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A Personal LOL

I edited the rough draft of Captives of the Fern Queen several times, paying special attention to the first few pages which are so critical.  Finally, I decided it was in good enough shape and started reading it to my children.  When I got to Janna’s description of the blueflame birds (4^th page), I tried to read it in a way that would make them feel how very wonderful these birds were:

“Their feathers were as bright as the flames that flicker blue in the heart of a fire. The very sight of a blueflame lifted people’s spirits so much that it changed their lives. Not many were seen, though. They were heard more often, but that was special too. Their song was piercingly beautiful. The history books said it brought tears to its listener’s ears.”

My daughter, Sarah, interrupted me.  “Wow, Mom,” she said.  “That’s some bird.”

I beamed with delight.  Yes, she was getting it.  Then she went on, “It has remarkable ears, doesn’t it?”

Oh.  So much for careful editing!  And it rhymed so beautifully.  🙂

 

I write fun fantasy in a Christian world view.  That means God is relating to people.  But does He like us?  I think He actually does, remarkable as that may be.  Here’s a quote about that from Coming Home by Barbara Jean Hicks.

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“Don’t you think,” the minister said slowly, “there might be times God truly delights in us?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I can,” Chappie countered.  “What I can’t imagine is God giving me the capacity to delight in people without having the same capacity himself.  I think God finds incredible joy in his relationships with us.  In our creativity and our capacity for love, in our response to him.”

 

“Do fairy tales–fantasy–teach children to retreat into a world of wish-fulfilment instead of facing the problems of the real world?  Let us lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story.  There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes.

We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairy land.  We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl.  But the two longings are very different.  The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it; the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring.”

“Fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what.  It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods:  the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”  (from C. S. Lewis, The Quotable Lewis, page 204-5)