Rain!

It's raining. The steady patter of the rain makes me feel cozy as the sky darkens with the approach of night. I made soup for dinner. That's always a great meal for a rainy night. But we live on a tropical island at sea-level, so it's not cold. I had to turn on the air-condition in the dining room so that we wouldn't sweat while eating the hot dinner. We don't usually turn on the air-conditioner downstairs unless we have guests. Electricity here is expensive, so we try to use the ACs and our clothes dryer sparingly.

I never get tired of rain. I think it's because of two things.

First I have great memories of rain as a child. I supposed the wet season was more irritating for my parents. There were always leaks in our roof and the day after a rain, Dad would have to get the ladder and go up on the roof to fix the leaks. Mom would gather all the buckets and pots we'd used the night before to catch the drops falling from the ceiling. I suppose she might have tired of having to wash the pots every time. The other problem was that the rain often knocked out the electricity. I remember spending evenings sitting on our front porch watching the rain in the dark. Sometimes we'd light candles all through the house. We'd joke that just about the time we got all the candles lit, the lights would come back on. The other thing we had to do as soon as the electricity cut off was run to the kitchen and unplug the fridge. When the lights came back on, the electricity would surge through the house at high power for a couple of seconds. We didn't want to lose our fridge in the spurt of power. Good times! Great memories!

The second reason I love rain is because we lived in the desert for so many years. Rain was infrequent to say the least. When it did come, it was not refreshing. It dredged up the muck and stinky-ness of the city and the lack of drainage left countless roads covered in chocolate milk colored water for days. Not pleasant. When we moved back to Asia and had our first rain I thought, "Ahhhh! This is why I love rain!" I love the rain in Asia because it is refreshing.

I know it's hard to get out and go places when it's raining. I know it is gross to have the bottom of your jeans damp all day. I know. But still, I like it.

"I know that the Lord is great, that our Lord is greater than all gods. The Lord does whatever pleases him, in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depths. He makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth; he sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses."
Psalm 135:5-7

#H54F: High Five For Friday

This Friday our family is super happy because...

#1 It's the beginning of SPRING BREAK! Yay! The boys are so excited to have a week free of homework, school work, and busy schedules.

#2 Kris left Sunday night on a trip and returned Wednesday night. That makes for a busy week for him. We are glad to be together as a family for the coming week.

#3 I actually received a copy of Side By Side! I am so happy to get to hold in my hands the product of a lot of work. A dream come true :)

#4 Parent/Teacher conferences this week. I'm happy to report that all the boys are on high honor roll. High Five for the Kelley Boys.

#5 My computer is well again...I think. That's a relief and definitely worth a high five.

What was your week like?

A Little or a Latte

Twenty years ago I wrote our first Kelley Khronicle! It was printed on paper. Copied in a photocopier. Stuffed in envelopes. Mailed (the kind that uses a post office and a real postman) to all recipients. Kris and I had been married less than two years and we were headed to a small four-year-old country in East Africa called Eritrea.

I wonder how many folks who received that very first Kelley Khronicle back in March 1995 are still getting our news today?

An awful lot has happened since then.

We've studied three languages (and two different scripts). We've lived in six different countries. We've had three children. We've been loved and prayed for by so many people. We've mostly-faithfully kept up with writing Kelley Khronicles during all this time.

And we still do send out the Khronicle in email form.

Which means that maybe now, maybe on this 20 year anniversary of The Kelley Khronicle...it's time to get a new name for the blog.

So in the coming days I'll be switching the blog name to "A Little or a Latte". That describes both me and this blog on a number of levels. Our family newsletter will stay the same. My author updates will stay the same. The author page JanaKelley.com will stay the same. And actually, the address for this blog will stay the same. You can still access it in whatever way you normally do. You'll just see a different title when you get here.

See you then!

A Cactus Kind of Day

It was a cactus sort of day. Or maybe I was the cactus. Admittedly, I was a little prickly. Kris was gone so I was running the house alone. It was a wreck. We were running late for school. I missed the turn to pick up someone who needed a ride. An unnamed individual bumped the gear shift and our car went into neutral while speeding down the road without me realizing what the problem was. You know, one of those kind of mornings.

And for whatever reason, I'd woken up with a foreboding feeling. I had Psalm 42:11 on my mind from the time I rolled out of bed. It's my standard "foreboding feeling" verse.

"Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet raise him, my Savior and my God."

Really, what do I have to be downcast about? When my soul is disturbed, I know deep down that I really have everything. A Savior, the Lord of All. What else do I need?

But I still felt down. And then, after the craziness of getting everyone to school semi-on-time I felt rushed and down. I pulled into the carport and something to the side caught my eye.

It was my cactus.

