A Season to Dance: The Book That Wrote Me

When I wrote the first line of my first novel in January of 2011, I wanted to get published because I was desperate to feel important.

I finished writing A Season to Dance that fall and hired coach Gloria Kempton via Writer’s Digest to look at the whole thing and tell me if it was any good.

She saw potential in the story of a small-town professional ballerina with big dreams, but explained I needed a clearer quest, more telling details, better scene structure, and better balance between sequels and dramatic scenes. I joined Gloria’s critique group and spent a year rewriting.

During that year, my husband got orders to move the family from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Germany, and he deployed for the sixth time soon after we settled on a lovely mountaintop in Idar-Oberstein.

When I finished rewriting, Gloria said the novel looked good and had everything a novel was supposed to have. But… “Something’s still missing. I don’t know what it is. We’ve covered it all.”

So of course I did what any writer desperate for validation would do. I told my coach that surely nothing was missing and that it was time to query. I hired a service to blast queries everywhere for me. I know… Shame on me… But God used that.

God’s Plan—Phase One

One query ended up with Mrs. Joyce Hart, of Hartline Literary. The novel wasn’t Christian—I wasn’t a Christian. She shouldn’t have received my query. But she did. She sent me a note saying she liked the storyline but that in Christian novels the protagonist couldn’t live with her love interest without being married. She was very kind and said that if she was missing the point and if the novel was indeed Christian that I should resubmit explaining the living together piece.

When I read it I laughed and rolled my eyes. I started typing a condescending reply. Something about Christian fairy tale brains and me living in the real world, but I decided not to send it.

Days passed. A week passed. A month passed. And all I did was collect rejections. I became bitter. Bitterly sad at first. Then bitterly discouraged. And then bitterly ugly. I’d never been ugly before. Not like that.

See, up to that point, I’d believed that there was some kind of “god” and that somewhere, somehow, being good was right and that it paid off. But with the disappointments of the publishing journey those beliefs became a joke to me. I stood in the middle of my empty German kitchen—husband deployed, kids at school, my first dog had just died. And I looked at that inbox full of rejections and stated to whomever or whatever was out there: “God is dead.”

Mercy. Surely I said that to the “god” of my imagination, and not to the real God—God as He reveals Himself in the Bible. But I know that He was in that kitchen with me. And phase two of His plan was about to start.

Luke 22:31-32: “And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.”

God’s Plan—Phase Two

As I lost all restraint and became the worst version of myself, God removed me from my green German mountaintop. 

After less than eighteen months in Germany, we were sent back to America, to the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas. To a place called Fort Bliss—a place from which you can see a Mexican mountain with the words: “Cd. Juárez. La Biblia es la verdad. Leela.” That translates to “City of Juárez. The Bible is the truth. Read it.” Gotta love it. God is good.

During the first six months back in America, I went to two secular writers’ conferences and met more rejection. My lack of restraint and my selfishness didn’t really make me happy. I wanted to go to therapy. I wanted a job. I still dreamed of that book deal that had to be just around the corner. I wanted, I wanted…

But nothing happened, and it didn’t matter how hard I tried to get help, get happy, and find any kind of relief for the pain I felt. Nothing. Happened. I’d never seen so many closed doors—slammed-shut doors—ever in my life. Even the shrink kept double booking, closing early, and somehow cancelling on me. It was ridiculous.

The One Open Door

When God planted our family in the desert, He planted us two blocks from a friend from the Fort Benning years. A friend whose claim to fame was church shopping whenever the Army moved her family. I asked her to take me to church on the first Wednesday of January of 2013. 

I fell in His arms. Surrendered, defeated, and dependent. Or what God likes to call—ready. I was born again two weeks later and was baptized on Super Bowl Sunday that February.

Gloria’s “Something Missing”

I had tickets to go to New York for the Writer’s Digest conference that spring, but sometime in March, it dawned on me: “You silly goose of a girl. You wrote a salvation story without the salvation piece.” My first coach, Gloria Kempton, had been right all along. There was something missing!

A Season to Dance isn’t just the story of a small-town professional ballerina who dreams of dancing at the Met in New York and the two men who love her. It’s also the story of a girl desperately trying to fill the God-shaped hole in her heart with often misguided career and romantic pursuits.

I deleted Mrs. Hart’s email that week. Yes, it was still in my inbox. Job well done, Mrs. Hart.

Now, I had work to do. I spent 2013 and the first half of 2014 rewriting the novel. Five ladies from my Sunday school read chapter after chapter as I produced them and cheered me on through that gruesome process. I couldn’t have done it without their support. God is good.

