This past weekend, my wife and I received a minor miracle. By ‘minor’, I mean that no great world-changing event took place. No higher order of peace was achieved in the Middle East. As far as miracles go, it was more in the common garden-variety category. But still…

As far as we are concerned, there is no question. We witnessed a miracle.

That's my "house," in the background

In order to understand just how amazing this event was, I need to explain something about our home here in England. The big house where we have our apartment is located at the end of a two mile-long lane. The telephone and power cables were all laid down in the ‘60s. Which means the phone lines are old, the seals are corroding, and we cannot get high-speed internet.

Up until last year, all we could get was dial-up.

It’s a beautiful world, our little haven in the fields. But it is also a world without Skype, or downloadable films, or music, or video conferencing. It’s not quite as bad a connection as where we lived back when we first arrived in England. That was an Edwardian boathouse, converted to a home back in the nineteen-teens. We renovated one room, and discovered all the wiring wrapped in old newspapers. The Times, to be exact. The headline was about the negotiations to end the War to End All Wars.

All this has something to do with the miracle. Really.

This past week, I invited my wife on a date. We have both been so busy since we returned to England—the surgery, and Oxford term, and work on the Unlimited novel. But a week ago I completed the novel’s first draft, and last Thursday I gave my last class and completed all the tutorials for this term. So I invited Isabella to go away for a little weekend break. I took her back to the village where we used to live, and still love, called Henley-On-Thames.

As the name suggests, Henley sits on the River Thames. Its history is pretty amazing. Back in the early medieval era, when the river was the major conduit for transporting goods through the heart of England, Henley was the seat of the royal customs houses. All goods transported along the King’s river was subject to the King’s taxes.

There are still houses in Henley that are over a thousand years old, that bear names from this time—the Salt House, and the Corn Exchange, and the Wool Market, and so forth. At that point, Henley was home to almost five hundred taverns and inns—not bad for a village of some five thousand souls. There is still one brewery, Brakespear, that has been making ale in Henley for more than seven centuries.

We left Henley because it was ‘discovered’ by rich London bankers, who, in one twelve-month period, pushed up the housing prices so high we could no longer afford to stay. In one year our rent went up 350 percent. At the time, it was a very hard moment. I can’t say I’m glad it happened. But I am very happy that we’ve had a chance to live where we are now. Very glad indeed.

So we returned to Henley, and stayed in a riverside manor called the Phyllis Court Club. It basically looks like a wedding cake that sits on an emerald lawn right alongside the river. It is one of my wife’s favorite places in the whole world. So to celebrate all the milestones, and to thank her for nursing me through the recovery from my operation, I took her to Henley for a date.

After my last tutorial, we drove down from Oxford. Before dinner, I checked my emails, and to my astonishment I discovered a note from the producer of the Unlimited film, Chad Gunderson, announcing that the rough cut was completed.

The rough cut of a film means that from all the hours and days of shooting film, a basic structure has been laid out from beginning to end. The soundtrack is in place, including the initial structure of the music. There is still a great deal of polishing to be done. But this is the first glimpse any of us have had of the story in its entirety.

The basic rule of thumb in watching a rough cut is, this is the worst this film will ever look.

Which means the only people who should see even a glimpse at this stage are pros – people who know to look beyond the off-tempo moments and the scratchy sound and the absence of special effects – and so on and so on and so on. There are a thousand different reasons why the rough cut could be a toe-curling experience. The best thing that can be said for most rough cuts is, there might be a film there somewhere. Basically the experience is a jagged shift from one cringe to the next.

My wife has never seen a rough cut before. When I told her over dinner that the link had come to the rough cut, she immediately demanded to see it.

“Let’s not ruin a lovely meal,” I begged. “It can wait.”

“Wait? Wait for what? For the sky to open and the Second Coming to arrive?”

“Let’s go home. I’ll go over to a friend’s house. I’ll give it a first look…”

“You’re not seeing this without me.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“We’re not waiting. They have wi-fi in this hotel. We’re watching it. Tonight.”

There are moments in married life when all the logic in the world is defeated by a woman on a mission.

My dearest friend in the publishing world, Gary Johnson, former President of Bethany House Publishers, was having a discussion like this one with his granddaughter last week. The granddaughter is nine years old.

When she came up with an idea that he had a hundred reasons to nix, she planted her hands on her hips and said, “Stay with me here, Grandpa. You have two choices. You can argue with me and then do it, or we can go have some fun.”

Which was exactly what I thought about as I gave my wife the inevitable answer, which was, “Okay.”

So I went to the front desk, and explained what had happened, and asked if we could sit in the disused room closest to their wi-fi connection. To stream a professional cut of a film, we needed every ounce of oomph their e-link could provide.

The receptionist responded without the blink of an eye. I mean, it was like she had been sitting there all day, just waiting for me to come up and say, I’m a novelist and a screenwriter, and there’s this film that I’ve been working on for over a year, and we have a chance to see it…

The receptionist announced that they had just redone their conference room, and installed a professional-grade overhead projector and a wall-sized screen.

