First Love

I've been thinking about quitting my day job. Not because I'm making so much money writing (my first book doesn't release until May), or because I have a terrible boss (he's actually a leading contender in the hypothetical World's Best Boss competition), or because I hate my work (I mostly enjoy it and the people I work with), but because I think I'm meant to be doing something else. Let me explain:

Another Goddess e-mailed me yesterday for help with a plot point in her current work-in-progress. And I had a blast coming up with ideas, working out details, drawing invisible lines between event A and event B, while taking character X into consideration. This is what I would love to be paid to do. While it's true that I'm an editor by profession (both on staff at a major academic press and an occasional freelancer), I've mostly worked with non-fiction. And fiction is my first love.

Stories have power. They can simulataneously entertain and teach. They can communicate Truth even while not being fact. Science fiction and fantasy, stories that are farthest from fact, have historically been written to bring us closer to Truth. Weird, huh? And romance, of course, gives us the greatest Truth of all: love is real and important (and often involves sex).

But that's what I want to get my hands on, shape and form, build and refine, so that all those Truths can come out, so that great stories can be told, so that the world of imagination can be fully explored. And I can't do that sitting here at Stuffy University Press.

On a different subject: For all of you who celebrate Easter, I hope you will find a Good Friday service today and a Sunrise Service on Easter morning. We need the darkness of Good Friday to truly appreciate the dawn of Easter.