Category: writing

Friday Five · summer · writing

Release {Five Minute Friday}

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

On Fridays the writers gather at Lisa Jo’s. We write in five minute increments like ones scared braved. We’re not supposed to edit or backtrack or over think, though everyone confesses to that at least once and that’s why there’s grace for even the most ordinary of writing tasks.

Except on Fridays five minute ordinary becomes extraordinary. Join us? Link up here and give us your five minutes on

Release

Sometimes the build up is more than I can stand. My fingers twitch and my eyes flick and I start to breathe convulsively as I stand surrounded by mounds of laundry and last night’s crockpot soaking in the sink.

It’s just too much life.

Is there such a thing? The calendar is pretending there’s white space but really it’s just blank until I get a rehearsal schedule and there’s another calendar of deadlines and due dates and color codes for fiction and non-fiction and the pieces that don’t actually pay inside a notebook for a writer.

I’m waiting to be struck over the head with great inspiration and it’s all around. The steam is rising off the hot pavement after the summer rain and the baby boy is looking for a lawn mower and there’s zucchini in my fridge that was on the vine a mere 48 hours ago.

There’s just so much life.

My fingers twitch and can’t fly fast enough and my mind chugs along not able to keep up with the words, words, words that spill out and over and all around because how do you capture the sound of a morning bird or a summer night?

Deep breathing. Slow. Down. There’s a little white space crammed in that afternoon between the church and the dance studio and it’s at the babbling brook that winds through the forest that grew me up when I was a college intern.

The release comes sudden. The desire to put it down and just savor the words for myself without care for if anyone else will know.

motherhood · writing

From One Extreme to the Other

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

I spent the first four days of last week just being myself. I went to a writer’s conference. I met agents and editors and successful published authors. I had insightful conversations with incredible people.  I focused my writing and took volumes of notes from a man who knows how to tell a story.

I read a book.

It was incredible and soul-filling and light-a-fire encouraging to my hopeful writer self.  While I was there, I was a blogger, a novelist-to-be, a social media guru others asked for advice.  It was thrilling to say the least.

But then I came home. And I spent the weekend being the mom I most don’t want to be.

Rather than that mom who has found her footing, I was right back to being that mom who was drowning in the weight of expectation.

Let me tell you there’s nothing heavier than the expectation you heap upon yourself.

On Saturday all four of my children were in a family wedding. After I had been gone for nearly a week, I came home, did last day of school honors and parties, packed again, and all of us headed to Atlanta for the weekend.

The sweet bride marrying my husband’s cousin is easygoing and a great believer in family. She never once made me feel like I had to do anything extra than put them in their dresses and have them show up. But of course I felt like I had to do so much more.

Here’s a piece of advice if your daughters are in a wedding. Know your own capacity for handling fancy hair and fancy clothes before you think you can do it all yourself.

I called in reinforcements in the form of my baby sister. She was great.

I was a basket case.

The bride was calm and completely unnerved by the idea that the two year old ringbearers may bolt before they got down the aisle.

I was a bundle of nerves.

So somehow I went from playing the “sure I know what I’m doing” writer mama to the “what have I gotten myself into” mama who was undone by curling irons, hot rollers, and a splash of Sprite.

Of course that splash of Sprite landed directly on the skirt of Annabelle’s dress and when I yelled about the stain, she cried great big crocodile tears that landed directly on the bodice of her dress.

And that’s when I knew I had swung the pendulum of motherhood from one extreme to the other.

I simply can’t be everything to everyone. What I can be, however, is good at who I am and aware of the situations that make me stressed because they are outside my comfort zone.  Most of these situations involve instances when I’m sure I’m about to be judged on my children’s behavior and appearance.

Are you catching a theme here?
It’s never about them. It’s always about me.  That, friends, is the problem.

Saturday wasn’t supposed to be about me. It was about how a wedding can bring a few hours of pure joy to anyone lucky enough to share it. It was about how Michael and Ashley are high school sweethearts who’ve dated for as long as Joshua and I have been married. It was about how God can cover over all our messes and steam them back into something beautiful–which is what the God-bless-her coordinator did with Annabelle’s dress.

I reached behind me in the minivan and held Annabelle’s hand while we drove to the church. I told her I was sorry and she was beautiful and no one cared if her dress had a little stain because she is more than a dress.

She is beloved by the King and a princess of heaven, and her mama is just a sinner in need of grace.

And a glass of sweet tea. Which I had at the reception while my children danced their hearts out like no one was watching.

They didn’t learn that from me, thank you Jesus. But maybe someday soon, I’ll have the courage to dance like that too.

Friday Five · writing

How I Became a Writer {Five MInute Friday}

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment
When I look back at four years of blogging, I find that my best and rawest moments have come in five minute increments. Because like Lisa Jo says, sometimes writing time is stolen five minutes at a time. Linking up with the Five Minute Friday community right here and telling you why I’m surprised by motherhood and writing right over here. 

{source}

Writer

In a yellow cardboard box on the bottom of my bookshelf are the battered remnants of what made me become a writer. Their covers torn and worn from so many countless rereadings, I’ve boxed them away in their original packaging and bought new shiny gingham covers for my girls and we snuggle under a quilt and up against too many pillows and dive in.

