This past Sunday, while preparing supper, I stabbed myself with a piece of bamboo. Not in the kitchen, out in the driveway on my way to collect tomatoes from the garden. It was a freak accident. The boys had left a bamboo lance in the road and someone ran it over, shattering the long piece of bamboo. Company was coming for Sunday dinner and I wanted everything to look nice, including the driveway. So I picked up the shredded bamboo lance and tried to toss it into our burn pile, but as I threw the bamboo, somehow a shard of bamboo pierced the top of my hand and embedded all the way through to my palm. Dang, did it hurt! At first I didn't realize how injured I was because the bamboo had … [Read more...]

It feels like a month of Sundays since I last posted a blog. So much has happened, I really don't know where to begin. Last night I emailed Far Side of the Sea to my editor. What a relief! Now I'm praying she likes it, and other folks enjoy the story too. Getting the book finished felt like such a battle. I thought for sure after harvest, with the boys all in school, I'd have more time to write. Wrong! Each day little emergencies arose the kept me from writing. I can't even remember all that went wrong in the past two months, but finally I told everyone, "I will not be answering my phone! My door! Or my social media until I finish my book! Please don't contact me. Thanks so … [Read more...]

  Here she is... Roman's headstrong little sister, Maria Vasquez. The girl who's driving me crazy right now. I need to nail Maria down. Make her go home. The trouble with Maria is I can't make her do anything. She's a lot like many of us. Her own worst enemy. Rachel in Until the Day Breaks was such a manageable heroine. Maria is not manageable. Maria is running from God. And the man she desperately loves. Because of the lies she believes. Have you ever run from God because you're following the wrong voice? The enemy's voice or perhaps your own voice? I have. For thirty-three years, I didn't want to obey God. I wanted to do it my way. So I forged my own … [Read more...]

The weirdest thing happened to me before we went to the mountains. I was boiling potatoes to make potato salad. While draining the potatoes, boiling water splashed straight into my eye. Searing pain shot to my brain. I thought I'd blinded myself. I spent twenty minutes rinsing out my eye with cold water, praying that I hadn't burnt my eyeball out of my head. A half hour later, I called my Aunt Marolyn who was an emergency room nurse for years. "I got boiling water in my eye," I told her. "In all my years at the hospital, I've never heard of boiling water in the eye before," she said with concern. "Maybe you should go to urgent care." It was eight o'clock at night. I'd just mowed the … [Read more...]