The Next Right Thing

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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New Year’s resolutions are hard.

Statistically, most of them end up abandoned a month or so after New Year’s. I myself have never had much luck with them. They put pressure on us for a huge amount of change in a very, very short time, and personally, I’ve never found that life changes that way.

The changes that have come in my own life, big or small, have come slowly.

They’ve come one page, one morning at the gym, one journal entry at a time.

In the last decade, I’ve traveled to eight countries, written ten books, moved into my own home, worked multiple jobs, started this blog, and finally made something of a start on my career. None of that came out of a New Year’s resolution.

It came from moments.

From working when I didn’t feel like it.

From people supporting, loving, and believing in me, even when there wasn’t a great deal to believe in.

From knowing what my dreams were every single day, not just the first day of the year.

And most of all, from prayer, and from knowing that God had something for me right where I was, whether I could see it or not.

I could not have predicted where I am today five years ago, or ten years ago.

I’ve never been a five-year-plan kind of girl. I know what I want, and I know what I’m passionate about. I love books, I love stories, and I’ve spent this decade pursuing that. I didn’t make a resolution to end up here, I never had more of a plan than to publish my books and to make my living as a writer.

But I took the chances that came my way. I treasured my moments and used them. And I focused on doing the next right thing. Whether that meant writing another page. Or attending another conference. Or seeking out the help I needed.

Or simply being able to appreciate where I was while I built to where I wanted to be.

So this year, I don’t have any resolutions, except to do the next right thing. To take the next step.

And to treasure where I am, no matter what the future holds.

Here’s to 2020!

What are some of your hopes for 2020? Do you have a Next Right Thing in mind?

Who Has Time To Read??

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

This week, I spent Friday night nannying at someone’s house.

Because I party hard, ya’ll.

I don’t normally nanny anymore, mostly because I work forty hours a week in an office, then get home and work on side hustle/personal career/books until I go to sleep. But this particular job fell into my lap, and I couldn’t say no. I mean, who DOESN’T need a little extra cash the month before Christmas, right?

At least, that’s what I told myself when I got home at 10 o’clock and realized I’d been awake for seventeen consecutive hours and really, really wanted to have been asleep a long time ago.

Not that I was counting.

But, aside from a little extra cash and an excuse to go out to dinner, this nanny job also gave me an excuse to sit on my butt and read for an hour or so. I mean, the kids were in bed, parents weren’t headed home for a while, and I had time.

And time, lately, isn’t something I have a lot of.

Actually, my reading has slowed down a little in the last few months. And by slowing down a little, I mean it’s fallen off a cliff into the ocean. I generally read a lot—in fact, I’ve read 96 books this year. But finding time to read when you work forty hours a week and run your own side hustle is a little—demanding.

So I listen to audiobooks in my car—with the volume all the way up, because due to personal reasons, my car sounds like a monster truck. Please don’t ask. And I sneak in a chapter here and a few pages there. I’ve started to bring a book to work with me, so I can read during my lunch break. That tends to have mixed results. Mostly because I do want to be social as well and hang out with my coworkers.

Because being social is definitely a priority in my life.

Wink wink.

Just now, I am working through Seven Years In Tibet. Actually, I’ve reviewed this wonderful book on my blog before, and I can truthfully say that it is just as magical and engaging the second time around. Despite having to read it in bits and pieces. I also have an audiobook waiting for me, which I WILL start today. Lately, the temptation in my car has been to turn on the radio and listen to music on the way to work, and several of my audiobooks have been returned to the library unheard.

Definitely not my proudest moment.

But today I am jumping back on the bookwagon, so to speak, and am determined not only to listen to this audiobook, but to fill up my queue again.

Soo… any suggestions?

What kind of crazy things do you do to find time to read? Tell me about them in the comments!

Eight Characteristics Of Serious Writers: Hope

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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Can I ask you a question, just between us writers and anyone else who happens to swing by my blog and see this post?

What are you hoping for?

When you sit down to write, where do you see your book going? Or, rather, where do you want it to go?

What are the big dreams in the back of your mind that you’ll never tell a single soul and definitely not admit to yourself because c’mon. That’s crazy! You don’t even have a completed manuscript yet. What right do you have to dream about that fulfilling career and personal endorsement by your favorite author in the whole world?

I’m going to tell you a secret.

You are allowed to make your dream as big as you want it to be.

When I was first getting started in my career—and I mean first getting started, a total baby author who hadn’t even finished a single book—my dream was not just to be a good writer or to have a finished book, which would have been a stretch anyway, but to be an amazing one. One of the greats. The elite.

Writer, when I was dreaming that, I was not great. Honestly? I wasn’t even good. And I have old manuscripts to prove it.

But that wasn’t the point. I didn’t have proof this could happen or a five-year plan. I had a dream.