Laura Ingalls and her pioneer family driving across a nation when it was still in the labor pains of birth. Those were the stories that made me want to find my story. Those were the tales that made me want to tell.

But I got lost. I got lost in criticism and thin-skin and rules and regulations and shoulds and shouldn’ts and I got so very, very scared that I had no stories worth telling. So I scribbled in a journal and on napkins and in the backs of notebooks and hid my secret until I felt ready to share.

I’m never going to feel ready to share. I’m never going to really feel like I deserve to be here, to write here, to be going here to learn and dive and swim in these waters that scare me to death with their beckoning call.

But I’m doing it anyway. Somewhere along the way, I got the courage just to put a little bit out there, just to chronicle some real life, just to write it down and choose to believe a few people might care.

You did. You do. You let me hand over my broken story while it was still breaking me and you received and loved and poured grace and encouragement back into me.

And I’ve become a writer.

Friday Five · linkups · writing

Writing Secret {Five Minute Friday}

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

It’s time for Five Minute Friday and I know what this says, but I will confess to you, I didn’t get up this morning.  I blame the lack of hazelnut coffee creamer.  I’m joining with Lisa Jo and the incredible community of writers who write on a one word prompt for five solid minutes every Friday.  No editing.  No overthinking.  No fear.  Well, working on that.  Today’s prompt is…

Write 

When I get up to write, the house is still dark and my only motivation to crawl out of the warm bed and stumble to the cold living room to turn on a lamp is the coffee maker.  Thank goodness for auto program.  It starts dripping at 5 a.m. and even though I want to hit the snooze on the alarm, the steady percolating from the kitchen helps me up.

I write in the quiet because my day is usually so full of noise and requests and squeals and fussy babies that I crave just the quiet.  I lose myself in the thoughts and the words and the possibilities for just a few moments before everyone else is up and begging waffles or milk or cuddles.

I write because I’m scared. I’m scared I’ll look back and wish I had, I’m scared no one will ever want to read it, I’m scared someone actually will.  I write because there are stories that have been told over and over so many times, but no one has ever told stories of mothers and daughters and sunsets and first loves the way I will.

I write because when I was nine years old my mama put a copy of Little House in the Big Woods in my hands and I was transported to another place.  I write to capture that for someone else, to be that transporter, to share a story that has a different meaning for the person who might someday be on the other side of the page than it has for me right now typing the words.

I write even though I don’t know if anything will ever come of it, even though no one’s ever paid me a dime to do it, even though I sometimes think I’d be better off reading great writers than ever trying to be one.

I write because I’m not alone even though it’s the most solitary time of my day.

I’ve got some fun giveaways going on this month!  Click here to read about how you can win a copy of my favorite organizational tools!

Margin Mom · reflections · writing

So Where Do I Go From Here?

Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment
{reflections on Allume, MomCon, and 31 Days}
It was the most jam-packed, kid-juggling, carry-on hauling, coffee-chugging month of the year. Seriously, December’s going to have nothing on October.  At least we’ll all be in the same state the whole month.
In the 31 days of October, I wrote 31 posts about embracing the idea of Living Local.  Confession: eight of those days were spent pretty far from my local. 
I went with my amazing leadership team for my local MOPS group to MomCon 2013 in Kansas City from October 17-20.  Then I turned right around and repacked my suitcase and headed up I-85 to spend four days in a hotel with women I only know online.  From October 24-27 I attended the Allume Conference. 
But just prior to my leaving for two back-to-back weekends without my family, my husband flew to Philadelphia to spend a week at a national conference for CDFI companies. (Don’t know what that is? Read this post.)
And while all this was going on, we found ourselves heavily involved in the production of The Masquerade, a walk-through drama, that took place at our church last week and involved very late nights and a lot of bacon. (We were going for realism in the morning scene.)
I don’t tell you all this to make myself sound like superwoman because I most definitely am not. I tell you this because I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons in the last month about my honest capacity as a 
….wife.
….mother.
….writer.
….servant.
My resounding takeaway from all that I’ve experienced sitting at the feet of amazing Christian women and sitting on my own bathroom floor streaming tears?
I have to create more space in my life.
I need space to listen.
I need space to create.
I need space to enjoy.
When I am running from one good thing to the next I’m getting filled, but I’m maxing out my capacity to use that good to encourage others. 
And that’s what I most want to do. I want to encourage moms to believe what they do matters. I want to encourage women to believe they are enough because Jesus believed them to be so. I want to encourage girls to evade the trap of comparison that will rob life of its joy. 
I want to be right here at this time and in this space for a purpose that is greater than me.  I want to love my neighbor despite the dirty laundry and social divide. 
I believe these two things are what God is calling me to beyond my first call as wife and mother. So over the next several weeks, I’ll be wrapping a few projects and turning my focus toward this.

It’s something I tried to do over the summer when I wrote about my search for margin, but it wasn’t time.  I still had commitments that I wanted to honor and that God is blessing.

But, now, I’m turning a corner.

I might be pretty quiet in this space from time to time while I finish some other work I’ve started, but it’s a rest that is long overdue. 
If you’d like to leave me a comment and tell me what’s filled you beyond capacity, I’d love to know I’m not the only one learning to stand strong and say “no.” 
For a list of influencers who’ve impacted my life in the past month click here.