For the entire month of November, stop by the Whitney Awards benefit auction. The program, in its second year, honors the best Mormon writers and needs funds to keep going strong:

Throughout the month of November, visit http://www.whitneybenefitauction.com

New items will be added every week, from professional edits to jewelry to clothing to so much more.

The dreams returned every few months, several times each year. Without fail.

For twenty-one years.

I dreamt of the different bedrooms I called my own. Of the living room's red velvet chairs I huddled in as I read books.

Of the kitchen counter, where I ate breakfast each morning, looking out the front window through the pine trees at people passing on foot or bicycle.

Of the family room downstairs where I spent hours watching recorded episodes of The Cosby Show because it was in English . . . and therefore a link to home.

The same room where I first cried hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the opening ceremony of the summer Olympics in L.A. From the ages of ten to thirteen, this was the house I lived in across the ocean, on another continent, in Helsinki.

Sometimes in the dreams I was returning to the house. In others, I still lived there. Often the house appeared different, and I discovered passageways or rooms I never knew about. Or the floor plan had changed. Or the whole place had been remodeled. The two constants in the dreams were that I knew I belonged there and that I needed to return.

The house dreams lasted through high school and college, into my marriage, and continued through giving birth four times. Even while raising a family, moving, and entering new stages of life, one thing I could count on to never change was having another disconcerting house dream every few months.

I never had the same one, and they never stopped. They kept coming even when my oldest child turned thirteen—the age I was when we returned to the States.

Why did I dream of a building I hadn’t seen since I got my first pimple? What hold did it have on my psyche? Generally, the dreams weren't pleasant. They left me feeling wanting, uneasy.

In time, I realized that, in many ways, those three years defined the woman I have become. I arrived in Helsinki a young girl. I came home a teenager. In between, I navigated the confusing waters of adolescence—confused further by doing so in a foreign language and on foreign soil.

Yet, because I went through those intense changes and emotions, that language and soil became a second home, tying themselves to me in a way nothing else has since. Ever could. So the house called to me, making a hole in my heart where that part of me belonged, because I'd left something of myself behind there.

Last month, I returned after twenty-one years. I walked up the front steps as if treading on holy ground, and when the door opened, I could have sworn that I just missed a little ghost of my former self running down the hall.

I peered into my former bedrooms. Floods of memories came back—times of joy playing eraser wars with my sister, learning to knit on my bed against that wall, the thrill of Christmas mornings, putting on my first bra, applying mascara for the first time, coming home from the school's maturation clinic in Finnish and trying to figure out what it meant for me.

The house held emotions so thick that at one point I could hardly breathe. I could see myself lying on a bed, sobbing into my pillow as I prayed for help with a burden my twelve-year-old heart could scarcely bear.

During my brief visit, I sat at the kitchen counter. Walked into the sauna. Ran my fingertips along the fireplace in the family room. Inhaled the smells, the same ones I'd breathed in as a child—nothing I could describe or explain using any term but home.

I saw myself doing homework in the dining room, playing the grand piano, curling my hair for school. The longer I moved through the rooms, the more the ghosts of my girlhood slowed down. Instead of running around corners, they beckoned me further. They took my hands, leading me room to room like old friends wondering why I’d been gone so long but not holding my absence against me.

After soaking in each memory, I took a deep breath and headed out. Standing on the porch as the door closed, I didn’t have a frantic urge to throw it open again, because this time, I hadn’t left anything behind.

The ghosts had known me, and they followed. As I walked down the stone stairway, I held them close to my heart. I’d come for them, rescuing the girl who’d spent three years trying to figure out who she was and where she belonged. Where she belonged was with me now, completing the woman, the wife, the mother I am today.

I brought her and her ghosts back, and now the void my subconscious probed during my sleep for most of my life has been filled.

I would love to return to my other home again, but if I never do, I’ll go forward feeling more whole. My soul is no longer fractured as it was when I boarded that plane at the age of thirteen and left a piece of myself wandering the walls of that house.

This time the only things I left behind are the dreams.

A couple summers ago, my then three-year-old was watching me getting dressed. She was at just the right height (or wrong height, as the case may be). She tilted her head and quite soberly declared, "Mommy, your tummy is SO big."

Gee, thanks for pointing that out. On Sundays I can mask it with control-top hoes and one of those things they now call a "body shaper" but is really just an elastic girdle that makes it hard to breathe.

Now all I needed was commentary on saggy skin and stretch marks.

I smiled and tried to explain that Mommy’s tummy got a bit stretched out because four babies had grown inside there. "Before you were born, you were in Mommy’s tummy, too."

