ConnieBrz

This is my story. It’s not the whole story or even the biggest portion. It is, however, the most important–

It’s the sweetened- condensed version of how  I met Jesus and came to love Him like thunder.

All my life, I’ve loved Jesus. These days, I call Him Yeshua.

Why? I don’t know.

Maybe Jesus became overused—a worn-out name without meaning. Like telling someone I-love-you a thousand times a day until the words dribble on the floor unnoticed.

And I really want to notice.

A Little Backstory:

I spent most of my years wildly vacillating between living correctly and loving extravagantly. Seldom have the two intersected for long.

My father pastored tiny churches full of the salt-of-the-earth kind of folks who say amen at all the right moments and play dominoes on Saturday night fueled by pots of  black coffee brewed up one right after the other. We visited a different home every Sunday and ate more fried chicken than allowed by law, even here in the South.

We did not dance. We did not swear.  We did not listen to worldly music or watch worldly movies or keep company with worldly people. Truth be told, we did not have much fun, unless you count the dominoes (which I don’t as back then, I wasn’t allowed to play.)

My older brothers decided to be hippies. They trashed  their butch-wax and grew their buzz-cuts out long and shaggy. They threw on  love beads and stopped wearing deodorant. Looking back, their lack of toiletries most likely saved me from a life of communes and love-ins,  as they seemed to be having way more fun than I was stuck back home bouncing from one chicken-fried dinner to the next.

So with the option of Flower Child off the table, I came to one conclusion.

All this correct living was boring as hell.

Somewhere in the recent digital past, I ran across this bright young lady on Twitter and begged for a stop-over on her blog tour. Why? I like her picture. Seriously, with hair like that, how can you not like her? Secondly, she’s writing about knights and fair maidens and jousting. If my characters weren’t constantly mouthing off and turning out to be thousands of years old, I’d totally write about jousting.
Also, she’s sitting in my kitchen chair–okay, not my *actual* kitchen chair, but a rogue twin, separated at birth.

Katie, can you tell us a little about your book?

Behold the Dawn  is a medieval “blood and thunder” tale—with a love story at its core. It’s about rogue knight Marcus Annan, who has spent the last sixteen years fighting in the tourneys—the huge mock battles condemned by the church—trying to forget the great sin of his past. When confronted by a mysterious monk who played his own ill-fated role in Annan’s yesteryears, Annan is compelled to travel to the Third Crusade in the Holy Land, in an effort to save the life of a friend. When he arrives too late, he becomes responsible for delivering the man’s widow to safety in France. But when they are pursued by both his own enemies and those of the lady, Annan is forced to realize that if he ever hopes to be free of his past, he must face it once for all.

“Blood and Thunder”. . . how cool is that? Can you tell us a little about your writing journey?

Stories have been running amuck in my brain for as long as I can remember. I started writing them down when I was eleven or twelve. Throughout high school, I wrote, edited, and produced a newsletter called Horse Tails, before moving onto bigger game. My first novel,  A Man Called Outlaw, about the land wars in 19^th-century Wyoming, was published in 2006.

I think I’m seeing a theme here– strong, heroic protagonists. Maybe it wasn’t just your hair that got my attention.

So, how do you deal with rejection? Liquor? Gambling? Confession is good for the soul.

This video  pretty much sums it up!

Actually, dealing with any kind of criticism is just a matter of absorbing, gleaning the good, accepting it, and moving on. I give myself a day or so to stiffen my upper lip, then get cracking again.

As a writer, who’s encouraged you the most?

I’m blessed to have a ton of very encouraging people around me. My family, friends, and writing buddies are all supremely supportive of my writing. I don’t know that I could single out just one person, since so many have contributed in some fashion or another. But my sister Amy, my dad, and my crit partners Linda Yezak and Adrie Ashford are definitely at the top of the pile.

Explain your creative process (Do you wear fuzzy dragon slippers for inspiration? Drink your morning coffee from a chalice?)

Actually, I do wear fuzzy slippers on a regular basis! My writin’ shoes, I call them.

 I’m not one of those people who just sit down of a morning and let fly. I like schedules, I like being organized. I write for two hours, five days a week—and I stick to that time religiously. Tragedy or plague has to be in the wind to prevent me from sitting down at my desk at four in the afternoon. I usually spend thirty minutes warming up, divorcing my brain from the helter-skelter of the day and priming it for creativity. I jot ideas and plan my day’s work in my writing journal, proofread what I wrote the day before, and select a soundtrack to listen to while I work. Then I dive in! I don’t concentrate on word or page count. That’s an unnecessary pressure, I think. I like that first draft to come as organically as possible. Sometimes that means I’ll write five pages a day; sometimes it means I’ll only write a paragraph.