“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me . . . Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

~ Shel Silverstein

Now, I am not claiming to be one of the greats. In fact, my dream is still so far out of my reach that at times I lose sight of it completely, and I have a lot of work left to do before I get anywhere near that goal. But it’s still my dream. And I am slowly making steps forward to reach it. Instead of an unfinished manuscript, I have written eight books. Instead of nannying to support my dream, I—against all odds and to my own great surprise—was hired out of more than a hundred other applicants to work as an apprentice scriptwriter for a radio program I happen to love.

Dreams happen. They happen when you have hope and when you move forward step by step and don’t give up.

Tips to Cultivate Hope.

1. Know what you’re hoping for. Do you want a published book, a career as a writer, and a place on the bestseller list? Or do you, for now, just want a finished story and a character that cooperates with you? What are you dreaming about and hoping for? Is it wild? Is it a little crazy? Does it bring you joy?

2. Don’t punish yourself for hoping. I used to do this. All the time. I told myself I was being silly, that I was being prideful. Now I just let myself dream because I’ve started to realize, without those crazy daydreams and wild hopes, I start to give up. I lose sight of what I want, and my attention wanders. Hope keeps me centered, and it keeps me moving.

3. Write your dream down. Repeat it to yourself when you’re alone. Keep it somewhere you can go back to, especially on the days when life feels all kinds of impossible. You’re going to need that spark of hope. So keep it alive.

4. Don’t share it with everyone. Let it be yours, just for now. People are quick to shoot down ideas they feel are ‘impossible’, or to come up with ten different reasons why you’re crazy for even trying. Nothing kills dreams faster than someone else trying to be realistic for you. So, for now, keep your hopes a little sacred, and let your work speak for itself when you finally reach your goal. ‘I have’ is much harder to argue with than ‘I will’.

Good luck, dearest writer! May your tea be hot and your dreams wild.

Eight Characteristics Of Serious Writers: Enthusiasm

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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I still get excited about my writing.

After seven years on the same set of books, that sounds crazy doesn’t it? Don’t the characters get stale? Doesn’t the world get boring?

Actually . . . they do.

Sometimes.

I have days when I’m not excited about what I’m writing. We all do. In fact, I have weeks when I’m not excited about what I’m writing, especially when it comes to the last rounds of revisions and editing. Once I’ve written a chapter eight different times and it still isn’t right, I start to get a little irritated with it.

But for the most part, I love my stories. I think they’re worth all the frustration I’ve spent on them, all the years I’ve devoted to their creation. And . . . I honestly just like the story. I like the characters. I am endlessly enthusiastic about writing them because I want to read what happens. And that fuels my writing more than any dream of getting published I can come up with.

But I learned a long time ago that enthusiasm wouldn’t write the pages for me unless I paired it with discipline.

“In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm . . . in the real world all rests on perseverance.”

~ Johann Wolfgang Goethe

It’s great to be enthusiastic about your stories. I highly recommend it, in fact. That love is going to shine through in your writing and eventually in your pitching. Your readers will be able to tell if you love a character, story, or even a setting. Or if you don’t care about them.

But sometimes I think we as writers—and as humans—don’t realize that enthusiasm doesn’t last without a little help. It’s easy to be enthusiastic about a new idea—for about two weeks. Maybe even a month, if you’re determined. But to be enthusiastic about a story for seven years—that’s a little harder. But if you continue to foster that attitude of enthusiasm for a project long after everyone else would have given up on it, you may just find yourself far ahead of those authors who refuse to stick to one idea for more than a year or two.

Tips to Cultivate Enthusiasm.

1. Think of enthusiasm less as something you feel—and more as something you choose. Feelings fade. They are fickle, flighty things that pop up at the most inopportune times and vanish just when you need them most. If you are a writer who writes only when you feel like it, you will probably never finish a book. So choose to be enthusiastic. Choose to love your characters when you don’t like them, and appreciate your story when you would much rather hate it. Give it love when you don’t feel like it, and the feelings will follow.

2. Prioritize. Give your writing time precedence. Value it. Make it special with tea, a writing companion, or a well-worn ritual. Know when your best writing time is and take advantage of it. Start with a hundred words, or two hundred. Once you’ve started, it’s much easier to keep going—and to remember why you loved this story in the first place.

3. Spiral journal. I got this idea from one of the loveliest author/speakers in the industry. (Hi, Nancy!) Sit down with your journal, ask your character a question, and give them two minutes to answer while you scribble frantically to get down what they say. Then choose a sentence you’ve written that you want to dig deeper into, write it down, and set your timer again. Have your character talk a bit more about that. And so on and so forth. Believe me. It’s brilliant. Nancy taught us this technique at the last writing conference I went to, and it built my sixth book from the ground up. I was so very grateful.

