thinking of stories i want to write. stories that require you to suspend reality as all good stories do. stories that reimagine endings.

writing a book for my grandmother. her life and her struggles. i want to give her a beautiful ending to match the full life she has lived. seeking out answers, asking to be retold things i have been told a million times (“we used to have to go under the house and clean out the chicken mess.”), clarifying details. she shall live on in this book.

and i think sometimes novels can be written, in part, as witness statements. short but descriptive stories of something that has occurred. writers as witnesses.

the ring of the landline could be heard throughout the house except it was more of a rattle than a ring. the signal that alerts you to the presence of a snake. what the snake offered to you depended on how you saw it. would you seek out its poison to cancel out that which already lived inside of you? or would you hide from it, detesting what you do not even know to be real?

God made things beautiful because God understood the importance of beautiful things in inspiring life. God made things ugly because God understood the importance of ugliness in relation to beauty, but also the importance of ugliness as something vital and natural in life. (Where does suffering come from? Where does happiness come from?) Ugliness creates beauty and beauty creates ugliness. There is ugliness in beauty and beauty in ugliness. They are inseparable, deeply intertwined, deeply necessitated by each other.

Use your writing to explore the things you cannot understand. Imagine what it must be like on the other side of understanding.

One day I will write a book inspired by Revelations and written in the style of Revelations and it will be about a woman’s revelations. I am picturing it now and it is inspiring me to read more works by female spiritual thinkers and the Bible!