I say "my cactus" but it was really a flower pot that was left from the previous tenant, about 1 1/2 years ago. I wanted the pot but not the plant. It was an ugly cactus. Bulbs of prickly. All crammed into a flower pot. I didn't want the cactus, but I just never got around to digging it out. I never got around to it because I do not have a green thumb. Which explains why the cactus has outlasted most of the other potted plants I own. It doesn't need that much care.

But what caught my eye was not the cactus itself. Didn't I mention that it was ugly? What caught my eye was two BIG white flowers protruding from the needly plant. How on earth did it produce such beautiful flowers? I got out of the car and walked across the cement to check it out.

Sure enough, two flowers shot out of one of the ugly bulbs. They were soft and lacy and smelled fresh, like baby powder. What on earth? It was like a beautiful gift, a reminder from the Lord to keep perspective on Cactus Days. Be the flower, not the cactus!

Why so downcast? Put your hope in God! I will praise Him, my Savior and my God.

It Arrived in the Mail!

Look what has arrived! It's a real-deal book y'all! Sadly, I have not seen it yet. The woes of living overseas. But my family has seen it and I'm pretty sure they are telling me the truth :) These are my advanced copies. I asked my mother-in-law to send me two copies and it cost a whopping $18 in postage so those books better get here because good grief. I can't afford to pay the postage for my own book!

Today I got on Amazon and noticed the book is no longer labeled as "pre-order", but the kindle version is. What? So, perhaps if you order it now they will actually send it to you now!! How cool would that be? Except, so much for a grand "Book Release Day" because apparently it has already released. Oh well.

So, in honor of all of us totally missing release day...whenever that was, you can apparently order it now. And I'd BE SO PUMPED if you would get on Amazon and put a review on there. That would be great!

Now, another exciting thing was that last night I met via Skype with someone from the publisher to record an interview for an upcoming podcast. Wow, that's a first for me. They wanted audio AND video. Yikes. That's unfortunate because I don't like my hair. But it's supposed to be about the book anyway so I decided to get over it and agree to the interview.

Besides the issue of my hair, there was the issue of where to set up my computer. Not in my "office" because it is more of a "crawl space" behind a giant wardrobe. And it's very messy. Not the living room because of three students doing homework and a dog that would want to sit in my lap and I don't want to be a crazy old dog-lady. Well, Kris is gone, so I took over his office.

Next problem. His office.

How to make a man's office look like a cozy living room...amazingly, I sort of did it! Look at this!

Can't you sort of think that I am sitting in a cozy living room or at least in a very cool looking office. I mean, awesome wall-hangings, a fresh ivy, family picture, cool looking lamp. "Welcome to my livingroom, all five people listening to this podcast!"

Look, I even brushed my hair and put lipstick on! I had to hunt for lipstick because seriously, who wears lipstick over here? I was once told (in a very Southern drawl) that "A Southern girl ALWAYS wears her lipstick for a picture..." (awkward pause) "you do have lipstick don't you?" To which I replied, "Does chapstick count?"

So I hunted down and actually found...well, it was more of a tinted chapstick, but pretty darn close to lipstick. I slathered it on my lips and immediately got grossed out and wiped off half of it with a kleenex. At any rate, this is what I looked like for the interview. Cozy, professional. Well, at least decent.

But to appreciate the efforts I went through, you need to see the full picture. This is what it actually looked like in there:

Yea, note the golf clubs shoved over to the left, papers barely out of camera shot. My soccer shorts go nicely with my fancy top, right? Don't you wear soccer shorts and flipflops when you are being interviewed? Hey, don't judge. If you had to do it at nine o'clock at night, you might have done that too. 

I also had to instruct my kids not to play their loud music or talk loud, puleeeeeeez, for half an hour. And I had to steal the dog's new squeeky toy that she carries in her mouth at all times and when she sleeps, she lays on top of it so no one will steal it. So she was distraught for half an hour last night. I shut the office door and could still hear her sniffing through the crack between the door and the tile floor.

Well, thankfully, the internet across 10,000 miles apparently makes the video a tad scratchy, so maybe the scene will look like a cozy living room and my hair will look awesome. I plan to post the link here whenever they put it up. They said it would be closer to the release day. 

Which brings me back to Amazon, who says they can now send it...and today it says only 2 left in stock, more on the way? What? 

Is this part of being a new author? Being in a perpetual state of confusion? At least I'm enjoying the ride!

I hope you'll get a chance to read Side By Side and will spread the word!

P.S. Oh, and I created a hashtag which is hilarious seeing as how I don't really know what to do with it. But those of you who do and want to help me spread the word, you can use #SideBySideNovel.

