The Stuff Inside

Seventeen years ago today, I was in a hospital bed holding my newborn baby girl. Drunk on hormones and lack of sleep, I held her in my arms and fell hard. Smitten, irrevocably besotted with this tiny person that would turn my world inside out. I cried when I had to cut her nails for the first time. Seriously? How could anyone trust me to do that right? Yet somehow we both survived without too much bloodshed. I bathed her without drowning her, I rocked her to sleep without breaking her and now seventeen years down the line, she is a beautiful young lady with the ability to turn my world the right way up on those days when it's too top-heavy for me.

I didn't always think I could do this mothering thing, but somehow we muddled through.

Eleven years ago, I started stringing words together. I sold some of them to magazines, but then Jesus pushed my button and I thought about writing a book. A whole book. All eighty thousand words of book. Seriously? Who could trust me to do that right? Yet eleven years later, I'm finishing up my third. Sure, sleep got short-changed, tears were cried and there may have been some bloodshed, but we muddled through.

When Jesus tells you to do something you're not entirely sure you can, it's best not to argue. Take a look at what He's planted in you. Dreams and hopes, desires... the things that make you come alive. You can be sure He didn't plant them there for nothing.

Breathe deep and step off the edge.
Watch the floodgates open.
See His Life and Love pour out of you.

Has Jesus been pushing your buttons? Tell us more...

Dianne J. Wilson is a South African author, who squeezes out words a few hundred at a time in between doing admin for a dance studio and mothering her three girls.

Her first novel, Shackles, is available as a free ebook.

Her second, Finding Mia, releases from Harbourlight on the 19th of June 2015.

Her third, Affinity, is a batch of flapjacks away from being  ready to go out to beta readers.

The Reason I Don't Read Much Modern Sci-fi

There must be something seriously wrong with me. Last week I was listening to an audio-book version of a modern sci-fi novel and there was this scene in which a baby was sucked out of a ship into outer space. I laughed. I know, it's terrible, but I actually laughed out loud.

Before you condemn me, perhaps it will help if I explain.

I chose this particular audiobook because it was published by Penguin and it had enough good reviews for me to take a chance. The author has written a number of books and is regarded quite highly. I have to admit that the book did have its strong points. The science was interesting (albeit over my head at times) and the plot kept me intrigued.

There were, however, three problems.

The first was that there was an almost total lack of character development. I've noticed this as something of a feature in the "hard" sci-fi stories I've tried recently. When it comes to a plot in which the characters are essentially facing a live-or-die scenario, you should at least care whether or not they live or die. Sadly, in this last book, I honestly felt as though the people were just names. I didn't care for them one jot.

The second problem was that the story felt a little like an instruction manual. It was basically all tell and no show. At the half way point I realized that I couldn't remember hearing a single metaphor or simile. I spent the second half of the book listening out for them, but can tell you that I didn't hear one. Perhaps they were there, but I didn't hear any. I can tell you exactly where the action took place, but I couldn't tell you what any of those places looked like, because the author made no attempt to show me these places. He told me about them, but he didn't show them to me.

The final problem has to do with babies, which leads me to my opening statement. When it comes to creating tension, the author seems to have only one literary device at his disposal: infants in peril. Dotted throughout the book are babies lying in craters, babies being thrown, babies crying, babies, babies, babies. I thought perhaps it was just me, but I checked some of the few negative reviews and, sure enough, others were saying exactly the same thing. The author seems to have a problem with babies. At least in this book he does.

So when I came to the part where a hole opens in the hull of the ship, and someone inside looks out of the window into the vaccuum of space, and sees "a baby" floating by, I couldn't help myself. What little  tension had been built up during the scene cracked. I laughed.

I finished the book, realizing that the best line in the whole story was actually the very last one. Now if only the author had written the other 400 pages like that, I would have been a happy reader.

