You're making it up! by Jane Walters

I was talking with a friend the other day. She has an interesting job, one which makes her privy to all sorts of information about people’s lives. ‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘If I didn’t know they were telling the truth, I could swear they were making it up.’ She was conveying what we, as readers and writers, already know: that truth is often stranger than fiction.

Take this entirely true anecdote as an example. Some long-standing friends were taking their elderly mother out one day and had parked in a multi-storey car-park. As they began to walk into town, a large dog – over-exuberant at his own day out – came flying over the top level of said car-park, landing squarely on top of the mother who then had to be taken to hospital. I believe the dog was unharmed…

How about me? At the end of last year, I was cleaning the grill pan after lunch. By the end of the day, my marriage had ended. Yup, just like that.

The reason I offer this little snippet of my news is that the eagle-eyed among you will have spotted that my surname has changed. It’s part of my “new normal” and perhaps a bit more extreme than some of the other lockdown reactions. A few years ago, dreaming of my future (still-as-yet-unseen) career as a novelist, I asked the members of the ACW Facebook page their opinion on my potential pseudonyms. Those participating voted overwhelmingly in favour of Jane Wyatt Walters – classy, eh? She actually exists now in cyberspace and you can follow her, I mean, me on Twitter (@jawywa). So she kind of led the way in my own recent re-creation, letting me use the slightly-adapted form: Jane Walters.

That last phrase sums me up at present. Life is looking very different both from without and within. I’m soon to move house and don’t yet know the full extent of the many changes I will have to negotiate. I’m a slightly-adapted form, hoping to become a fully-fledged one in due course. In the meantime, I’m trusting Him who knows the future and I’m bashing away at the keyboard in the hope that Jane Wyatt Walters might yet take a modest centre stage at some point. And let’s none of us forget that, whatever the flying dogs that get thrown at us, God is still in charge, the true source for all our inspiration, and the one who is constantly transforming us.

Jane Walters is the author of Too Soon, a mother's journey through miscarriage (Jane Clamp, SPCK) and appears regularly on UCB and Premier Radio. She leads two ACW affiliated groups in Norfolk and leads writing retreats further afield.

 www.janeclamp.com