Grace-filled Tuesdays (Book Club "Meeting" #31): Fighting Discouragement

Welcome to the club!  If you love books as much as I do...then we totally get each other.

For the past couple of months, my oldest son's wife and their four daughters (2, 4, and twins aged 6) have been living with us at our new house in VA, while our son was completing some flight training in FL in preparation for his new career with a regional airline.  It has been a wonderful opportunity for us to be involved on a day-to-day basis with the lives of these precious girls.  They will be moving into their own place very soon and we're going to miss having them around; but luckily their new house is less than 20 minutes away from ours, so we'll still be able to see them often.

This is the older of the twins (by a whole two minutes), doing what she loves to do best.  And I totally get her.

This eager reader cannot put a book down, once she gets into it.  She reads until the last possible minute before the lights go out at bedtime.  She brings whatever book she is currently devouring to the table (with her nose in it, just like the saying goes), and is barely conscious of her mom's gentle admonishments to close it and eat now, read later.  This photo was taken recently during their homeschool's weekly "Tea Time Tuesday" celebration, which features poetry readings and sweet treats, when she had a plate of animal crackers--and chocolate icing to dip them in!--on her plate.  (Now that, my friends, is dedication to reading!  Even I might have put my book down, no matter how good it was, for chocolate icing!)

I might add that these girls' mother is a former librarian/archivist; so they come by their love for books naturally.  All four of them think their regular trips to the library are almost unbearably exciting.  Fresh new piles of books for each girl!  It never gets old--it's like Christmas morning every single time!

I like to imagine giving Erin's Ring to this granddaughter (and all the rest of my growing brood of grandchildren, too) a few years down the road.  She will be ready for it before I know it.

And that, I think, is what will keep me from being discouraged by the lack of worldly success that has thus far eluded my two novels.  It helps me to remember that the whole reason I set out to write Finding Grace (which was the one and only novel I thought I would ever write) ten years ago was so that I could pass it down to my children's children.  I imagined writing a book that would hopefully inspire them to fight all the bad influences in our increasingly fallen world.  So despite the fact that neither book has made much money for either me or their publisher, maybe they can do their small part in helping young readers--the ones who are near and dear to my heart, and maybe even a few strangers I will never meet--to find the Catholic Faith, to embrace the Faith of their Baptism more fully, or to make a better decision when faced with difficult choices.

If you are interested in receiving a signed copy of Finding Grace at a discounted price, visit Catholic Reads and find out how to subscribe to their newsletter.  The sale is going on for a limited time through this website, which is dedicated to helping relatively unknown works of Catholic fiction by relatively unknown authors get into the hands of more readers.  Knowing there are generous folks like this out there, working hard to promote books like mine...how can I be anything but encouraged?

That's it for today.  Now go find yourself a good book to get lost in!