Carie Lawson - Guest Blog about Inspiration

Carie Lawson is a talented author from Desert Breeze. She home schools her four kids, drives the soccer van --- complete with dirty socks and McDonalds bags scattered throughout --- and tries to sneak away to her computer whenever possible to write. She is an active member of a local writer's group, Middle Tennessee Christian Writers, and received third place in the North Texas Romance Writer's Great Expectations contest in the Inspirational Romance category. She's here todat to talk about inspiration.

Take it away, Carie!

Where does my inspiration come from? 


      I loved writing about the kids in Beyond Summer. They danced and played through my imagination so vividly. I also got to use some of my favorite memories of my own kids in them. Instead of telling you about the scenes I've already written, I am going to tell you a story that might make it into another book.

      My son Zeke is four, and the baby of the family. You know how everyone says the baby is always spoiled. Yep, they're right. But there's something else too, something about never being as strong or as fast or as smart as anyone else in the house that makes them reach higher and try more things because, while they might not be able to beat their siblings in a race, they can do lots of other things that other kids their age couldn't...or wouldn't.

      Our family spends about ten hours a week during soccer season at the field, so the kids are very comfortable there...sometimes bored. As the game we were watching was over, the teams stopped in the middle of exchanging the requisite high five and "good game" and started yelling and pointing behind me. In the deepest part of my heart I KNEW it was Zeke. I turned slowly around and there he was about fifteen feet up a light pole. He'd shimmied up there like he was after coconuts in South America. Below him the ground was half concrete and half grass. I was afraid to yell at him, so I jogged over there and stood quaking in my flip flops while he slipping back down. Once he was safely in my arms, I looked around for my bad-parent badge and slapped it on, trying my best to get to the funny-later stage of embarrassment.

      Then, this is not an exaggeration, the next week my husband is up at the fields with Zeke and the other kids at yet another practice. No one could find Zeke during their game of hide and seek. Another mom from the team went into the Ladies Room and heard a little voice say, "I can't get down," not screaming or crying, mind you, just making a statement. So she followed the voice to a stall, where my son stood on the small steel trash can mounted to the wall stretching up grasping the top of the stall. How long he'd been in there, no one really knows. Long enough to be sure he couldn't dismount by himself. She helped him down and he burst back into the light of day happy because he'd won the game of hide and seek.

      So fun kid stories come easy for me. If you read Beyond Summer, I'll let you guess which ones are fact and which are fiction. Enjoy.

Thank you for joining us today, Carie. The purchase link for Beyond Summer is here, isn't it an awesome cover? Next week, Inspiring Mondays will return with a picture especially for Danielle.