4. In the end, worry less about being enthusiastic and more about being committed. I’m afraid this is what it comes down to, O writer. It’s lovely to be enthusiastic about your story. It helps a great deal and pours a lot of love onto the pages. But in the end, what really matters is that you are committed. That you are going to show up, even when you’d rather not, and write the next page when you’d rather trash the whole thing. A writer who can do that will conquer any story they touch.

Good luck, dearest writer! May your tea be hot and your dreams wild.

On The Edge Of Living

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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All men die, I tell them when they ask me why the world ends the way it does. And when they die, they come here.

We’re not dead. Not yet. They ask me why that is, but I don’t tell them the reason. I don’t tell them that we’re the forgotten people, the ones sent ahead to meet Death before she was sent for them. Some know already.

The ones that don’t are happier not knowing.

We live in the cliffs. Beneath Death’s falls, on the edge of the world. The seventh sea flows above us, spilling over the black rocks, tumbling into the abyss below us. The dead follow the current, and they fall. Straight to heaven’s doors, the tales say, or maybe straight through hell’s gates. I’ve stopped trying to guess which. Maybe it’s both at once. Maybe neither.

Either way, I don’t intend to find out. We live on the edge of the world, in the span of breath between living and dying, and I have no intention of joining either side.

Instead, I watch the sunrise from the black rocks, the cliffs and ledges. The light passes through the falling water, glinting like jewels, gleaming like veils of gossamer and pearls. Rainbows dance across the damp stones, and mist hangs in the air, smelling of wet earth and sea air. The dead pass us by, hardly more than a flicker of pale light, a solitary spirit caught up by the falling water and the ocean currents.

I’ve been watching them this morning, mostly before the sun came up. They’re easiest to see by moonlight, and I find that I think clearer when I’m behind the falls. I’ve lost count of how many souls have gone by, some of them so thin that they’re nearly transparent, but I have to go back now. The others will be waiting, and if I don’t come they’ll worry.

I rise, climbing down from the ledge I’ve been sitting on. The rocks are slick with mist and moss, but I’ve been climbing these cliffs for a millennia, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve slipped. I know these rocks too well.

The ledges below are flushed with green, with tangled vines and waving leaves. The gardens are being tended already, and more people are awake than I expected. Fires are being lit, coals fanned to life and kindled again with driftwood and dried grass. I kneel beside one, helping the woman to blow the embers to life again. She glances at me, at my soaked shirt and wet hair, and smiles. “Been at the falls?”

I shrug. “Keeping watch, that’s all.”

She nods. Someone is always watching the falls, not for the dead, but for the living. Those who were sent ahead, meant to meet Death on her way rather than waiting for her. People like Mazia, whose uncles put her on a boat in the seventh sea and towed her into the current. She spoke with the wind, they said, and her smile belonged to the devil.

Personally, I’ve always liked her smile.

Ewan, too, came to us from his own family. His legs are crippled, and they were finished with him. Most of the others have the same story. A child that no one wanted, a baby that was an inconvenience, a grandmother who was a burden. They come to use one by one, and we take them in. The lip of the falls catches them, the rocks that allow the dead through but hold back the living. I hear them, or someone does, and we bring them here. Here, where the sun shines like liquid gold through the curtain of falling water, where the moon rests on her flight across the sky, and the stars seek shelter from the burning rays of the sun. Death doesn’t come looking for us here, and the nights are cool and still, broken only by the rushing of the falls. They are broken when they come, but they heal. There is peace in growing things, in gathering a harvest, in building a colony. We live on the edge of the world, in the span of breath between living and dying, and we are content.

Snowstorms and Michael Crichton

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

Photo by Sindre Strøm from Pexels

Fun fact: it is snowing today.

Actually, it has been snowing all week.

I think it might have something to do with it being January. And my living in Colorado, where we randomly get blizzards in January and sometimes have to stay at home because the snow is almost as high as our knees and we can’t get our cars out of the driveway.

Crazy, right?

This week has been one long succession of crazy, actually. Besides a round of job interviews (or attempted job interviews), I have also done my best to get to work, finish my writing projects for the week, conquer a cold, and keep my house warm enough to comfortably live in despite the frigid temperatures and high winds.

I managed most of these things.

Definitely not all.

For example, on Tuesday, in the midst of a snowstorm that was actually a blizzard, my dad and I piled into his Subaru in an attempt to make it to work.

Spoiler.

We did not make it.

We got stuck three times. Once on the way and twice on the way back. In-between, we waited at a neighbor’s house for the plow to come and save us. My dad worked. I binge read Michael Crichton’s Micro.

