“A woman stuck in a mangrove might look like a mangrove, taste like it, smell like it, but that doesn’t make her a part of the mangrove. Once she gets herself out and washes off, she no longer looks or tastes or feels like the mangrove, and it’s the same with misery.”—excerpt from the book Sand in My Eyes

I like to think of fiction writing as a form of play. That way it never loses its joy. As a child, I loved playing with my dollhouse. Opening its wooden doors, I would name my dolls, dress them how I wanted them to look, and think up plots and problems for them to work through. I gave each doll a different voice and personality. It was in the midst of playing that their stories and dialogue unfolded naturally. Creating characters for a novel is similar to this.

But just like child’s play, actors must play parts they cannot relate to and writers create characters with problems they themselves haven’t personally experienced. In Sand in My Eyes, I had a hard time relating to my main character because she was so miserable. Not only did I judge her for being full of doom and gloom, I also feared I wouldn’t be able to write her out of the stagnant swamp of misery I had put her in. And to think, this was my main character!

I’ll never forget the night I created her and gave her a name. I was making dinner for my children, standing at the stove waiting for a pot of water to boil and staring at the ugly wallpaper in the kitchen of our rental home—old-fashion pink and green obituaries from the year 1026 A.D. and there it was—Anna Hott, daughter of John Hott and Margaret, his wife, born on the 31^st day of October. Aha! My children got dinner and my character a name that night!

I wanted Anna to be overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood and a crumbling marriage so that hardly was she seeing the beauty around her. It would be like she was walking around with sand in her eyes. A sleep-deprived mother myself, I could relate to Anna’s laundry issues—the mounds of clothes that formed and how the children jumped in them, and sure, like her, no one told me it could be so hard, that motherhood gives indescribable joy in exchange for who we are as individuals, and that the accumulation of it all, of worrying, caring for, responding to their every whimper, oh, and all the housework and grocery shopping, the cooking of things they do not like and cleaning would turn me (and her) into a completely different person—a mom!

But I could not relate to my character and her marital issues. My husband is my best friend and a loving hands-on-father and I had no idea how to rescue my character from the cheating husband I had given her. But I had to. Just as I gave my dolls happily ever after endings, a writer often feels they must work out the problems their characters face. So I created a new character, Cora, to help her through. Cora is the one who inspired Anna to cry out to the Lord because He hears every person that cries out to Him in despair. It was all I could think of to pull my character from the fiery forest of anger and resentment she was in.

But Fedelina, I created for myself, to help me deal with my messy house and ‘chicken-with-its-head-cut-off’ phase of motherhood that I was in. Through this character, it was like the older me was talking to the younger me, telling me it all will pass, that one day my house will be quiet and clean and my children grown and gone and I would do anything to have my house a mess and my children little again. These characters who tell me what I need to hear, the ones who talk sense into me and get me through a particular stage of life are my favorite to create!

“Fedelina shared with me the insight I needed to rake through my mess. I don’t think it was her intention to do gardening on me then, and I don’t know whether she knew that one by one, our small woman-to-woman talks were helping me pull the ugly from my life, so that beauty, peace, simplicity and contentment could sprout forth strong and free. We were two females gabbing away. She was the older widow out growing flowers and I was the mother of three caught up in the weeds.”—Sand in My Eyes

“Self-doubts are like weeds, a constant part of life, but you must inhibit the weed seeds from germinating. I’ve learned to control them with the least amount of time and energy, but strong weeds, I’ve found, have a way of emerging through concrete.”—excerpt from the book Sand in My Eyes

Self-doubting is part of the writing process. Aspiring authors chat with me at book signings, sharing with me their secrets—they’ve been working on a novel for years but fear it might not be good. I tell them I understand. After months of inspiration and countless hours typing away long after my family had gone to bed, I sent my Sand in My Eyes manuscript to a New York editor (not an agent; but an editor who gives objective critique). Frankly, she told me to bury the manuscript. The story didn’t stand a chance and no amount of editorial consultation could transform it into anything the world would want to read. Then she told me to contact her after I write my next story.

The negative feedback triggered in me a sort of ‘dark night of the creative soul.’ The thought of inspiration not existing produced within me a deep loneliness—the kind one might feel when alone in a house with nothing but the thoughts in their mind because they don’t believe in their soul. And that’s putting it mildly. As I took daily five-mile walks around the island, I wondered for weeks whether it had been blind faith that kept me writing this story night after night, chapter after chapter, or stubborn determination. It was like my mind and soul were at odds with each other and they were questioning which one was to blame for having me waste all that precious time working on the same story, a ridiculous story.

