Small Joys. With no volume number.

Oh, hello there friends, happy Sunday to you! I hope you have had an enjoyable weekend, or that a weekend is coming for you soon (I say this for the nurses in my life who sometimes work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and then get to have a weekend of their own for the remainder of the traditional workweek)!

I hope you won't take my silence over the past few days as anything personal (most of you stuck with me for weeks of silence back when I was wedding planning.  I guess a few days seems like nothing at all to you now); truthfully, I have actually been writing, just not on a public forum.

Today I am officially announcing my book to you, in hopes that you will pray for me through the process of writing it and that you will be understanding when you don't see frequent posts on my blog.  I've mentioned my book a few times, and there's even a tab for it on my page.  Until this point, I have been "writing a book" in very vague ways.  I've come up with a list of titles, written a few chapter names.  I had an intro at one point, as well as one or two chapters.  But it was all starting to sound like a self-help book which is not at all what I wanted.  I wanted more of a memoir, real-life tales and stories about grace and hurt and beauty and tears.

So I scrapped everything from my "book" and put it away in a word document to be dealt with later.  I started a new one with blank pages and the hope for something new, something better, something authentic and palpable.  I was done with the vague, elusive, self-helpy, shallow sort of thing.

I bring to you now something that my entire heart is in, a book about finding joy in the midst of the ordinary and sometimes mundane, about finding joy in the midst of immense heartache and sorrow.  You've read these words before on my blog, but now you will read them as the title of the book I am writing.

Small joys.

I'm very committed to the writing process and have been doing extensive research about writing, publishing, etc. in order to bring my best and truest self to this book.  This week was huge.  A funny sort of thing happened that I think is important to share.  I had just finished Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist (my spirit animal, if you will), and I was feeling very inspired to write.  There are certain authors and bloggers who give me this spark of inspiration, and she's definitely one of them.  So I pulled out an index card and started jotting down all of my thoughts about my book.

I wrote down words. And I just kept writing words.  When I was finished, I looked down and realized that this was my chapter list.  These words were haphazard and seemingly random, but they were the things that I had struggled through and labored over, things that brought me to understand how to find joy in the midst of the chaos around me.

Feeling excited and ambitious, I opened the new document on my computer and typed out all of these words.  I wrote the title in bold italics,

Small joys 

finding joy in the midst of the ordinary

by Cristina Helena Davis

I needed more inspiration, though.  Now that I had the chapters and the title and the ideas, I needed to know where to start.  So I went to Shauna Niequist's blog, thinking that she probably had this problem at some point and she likely blogged about it.  She probably once had an idea but got stuck there at the beginning with it, so maybe I could sift through her old posts to find a time when she wrote about this.

What I found was lovely.  Before I could even begin the search, I saw that she had a new blog post: her book announcement.  After reading Bittersweet, I was craving more Shauna.  I had read all of her other books. I wanted a new book from her, but didn't think there was any sort of plan for this in the near future.  What a huge huge blessing to find that she was writing a new book.  The same week that I was both craving this and that I decided to write one of my own.  

So I have been laboring over words and sentence structure and writing from my heart for the past week or so, and I find that it's all I want to do.  I understand now why people quit their full-time jobs to write a book.  It's so consuming, in the very best way.  It's not a dreaded task, but something I genuinely look forward to every morning when I wake up.  It's all I want to think about and do and dream about.  And 20 pages into writing it, I think I'm finally getting the hang of it.  

I'm thankful that I have the kind of job that gives me a lot of days off in a row (if I choose to schedule myself this way) and that I can find the energy and motivation on those days to harness my creativity and my free-floating thoughts into something semi-productive.  And I won't be quitting my job anytime soon.  Out-of-state dental school loans prevent me from that, as does the realization that I am writing mostly for myself and not necessarily for an editor or publisher.  I have not a single prospect on this front, to my own choosing though.  I want to write my entire manuscript before I consider what to do with it.  

Maybe I will decide to have it bound as a coffee-table book to have in our home.  Maybe I'll send it to friends and family to thank them for their constant support of my writing.  Maybe I will pursue a big-time publisher and have my dreams crushed when it ends up in a pile of "not good enoughs."  Maybe I'll self-publish or make a free e-book out of it.  But I'll never know until I try.  And I love writing so very much that I have to give it a chance.  I owe it to myself after years and years of sharing little bits of my heart with you to put it all into something bigger than just the few paragraphs I give you per week on here.  

I hope you will bear with me through the process, and that you'll keep me accountable so that it doesn't  become something vague and far-off and ignored.  I want to be intentional about writing every week.  My sweet friend Shannon, an excellent writer, will be editing material for me each week which will hopefully help to keep me on my toes with writing and editing.  But your accountability will be lovely and needed as will your prayer.  

And there it is.  I can no longer hide behind the curtain of "what ifs" and "maybes."  The curtain is drawn, and I am standing before the window looking out into the hope of what is ahead.  Will you stand there with me? 

Lots of love and grace and peace,

C. 

My scribblings. Note: not all of these will be

chapters.  I can't possibly write an entire chapter

titled "Sweet tea!"