Friendly Friday - Rachelle J. Christensen

Rachelle J. Christensen was born and raised in a small farming town in Idaho. Her creativity developed easily in the rural area as she spent many years working in the fields with only a few weeds to distract her daydreaming.
After graduating from USU, she and her husband moved to Utah County. Rachelle loves spending time with her family and laughing with her silly kids: two girls and one boy. She also enjoys singing and songwriting, playing the piano, running, motivational speaking, and of course reading.
Rachelle hopes that someday she’ll be able to do some research in Hawaii for a novel and then maybe England and Scotland. For now she’s doing research close to home and working on several new story ideas.

Her books include a romantic suspense novel, Wrong Number, and a nonfiction book, Lost Children: Coping with Miscarriage.

As I stared at the blank page on my Word document trying to think what to blog about for my guest post, I thought of something. No, it wasn’t how many loads of laundry I needed to do, or what I should fix for dinner, or that I really need some stronger air freshener for my baby’s latest diaper…

I thought about life and why I love to write—why I need to write.
When I’m in the first stages of writing a new novel, a blank page can be frightening. I want to get it right. I want to develop my characters so that they sing from the pages. I want to write the next best-seller. So it’s a little frightening, but it can also be exciting. The anticipation of how words will fill that blank page and become part of a story, how one sentence might change the whole direction of the story—the power of one word—all these things can make writing quite exciting once you’ve put those first words on the page.

Maybe it’s the writer in me or maybe some of my synapses are just pointing in a different direction, but I feel like so much of my life is like the writing process. Life is much like a blank page. Each day I wake up with a list of things that need doing and I try to plan for life, but it always surprises me.

I think that’s why I like writing, because to me, it feels like a natural extension of life. It’s how I communicate with life. All of those thoughts buzzing through my mind can at times feel overwhelming, but when I’m writing a novel I can pull in stray thoughts from the far reaches of my brain and tie them together with the nagging worries hovering on my cortex and create a story. A story where I can escape the wave of notions going on in my head and organize my thoughts into a novel.

And when I’m finished writing—or more likely when I get interrupted—I’ll go and change that diaper, change that load of laundry, start preparing dinner, and all the while I’ll be smiling, thinking about the conversations my characters are having in my head. My fingers will itch to write down the words bouncing around in my brain and I’ll fill up those blank pages.

I’ll make some mistakes and I’ll have to rewrite, but that’s life—it really is. Every day I make mistakes, but that doesn’t keep me from trying to be the best wife and mother I can. It won’t stop me from trying to show my children every day how much I love them and that I love them enough to try and fix my mistakes and become a better person.
Character flaws are what make a story interesting, but in real life I wish I could be rid of them. So I’ll keep writing, filling up those blank pages, and living, hoping for the day when I can write that perfect page.

You can pre-order Wrong Number online now at

Borders

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

Watch the book trailer below:


Thanks for being my guest, Rachelle. Life does indeed feel like writing sometimes and I'm glad we can edit and rewrite some of our mistakes out of our lives. Can't wait to read this book. Every time I watch the trailer I get more and more anxious to get my copy.

Next week on Friendly Friday, my guess will be Melissa Cunningham.