developing bit by bit through each new experience could never have been
learned in a classroom.
Experience is an interesting thing. I have gone through pain
and loss, success and joy. I am not the person I used to be, and I am not the
person I will become.
I find it funny how I once viewed life in terms of black and
white. Today I open the curtains and look at a world that is painted in an
entire spectrum of gray.
My writing has changed as well. With all these new questions
burning within me, my writing has become a journey not just for my characters,
but for myself. I want to explore those tricky gray areas. I want to gain the
wisdom of experience by living vicariously through fictional people who will
never live outside of the written word. And most of all, I hope that others
will take that journey with me—for we do not walk the earth alone, but
together.
I think this is at the heart of why I write. I could pen a
million words and never show them to another soul, but that would be a waste of
the gift God has given me. He has opened my eyes so that others’ eyes may open.
He wants me to share the stories with anyone who is willing to read them.
A year ago I wrote a story that is very close to my heart. I
wrote it as a ghost story, but it is much more than that. It is a story of loss
and anger, and one of letting go of the pain that prevents us from moving on
from the past. But above all, it is a story of forgiveness. The title is Rage’s Echo, and it should be released
this coming fall.
(Yours Truly, March 28, 1989)
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