This month, I’ve been grappling with one screenplay during work hours and yet another in the evening. For the past two nights, I’ve been doing it in my sleep, too.

Seriously. In my dreams, I’ve been writing action lines and bits of dialogue, deleting and reworking to get the words just right. It’s all in the correct font, too.

Last night, I even dreamed the story first, and then sat down to base a screenplay on the preceding events. I can’t relate all the details to you at present, but there was a trip down to Ecuador involved, from whence I commuted one day per week by ship to a small country in Africa (Sengala, for the made up country on the show 24 – but even in my dream, I knew it was a false name and kept trying to google a map to figure out what it really was) to do missionary work.

Once the events of the dream concluded (with much fanfare and adventure), I began my toil of typing just the right action lines and beats to capture the story. There was much replotting and rewriting…and by the time I woke up, I was just plum wore out.

I need a vacation.

2 Comments »

I was recently tagged on Facebook to write a post with 25 random things about myself. It was a fun brain dump. So here it is, reproduced on this page for those of you not in the Facebook loop.

1. I am an autumn fanatic. I can’t do without fall color, chilly days, and the scent of woodsmoke in the air. Winter is a close second, and it’s driving me batty to live without the expectation of snow any day, now that we’re in Georgia. (David and I keep threatening to pick up and move north every time the temperature goes over 60 in January.)

2. I’m an INFJ for those of you in the Myers-Briggs know. I used to be extremely introverted in high school and college, but have eased into better balance during my adult years.

3. If you want to know the absolute root core of what I believe, check out the lyrics to “In Christ Alone.” (http://www.gettymusic.com/lyrics.asp?id=88)

4. If it involves coffee or dark chocolate, I like it.

5. When my sister and I were young, we each chose an animal to be for the day on a regular basis and interacted as such.

6. We never had expensive toys, but we did have “The Things in the Box” – a cardboard container of My Little Ponies, bits of ribbon and lace, beads, doll furniture, various plastic animals, and so on that kept us occupied with elaborate worlds for hours on end.

7. My maiden name is Beachy, the original German spelling of which is Bitsche, with is pronounced…well, you figure it out.

8. My family (many generations back) emigrated from Switzerland, and I have never felt anywhere quite so at home as traveling through the Swiss Alps, hearing the tinkle of cow bells and the faint chimes of church bells across the family.

9. I was irrevocably a cat person until my dog-person husband managed to persuade me to allow a large black lab/chow mix into the family. Nina has turned me into a dog person.

10. I’ve run four half marathons and am contemplating whether a marathon should be on the horizon. Definitely NOT a spring or summer race in GA.

11. Though I’m now a screenwriter by profession, I grew up without a television, watching very few movies. I once excused myself from watching a movie in a 7th grade class so I could go read instead.

12. I met my husband during a 2002 writing workshop, but didn’t see or talk with him until four years later when he did a google search and contacted me through my blog.

13. My sister and I have a random tendency to start speaking in terrible fake British accents whenever we’re around each other.

14. I believe the only real specimen of Christmas tree is the cedar.

15. I grew up near Colonial Williamsburg and had a season pass there during my 6th grade year when I home schooled. I love to simply wander the streets and bask in an entirely different era.

16. I have moved literally every single year of my adult life, many of those moves to different states (6 total).

17. My grandparents (my dad’s parents) were missionaries in Haiti and later Ecuador while I was growing up. They were close friend with a Haitian family who had a daughter about my age also named Elizabeth. I always heard stories about the other “Little Elizabeth”.

18. I’ve really enjoyed cooking on a regular basis since getting married, but as my husband will tell you, I have an obsessive need to over-spice everything.

19. I am who I am, in large part, because of the incredible mentors God has placed in my life at key times.

20. My declared major when I started undergrad was premed to go into biotechnology.

21. I have perpetual paranoia that there’s something wrong with the car, especially on long road trips.

22. I am a Mac, not a PC.

23. I always feel immeasurably better after a good cry.

24. My mom required two hours of work in the garden every day during summers, but I will be utterly clueless about where to begin when I actually have room for my own garden.