I recently started and abandoned a new sci-fi book. Popular author. Interesting premise. Good reviews. Forty pages in and I was bored. I'd heard so many names I didn't know who was who and I honestly didn't care anymore. At least the author was trying to show me the environment a little bit, but it was too little too late. All I started hearing was names, names, names... I stopped reading for fear that a baby might get into peril at some point and I'd laugh and feel like a terrible person.

At least now I know why I don't read much modern secular sci-fi. I am currently reading "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury first published in 1951, and loving it. It's sci-fi, but the main character (Montag) has soul and I care what happens to him. Prior to that I read "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. Le Guin published in 1971. Again, I really cared about the characters.

Perhaps I've been unlucky in my choices, but it worries me that I have to read books published half a century ago to get sci-fi stories with decent character development.

Is it just me? Am I unlucky? Or has anyone else noticed this?

How News Travels

Once upon a time a baby boy was born in Goroka, Papua New Guinea. The year was 1975, and the baby boy's parents were missionaries in the mountainous jungle. Of course the parents were eager to share the news of their infant's birth with their own parents, who lived far away in BC, Canada, and in Florida, USA. There was a telephone available to them at mission headquarters, where, for an exorbitant long-distance rate, they could call home with the news.

Details followed in a blue aerogram, folded up, licked shut, and put it in the mail. About three weeks later the message arrived, and the extended family rejoiced to hear the details of the baby's safe birth. The same protocol was followed for the birth of their second son in 1976 and their daughter in 1977.

In 1980, a baby boy was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Once again the parents of this little boy wanted to share their joy with their relatives in North America. The grandparents who lived in BC, Canada, also wanted to know that their youngest daughter had safely arrived to visit her sister and help care for the little family. Telephone service was even more erratic from this country, and these missionaries couldn't afford the rates.

A friend of theirs, a ham radio buff, set out to get all this news north over the airwaves. He contacted an operator in Panama, who located an operator in California, who found one in Washington state, who phoned the baby's grandparents collect. All these ham radio operators relayed the messages back and forth: "We had a baby boy, and the baby's auntie arrived safely for her visit." And then, "Congratulations!"

Into this extended family no more babies were born overseas. But three of the five sisters served as career missionaries in Papua New Guinea, Bolivia, and Senegal. Blue aerograms regularly flew back and forth over the oceans, and occasionally fat envelopes with photos. One year out of five, the families returned to North America and the grandparents got in all the loving they could in the brief time they had.

In 1998 the grandfather of the clan suffered a series of heart attacks and strokes. By an act of God, his daughter from PNG had visited just six weeks before, and the other four daughters were all at his bedside that week, comforting him and their mother and each other in the days before his death. But by this time internet had been invented, and with it, email. Although the sister in PNG did not have internet access in her tribal location, the mission headquarters in Goroka did. Every day emails were sent to Goroka to be read to their other sister over the regular radio skid. She did not have to wait until a little blue aerogram arrived in the mail weeks later, telling her that her daddy had departed for heaven.

Now it is 2010, and the youngest of the five sisters became a grandmother for the first time sixteen days ago. This precious baby girl's other grandparents live in Chile, not far from the epicenter of the massive earthquake that struck the day before she was born. This did slow down the news of her safe arrival somewhat because phone, internet, and power lines were in a state of disrepair. Still, within a few hours of their granddaughter's birth, the news found them. By the third day, they could access their email and download a dozen photos. Not long after that, they watched the baby wiggle and squirm in her daddy's arms via video Skype while hearing all the details in real time.

Technology has wrought tremendous change in the way we communicate around the world in just the past thirty-five years. How has your family measured these changes?

Valerie Comer is the youngest sister in this true story--true as far as she remembers the details, at least. She is the sister who visited Bolivia in 1980 and became a grandmother on February 28, 2010. She writes novels of romance, fantasy, and faith from a farm in Western Canada, though these days she finds it hard to tear herself away from her granddaughter long enough to accomplish anything else.