So I say to writers who confide in me, “yes, I understand your fears.” But then I tell them this, that one day in the midst of this creative darkness, I walked and prayed to God, asking whether I should bury this story for good or not. And while walking down Tarpon Bay Road past Bailey’s, there was a white bird standing in the middle of the road, stopping traffic. A woman held her head out her car window and said to me, “These birds—they have no fear!” I thought about her words the entire way home and the very next morning, set my alarm and without fear started rewriting my story from start to finish.

I saw then in my mind that my story was like a tree—a barren tree—so page after page I embellished it, adding a layer of details that were like leaves to my tree. Next I added a layer of beauty to my story—flowers to my tree. And I made my plot juicier, writing until I could see fruit in my tree. I came into my voice and it was like there were birds in my tree and they were chirping. I printed and read it but realized that the branches weren’t moving so I went back from start to finish adding spirit to my story. This layer of spirit was the wind that had my story coming to life. And when I saw in my mind that my story, my tree was beautiful and full of life, I wrote the words ‘the end.’ The book has since won awards, gone into multiple print-runs and has received national reviews far more positive than I ever could have imagined.

Now I do believe there are times when we have to move on and start something new. When you try something over and over again to the point of insanity and it still doesn’t work, pinching off the spent blossoms and leaves encourages other blossoms to open and makes their flowers last longer. I have found it to be true that giving up certain projects in the past only made my next attempts more prolific. But this story I believed in. And I had thanked the Lord each time a sentence or paragraph fell into my hands like a blossom from a tree. I’m glad I didn’t bury it.

“A writer doesn’t only pick her themes like apples from a tree; she prepares the ground, plants, grows, harvests, nurtures and processes those themes, too. It took a long time, and the process of writing it was hard, but I never wanted to look back one day and ask myself, why didn’t I plant a Royal Poinciana?”—Sand in My Eyes

“Inspiration is real. It’s like watching for wildlife. You need to be at a quiet, comfortable distance or you might disturb it. Sometimes it’ll freeze and go away, but I try not to assertively approach it or force it. It shows up when it’s ready, as long as it feels secure, as long as my mind is still and in a quiet, receptive state.”—an excerpt from the novel Sand in My Eyes

 Writing a novel is a three-step process that involves inspiration, writing and editing. Often when asked where I get my inspiration for writing, I laugh and switch the subject. Articulating it is hard, but I know exactly how I get ideas. While biking down Periwinkle Way with my husband and children, I had a burst of inspiration and ran into a store to ask for pen and paper. Unedited and exactly as I scribbled it on the scrap paper, that burst became one of the epigraphs in my novel, Portion of the Sea:

There are those times when a woman fears she is on the brink of extinction or that the dreams and wants she has for her life are endangered. It is then she must declare herself a refuge and take whatever measures to preserve her natural elements.

Watching a sunset at Blind Pass on Captiva, I asked my husband if he saw what I saw, that glistening pathway atop the water, as if you could get up from the sand and walk it. I knew right away what I wanted to write, that no matter the circumstances, when life doesn’t go her way and she’s feeling hopeless and defeated, there are always those “glistening steps” a woman must take for herself—steps that lead to survival—and it became a major theme in Portion of the Sea.

I was writing one night and glanced out the window and spotted an owl looking directly in at me from the branch of the banyan tree. The hair on my arms stood and not wanting to move, not wanting to scare it away, I continued writing—writing the owl into my scene, which turned into a scene about wisdom, how my character Lydia desperately longed for wisdom.

During the writing of Sand in My Eyes, I would bike around the island daily. I would see daisies and knew I had to write a silly little story about flowers and how the flowers all had something they wanted to say to us.

And the daisies, I always noticed them growing alongside trash cans and ugly parking lots and thought how even in times of ugliness, there are always glimpses of beauty. If we look for it, we’ll spot it—beauty in the world.

I will say I never sit down with pen and paper and try planning a story. Never do I write an outline of what I want my book to be. That works for some but I tried it once and found myself writing a grocery list instead. I’d rather let ideas fall naturally like sea grape leaves from the trees. And living on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico does inspire me, but ideas come mostly because I have learned how to listen to silent moments, to be receptive and cherish moments of contemplation, reflection and prayer, realizing that time spent alone with myself doesn’t have to be boring or lonely; that within me—within all of us—are creative ideas as infinite as the waves of the whispering sea.

