Plot Points #20 💌

Waiting for wisdom, spooky reads, and the witching hour

Welcome to Plot Points, a weekly newsletter from The Nook. Here, you’ll find my favorite links from around the internet, books I’m loving (or not), prayers to keep + share, quotes, updates on my books, and more. If you enjoy Plot Points, I’d love for you to prayerfully consider subscribing to The Nook via a free or paid subscription. Thank you for being here!

---

Happy weekend, friends, and welcome!

Sitting down to write this email is one of my favorite parts of each week. After we drop the kids off at school in the mornings, I head home to the office and get settled at my antique roll-top desk to write. (A gift from my dad who was just getting rid of it…because people apparently do that?) Sometimes I work on a draft of Plot Points; sometimes I write a collect; sometimes I work on my novel. All of it contributes to the work I do here, so thanks for inviting me into your inbox. Seriously.

Also, a BIG thanks to Gabi for upgrading to a paid subscription this week!

I noticed as I was working on novel edits earlier that my protagonist—newly changed from a 26-year-old woman to a twelve-year-old girl—is giving off strong Anne Shirley vibes, and I can’t help but laugh at myself. Anne Shirley, Jo March, Hermione Granger…all of these strong female characters live rent-free in my mind, and it’s fun to watch their influence show up on the page because they have meant so much to me in my own life.

In other news, joy + sorrow married together has been a bit of a running theme in the Nunnery house lately. We’ve had some wonderful stuff come our way and we’ve had some frustrating challenges to face, too. In all of it, we are trying to have courage and hold fast to the God we know is good, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

This week, I wrote a collect to encompass these feelings. Feel free to save it to pray over your own struggles or pass it along to someone you think might need it. Sometimes it helps to have words already written for you when you don’t know what to pray, and I hope this blesses you as you go into the weekend.

Collect: For Wisdom In Trying Times

Almighty Father, Who gives so graciously to His children, grant us the wisdom we long for and the courage to obey, so that we may become peacemakers, not just peacekeepers, to the glory of Your Name, our Father, Who lives and reigns with Jesus Christ, our Savior, and the Holy Spirit, our Helper, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Thanks for sharing some of your time with me this week! Be well, friends.

---

Point #1: Ebay purchases can make for sacred mysteries.

I love a lost-and-found story. I love family mysteries. I love the truth that our parents, too, were once children. This lovely piece about a man who comes in contact with his mother’s long-forgotten siddur, or Jewish prayer book, via a chance encounter with an eBay seller is all three of these combined. Read it and feel your heart swell.

Point #2: The witching hour might be holy, too.

Every parent knows it: that space in the late afternoon/early evening when it’s not quite time for dinner and bed, but the kids are bored out of their minds and on the hunt for something—anything—to do. Welcome to the witching hour. Cue all sorts of fights, frustrations, and sensory overload! This thoughtful piece gives all of us, whether we are parents or not, a framework for cultivating holy, sacred moments at a time of day when life feels anything but, “no heroics necessary.”

Point #3: If you build it, they will come.

Yes and A THOUSAND AMENS to the latest piece from the brilliant

Lore Wilbert

: “Social media was not made for serious writers and it will never work for us in the ways we’ve been told it would.” Write, and write, and write some more, friends. The followers might not show up, but the readers will. (I am super grateful for how Lore always articulates the cultural moment so well!)

Point #4: Don’t bastardize art or artists.

This piece on the use of the word “content” as a catch-all term for art in its many forms has got me thinking hard about how I use my words. (Which is already something I do a lot.) In an increasingly AI culture that seems hell-bent on ousting the skill of actual human minds, we can’t run the risk of diminishing the value of what artists add to the world. (Plus, you really can’t argue with Emma Thompson.)

Bonus Point:

I found the cutest kid in the world. (Except for my own, of course.)

It’s the “Ma’am?” at the beginning for me 😍.

---

Reading In The Nook

I’m afraid I’ve gone an entire week without reading a single book. I’m in a definite slump, it seems. BUT! I have a new list of spooky, ghostly, mysterious novels on my TBR for October, so I’ll share those here in case you’re also in need of a good read. (A big thanks to my favorite book gal

the rad recap

for her fabulous recommendations!)

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

Scarlett Clark is an exceptional English professor. But she’s even better at getting away with murder.

Every year, she searches for the worst man at Gorman University and plots his well-deserved demise. Thanks to her meticulous planning, she’s avoided drawing attention to herself—but as she’s preparing for her biggest kill yet, the school starts probing into the growing body count on campus. Determined to keep her enemies close, Scarlett insinuates herself into the investigation and charms the woman in charge, Dr. Mina Pierce. Everything’s going according to her master plan…until she loses control with her latest victim, putting her secret life at risk of exposure.

Meanwhile, Gorman student Carly Schiller is just trying to survive her freshman year. Finally free of her emotionally abusive father, all Carly wants is to focus on her studies and fade into the background. Her new roommate has other ideas. Allison Hadley is cool and confident—everything Carly wishes she could be—and the two girls quickly form an intense friendship. So when Allison is sexually assaulted at a party, Carly becomes obsessed with making the attacker pay...and turning her fantasies about revenge into a reality.

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.

Called "Pastoral," this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it… he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.

Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.

Have you read either of these novels? Tell me what’s on your spooky season reading list! 👇🏼

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”

—George Orwell—

Get My Latest Book: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N

Want help getting published in 2023? I got you.

Can’t afford a monthly subscription to The Nook but want to support my work? You can buy me a coffee instead.