Sign of the Dove

I seem to have issues with courage. I don’t have near­ly enough of it. One time I con­fessed this to mem­bers of a book group who had invit­ed me to answer ques­tions about Shad­ow Spin­ner. One woman said, “What? You have no courage? But your char­ac­ters are all so brave!”

“Exact­ly,” I said. “I’m work­ing with the issue. I’m imag­in­ing what it would be like. If I imag­ine courage hard enough and long enough, maybe I’ll get some.”

It’s not that my hero­ines aren’t scared. They are. But they just go ahead and do the scary things any­way. That’s my def­i­n­i­tion of courage.

But there is one notable chick­en among my brave hero­ines. It’s Lyf, in Sign of the Dove. She is con­front­ed with some­thing scary she knows she real­ly ought to do … and she actu­al­ly runs away. (Or tries to! But her mean author does­n’t let her.)

I’ve done a few kind of unusu­al things, things that were scary to me (but maybe not so scary to any­one else). And there is always this moment, this moment when I am about to do the scary thing but I’m not quite actu­al­ly doing it yet, this moment when I say to myself, What are you doing? You’re insane. Just stop this non­sense right now and go home.

Courage? I’m work­ing on it.

So Lyf starts out about as yel­low bel­lied as any­one you’d ever hope to meet. But she is forced to do scary things, and her courage grows with every obsta­cle she con­fronts. The book’s edi­tor, Jean Karl, said her favorite thing about Sign of the Dove is that Lyf believ­ably grows so much. That meant a lot to me.

Oh, and I should tell you that there are lots and lots of trou­ble­some, ornery, love­able dra­clings in this book. And baby-sit­ting, of course!