FEARLESS FRIDAY
Please welcome Caroline Warfield to Fearless Friday. She's conquering fear today.
Fear is a part of life—there are risks all around us.
Courage is feeling fear and getting on with it anyway. That’s a lesson I
learned early.
Life is a risk. Getting married is a huge risk. Having
children isn’t as much of a risk medically as it was for women a hundred years
ago, but it is still a huge risk financially and emotionally. In the
professional realm, taking a job is a risk; quitting one is an even bigger one.
I once worked in a public library. Some libraries have happy
staffs that function as a family. That one was a dysfunctional mess with a
manipulative power-driven director, whose techniques were so subtle they took
me two years to fully face and realize. When I did, I quit. I had worked hard
to finish my professional masters while raising children. That job was my first
professional position. And I quit. It was a risk.
I didn’t throw myself on my sword in the directors’ office
the day she kicked the rug out from under
It turned out to be the best career move I ever made. It turned
out to be an environment where, if you had a good idea, you could do it. I
thought I was hired to write abstracts about technology products for disabled
children. In the end I created a searchable database from the ground up, set up
a searchable front end, and (this was pre-WWW times) gave it dial access. I
learned to manage it remotely from home, and I wrote technical documentation
for it. Unfortunately it was a federally funded project and eventually funding
was pulled. At that point I had a professional resume that took me many places
I couldn’t have imagined in library school. Was the risk worth it? Oh yes.
I’ve realized lately that risk-taking is a factor in every
story I write. Sooner or later both hero and heroine have to leap into the
unknown and take a chance. My newest release, Christmas
Hope is no exception. It takes place during World War I, and duty
demands that the hero, a Canadian soldier, lead men into the face of German
guns. Loving the heroine, a French widow with a tiny son, terrifies him as
well, though he’d never admit it. He can’t protect her in those terrible times,
and every time he manages to see her, he isn’t sure he can come back. But she
reminds him of life beyond the mire of war and gives him hope.
Award winning author of
historical romance often set in the 19th Century, Caroline Warfield
reckons she is on at least her third act, happily working in an office
surrounded by windows where she lets her characters lead her to adventures in
England and the far-flung corners of the world. Christmas
Hope is a departure, but as in all her books, she nudges characters
to explore the riskiest territory of all, the human heart, because love is
worth the risk.
When God shuts the door, he opens the window.
ReplyDeleteSo true.
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