25. I am the eldest of numerous grandchildren on both sides of the family. There are as of yet no great-grandchildren. Can you say pressure?

No Comments »

I did a google image search, and came back with visuals of Scrooge, a point on a map, or a Baptist church.

Only one image caught the meaning I had in mind: a climbing tower of stones. The pile of rocks God commanded the Israelites to raise time and again in the Old Testament to remind them of a specific moment of His work and power.

When my parents and grandparents bought a tract of land along with my uncle’s family, we all gathered and cobbled together a small cairn of stones with cement, consecrating that moment and what God had done in allowing us to acknowledge the land as His. All three families built homes there. Five girls grew up there. Countless travelers and guests make the trek up the hill.

The altar still stands in the brush near the tiny, reedy pond. The date on it reads 4-10(?)-88. Someday, I will show it to my children.

Most of my ebenezers are less concrete, less acknowledged…and easy to forget. I need them, desperately, because I do forget so very easily. Most are cataloged in the back of my mind, the pages of journals.

This week, there was a particularly clear, sturdily constructed ebenezer on the road to making a film…a sort of path that requires a veritable handful of miracles to complete. This week, a well-known actor/producer signed on to executive produce our small, quirky, comedy that still doesn’t have a completed script. This does not guarantee that we will make it to the end of the road.

But it does make the journey seem far more possible.

1 Comment »

I’ve attended church nearly every Sunday for 31 years and listened to some excellent teaching and gifted preachers. But I must confess that usually by Wednesday I’m struggling to remember what the sermon topic was. I recall one pastor pointing out that’s why church is a weekly, ongoing gathering. The week’s sermon is daily bread for that time. God knows these things are crowded out of our brains and hearts by the noise of the week. We need reminding, over and over and over again.

But for the past few months, at Stonebridge, I’ve had a new experience. Though doctrinally sound, the pastor is not particularly polished, certainly not breathing fire and brimstone or three simple steps to apply certain verses. Somehow, though, these sermons are sticking with me. The visual imagery. The simple points to mull over. I can tell you the meat of the last three weeks – and I wasn’t even there three weeks ago (ah, the wonders of podcasting).

Being amazed by God. Simply, if you’ve stopped being amazed by God, you’ve stopped seeing Him. Stopping paying attention. Every day, every minute provides the stuff of being amazed.

Wisdom vs. revelation. Wisdom is holy common sense. But occasionally, God grants those moments of clarity, calling us to take 300 men with clay pots against a multitude of armed warriors.

The dreams God has crafted, individually, for each of us. He knit the intricate parts of our being, crafted our days, prepared the works and moments for each of us to walk in. His dream is specific as the individual.

It’s surprising to find 20 minutes of conversational thought from Sunday clinging to the back of my mind, turning over and settling like the depths of a compost pile (okay, that might be overkill). But I’m in need of it all right now. Especially the balance of wisdom and revelation, as David and I look at a host of opportunities, none of which fit neatly together. We need the holy common sense, but even more, we need revelation of what the big picture is. Of which puzzle pieces to pull from the pile and fit together on the table.

2 Comments »

It’s official. If I blog this much about my dog, I am guaranteed to become one of those insufferable parents who talks about nothing but the every cute doing of their children. Still, the family anticipation of grandchildren is high enough at present that I should be able to get away with it.

At any rate, after my mini-meltdown over the impossibility of ridding the house of dog fur, my husband came home this evening with:

The Furminator

This handy configuration of plastic and stainless steel is vastly overpriced. But they could charge pretty much whatever they wanted. Because this contraption works. I managed to rake an entire dog’s worth of fur out of Nina’s coat in one sitting (well, multiple sittings. Multiple sits, flop downs, stand ups, and follow the dog around the kitchen-s.) There’s an entire 13-gallon trashcan downstairs nearly filled with fur. No exaggeration. And our fuzzy black beastie looks furry as ever…if slightly neater than usual.

The true tale will be told when next I vacuum.