So we took our desserts and our coffees and moved into this room with padded swivel chairs. And this really nice guy came in and hooked up my laptop to their system.

And there comes the film. Just remembering that moment gives me chills. Readers who have followed the course of this project will understand when I say, there have been moments when all we had to go on was prayer. And yet here we were, holding hands in the darkened room, watching rain streak our window and make patterns upon the river, and then the dream came to life.

Unlimited is without question the finest inspirational film I have ever seen.

There are so many astonishing aspects of the finished project. I am going to mention just two here, and come back to others later on.

A few weeks before we started filming, the insurance groups that cover risk on a film production stopped covering work in Mexico. The violence and the risk of kidnapping were just too great. Which meant it was possible to film in the slums of Rio, or Angola, but not across the border from El Paso. So one of the last-minute issues our producer and director had to overcome was finding sites that looked like Mexico, but were north of the border.

There are moments in the film when the border fence becomes visible. And I know at some level that I am looking south, from Texas into Mexico. But my logic doesn’t hold me. Because at a gut level, I am so caught up in the atmosphere that I’m in Mexico, seeing across the impossible divide, and there on the fence’s other side is the forbidden land, the richness and the opportunities of USA. Which it isn’t. It’s actually the other way around.

That’s one thing. The other is the cadence, or what in film parlance is known as the beat structure.

Too often inspirational films go like this:  Story, story, story, then soapbox, soapbox, then back to story again.

The hardest thing about bringing an inspirational story to the big screen is finding that balance between message and story, so that the entertainment value is never lost, not for an instant. Because this must happen, it must become the norm, in order for inspirational films to start drawing a mainstream audience.

The message of Unlimited is solid. But at no point – not one – is there the sense that the moral pulls the viewer out of the story. It is amazing.

• The emotional ‘feel’ is constant.
• The tension and the flow and the steady unfolding of the plot draws beautifully towards the climax.
• The lighting is exquisite. It holds to that arid Mexican yellow, the parched quality so powerful I was comparing it in my mind to favorite big-budget movies that have been shot in desert settings.

Unlimited is a good movie. Really. As a rough cut, it is fun to watch. From start to finish.

I will finish here with a request.

This week the producers and director are flying to Nashville to show this rough cut to major backers. It is a vital step. Crucial. So much hangs on this showing. Your prayers would be so very much appreciated.

We stand in prayerful thanks, our hands outstretched to receive the next miracle.

In December, my wife and I bought a new home, an apartment in the Florida town just nine miles south of where we have lived for the past fourteen years.  It is only the second time we have purchased a home, and it was a big and long-awaited transition.  We sold our first home two years ago, after having it on the market for three years.

When we bought our first home, I never thought selling it would be a cause for celebration, or that we would accept an offer for half our original asking price – and then count ourselves fortunate.  Welcome to real estate in Florida.

Yes, we know it is a hurricane zone, and yes, we know there are risks involved.  But we love it here.  It is home.  And so we bought a unit that we think is extremely well built, and we feel much more comfortable about leaving this for extended periods of time in England.

The problem is, I don’t want to go.  Since our arrival, the time here has been one non-stop hurricane of events.  The purchase of our new home is a great example.  My wife and I watched them build four identical buildings in a little park-like setting, and we realized they would be perfect for us.

But they were soooo expensive.  But like so many developments these days, the prices fell and fell and fell some more, and then on the second day after our return from England, the twenty-first of December, one of the units dropped thirty percent in price overnight.

We thought, we hoped, the builders might want to get out before the end of the year, and we were right.  We countered and offered to close by December thirty-first.  They accepted, but only if we bought it before year’s end.  We had eight days to close.  For anyone who has ever bought a home, these words should send shivers down your spine: we had eight days to close.

With Christmas in the mix.

A whirlwind of writing, rewriting, editing, filming, and moving!

Our lives have pretty much stayed at that incredible pace ever since. I have been pushing on two projects simultaneously.  This rarely happens.

But one of my new book projects is a totally new concept, and I wanted to get a third of the way into it and share it with the publishers.  It is a huge new direction, something I’ve never tried before, where the publishers came to me with an idea, one they have been thinking about for ten years.

It was both an honor and a major challenge to be approached by a publisher.   As soon as I reached my goal for the new concept, I left for the film set.

What an amazing statement to make: I left for the film set.  We closed on a house in eight days in December.  I left for the film set in March.  (See my blog post, “Learning at the feet of actors,” for what the set was like).  Since my return, I have been pushing hard on the novel based upon my screenplay, Unlimited.

Of course, added into this has been the ongoing work on my three books being released this year (Rare Earth, Hidden in Dreams, and Prayers of a Stranger. Each book, once it has been accepted for publication, goes through four back-and-forth transitions between author and publisher.