Even in the midst of chaos, or in the company of others, I have learned how to tap into my innermost depth and usually, if my mind is clear and free of debris, it doesn’t matter where I am, or what I am doing: carrying groceries up the stairs to my little house on stilts or walking on the beach, I can do it! I can spot a creative moment as clearly as one spots a seashell, picks it up and, holding it to the ear stops and listens. And that is my secret—I stop and listen. At first I hear what sounds like just a whisper from the ocean. But then I hear more. When asked how I get my ideas for my writing, that is what I want to say to my readers. That is how I feel.

“Sometimes ideas fall on me like little drops of water, but still, I pay attention to the small ideas, storing them away as if I had a pail on the beach for collecting things. Often, it’s not until months after getting the ideas, when I am on my hands and knees in the sand, trying to build a castle, trying to write a novel, that I need those drops of water, and see at last how they are a part of the sea.”—Whisper from the Ocean

“Mornings will come to mean a million different things to a person throughout their life.”—excerpt from the book Sand in My Eyes

When I look back on the mornings of my life I get emotional—those wintry childhood mornings alongside my dad pulling bales of hay out to feed our horses, then coming inside to mom’s homemade breakfasts before catching the school bus and riding it an hour through farm-filled roads, and those summer mornings making hot fudge and waffle cones before hanging the ‘open’ sign of my family’s ice-cream shop.

A few years back, when my mom was undergoing cancer surgeries and I would visit her in the mornings, she told me those years when the family was young and she was cooking for us and we were working that ice-cream shop together were the best mornings of her life and never did she imagine mornings would come to this—her unable to warm herself or stand or shower or prepare a meal for her family, let alone eat or drink anything herself. I’m glad that those mornings for my mom have passed and she has better ones now.

And long gone are those mornings when my husband and I were young newlyweds searching for our first career jobs, waking on the floor of our apartment with no furniture, sipping coffee until noon and sharing our dreams. Those mornings didn’t last long enough, and soon we were waking to different alarms, rushing off to the stresses of our jobs and office politics.

They passed in the wink of an eye—those mornings after the birth of our first son when I’d play classical music and lay him in the sunbeam coming through our window, massaging his little arms and back while thinking these are the mornings I want to remember when I am old! I laugh because then our second baby came along and a few years later our third and I’ve hardly given anyone a massage since.

Mornings couldn’t care less whether a mother is rested or not, I discovered, and they kept on coming, one sleep-deprived morning after the next—no longer my own but belonging instead to my children and household chores. As I ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, responding to the needs of three little ones, I wondered whether one too many mornings mixed with lack of sleep might have a tragic accumulative effect, like one too many huffs and puffs and the house falls down.

Those mornings passed and I already miss that beautiful chaos but also love my new mornings—waking at four-thirty or five to pray, then work on my next novel—like a person on a horse riding into the sunrise, writing in the direction of my dreams. And come seven, when my children wake, I enjoy making them breakfast and know that like my mom I will one day look back on these as the best mornings of my life!

After my boys go off to school, my three-year-old and I sit on the porch and listen to the birds, then go for a walk and pick wildflowers—her favorite morning routine. Mornings are important. They set the mood for the entire day. And just as the morning glories unfurl for only one day and then close, our current mornings will not last forever. It’s why I try to make mine beautifully memorable in some way.

“Because not everything will be blooming all the time, it is my prayer for you that each and every morning of your life, and in every season, you wake to birds singing out your window. And when there are no birds, or window, that you wake up singing yourself, and when you having nothing good to sing, that your soul will sing for you, to remind you in some roundabout way that this is the day that the Lord hath made and only He can turn your bad days good, making you feel as if you’re flying above the turbulent waves of life on the wings of a Great White Heron.”—Sand in My Eyes

To show my appreciate for book bloggers who were so wonderful during the Sand in my Eyes book blog tour, I’m giving away a $50 gift certificate. For all book bloggers who reviewed Sand in my Eyes: send me the link(s) to your reviews and you’ll be entered to win the gift card. If you reviewed in multiple locations, send me all links and you’re name will be entered into the drawing the same number of times as reviews. For instance, if you reviewed on your blog, Amazon, BN.com, goodreads and Library Thing and you send me links to all those reviews, your name will be entered 5 times (increasing your chances of winning!) And it’s not too late – post your Sand in my Eyes review to as many places as you are able and send me the links to be entered.
 
