Morning Work | Week 7 | The Shelf

The best review I’ve ever gotten came from two kids on a couch.

Howdy. Happy Friday.

I have been making a children’s book since Christmas. It is my Narnia, and I am writing it for my own kids.

And I have been too careful with it. Not scared, careful, which is the sneakier problem. Everything else I make, the noir, the histories, goes out the door every other week. This one has sat on my desktop for months while I fuss over it. The thing I make for the people I love most is the one I grip the hardest, and the grip is exactly what keeps it from them.

So this week I set it down and read them the first few chapters.

The Couch

They absolutely lost it. Grinning ear to ear, guffawing at their own innocent silliness handed back to them on the page. I put my best work online for you, and I am grateful for every single review people take the time to leave.

But not one of them ever did what those two hysterical faces did.

Cameron calls this week Recovering a Sense of Connection, and then she spends it on perfectionism, because perfectionism is what cuts the connection. That is what I did. I polished the book into something too precious to hand to anyone, and something too precious to hand to anyone reaches nobody. The minute I read it out loud, rough and unfinished, the connection I’d been guarding it from was just there. Two kids, one foot away.

The Vessel

Their faces did not light up for me. I did not make that happen, I caught it. I am a vehicle for these things, not the source, and what lit them up was the thing coming through the story and landing where it was meant to. Story over sermon. It rode in on the story the way a lecture never could.

The Long Clock

My hero is C.S. Lewis. He wrote Mere Christianity and the serious, grown-up books. Then he wrote about a lion and four children and a wardrobe, and that is the one that put the Father into millions of kids who would never have sat still for the rest of it. It took decades to show what it had planted. He built it slow and let it find the world on its own time.

So that is what I am building. Brick by brick, in no hurry. I will print it out for my kids first, then their cousins, and then maybe their friends.

If it lands with them, I’ll self-publish it. I used to think the couch was the small audience and the world was the real one. I had that backwards. The couch is the whole point. The rest can come when it comes.

The Assignment

Three things this week.

Go slow with them, and mean them. They are a kind of prayer.

01. The Edge

In your Pages, go to the place where you would normally stop, the line right after the good one, where it turns uncertain and the notebook usually closes. Stay there. Write ten more minutes. See what was waiting past the spot where you always quit.

02. The Reading

Take the thing you have been keeping to yourself and give it to one person this week, the one it was actually made for. Read it to them, or hand it over, before it is finished. Watch their face.

(I’m giving the book my wife, my harshest critic)

03. The Mantra

Cameron gives you the line for this week:

treating myself like a precious object will make me strong.

Feels weird to write that, but I am committed to the process.

Write it out by hand and put it where you will pass it every morning. Treat it as an intention you set into the day.

This Week

I put out Cain this week, the last of the Genesis books. It is free on my site, and on Amazon if you want to hold it in your hands.

But the truest thing I made this year is the one that is not for sale, the one I read on the couch. To my kids. I am building that one slow, for them.

<3EKO

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P.S. What are you making that you have not let anyone see?

Have a good weekend. I’ll be on the water next week.

I love you.