Three Lessons From Springtime in Surrey

In February of this year, I was accepted by Wild Blue Wonder Press to participate in their first ever anthology, making this my first ever traditional publication. It was something I’ve been working towards for years, and it’s still hard to believe it’s finally here. Now, here we are, launching the book and sending my story out into the world.

You’ve already gotten to hear from a lot of my fellow authors over the past weeks, and you’ll continue to hear from them for a couple weeks more. So today, I thought I’d briefly go over some lessons and observations I’ve had while achieving the milestone of publishing my first story.

God does so much more than we expect.

I didn’t expect to get into the anthology. I saw the submission call and gave it a try with a story I had thought up on a whim to have something to send in. Of course, I hoped that it would make the cut, but realistically I knew there were a lot of other authors who had sent in. God surprised me by choosing me for it.

Then came the process of drafting and editing, all on deadlines, and there wasn’t a single one of those that I didn’t think I was going to miss. While I had practiced writing on deadlines and knew I had the head knowledge to do it, these were some of the tightest turn around times I’d ever experienced, with a legible draft needed at the end of them.

And yet, I made every single one.

God is able to do so much more than we expect or even dream to ask for. And not only is He able, but He chooses to share it with us.

That’s a hard truth for me to accept, because I can think of other impossible things that I really wanted, that I still want even today, expectations that He has not shattered. And honestly, I don’t know what to do with that gap. Maybe this is the process of Him reshaping the expectations I have into something far greater. But many days it doesn’t feel like it.

Many days, I have to grip on tight to the things He’s done before, things like this, to know that He will see me through.

Not everything has to be perfect, and you can make mistakes.

When I’m writing a draft just to pitch sometime, I have all the time that I want to tweak it and make it whatever vision I have of perfection.

When writing this story on a deadline, I didn’t have that. I simply had to turn in a strong draft by the date specified. That meant, especially in the early stages, that I had to turn in a story that I knew needed work. That’s the whole point of a draft, but I forget that a lot. Do you?

Sometimes in writing those drafts or turning in those edits, I would make a mistake. It’s easy for me to be too hard on myself when I’m in the safety of my own world making those edits, but as I worked with the rest of the WBWP team, I realized that this was a safe space to make mistakes and to fix them together.

Sometimes in that process, I had to go with a suggestion that didn’t feel right at the time, but that I knew would make it a better story. Sometimes the cool shiny things I added to the story didn’t make sense and I had to delete them.

It doesn’t just apply to book editing. Sometimes we do the very best we can, and it’s not quite perfect. Sometimes we make mistakes. That's okay. (That’s different than a deliberate choice to sin, which God can still work with if we repent, but it looks a little different and for the purposes of this lesson is not what I’m addressing.) The idea of life is being able to work to fix them together and to discover better ways to do it next time.

Everyone’s different and has their own amazing story to tell.

Finally, this anthology has served as a lovely reminder of everyone’s uniqueness. I look across the eight stories in this collection, and they couldn’t be more different. They represent eight different people, eight different lives, eight different backgrounds.

Each of us has something to bring to this world that is uniquely us. It may not be doing anything big or flashy. It may just be living our lives the best that we can. But that’s still something only you can do, because there is only one you.

That story, that life is important. It may not seem like it, but the whole world is actually listening for it, and if it doesn’t go on, we will all miss out on something beautiful.

This anthology is part of my story right now. And God can do so much more than I expect with the rest of my story, and with the rest of yours, too.

If you love stories featuring diverse casts of characters, strong female friendships, and of course, tea and literature, then this is the story for you.

Jessamy Aubertine is too much for her university classmates, too little for her overstressed mum, and nothing in between. In an attempt to make herself useful, she takes on a spring holiday at her childhood home in Box Hill to sell the family's fading tea shop and somehow tell her mum that she intends to switch study plans.

When mysterious letters signed by famous authors show up, can Jessamy and a pair of unlikely comrades find the writer behind them--and perhaps discover themselves as well? Or will their friendship fade with The Muses at the end of spring holiday?

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