Email the links to christine@christinelemmon.com and I’ll pick a winner on Friday, September, 24th.

 
Thanks to all you fabulous Book Bloggers!

“Dear Grandma, I’ll call him Rafael de Espana. He transforms Spanish into more than grammar off the pages of a book. He brings it to life for me and takes the language barrier away. As he speaks to me slowly and without shouting, I feel beyond culture shock and am no longer homesick. I love this country now that I have Rafael as my friend. This sounds dramatic, Grandma, but I know you love reading romance. And I don’t mind living it!”—excerpt from the book Sanibel Scribbles

 After my grandfather died, my grandmother Betty Jann remained migratory, spending winters on Sanibel and summers in Saugatuck, Michigan where she nested in a cottage behind my family’s ice-cream shop. An eccentric bird wearing dark sunglasses and red and purple silk dresses from the Orient, my grandmother would sit on the pink radiator of our shop and chat with me as I worked. After work I would go to her cottage and because I was a teenager and she a night owl, we would stay awake all hours listening to Elvis Presley while burning sandalwood incense. I loved settling beside her on the twin bed as we ate Kit Kat bars and talked about the Nora Roberts novels she was reading, and about life!

 My sister and I spent our high school and college spring breaks visiting our grandma on Sanibel and we discovered how lonely she was with nothing but her seashell projects and romance novels to keep her company. And so I began writing her letters—not ordinary ‘how are you doing? I’m doing fine’ letters, but juicy ones about the boys I was dating—those I liked and didn’t. I left nothing out, writing consistently to my grandma about the adventurous details of my life. She called me one night at college and said, “Keep writing those letters. They’re adding spice to my life and they keep me going—waiting for the next. In fact, your letters are so good I just know you’ll become a novelist one day.” I’ll never forget those words because I wrote them in my journal.

 My last letter never arrived to Grandma. She died before it reached her. But in an effort to ‘keep her going’, when I wrote my first novel, Sanibel Scribbles, I made my grandmother one of the characters and interwove letters to her throughout the book. I am now living with my husband and children on Sanibel less than a mile from where she lived and bike past her old place, feeling blessed for the unique influence she had on my life. When mothers or grandmothers tell me their children want to be writers, and ask what they can do to encourage it, I tell them this: When your child writes something and wants to read it to you, stop everything! Turn the faucet off. Pull the car over. Stop folding laundry and listen! Listen as if their written words are what you’ve been waiting for. And tell them you can’t wait for more. Oh, and no need to critique it. There are plenty of other people in the world who will do that later on. 

 I hop off my bike and walk up the pathway to my grandma’s old place, wishing she were still alive so I could go inside and see if she has put her Nora Roberts novels aside, if she’s reading one of my three novels instead.

 Dear Grandma,

You once told me that the letters I wrote added spice to your life and kept you going. Well, the encouraging words you once gave me have kept me going, too.”—Sanibel Scribbles

“To an ordinary person, washing a pan is simple. But for a mother, who is also like a ringmaster in a three-ring circus, doing dishes is more hair-raisingly difficult than swallowing fire.”—an excerpt from the book Sand in My Eyes

 I’m often asked how long it takes for me to write a novel. If I were living a life of solitary confinement—in a convent or prison cell—I might crank one out in a few months. The reality is that I live in a noisy little house on stilts with three children, a husband, too, and the truth is, I can hardly wash a sink of dishes without getting interrupted ten times. Sometimes I go into the kitchen spinning like a top, dizzy from their demands and forgetting why I went in there in the first place.

 When I got the inspiration for Sand in My Eyes, ideas came fast and furious and I could see the characters, plot and story unfolding as a panorama in my mind. It would be a silly little story about a mother so overwhelmed that hardly was she seeing the beauty around her. I scribbled it all down in crayon on a coloring book, and then told my husband the good news—that all I need is two hours every single morning before the sun and kids rise and I could have this story written in two weeks!

 Also at this time my sister was training for the Chicago Marathon and I thought as she wakes early to run, I will wake early to write and by the time she runs the marathon, I will have written my novel. Well, she ran the marathon. And she ran it again the next year, and the next. And guess what? I was still writing my novel.

 Here’s what happened. Our landlords needed us out—writing postponed—they wanted to sell the house we had been renting, the one on Sanibel that inspired me immensely. Settled at last in a new rental, I set my alarm for five in the morning only to discover my laptop had died. It took me three months to afford a new one. Here we go again, I set my alarm to start writing this story and my son decides to wake along with me. This new routine (me on a coffee high hoping to write while watching The Wiggles instead) lasted for days until I decided to write in our pantry (also our laundry room) where my son couldn’t find me. From my new hideout I could hear my husband telling him, “Mommy went to work. She’ll be back when the sun comes up.”