In a perfect world full of magical editor fairies granting your every publishing wish, what would you write next if it couldn’t possibly tank?

Oh, anything that would sell a million copies and let me retire a wealthy woman! No, seriously, I’m blessed to be writing pretty much exactly what I want to be writing. My next project is one that I’d tentatively say I’m even more excited about than I was Behold—and that’s saying something! It’s a historical piece about the passion, betrayal, and vengeance that dog two men and the woman they both love through the trenches of World War I, corruption in colonial Kenya, and the criminal underbelly of London. I also have a completed fantasy (about a man who discovers his dreams are really memories of another world) waiting for some serious edits.

Love it!

Thanks for stopping by. Best wishes on your writing adventure~

Behold the Dawn

Marcus Annan, a tourneyer famed for his prowess on the battlefield, thought he could keep the secrets of his past buried forever. But when a mysterious crippled monk demands Annan help him find justice for the transgressions of sixteen years ago, Annan is forced to leave the tourneys and join the Third Crusade.

Wounded in battle and hunted by enemies on every side, he rescues an English noblewoman from an infidel prison camp and flees to Constantinople. But, try as he might, he cannot elude the past. Amidst the pain and grief of a war he doesn’t even believe in, he is forced at last to face long-hidden secrets and sins and to bare his soul to the mercy of a God he thought he had abandoned years ago.

So how does one become a Pharisee?

I don’t remember waking up one morning intent on hardening up over religious dogma, leaving my first love behind, developing a critical spirit…

Funny how it happened anyway.

Life on the Funny Farm

Living with mental illness stinks. When everyone sits around pretending nothing’s wrong, a girl questions her own sanity after awhile. We were a family of secrets, pretending to be okay while the world fell apart.

I learned to cope. Sleep meant escape. I slept hours and hours at a time. I developed migraines, not on purpose you understand but the effect was the same– escape into pain.

And then, for my next trick, I shut down entirely.

In the dark, I peeled off a portion of myself and backed away, leaving it behind to deal with things too big for someone so weak.  The technical term is disassociation. I locked myself up, ran all my friends off and spent days  in a fantasy world of my own creation.

I learned to run.

The smallest problem, the hint of pain and off I went– overly sensitive, unable to deal. That’s the trouble with terminal cancer—a head cold might do you in. Avoidance seemed like a mighty good idea.

I stopped crying.

One tear sneaks out and next you’re blubbering so loud they hear you in Kansas.  Crying makes others uncomfortable. Blubbering gets you committed. So at the ripe old age of fifteen,  a rock replaced a once tender heart.

I stopped feeling.

The problem with not feeling anything is you don’t feel anything. The Jesus I knew and loved brought an entire boatload of those pesky feelings with Him on every visit. Hardening up meant I no longer felt His presence but I could live with that.

I backed away from Him too.

Religion is Easier than Relationship.

The next fifteen years, I pretended to be okay.

This was the plan. It seemed like a mighty fine plan at the time.

• Grit teeth.
• Barrel through.
• Find all the right answers through intensive Bible study and/or sitting under the teaching of others.
• Spout said answers without thinking.
• Commit to a rigid life of correctness. Quiet time in the morning, Bible study at night. Attend church with ardent enthusiasm.
• Mumble canned religious rhetoric until others puke with joy.
• Pray desperate prayers occasionally, then snap back into hiding.
• Hope for a slow death to give time for any last minute repentance just in case.
• Don’t let anyone close enough to notice anything amiss.

After all, what more was there? I was saved by grace, filled with the Holy Ghost. Now I just needed to hang on tight and coast along a few dozen years until I got hit by a bus.

Easy.

Only one problem. Other people hurt. My stellar acting skillz and religious pedigree gave people the silly idea I had it all together. After all, my father was a pastor, I was a nurse with an intact family and a couple of well-behaved children (Pharisee-ism is taught you know, but that’s another story entirely.)

A steady stream of the wounded arrived on my doorstep and bled all over the bricks. Not one. Not two or three.

Dozens.

I murmured religious answers, twice dead, plucked up by the roots and scooted them off as quick as possible. I had nothing to give them. No bread. No water. No deliverance. No healing.

No Jesus.

I could  hear God snickering as they paraded through my door.

From way inside my hard little heart, I raged against their weakness. I fussed and fumed, waved my arms and told them to buck up. Ignore that pain woman! Move on already!

But like the Grinch, something deep inside started to wiggle.

I was about to get hit by another sort of bus entirely.