First there are the major edits, which have to do with smoothing out the plot-line and making what can be substantial changes along the way.  Then there are the minor edits, or line edits, which deal with everything from a character’s hair color to dialogue to all the myriad of small issues that make the book whole and polished.

Then there are what in the industry are called the final passes, the galleys and the page proofs.  These are the final opportunities to correct all the small issues before the book goes to print.  And there are always issues.  At this point, my wife calls them ‘eekos’, which is the sound she makes when she finds one.  Eeeek-o!

So I had three books going through edits and galleys, and two new book projects, and a film.

So what’s the fun of moving?

And let’s not forget the move.  For those of you in the know, let me add that we are moving from a house to an apartment.  And my wife does not like to throw anything away.  Nooooooo.

Actually, the move turned out to be fun.  I know, that’s not possible.  But it was.  Isabella has been as busy as me, and perhaps at times even busier.  I will not talk about her life here, I’d need another ten pages, and it’s two in the morning, and I have a book I’ll be working on at dawn.

Most of my blogs are done in the wee hours, when a transition is coming up and I find myself stunned by all that’s happened.  Like now.  It helps me sort through the whirlwind, these quiet moments in a dark house.

Back to the move.

As I’ve mentioned before, the people who bought our home couldn’t move in because their company needed the husband to stay on and not retire.  We didn’t know where we were going, if we were staying in Florida because of Isabella’s work, so we rented it back.  And we insisted on a three-month opt-out, because we didn’t want them telling us we had to leave when we were in England, and giving us thirty days to get out.

The problem was, we closed in eight days.  We didn’t need three months.

But we had it anyway.

Amazingly, our new apartment was the same deal as our old home.  The previous folks had bought it as a retirement place, but never retired.  So it’s four years old and never lived in.

Last month we took the tags off the dishwasher.  It needed painting and carpeting and other stuff.  And we had ninety days.  Ninety days!  The painter and his entire crew came down with the flu and had to put off our job for two weeks.  We said, okay, no sweat.

Moving can be utterly horrid.  But if you take out the pressure of having to get it done, and you factor in all the stress we had in our professional lives, hauling boxes down to a new place became a, well, hobby.  It was our downtime.  We filled up our little SUV and we carried our boxes in and walked around the place, anticipating the day we could call it home.

When the movers finally came for the big stuff in mid-March, we were ready.  So ready.  And so calm about leaving the first home we had ever bought, the place we had thought we would never leave.  Back before we endured four hurricanes and burst pipes and blown-out windows and a new roof and four new a/c units.

But that was the home where my study was in a cubby at the top of the stairs on the third floor, with seven sides and seven windows and water to the east and the west, and all the world was green and blue.  That was the home where I wrote a dozen novels, and dreamed big, and loved my wife and our home and my life.

But it was time to move on.  I went back by the house today to check on mail, and realized it’s not mine any more.  There was an official ‘vacant’ notice in the mailbox and the drive was empty of all but sunlight and memories, most of them very good indeed.  We have moved.

Time to embrace change

The problem is, I don’t feel like I’ve had a chance to settle.  I’m not ready to go back to England.   It’s really bothered me.  We moved in three weeks ago.  Immediately after I go teach in Colorado and Tampa we’re supposed to make the change to England.

Next week I need to go to Nashville to meet my new publishers, and then six days later we leave.  I’m not ready to go.  I want to sit on my new veranda and drink my coffee and watch the green world out back of our new home.  We have bunnies and osprey and so many different kinds of birds and some very nice neighbors.

Then today two things happened.

First, I got my teaching schedule from Oxford.  And that, folks, is another sentence I never in a thousand years thought I would ever write.  But it’s come.  I am a lecturer in Oxford’s new creative writing program.  The pay is laughable for part-time lecturers in England, set by the state at a level so low a secretary here would fall out of her chair.  No kidding.

But hey, this is Oxford, and I am loving it.  So I got my schedule, and I’m doing tutorials, which are the crown jewel of Oxford’s teaching program.  All six of my tutorial students were in my class in the autumn, and I am really looking forward to seeing how much they have progressed with their writing.

And then tonight I got up and couldn’t sleep and was walking around our new home, padding from room to room in the dark, and came into my office, and turned on my computer, and drew up photos I took of a favorite bike ride I took last autumn through Alesbury, a village rimmed by prehistoric planted stones, like Stonehenge but not in a neat tidy circle.

Forty miles.  Eight mile-plus climbs.  From there I had climbed the Ridgeway, up to a Neolithic road that was old when the Romans arrived.  I then descend into a hidden valley, with one road that runs straight and true for nineteen miles.  And in that entire run I might have passed two cars.

In my mind, I’m already overseas and it is green as only England can be, and the wind is my dear friend.  I then mentally climb back up to the Ridgeway, and over the peak, and then swoop down a three-mile descent to the plains of Wiltshire and my car and home.  Because that is what awaits me.

Our other home.