You know that thing where you are pregnant and you start thinking everyone else seems to be pregnant too? Maybe it also happens where you grow a beard or have your foot in a cast. Or maybe not, I can only speak about the pregnant thing. Suddenly, when you’re pregnant, it seems that the whole world is also waddling around in comfortable shoes with various degrees of spherical bellies.

Since I have been focusing on my fiction writing over the last couple of months, I have experienced something similar. I don’t see novelists everywhere (although, what do I think a novelist looks like??) but it seems that articles, podcasts and bits of conversation are more likely to spur a thought about my stories. It’s been really fun to have these internal conversations with myself in the car pick up line at my son’s school, or as I am walking the dog, and see some of the ideas make their way into my work.

Conversely, the more I write, the more of these moments seem to jump into my path. It’s an amazing cycle. One of the more recent little serendipitous things happened this week. I was at Goodwill, wandering down the book shelves, and spotted a tiny little book called “A Church Revival”. One of the main story arcs of my novel involves a traveling preacher and a revival, but I hadn’t yet thought about how I would develop it, since I have no personal experience with them. The book is literally an instruction book, written by a theologian with the Southern Baptist Convention, about how to plan and execute a revival.

Crazy, right??

I’ve tried to get up and get some writing done every morning, and have been moderately successful at making a habit of it. It’s been so exciting to be so excited. Obviously, it’s early in the process of creating the first draft of my novel, but as long as I’m feeling optimistic I should probably embrace and mark it – since I am confident there will be days when I am not so high on the process in coming months.

Write on, friends!