Nice way of shifting the blame, I know.

It wasn’t until she answered that I realized that unlike my older three children, she had never seen me pregnant and didn’t understand the concept.

She narrowed her eyes, snorted the way only a toddler can, and with a shake of her head and a giggle said, "Nooooo . . ." Apparently Mommy was being silly.

Not quite. Like most mothers who have given birth, I have what can be affectionately referred to as "bread dough tummy." If you have it, you know what I’m talking about—that stretched-out skin with the consistency of bread dough that will never be tight again and instead just hangs there. It's one of those after effects of pregnancy that never go away, like stretch marks.

Eight months into my first pregnancy I was rather pleased that I had managed to escape the dreaded stretch mark phenomenon. I slathered on a cream every day. It was supposed to help repair skin, and three weeks before delivery, I was still stretch-mark free.

Then I ran out of the cream and couldn’t justify buying another $50 tub for the last part of the last month. After all, it probably hadn’t done much anyway, and really, how much bigger was I going to get in the last stretch of pregnancy? Whether the cream worked or not, I’ll never know.

What I do know is twofold:
1) babies do grow a lot in their last few weeks and
2) somewhere in the last days of that pregnancy, stretch marks blossomed on my thighs and crawled up my belly.

Watching the red lines travel felt like being trapped inside a science fiction movie with an organism that couldn’t be stopped.

Over the years my stretch marks have faded from scorching red to a pinkish silver, and I make a point of not even looking at them. Avoiding swimsuits tends to help. But a few weeks after my toddler noted my BIG stomach, my husband and I were visiting my parents, who were doing volunteer work in Jerusalem. Like good tourists, we took a dip in the Dead Sea. As I floated in the bath-warm water, I looked at my legs, which hovered barely under the surface.

Did you know that water is a perfect magnifying glass?

The wobbly silver lines I hadn’t looked at in months suddenly looked as wide as racing stripes.

And this time I didn’t have any of my children around to blame it on. "See? You did that to me."

Which is just as well, because the reality is, my children were worth getting every squiggly line and every ounce of hanging bread dough.

I know from personal experience just how powerful an influence an older sister can be. In fact, my being a writer is essentially because of mine.

Mel is about four years my senior, and while I’ve heard her scoff at the idea that she should be held on a pedestal, for most of my childhood, she not only was on one, but I buffed said pedestal daily.

If asked which flavor of ice cream I wanted, I’d have to think, Hmm. What flavor would Mel want? If she was present, I’d take a peek. Pralines and Caramel? Make that two, please.

She was so grown up, and I wanted to be just like her. She took advantage of this.

Such as when, in third grade, she learned the multiplication table and cursive. Ever the vigilant devotee and/or apprentice, I wanted to know what she knew. She enjoyed playing school and recognized an opportunity presenting itself. She took the worksheets her teachers had already corrected, erased her marks, and made me do them.

Keep in mind here: I wasn’t even in kindergarten yet.

Yet Mel was giving me timed tests on the multiplication tables as I curled up with a pencil on the kitchen floor. Then, tongue sticking out of my mouth, I painstakingly tried to write my name in cursive—even though I could barely PRINT it.

But I was learning to be like Mel!

Enjoying our teacher/pupil relationship, Mel moved our “school” to other subjects. She gave me hands-on projects. I remember (and no, I’m not making this up) being assigned the task of creating a shadow box model of the solar system.

Once she pulled a volume of the encyclopedia off the basement bookshelf at random. It fell open to the anatomical drawings of a horse. She promptly informed me that I was to memorize all the muscles.

I did. And I LIKED it.

When I went into my kindergarten pretesting and Mrs. McKay said, “Can you write your name?” I happily complied—in cursive. “Alrighty then,” she said, looking a bit puzzled. “Let’s try that again . . .”

We think my horrendous handwriting is due to the fact that I learned cursive before my motor skills were ready for it. To this day, Mel willingly bears the blame. I’m happy to give it to her instead of, oh, taking responsibility for being too lazy to write cleanly.

But I can thank Mel for getting me into writing because when she was in sixth grade, she had these brown notebooks that she’d scribble stories in. And of course, I thought that was an intensely cool thing to do, so I had to do it too. I wrote stories and had her read them for “feedback.” At the time, I didn’t actually want criticism. I wanted my icon to rave about my wit.

But being as we already had a teacher/pupil relationship, she wanted to mold my writing into Pulitzer material. After all, she WAS in sixth grade. When she told me my story about a sniffing cat wasn’t brilliant (it had too much smelling in it; it wasn’t funny), I was devastated. But I was bound to make her proud and try again.