Book Tour

No silly! I'm not going on a book tour. That's for writers who know what they're doing. I am giving a tour of the books in my life. We used to read a lot when I was a kid. We'd all gather in the living room at night and Dad would read to us. We lived in the boonies, y'all, and didn't have anything else to do at night. I'm glad we did it. I learned to love books.

If I have a lot of time on my hands-which is absolutely never, but I feel like at some point I did because I have this faint memory of it-I will enjoy all sorts of books. Nowadays my time is short. I want the book to be really excellent if I'm gonna spend my time reading it. The problem is, I haven't figured out the formula for what I consider awesome, so I can never figure out what book to start reading. I end up spending my reading time perusing Amazon or Goodreads trying to figure out what would be worth the short time I have to read it.

I want to know about the author. So then I start looking up their websites and making decisions based on the author as well. As if I need one more stipulation to add to what book I should choose. That's why recommendations from people I know are also biggies for me. If someone else-that I know y'all, not just a random person-read it and liked it, maybe I will too.

I like to learn something. I actually don't really want to read a story just for the sake of a good story. I want to read to the last page, close the book, and feel like I've learned something about history, a country, a group of people, or something.

As a child I loved the Betsy, Tacy & Tib books. I thought they were so cool and loved how much time they spent together. And what cool names y'all! I wanted to rename my best friend Tassy. Or Tib! Who wouldn't want a best friend named Tib? My best friend was named Susan and she only spoke Indonesian. But she lived two doors down from me and she didn't think I was too weird, even if I was the only white girl in the whole little Asian town I was raised in. So, you don't think I'm weird? Best friends we are!

As I got older I loved CS Lewis' space trilogy and The Screwtape Letters. I remember scenes from those books to this day. They helped me to better understand my Christian walk by giving me a creative way to look at life. And also it was very cool to love CS Lewis. Very grown up. Like drinking coffee. Which I started doing at summer camp because all the returning college kids drank coffee and that was very grown up. Like reading CS Lewis.

In high school I had to read I Loved a Girl and I Married You by Walter Trobisch and found them to be very interesting. Probably some of my first non-fiction reading began then. I was taking a Marriage class. In high school. Strange right? Looking back on it that does seem strange. But whatever. It was a good class and I learned a lot about relationships from those books.

College was way too busy. Good grief who reads books for fun in college? It's reading for class and then hanging out with college buddies. College was a four year hiatus from reading for fun. I did read some famous stuff, during the short period of time that I considered English Literature as my minor. Then I had to read Edgar Allen Poe and some other creepy authors.

And worse than that, we had to discuss the deeper meaning of every piece. Really? What if the author just wanted to write about a big tall oak tree and it had nothing to do with her deeper need for acceptance that she never got from her mother? What if a tree is just a tree because the author looked out her window and saw a tree and wanted to put it in her story? So I quickly learned that I had nothing to contribute to discussions in class.

Also my main professor was a little creepy himself. He drove an old station wagon with fuzzy dice hanging in the front windshield. He gave me a necklace with a gold heart for my birthday and also asked me what I would say if he asked me out. I told him I would say no and I promptly switched my minor to Psychology.

I didn't read again until our second year of marriage and that was when we lived in Africa. We were the only foreigners in a town in the middle of nowhere. OK, there were two Peace Corps girls, but they were our polar opposites so we didn't really cross paths. Our first year there, we didn't speak the language and no one spoke much English. So I read about two million books. Or maybe around 50. I think I averaged a book a week. To which I say to my previous self - Good grief Jana, get out and meet the people already.

But somehow God blessed us anyway and we did eventually pick up the language and start making friends. My favorite book from all the many books I read while there was Out of Africa. Perhaps I remember that book in particular because I was able to travel to Kenya and actually see the house and some of the area where Karen Blixen lived.

Nowadays I read a little here and there. I think it's good to have a book or two in process. I like to have one "serious" book and one fiction book. I guess I like travel books and suspense type books the most. The verdict is still out on suspense. I like suspense movies, does that count?

I don't like to commit to a long series, but I do like:

The Zion Covenant Books by Bodie and BrockThoene (now that's how I like to learn history)
Mrs. Pollifax books by Dorothy Gilman (I like the different locations, and also Mrs. Pollifax cracks me up)
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (although I petered out after awhile, that series is too long)

Some of my favorite fiction books are:

Nights of Rain and Stars (I think that's an awkward name for a book) by Maeve Binchey
The Book Thief (thanks for the recommendation Twyla C!)
Safely Home by Randy Alcorn
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Christmas Train by David Baldacci
Invisible by Lorena McCourtney
Monday Morning Faith by Lori Copeland
Married to a Bedouin by Marguerite van Geldermalsen (not fiction but a favorite)
Diplomatic Baggage by Brigid Keenan
Stepping Heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss
The Last Sin Eater by Francine Rivers

What do you like to read?