Well I finished the rewrites and revisions on The Replacement Lists, (the sequel to SOTD) and have submitted. I will not hear for a while. I have my fingers crossed, but I try not to count on anything. The hardest part of being a writer is learning to live with rejection. I’m tough though. And this week I move on too concentrate on one of the other WIPs.
My older sister is my idea bouncer off-er. You know what I’m trying to say. She has one of those 150 or higher IQ’s, so she’s literate and funny as hell. I tell her what my idea’s are and then she helps me tweak details on characters or the mythology of the world I am creating. As I was letting SOTD percolate in my head for many months before I sat down and it poured out of me like fresh coffee, I was working on the mythology of the ghosts in my story. Did they have rules and what were those rules? If you have read the book, then you know that there were rules for them.
My family is very spiritual. And my sister insisted that when they died they had to make a choice to stay. The light to the next place in their spiritual journey was there for them to take and the light appeared every day at sunrise. The ghosts all have different reasons for remaining. Some to assure their children were safe, some to try and ease the pain of the living and some because they were young and afraid. But the sun will rise and a new choice is made each day.
That is our life anyway, we didn’t make one decision as a child and move on. We make a decision every day on how we see our world and lives. We wake to the new day and decide… Que Sera, Sera…Will I be happy, will I be sad. I’ve always thought of life’s journey as a tapestry, we pull the threads, change the colors, weave the good and bad together into our own design and once in a while we look back at the big picture. I try to live in the moment, but it ‘s more than that. I try to enjoy the moment. Ol James Taylor sings about it in the Secret of Life, The secret of love is in loving. The secret of life is enjoying the moment you are in.
I’ll admit, I’ve been all over the place with this blog tonight. It may be lack of sleep, but I have to tell you…I’m enjoying it.
Rhianna Samuels
Rhianna, I love how your ghosts make the choice to stay here every day…and that every day they have the choice to move on. We should all be conscious that we have the same choices every day. We can either live in the past and bemoan our fate and say “why oh why me” or we can get on with our lives. It’s not an EASY choice.. but it is our choice.
Comment by JudyThomas — February 4, 2008 @ 2:06 pm
Rhianna, I’m so jonesin for your next book. Does it take a long time to hear if they accepted it? (I’m sure it will be!) Does it take months then after that for it to be actually out there? I know nothing of these things. Will you post when you get the news? I’ll be checking back so that I can get it asap when it comes out. Good luck!
Leah
Comment by Madame Butterfly — February 7, 2008 @ 12:49 pm