Jeff Gerke edited my novel in the summer of 2014 and had me read Robert McGee’s The Search for Significance: Seeing Your True Worth Through God's Eyes. God is good.

I went to my first Christian writers conference, the ACFW 2014 in St. Louis. Two weeks later, Les Stobbe offered to represent me. God is good.

ACFW 2015 was fantastic and many houses are looking at that first manuscript. God is good.

My family got saved, too. My husband in July of 2013. Our son in December of 2013. My mom in the fall of 2014. And our little girl just this past summer, the summer of 2015. God is amazingly good.

How about you? How has God used your writing to grow you?

Patricia is from Brazil and immigrated to America in 1992. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Cincinnati in 1998 with a B.A. in English Literature. She's been stationed in Germany twice, first as a public affairs officer for the U.S. Army and later as an Army wife. She and her husband live in El Paso, Texas, with their two children.

Facebook - www.facebook.com/patricia.beal.author
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Web - www.patriciabeal.com

The Occult

Over the past weeks I have shared some of my experiences with meditation, Buddhism, the Silva Method, and Scientology. Today I would like to talk about things that fall under the broad label of "the occult". Happily, my experiences here were always as an observer and not a participant. Looking back, I really feel that God was protecting me while allowing me to witness, first-hand, the detrimental effects of the occult in peoples' lives.

I was not raised in a Christian home, so I had no guidance when it came to spiritual matters. My journey started as an attempt to improve myself while seeking out the truth about the universe and my place within it. It started with meditation and went from there. Harmless enough, it seemed, but then this is how the enemy works. He ensnares you with the harmless stuff then, before you know it, you are dabbling in things that can put you into deep trouble, even placing your very soul in mortal danger. This is very much the case with the occult. For Christians, it conjures up all sorts of dark ideas, but it can start with something as simple as reading your horoscope in the newspaper, or having your palm read at a funfair. "For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it." (Matthew 7:13).

The word "occult" comes from the Latin occultus, meaning "hidden" or "secret". In terms of religion, it refers to things of a spiritual nature, not observable by science. Practitioners of the occult attempt to pull back the curtain separating the visible world from the hidden world of the spirit realm. As such, it covers a wide range of practices, from ESP (extra-sensory perception) to astrology. It even encompasses meditation, if that meditation is used as a tool to attain spiritual awareness.

During my teens, I seemed to be surrounded by people who were interested in the occult. A school friend (I'll call him Steve) tried his hand at Tarot cards and Ouija. He was struggling with feelings of rejection from his family and was trying to find a sense of control in his life. He once told me that he woke during the night to see a wall of evil-looking faces staring down at him, mere inches from his own face. Not long after that, Steve and I were talking with the parents of a friend when Steve became extremely agitated and kept insisting we leave. I eventually relented but, as we were saying our goodbyes, the father collapsed and died from a heart attack right in front of us. Later, Steve told me that he had dreamed that very thing a few nights earlier, which is why he had been so determined to leave. He knew the man was going to die. Steve, it seemed, had found a way to view "hidden things" and, even though it frightened him, he seemed to enjoy the sense of power that came with it.

Another person close to me, the mother of a school friend, was heavily into all things occult. She was a lovely person and extremely intelligent, but she eventually slipped into paranoid schizophrenia. For years, she practiced daily the I-Ching and the reading of tea-leaves. Like so many people who get involved in the occult, she seemed to be driven by a desire to know the future. Every person I have ever met who is involved in these "hidden" things is doing so to gain some sense of power in their lives. They want to know what is going to happen tomorrow, and this makes them feel in control of their destiny. Sadly, what they do not realize is that by delving into the spirit realm they are opening themselves up to all sorts of demonic activity. A woman who worked as a nurse at a mental institute once told my wife that approximately eighty percent of the people admitted to her hospital with paranoid schizophrenia had been involved in the occult at some time in their lives. If this is accurate, then the dangers are clear. People may think it is harmless fun, but dabbling in something forbidden by God is never a good idea.

I believe that God forbids this kind of activity for a very good reason. The Bible warns us: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." (Ephesians 6:12). By taking part in occult practices, by attempting to draw back the curtain covering hidden places in the spirit realm, we are inviting attention from "spiritual wickedness". Our single point of contact in the spirit realm should be God. He loves us and has a plan for our lives. We should trust Him and turn to Him for all our needs, including our future. The enemy, on the other hand, will lie to us and try to deceive us. God wants to lead us down paths of righteousness whereas the enemy wants to drag us down to our destruction. The Bible instructs us to "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:" (1 Peter 5:8).

In my next post I would like like to share my conversion to Christianity. Not, as it turns out, the end of my spiritual journey, but the beginning.