A couple of years later, she took a hardbound blank book and started writing about personal beauty and makeup. (She was a mature teenager of fourteen at this point and knew about womanly stuff.)

Naturally, I trotted in her footsteps. I purchased a hardbound blank book and wrote what I knew about—big kid stuff. She never finished hers, but I did finish mine. It was called, "Helpful Hints for Kids."

So in some ways, I can thank Mel for setting my feet on the path of writing. What started out as a little more than copy-catting has become a life-long journey and passion for me.

I’m a big sister too, but my little sister Michelle and I are only two years apart. I attempted to play teacher/pupil, and she rebelled, since instead of seeing me on a pedestal, we were more like peers. We ended up playing bank/post office/grocery store, having eraser wars across our beds, and staying up late at night behind our parents’ backs talking on our purple toy phones that really worked. But that’s for another post.

After, “What are you calling it?” one of the most-asked questions I get about my writing is, “So, have you started anything new since your last book?”

Often the answer shocks a lot of people, because it’s not that I’ve started anything; I’ve finished something, turned it in, and I'm working on something ELSE.

My fifth novel, Spires of Stone, was released September 2007. When I'd get this question around that time, I'd get the reaction, “But didn't your last book just come out?!”

Well, yes. But I didn't finish WRITING it in September. Trust me on this one; I’m not some Super Woman who whips out a book in three months flat (HA!!!! It’s hysterical to even think that, especially when you factor in the research involved in a historical novel.)

So to set the record straight, here’s the scoop on how this publishing time line thing works:

In a nutshell, it takes a whole lot longer to get anything through the pipeline than most people realize. The LDS market is much quicker than the national market, but even here it simply takes time.

Here’s what a typical manuscript goes through for me: First I draft the book. Then I revise it several times, giving it to my critique group and revising again. When I think it’s polished enough, I submit it to my editor. From drafting to submission This process can take a year. A little less, if I'm lucky.

Then it goes out to three different readers who fill out a huge evaluation form with something like a dozen pages or more. This process generally takes two or three months. For a new writer trying to break in, the process can take much longer, since current authors with my publisher get priority in getting their stuff out to the readers.

If the evaluations are favorable and the editor feels the manuscript is strong enough, it’ll be brought to the committee. (If not, it might need some revisions first). Committee is where the final publication decisions are made. Once a book is officially accepted, four months or so may have passed since submission. In my rejection days, instead of four months, it could be nine months or longer before I'd get an answer.

Then comes the fun of edits: a content edit and likely at least two line edits as the manuscript ping pongs between me and my editor. This can last weeks or months. (In the meantime, I'm trying to research and draft the next book.)

After that are the proofs. Again, several of them, some done by me, others by hired proofers. By the time the book is sent to be typeset into the final galleys (so it’s formatted and printed on the page just how it’ll look in the final book), I’m ready to burn the thing. I can practically recite the book in my head, I’m certain that it’s awful, and if I ever read another word of it again, it’ll be too soon.

Generally I'm somewhere around a third of the way done drafting my NEXT book when I enter the proofing stage with the one that's been accepted. Proofing can be a couple of weeks or an entire month or more.

Once the book is finally ready, it’s sent off to the press. Getting the final copies printed and warehoused takes a couple of months, and then shipping them to stores takes more time.

The upshot is that if the entire publishing process takes less than ten months, you’re very lucky. So you submit one book and get to work on the next.

To give you an idea: My fourth book, At the Journey’s End, was submitted December of 2005. The very next month I began working on what would become Spires of Stone. At the Journey's End came out that September (2006), and I submitted Spires of Stone that December. Spires came out the the next fall, 2007.

With book #6, the waiting game will be even longer. The book been accepted (check my gallery for the photo taken of the Manti temple, the setting for the book. The new title is "Tower of Strength."

I began it more than a year ago, submitted it back in December of 2007, and it won't hit shelves until spring 2009.

We'll probably start the editing process in a month or two. So in the meantime, I'm (of course) drafting my next book. (A contemporary novel this time, about five wives whose husbands are deployed. I'm having fun with it.)

The delay feels a little weird at times—here I am promoting and talking about one book that written at least a year ago, when I’ve been living and breathing (and very excited about) a different book that I've been drafting during the same time.

But for readers, of course, it feels immediate. They don’t know when you wrote the thing, submitted it, or, most likely, how long the editorial/publication process took.

But know you do.

And so it goes . . .