So there I was, minding my own business—a husband, two little girls and a life busy enough to keep  thinking down to a minimum. The idea that I might be misrepresenting the love of Jesus to a hurting world didn’t bother me one stinkin’ bit.

Let them eat cake. Or figure it out for themselves. Or show up at church and peel off the top ten percent from their paychecks like the rest of us poor church slobs. Whatever.

I just wanted them off my doorstep.

Playing Pharisee Games

You may have noticed I’m not talking much about sin. There’s good reason for that. I figured out long ago sin isn’t the only thing keeping us from Jesus.

Sin is a condition, like dandruff or the heartbreak of psoriasis. Only it’s something we all share. And because it’s so common, sometimes we don’t notice anymore.

Sins are things we pick up to beat ourselves with, then turn around and beat everyone else. It’s the selfish things we do to make ourselves feel better at the expense of others.  It’s the things God hates because it damages our soul and He loves us so much, He doesn’t want to see us hurt.

 Pharisees, on the other hand, are very fond of sin. We catalog and sort. We point out the sins of others and feel superior in the process. We pick out the biggies and tell folks to straighten up and  they’ll be fine, only we know good and well they won’t. We hand them a list of requirements for living the proper Christian life and let them drown while we come up with a new list.

Not once in the gospels does Jesus pound on sinners. He eats dinner with  prostitutes. Hangs out with the longshoremen. He makes friends with the IRS. When I woman gets caught in adultery, He refuses to carry out the penalty. He says, fine. Let the one here without sin throw the first rock and when He winds up being the only one left, He tells her to just go on woman, and cut it out already. Real tough.

Jesus loves sinners.

Pharisees tend to piss Him off, bigtime.

The Wages of Sin

The biggest problem with sin, both ours and others? It seperates us from a loving Father and pays out dividends for decades. Things like pain. And shame. And anger. And fear.

We need forgiveness. We need a whole new birthday.

Simple really.

Pharisees want to complicate things. We strap burdens on others we can’t carry ourselves and make-pretend we’re Hercules if anyone’s looking. Instead of introducing people to the One who pardons the guilty, who can fix broken hearts, we tell them how to live the Christian Lifestyle—

• Find yourself a church (ours preferably)
• Attend every time the doors open no matter how tired you are, no matter how many hours of overtime you worked last week
• Open up your wallet and start paying out (ten percent, off the top)
• Teach Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, sing in the choir, lead worship
• Listen to the pastor ‘cause he’ll surely get around to addressing your issues… from a nice, safe distance, in a year or two.

So hurting people buy some church clothes and sit on the pew, holding their boxes and wonder what on earth they’re doing there. The Pharisees sit on the other side of the church with all their church friends and pray the messy people with their messy pain don’t ask questions they can’t answer.

It’s Not an Excuse But…

We all tend to self medicate—drugs, alcohol, relationships, shopping. Anything to fill the empty places. My drug of choice was religion.

He didn’t like it much.

He decided He wasn’t having it anymore.

What Are You Doing Here?

By this time, I’d played the game long enough and loud enough I believed my own press releases. Pain? What pain. I had a wonderful childhood. Whoever that was hiding in the closet for two years, it wasn’t me. I was Super Christian, able to attend multiple Bible studies in a single week. More powerful than a sack of wet Baptists. Able to leap hurting seekers with a single shrug.

So why was I crying on the couch every night?

Might have something to do with Jesus showing up in my living room  whether I wanted Him to or not.

Put the kids down for a nap and dadgumit, there He was. The hubby heads out the door to work the late shift and I’d settle in for an entire night, all by myself with Magnum PI and BAM! There He was, sitting in the living room, ready to talk.

I didn’t want to talk.

I did the next best thing.

I avoided.

And became more religious. Yes, it was possible.

If He kept showing up that way, I figured I must be doing something wrong so I cranked up the juice. I read my Bible thirty minutes instead of fifteen, quit watching television altogether, starting sending an extra ten percent off to orphans and evangelists (that’s a total of twenty percent of the gross if you’re keeping count.) I quit wearing pants and wore only ugly clothes bought at Goodwill as everyone knows ugly clothes are much holier than pretty ones.

If nothing else, I’d run Him off having to look at me.

But He stayed.  He would not let up. And I couldn’t quit crying.

At some point I don’t even remember anymore, I decided I had to take care of myself, only I couldn’t and didn’t get the memo.   Jesus showed up like the cavalry, ready to scoop me up and kiss away all the pain. Only I was busy pretending nothing was wrong.  That box was staying shut if it killed me.

So, He let me hang on awhile longer. He started pointing out all the other folks running around, holding onto their boxes.

So many boxes, so much pain, nobody getting better.

Then He had the nerve to tell me I was religious.