2 Comments »

I neglected to carry out Day 3 of my blogging commitment, so consider this retroactive.

It’s mid-30s and raining today in true Georgia fashion, but yesterday afternoon,  a small miracle slipped past the weather mavens. A flurry!

I was out for a run with Nina, and I must say there are few things more striking than a black dog in a thick flurry of snowflakes.

No Comments »

I find to my horror that I somehow committed to blog again today. And for the next five days, no less.

So I shall start with a spot of thievery and steal a friend’s current Facebook update:

“Liz sets her face against the wind and braves the frozen tundra with its fell beasts and ne’er-do-wells.”

Shockingly, it’s 12 degrees here with a windchill of 0 and the faintest possibility that something out of Tolkien might come lurching by. But despite the fact that native Georgians are cringing in their sweaters, I can’t help thinking that this is how winter should always be – not just once every decade or so.

When we initially moved, I anticipated that I would miss snow. And I do. Not that I’ve ever lived in a particularly snowy clime aside from my three years in Chicago. But there was always the hope and expectancy of some white stuff to muffle the real world and suspend animation for a few minutes or hours or days.

If we stay in Georgia, I will adjust and appreciate my car starting up with ease on January mornings and taking the dog for runs in 45 degrees instead of teens. But still, I mourn the loss of the season – and I know David feels it too. Winter ought to be a necessary hibernation, where the weather forces you inside, literally and figuratively, to do some internal housekeeping. To take stock of the year past (give it a chapter title, as one friend suggested) and to brood over ideas and possibilities for the year ahead. Snow, properly speaking, closes out the old and wipes the slate clean for the new. One surfs to weather.com with the breathless anticipation that there just might be flurries -or the jackpot, a blizzard- ahead, that the world might just shut down and take a few deep breaths before starting back up again.

I don’t think it’s exaggeration to say that there is something sacred, holy about a fresh covering of snow.

And of course, from a practical standpoint, I fully believe that the only real justification for cold weather is snow.

Weather.com does not agree. Not a whit of precipitation in the forecast until the temperature jumps back up into the forties.

1 Comment »

For some reason, the browser took almost a full minute to pull up this site. This may indicate a certain amount of rustiness on the part of Caribou’s wi-fi – but also seems properly indicative of the state of my being when it comes to spilling some of my internal processes onto the page.

I’ve been wrangling a screenplay outline 8 hours a day for the past week at work, and drafting pages on another script during my off hours. But over the past few months, I’ve simply neglected the emails, the journaling, the blogging. And when I stop doing this, I usually stop paying attention to the actual moments that I might write about on the cusp of their happening. To the flashes of revelation or bits of beauty or seconds of pure frustration or joy.

So on that note, I plan to blog every day for the next week to jumpstart the reflective faculty. This is no new year’s resolution, and I can’t guarantee anything particularly interesting or perceptive – in the case that anyone is actually still reading this blog! Still, it may be a start. May be.

At present, I’m sitting in Caribou Coffee with a cup of java from Einstein Brothers next door. I feel slightly guilty about this and wrapped my hands around the label on the cup as I slipped from one shop to the other. But a) I used up my Caribou gift card, but still have cash on the Einstein Bros. card and b) as Einstein advertises, their coffee is “darn good”. However, Caribou wins hands down on atmosphere, what with the leather arm chairs and roaring (albeit gas) fireplace.

Speaking of discipline, I sincerely hope that God is not preparing us for a strong-willed child, though it may well happen, as David and I are both very quietly, but very firmly, stubborn. As our canine child, the enthusiastic black lab/chow mix Nina, hits adolescence, the chow is rearing is rearing its fuzzy ruff. Put simply, chows do not do what they do not wish to do – and unless you establish yourself as leader of the pack and consistently make them do it anyway…well the chow will rule. Thankfully, the lab ameliorates the worst of it, but there are daily battles of will when it comes to not pulling on the leash or poaching random items off the coffee table.

This practice better pay off when there’s a two-year-old in the house.

No Comments »