It’s Tuesday, and I am not waiting for the dark tonight.

For ten of eleven years, these have been night writing. Two hours, after the day went quiet with my porch lights low, the unquiet in my mind slowly arranging itself into sentences until things made more sense than they did before I sat down. Tonight, however, I’m writing in the early evening because I have somewhere to be, something to celebrate. I’ll let the ritual bend around an occasion.

It is a different front porch than the one where this started. A different loveseat. A lot of things are different now, but it’s the same writer in the same chair-shaped habit, doing the one thing that has reliably helped me grow.

People tell me I write beautifully, and I have learned to receive that kindly. Still, I know what it actually is. It is not that I am gifted so much as that I was given something… a way to process a life that has often been more than I could hold. God knew, long before I did, that I would need this. He handed me the page so that I would have somewhere to set the chaos down and, in the setting-down, begin to see what He was doing in it. The writing itself wasn’t the real story. It was the lamp He gave me to read it by.

I have always called these my Two-Hour Tuesdays. As of this morning, that is also the name of a book.

Two-Hour Tuesdays came into the world today. It’s the first three and a half years of these Tuesday nights, before the sabbatical, bound between two covers with my name on the spine. If you have read this blog for any length of time, you have already read much of it. The garden metaphors and the fairy-tale names I gave the people I loved so I could tell the truth about them without telling on them. A divorce. A faith I lost, and a faith that came looking for me while I thought I was writing about evening glories and pie recipes.

I started writing while I was still lost, so there is a record of the lostness. I couldn’t fake that arc. I had to live it forward, a thousand words at a time, before I could ever read it back as a story authored by Another. That’s what this book is. The living-forward, collected… the record of a woman who did not yet know how it ended, kept by the God who already does.

The cover wears a Yorktown sunset. That’s not an accident. This is the place where I became whoever I am now.

The truth underneath all of it, the part no book jacket can hold, is that I don’t have anything worth writing about because I am a writer. I have something worth writing about because of what happens at the water.

Nearly every morning for eighteen months, I have driven to the York River before the sun. I still love Fort Monroe beach at low tide — the ukulele, the sea glass, and the easy joy of a beach that brings my soul to life. None of that has changed. Nevertheless, the river at dawn is something else entirely. It is still. It is quiet. And it is where He restores my soul. I sit at the edge of that stillness and let the One who leads me beside quiet waters do exactly that, whether I feel Him or not, and then I come home with something to say. The sunrise is the source. The blog is only the overflow.

Lately, He has been teaching me a second way to catch it. I started carrying a tripod to the river along with my camera, learning to shoot in manual — to set the exposure myself, to decide what the light gets to do instead of letting the machine guess. It is humbling, slow work. Somehow, there are mornings the sky does something I have no words for, and now I have another way to say, “Look at what He did!” A few days ago, a fellow sky-lover named Alex recognized me at the water, struck up a conversation about photographs, and ended up teaching me more in a morning than I’d learned in weeks. He took the launch pictures for this very book this weekend. I came to the river that morning to meet God, the way I always do, and went home with a teacher, a craft, and the images now telling the world the book exists. God provides in the water; it’s the medium that changes.

In essence, my next book, the third one, didn’t begin on this porch at all, even if the story did.

The practice made the first book, and the practice taught me how to write the next one. It becomes itself a chapter at a time, in this same habit, the way I once wrote a post at a time. I even opened the new first chapter the way I opened the one that launched today: I used to be. The same three words I first typed into a Word document eleven years ago, not knowing they were the beginning of anything. The form taught me the form.

That said, the new book itself began at the water.

There is a manuscript I had to write before this one. Nine chapters documenting the hardest things I’ve ever survived. I wrote it because I know what I have always known in this loveseat: some things make no sense and hold too much power until they have been set down in words. I set them down. I had to. Only, it’s not the book I want to be my third. It is the storm itself, documented. It was not written so much to be read as to unburden me, transform me, release me.

Last week, the morning after school let out, I started over. And I can tell you the exact moment the new book began. I was at the river trying to capture a blue heron fishing in the golden light when a fellow sunrise-chaser showed up and so did the pier. Suddenly, there were dolphins in the river. And a sting ray splashing in the shallows. And a short exchange as the sun crested about finding purpose in the summer months. He pulled me into a long, unexpected hug, somehow precisely what I needed. Steady. Strong. Safe. Calm. It was as if God Himself had reached through an ordinary stranger to wrap that whole sunrise around me in a human pair of arms.

That embrace was the start of the real Sanctuary in the Storm. Not me writing my way back to life this time. God meeting me at the water, and me simply staying long enough to be held.

I do not know yet where the book goes, yet. I know better than to force it now. The Author leads; I follow by writing. It has never once taken me somewhere less true than where I started because the One leading it has never abandoned me. There are unmistakably two footprints in the sand before anyone else arrives.

If you have been reading Writer’s Growth along all these years, thank you. You were here for the undercurrent before it had a name. Before it was a book, before it was two. Every reader who ever wrote to tell me, “Me too!”? You’re one of the reasons I kept sitting down on Tuesdays when I would rather have gone to bed or run from the unquiet spinning inside.

Two-Hour Tuesdays is available now.

And now I am going to close the laptop while there is still light in the sky to celebrate my second book in Hampton where the original blogs were penned. Mary Beth is meeting me at Fort Monroe, and we are going to walk the shore. She’s the same friend who once made me hold up both my books for a photo and call it an Ebenezer, a stone set down on the far bank of deep water. I will bring the camera. The evening light is harder to meter than the morning light, and I am not very good at it yet, but I am going to stand there anyway beside the friend who has walked me through the worst of it, and try to catch what God is doing while the sun goes down on the day my second book was born.

I don’t know yet where I’ll end up for the sunset. That feels right, somehow. For so long, I scripted every hour to keep the ground from moving, and tonight I am just going to chase the light and let it take me where it does. What I do know is that tomorrow, before the sun, I will be right back at that beach overlooking the York River, waiting at the water to see what the Author writes next.

Two-Hour Tuesdays is available now in paperback and on Kindle. Or, ask your local bookstore to order it in. 📖 Paperback on Amazon · Kindle · Barnes & Noble