Hi, subscribers! Thanks for joining me in my continuing celebration of Undertow’s 10th birthday coming up this November. That’s when we sold it right here on this Blog and many of you got your signed copy then. That offer continued for one month, then we “went live” on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online vendors. Undertow is still out there for sale in paperback (List price: $24.95) and eBook (List price: $9.99). Don’t pay more! (There are suspicious sellers asking for more, even for my second book, From the Porch to the Page). Since the paperback versions of both books are print-on-demand, no copies are collecting dust in any warehouse or under the bed in my writing room. I think that’s better for the environment.
So, what’s missing from Undertow?
What is in Undertow is not the whole story
Undertow could not be “the whole story.” Lots of events were left out. The story told in Undertow had to have a focus, a theme supported by particular, relevant scenes about salient events, etc. That took some heavy hours of contemplation and countless hours of editing, since the whole story about those seventeen years would have spanned who knows how many volumes and would have taken me another few lifetimes to write! And reading it, you would’ve fallen flat from exhaustion!
Bible Lands Tour: one event left out of Undertow
Every writer knows that one of the most confounding challenges in putting together a story or poem or essay or book is deciding what to put in and what to leave out. In Undertow’s case, as I said, I had to leave out a lot, but here’s a scrap from one leftover:
In October 1985, I went on a trip: The Way’s two-week “Biblical Research Tour of the Bible Lands.” At the time, I was working fulltime at Way headquarters on the biblical research team. That summer, we’d published a reference book that V. P. Wierwille had commissioned: The Concordance to the Peshitta Version of the Aramaic New Testament (it was really a concordance to the Syriac New Testament), and so it seemed an appropriate time for me to fly to Israel with about one hundred other Way believers and visit some of the sites mentioned in the N.T., places where Jesus had lived and taught.
One day, a few sightseeing boats took our big group across the sparkling blue Sea of Galilee under a blazing sun, the same sea Jesus sailed around with his disciples. I loved being out on the water, not crammed on a bus listening to our Way tour guide expound “the accuracy” of the Bible. This ride gave me time to think for myself, a suspicious activity for sure. I fell into a reflective mood, and a few suppressed, subversive questions rose to surface, such as “What do we think we’re really doing in this organization? Would Jesus approve of our methods of “rightly-dividing” the Bible? Which translation contains the true Word of God: the Syriac or the Greek? I had been squelching these rebellious ideas for a while already, but that day they sprang to mind like the irrepressible flotsam and jetsam atop the sea around us. I could not drown those questions after that.
Visit the photo gallery below for pics from that trip.
The Kitchen Sink series
If you’ve been a subscriber here for a while, you may remember some posts about other events which were cut from the original manuscript. Here they are again. Click the links to The Kitchen Sink Series. Enjoy!
The Kitchen Sink: The Catholic Girl Who Got Left Out | Charlene L. Edge
The Kitchen Sink: Sixth Grade Rebellion | Charlene L. Edge
The Kitchen Sink: Summer of ’65, the Nunnery | Charlene L. Edge
The Kitchen Sink: Prisoner for a Day, 1972 | Charlene L. Edge
Thanks for reading!
Your writer on the wing,
Charlene
Kathleen Brandt
That’s a great story. A good place to have doubts!
I don’t know if you remember her, but I’m pretty sure my mom was on that trip. She roomed with her pal, Elena Whiteside.
Charlene
I wish I remembered meeting her but, it was so long ago …