“Bye-Bye Deyah!”

“Bye-bye Deyah. Bye-bye Deyah.” According to Gil, my one-year old niece went around saying this all day after spending a weekend with her mom and I at a retreat.

Colored Crayons

I’m Everybody Friendly

How can so many people write off such a huge segment of our humanity because of a label? This can be applied to race or gender or any number of characteristics, but none of the labels can ever begin to describe the soul, that eternal light and energy that is so breathtakingly beautiful to behold.

Andrew Lesnie

Finding My Roots

Looking around me, I can see that sometimes we get so wrapped up in our business, we lose ourselves. The wind comes, our branches shake, and we forget to grip the earth with the roots God gave us. We don’t remember who we are and why we’re here, we feel ungrounded and become blind to what is most important.

Finding Love's Way Front Cover

Cover Choice for “Finding Love’s Way”

Picking the cover for Finding Love’s Way was the hardest decision I’ve had to make yet. I was stuck between two options: a brown one with beige lettering and a beige one with brown lettering. They both fit different aspects of the book and I loved them both for different reasons.

Person drawing

The Question of Illustrations Rethought

As I’ve been working on writing the last 10% of the book, I’ve also given a lot of thought to the illustrations. Though in an earlier post I shared I would be creating a few drawings of my own for the start of the sections, I have gone back and forth whether to use a graphic of a labyrinth or my own art.

Creating a Clean Manuscript

For weeks, I’ve been working with a manuscript made up of my editors’ original papers all marked up with four different people’s edits. Having already entered all the changes in to the computer, what I had in front of me no longer reflected what the actual poems were. I needed to print out a clean manuscript.

Three Writing Rules

When I started talking to my editors about this book, I gave them special permission to ask any question they wanted, inquire about the back story of any poem. They have only taken advantage of this once and when they did, it was to ask if a poem was about romantic love.