If you have never read Micro, I would highly recommend it. Michael Crichton’s books are a rather new addition to my shelves, and the more I read, the more impressed I am. I think Micro is my new favorite of his works. The story is engaging, fast-paced, and about as scary as they come. If you’re a fan of Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, or monster thrillers of any kind, I would highly recommend it.

To be honest, it was the perfect book for the type of day I was having. Instead of focusing on being stuck at a stranger’s house for several hours, trudging through calf-deep snow, and being battered about by bone-chilling winds, I got to explore another world and immerse myself in the dangers and grandeur of a microscopic world.

And, seeing as how we were stuck for seven hours, and I never did get to work, I managed to read the entire book that day.

All 400 pages of it.

So it wasn’t entirely a lost cause.

And we did make it home eventually. Neither of us were frost-bitten, and my dad even got his car back with minimal damage.

I think next time, though, I will just stay home and read Michael Crichton by my wood stove instead. Blizzards in January are not some of my favorite things.

Portrait of a Missionary

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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As a writer, I am fascinated by people.

No two people carry the same stories. Their life experiences, their worldview, and their hopes and dreams are uniquely their own. No work of fiction can compare to the beauty and complexity of the world around us, but, caught in our jobs, our routines, and our day-to-day tasks, it’s easy to lose sight of the richness of life amidst the mundane.

In this series, I would like to reawaken your awareness of the extraordinary.

A.R. Geiger

Not everyone has the privilege of a returning missionary sitting at their dinner table.

As I was setting out our plates and sitting down opposite my visitor, I was very aware of this. Even in my unique position as this particular missionary’s sister, I only get the chance to have dinner with him once every other year or so. Armin Geiger is a youth pastor in Vanuatu, a collection of islands in the South Pacific, and he returns to the United States very rarely.

When he does, I like to make sure I have at least one evening with him.

He didn’t hesitate when I told him I wanted a story. His life in Vanuatu is a strange mix of the mundane and the fantastical, of office work, a regular job, and schedules, and, scattered throughout, adventures worthy of a far longer post than this one. He always has a story ready when I ask.

“We were in west coast Santo on the medical ship last year,” he told me, already forgetting his dinner. “Giving care to the local communities. But their clinic location was set up in one village, and all the other people had to travel to get there. We knew a lot of elderly and disabled people needed medical care. So a local, one other girl, and I took a tender—a small speedboat—and drove forty minutes up the coast from where the ship was anchored.”

He sat back in his chair, pausing to remember. “We arrived and the waves were stronger than we anticipated. So I hopped off with this other girl, and we go off with the local to find these two old ladies. In this small woven hut, we find this one lady who was practically deaf, hunched over, frail as a bone, with this stick that she used to walk. She was in her seventies, I think, dressed in a classic, flowery gown that they wear in the islands. My friend began to walk her toward the shore, while I went to get the other patient, who ended up being an old lady who had no legs. Not as old, probably in her forties or fifties, but she had no legs and some sort of odd, wheelchair type thing that didn’t work so well.”

“So we half-carried, half-wheeled her to the shore, which was probably 200-300 meters away, and when we arrived, the waves had gotten even bigger.” He ran his hand through his hair, looking out the window. “And so the challenge was to get these two old ladies into the boat with waves that were up to my chest and not kill them or drown them. Cause at that age, you’re very frail. The guy on the boat had it running because you had to keep it running continually. So he’s running it with prow pointed out to sea, hitting every wave and riding it out. We’re timing it with the waves. So I scooped up the old grandma with the walking stick, and when a wave comes and it runs down, I run in and chuck her on board.”

I laughed, and he grinned, continuing, “She’s sitting there, freaking out,” he lets out a yell that sounds as much like an older woman as a twenty-something man can sound. “Then we go back for the next lady. I’m carrying her in front of my chest and the boat comes down—‘cause when it’s on a wave it’s up high, like above my head—the boat comes down, and I go for it to put her in. Then the wave comes a little sooner than we anticipated, so I lift the lady up high above my head, and the wave hits me in the chest, drenching me, ruining my phone.”

He lifts his arms above his head, demonstrating for me, totally caught up in his story now. “So I’m holding her as high as I can, and the waves are still coming, and then the boat comes down again and I chucked her onto the side and the guy on top grabbed her and pulled her up.”

“Pretty intense couple of moments,” he tells me, pausing again as he remembers the boat trip and the struggle to get the women aboard and back down the coast, “because if she fell in, that would not have been good. But we got them safely to the location, where they got medical care and glasses.”

I got up to refill his plate, marveling that, to him, his story is a fairly normal part of his life in Vanuatu. To me, it sounds as outlandish as one of the history books I grew up on, and the realization serves as a reminder that the extraordinary still remains hidden among the mundane.

But, as I said, not everyone has the pleasure of a returning missionary sitting at their dinner table.