 The writing in the pantry was going fine until one morning I found myself tiptoeing to the bathroom to vomit—pregnant with our third. I wish I could say it was glamorous, but I wrote big chunks of Sand in My Eyes from the bathroom floor with the fan on to tune out the ‘beautiful chaos’ that was my family on the other side of the door. I didn’t like writing in the bathroom but if I left and headed for the pantry, the boys would intercept me and my writing session would end.

 I also experienced clusters of intense three-day headaches during the writing of this book. And my mom was diagnosed with cancer. Fear woke me in the middle of every night and had me twisting and turning through the fiery forest filled with worry. A writer needs sleep, and so does a mother. I consider giving up my story about the overwhelmed woman no longer seeing the beauty to life. But faith kept me going. I had to believe my inspiration was real. I had a choice. I could either let life get in the way of my writing or I could allow life to enhance my writing. I chose the latter and created characters in my story to help comfort me through. At times, while writing it, I felt as if the older me was talking to the younger me, telling it’s all just a phase, and one day you’ll wake and your house will be quiet and clean but your children grown so you might as well now—in the midst of the chaos—feel the beauty all around you.

 So how long does it take to write a novel? More than two weeks is all I’ll say!

 “Everything in life takes a certain amount of work. If you think getting what you want in life is easy, then you may as well walk over to your neighbor’s yard and steal one of her flowers when she isn’t looking, because life isn’t easy, nor is growing a garden, but once you start recognizing the pests and learning how to control the weeds, and all the other basics there are to learn, then the effort you put into your gardening becomes more pleasurable.”—Sand in My Eyes

 “When I entered the bay I put the paddle down, leaving the canoe to drift about under the morning sun while questioning how a mother knows when to give up certain selfish passions and fold laundry instead. I struggled with this, and needed to know whether I should hang my cravings to write out to dry until a different stage in life, or when I am old and there is no one to answer to but the flowers in my yard.”—excerpt from the book Sand in My Eyes

 Before I start writing a book, I go over the impracticalities in my mind. I’m not going to get the hours of sleep that I like. I won’t be saying ‘yes’ to all the social invitations. The laundry, which I fold at night, will start piling up again into mountains my children climb on. There will be no television watching, and hardly time for reading. The decision for me to write is similar to that of having another baby, or buying a puppy. There’s never a perfect time. It’s an emotional choice, and life-changing, too.

 But I think of the ideas I have, and how sad, if I don’t pursue them they’ll remain like seeds in a packet that never get opened. I make my choice to write and like a gardener stepping out into her patch of dirt, I begin raking through the mess, simplifying my life and clearing the way so I can write. All I need is a consistent two-hour chunk of time—morning or night. And because my three-year-old wakes early, climbing into my bed to cuddle, I decide at this particular stage, night writing will have to do. But that means I can’t get tired in the evenings. No falling asleep on the couch by nine!

 I find myself dusting my desk, emptying drawers, and clearing my schedule for upcoming months.  I also search for new music. I listened to Mozart while writing Sand in My Eyes, but need different music now. I buy a sandalwood candle and lotion for my fingers that will soon be hitting the keys. I switch from drinking two cups of coffee in the morning, to one, and then add two cups in the late afternoon, hoping for an added oomph. My husband questions whether all of this is a writer’s ritual or procrastination. I tell him it’s ‘nesting’—I’m carrying within an idea and preparing for it to come out.

 I laugh at myself, aware that when we pursue what we are passionate, it might at first look to others as if we are only playing in the dirt. But there is a difference between playing and toiling in that toiling brings forth change in your life—even if that change is in your state of mind. My state-of-mind is full of anticipation. I am ready to write! Whether or not my toiling turns into a garden, or a novel that others will like, it’s okay, because the process is already bringing me joy.

 For anyone choosing to pursue their passion, but wondering how they might go about finding the time and energy to start, try this: “…cut out that which isn’t needed in your garden, in your life, once, or twice a year. Trim away that which serves no purpose and benefits neither you nor others. And space your plants appropriately. Over planting, crowding your days with too many commitments, activities and involvements, may lead to disease and fungus, and the things you want to do won’t stand a chance of surviving.” –Sand in My Eyes