Close your mouth and get to writing...
I don’t know the exact date that the title From Slut to Saint first came to me — so it must’ve been subtle, gradual…in a much less dramatic fashion than the sheet-like bucket thing that stunned the bold-talking apostle with the command from heaven to “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”
I do know it was some time after being scared silly straight when Satan smiled at me during a nightmare on April 22, 2000 — the day I turned 31.
That night terror was my warning voice from heaven to stop pitching the salacious self-published book I was barely selling and to get on with the business of “working out my own salvation with fear and trembling” now that I was newly saved.
I obeyed.
Tossing the unsold tomes in the trash, I ran away from Ohio to work near the San Francisco Bay area.
Multiple Miscarriages… then Blessed with Babies
By the summer of 2001, two chicory-rich wide and satisfied eyes peered up at me through the plastic sunroof of a new bland green Graco stroller as I periodically lifted the pastel-colored blanket shielding the sun to check for closed lids.
During 1999, death had come in threes: Two babies my husband and I longed for turned out to be blighted ovums.
“Are you gonna sleep all day?” my dad quipped to my mother as he poked his head in her room. Before her funeral, he recounted finding his wife of nearly 38 years lifeless, with an almost-smile on her face: “I touched her; she was cold.”
In the wake of waves of grief, the only place I found true solace was church — and two years later, the real Restorer was already showing me the benefits of following Him.
The Maker of heaven and earth put a desire within me to stop robbing Him and to finally start tithing at the age of 30, and showed me His promise that “neither shall your vine drop its fruit before the time in the field” related to many failed feats in my life, including — in my case — my miscarried babies.
Like the Shunammite woman who perceived a holy man, had her womb opened and family resurrected, I propelled the living proof of God’s devourer-rebuking test right there in front of me that spring season, in the form of our healthy baby son.
This Writer’s Blocks
One of 'The Four Corners' that kept me sane
My California living locale was within a clean, exclusive section of houses in Paradise Valley in Fairfield — a city about an hour’s drive north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
No longer living the fast-forward speed life of a silk-pants wearing, cell-phone adorned, two-way pager clipped-to-the-hip full-time corporate employee, I whiplashed on a dime — down shifting into the slower-paced play-mode of a full-time mother.
Strolling my son for up to two hours some days — I fought against post-partum alienation, isolation and craziness, each step a prayer answering the poignant question “How do you fill the hours?” that would soon be asked by Nicole Kidman, donning a fake nose to portray the suicide-plagued Virginia Woolf in The Hours.
The Four Corners from Heaven
Unlike the depressed Woolf, I refused to fill my pockets with rocks and walk into a river and drown myself.
The writing is on the wall...
The Spirit of Christ within helped me heed the life-saving instructions beneath on the concrete walls of the waterway that ran under my feet as I walked us across Dover Avenue on our daily strolls.
Stay out of the canal, it warned in so many words — painted in writer’s eye-catching crimson red stencil letters.
The omen was a lot more evident and understandable than the word “PRECARIOUS” mowed into the side of a nearby hill facing I-80, all but invisible as the mounds shifted colors through the seasons.
Back on Dover, my irrepressible mind imagined a body floating down that waterway.
It’d be the corpse of Joe Gillis, a name that springs from memory without much attempt.
Falling in love again…
“They'll love it in Pomona.”
William Holden brought the screenwriter Joe to life in the movie Sunset Boulevard — a character played with such lovable, shoulder-shaking aplomb that I fell in love with Holden after watching the classic many times over.
(Have you ever fallen in love with someone who lived in a different era?)
I wanted to see Holden resurrected via Vince Vaughn, and the Oscar-winning screenplay of the 1950 film noir introduced to a new set of movie-goers through my 21st century rendering, Coldwater Canyon.
My self-imposed near two-year-long writer’s block exile was over.
I’d mentally flogged myself long enough for disappointing God with my naughty novel; I began to feel new hope as I tried my hands at completing a screenplay once again, its plot points unfolding each morning as I discerned the time of day by how high the sun hung over my head.
I dubbed the four cul-de-sacs that made up the first part of my journey “The Four Corners” — and how I marvel now, ten years later, at the Author and Finisher’s perfect full-circle symmetry in describing the four corners Peter encountered from heaven in the Bible verse that kept rising in my soul to open this essay.
Writers, Start Your Essays…
Start writing for Him
Making my way down Paradise Valley Drive past rows of poisonous pink, white and blue oleanders, I’d turn onto Manuel Compos Parkway and stop at the end of the street where I could walk no farther.
(In those days, Mystic Drive didn’t exist, only unfettered views of the burnt-gold or soaked green hills with cows in the distance.)
Doing my U-turn, I spied evidence of The Fast and Furious-inspired drag-racing screeches I’d hear around midnight or later some evenings all the way from my house a half-mile away.
I snapped a pic of the ’start’ line spray-painted on the pavement.
That ’start’ was significant to me, meaning it was time to jump-start my writing, my life, my livelihood.
The sign told me that just because I was now a mother, I shouldn’t neglect the gift within.
All that glitters...
Motherhood was not the totality of me.
I plunged into Coldwater Canyon, rewrote it four times, then pitched it all over the Golden State — hoping my new Cali zip code would open inroads to Hollywood.
I thought I’d succeeded when a producer called my home after receiving my query, and claimed to be so intrigued with the script idea that he asked me to express mail the whole shebang to him as soon as possible.
“I love movies with voice-overs,” I told him.
“Yeah, but the script has to be good,” he countered. “Are you on one of those cheapy phones?”
“No,” I said, not yet predicting the foreboding clues of his strange dialogue.
Continue Reading ‘From Slut to Saint’ from the pulpit – Page 2
