Well, it's done! My publishers, Instant Apostle #InAp contacted me a week ago to say, 'can we have the completed manuscript for the second book in two weeks, please'. Now, on the one hand, as a writer it's lovely to be able to say those two wonderful words, 'my publishers' after, like many aspiring authors, so many years and so many manuscripts (about 15 in my case - I still have hopes for all of them!) but to find oneself staring down the barrel in quite that fashion is sobering. 
And guess what! I finished it this afternoon! Another 20,000 words or so, hitting its lowest depths and highest heights in bringing it to the intended conclusion, while still working at my 'day job', in a week! I'll try to do a preliminary review this week before sending it in. 
Which is fabulous. 
But this evening, I went out for a walk with my older son, Tom, who still lives with us. It was a bit drizzly, but really nice as we saw sheep, countryside, and the inside of a place of refreshment. And I realised - give me the choice of finishing a manuscript or being able to go out with Tom, and I'd take the time with Tom. Give me the choice of being a fabulously successful author (!) and being able to go out for walks with Tom, and I'll take the latter, any time. 
I'd have to say I'm pleased with, proud of even, my priorities.
Oh yes, I know, having to finish the second manuscript just 3 weeks before the first is published sounds suspiciously like a kind of madness.

IT'S TOM!

MY PUBLISHERS!

Oh yes, it's being published by Instant Apostle #InAp
Look them up. They're a young firm doing some exciting work.

In just over a month, my first-published book comes out. It's called, 'A Christmas Calling' and will be available on Amazon or, preferably for those that know me, direct from me, and signed. You could say it's all about getting festive. Though it isn't. But my hope in writing it is that it will stir those festive fires in adult readers - may even become a favourite to be read every December.

Children get that festive Christmas feeling quite easily. At the first real sign of its coming, something flickers to light inside them. A most glorious sense of anticipation, of rightness, of an unnameable blessing such that the very air, and every encounter, and every mention, increasingly fills them with a bright joy. 
Adults often remember that seasonal glory, but find it much harder to recreate. The story centres on a man desperately searching for the festive fizz, because his life is a lonely, soulless grind, lacking any kindness. And then a woman drops into it, seemingly offering a way out of being Scrooge, and into a bigger, brighter world. Is she an angel, or an invitation to disaster? Their hopes of joy together are doomed if he really is immune to kindness; doomed if her friends won't accept him; doomed because she starts getting him into trouble from the first day they meet. 
And what is that yearning that calls to him from afar and aches as it echoes in the hollow caverns of his heart? 

DISAPPOINTMENT

I so look forward to having grandchildren! (That isn't a subtle message to my son and daughter in law!) But the other day I was on a train – a steam train, as it happens, in the west country. And in the same carriage were some grandparents with their grandson. And the whole time it was, ‘No, sit down Kieran (his name wasn’t Kieran), no leave it alone Kieran, no why aren’t you listening to me? No don’t go out there I told you before Kieran. Come and sit by grand-dad. Well sit be me then,’ and so on, smoky mile after smoky mile.

And I commented to my travelling partner, as it struck me, that those grandparents had probably longed for grandchildren and for a nice relationship with their grandson, and what they were experiencing must have been such a disappointment.

Maybe he has better days.

Then I was at a meeting on Sunday when someone commented how many people are living with disappointment in their marriages – constant, ongoing disappointment that this wasn’t what they expected or signed up for. Mostly, it's hidden from view. But it’s hard to live with such daily destruction of your dreams.

Disappointment. There have been times when I’ve looked at a bunch of lively, attractive, intelligent, friendly teenagers and thought, ‘most of you will experience real disappointment in your lives, one way or another’. I’ve thought that because I’ve seen it, with earlier generations of wonderful young people seemingly full of such potential and seemingly deserving of such happy and fulfilling lives.

But life isn’t like that, is it?

I guess there must be people who find just what they were looking for, and live in untroubled contentment. But U2 didn’t, as they sang so beautifully (though I think they had a further message to convey in that song). I suspect most of us live with hidden or at least non-publicised disappointments. I’m amazed at the number of children I know with serious health conditions, much to the anguish of their loving parents. At the people now in their late forties whom I knew as teenagers back in the day before their first marriages failed. And there is no judgement in that truth.

The one compelling reason I’ve heard why school sports days should be fully competitive is because children have to learn to deal with disappointment. When they throw a fit because they can’t have what they desperately (in that moment) wanted in the shop, the wise parent continues to say ‘no’ having said it once, because that’s life (and because giving in teaches the deadly lesson that whining works because it's rewarded eventually – though I suppose that teaches another lesson - persistence - ‘if at first you don’t succeed… whine, whine and whine again!)

But my point is, disappointment, small and large, is part of life. The prevailing (and, I am pleased to see, now much more criticised) message in our culture that you deserve happiness and you deserve getting all you hope for and ‘follow your dreams’ because they will be fulfilled, just sets generations of young people up for selfishness and sadness.

Maybe we, the older generation, need to convey a message of ‘Embrace your Disappointments’. And point them to whatever we’ve discovered that enables us to live and cope and thrive.

I know where my help lies.