It’s time to silence the inner critic.

It’s time to hush the voice that whines on and on about how you’re no good.

It’s time to cram out the distractions and excuses and take pen to paper, keyboard to screen and write.

It’s time to write.

We call it Five Minute Friday. Where everyone writes for five, unedited minutes all on the same prompt. This week, that prompt is the challenge itself, the dare, the scary.

This week’s prompt is “WRITE.”

{All the details for how to join us are right over here –>easy peasy I promise.}

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GO:

So, I didn’t tell you.

I didn’t tell you that I’ve slept less in the last year than the year Zoe was born.

I didn’t tell you that I’ve been cramming hours of writing into the margins around my full time job.

I’ve been writing. Early mornings and late nights and long weekends. I’ve been writing scared and I’ve been writing brave and I’ve been dredging my memory for each of those back stories that made me a mother. The stories that brought me from South Africa to the States. The stories that maybe you’ve never heard. My once-upon-a-times when I swore I would never be a mother. That I wouldn’t sacrifice my dreams for a wedding ring. That I ran hard and fast from all the places that hurt me most and started again on the grounds of a small campus in the North East with death ringing in my ears and new beginnings within reach.

The story not just from South Africa to the States, but from a motherless daughter who swore she would never be anybody’s mother to a place of stumbling onto the unexpected ending of three very loud kids and the happiest messy house ever.

I never grew up dreaming of being a writer. But turns out we all of us have a story inside us. Like bone marrow or grief or memories. It fuses into our DNA and one night when you least expect it will stand up and demand to be written down.

So I’ve been writing.

I’d passed the first time Tyndale House asked. I wasn’t ready, I said. I didn’t have a story.

But then a year later, Zoe turned one and it turned out I did.

So I’ve been writing.

And then I’ve been editing.

And then I was done.

I wrote a book. It feels strange to even say it out loud. I wrote a book and mostly it feels like I just wrote a word document.

I wrote it one blog post sized chunk at a time. And it feels good and right to share it here first. Where I feel the safest. With my writer people. And because you’re all the in acknowledgments. This Five Minute Friday community.

Because you make me brave.

And I’m especially gonna need you next spring when this fourth (book) baby arrives. Right in time for Mother’s Day.

Now, somebody for heaven’s sakes please pass the chocolate ice cream.

STOP