Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, I think I am finally getting some good traction with my novel after two false starts. I know you've read many novels but never written any.  Probably you didn't need to, already being so immersed in the stories of other.  Or you couldn't, being in the precarious position of a pastor, held accountable for your every word and often by ham-fisted literalism. But I know you would know what I mean when I say I was struggling with, for example, choosing the right point-of-view or which tense (past vs present) to use.  By "right" I mean right for the story, faithful to the voice of the character that I am speaking through and for.  The Word speaks the Man into existence. I am also busy helping my brother-in-law with home renovation, a great training for writer, hammered some good common sense into me.  And then there's the great generosity of the many people I've served and worked with in the past month.  It's been surreal.  I feel ve

Dear Eugene, It's been a while since I last wrote to you.  It's because I've been busy and there's too much I want to say to you but don't know how to choose.  I've lived many days that's just like any other day, but now I've just lived a month that is unlike any other month, each day of it.  It feels like it's not my life that I am living, a life so new that I don't know what to make of it yet. Today I was looking at a tree and made the most banal comment, "This tree is going to outlast all of us."  We can point at any random tree and say the same thing and the comment will likely turn out to be true. If that's the case, aren't we all making too a big deal out of ourselves?  Stuffs we do to ourselves, stuffs we make ourselves do, just to live out what we call a life.  And what is this "life" but a handful of years, the first third in utter confusion, the last third in worry and pain, the middle years to recov