Journal Entry: June 4, 2008

Yesterday I started work on a review and markup of my sister Heather’s novel, Light in the Darkness. It reminds me of the stuff I wrote when I was younger — not in quality, because she’s made a really good manuscript, but in…I dunno. Message.

It’s fantasy, driven by the Christian myth. It’s not exactly or preachy (or, rather, it is in places, but only in a first draft sort of way — it’ll be easy enough to clean that up, and she’s wanting to clean it up). The book isn’t evangelical, not even as much as Lewis’s, stuff, but it’s still heavy with the fundamental ideas of a god active within the world and pursuing a highly localized agenda.

In fact, that specifically describes the plot of my first novel, The Scorekeeper. The plot is much different, but the feel of it, and the underlying theology of it, is remarkably similar. It’s…well, I’ve just recently read through all my old posts about the world as our dirty human sandbox, and I don’t personally believe in a god interfering in the world that way anymore, so it’s even more bizarre for me to deal with it in a novel form (and recognize so much of my own old agenda there).

Which is all to say, the experience has been a weird one. The book is good, though, and I’m excited at the opportunity to help her make it better. Dad ended up facing almost exactly the sorts of problems I’m stumped by, so apart from cleaning up his verb forms (which is boring work), I didn’t have a lot to offer him. Heather’s issues are an entirely different set, and one I’ve successfully dealt with in the years of my rewrites of Taming Fire, and it’s not a hard problem to fix. It’s always nice to feel useful, and I can definitely be useful here.

Anyway, I started on that yesterday. I also ate some delicious lasagna, dropped off a movie at Red Box, picked up some McDonalds desserts for us, did the dishes, and played with AB. That pretty much describes my evening. After AB went to bed we watched a couple episodes of Lost and I played AoC for an hour longer than I should have, but it was a good time.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.