Why I Wrote God & Ice
I did not set out to write a book. I set out to get through two weeks.
The writing started as something much smaller than a book. It was a way of keeping my head straight. Sitting in a cold house with a heavy blanket and three dogs and my hands in my pockets, I started putting down what was happening, mostly so I would not lose track of it.
I did not know at the time that I was writing a chapter. I thought I was just talking to God on paper.
Where the title came from
The morning after the storm, our woods looked like something out of a painting. Every branch was coated in glass. When the sun came up the whole place lit like a chandelier.
And then a pine covered in that same beautiful ice hit the ground about twenty feet away, and I understood exactly what I was looking at.
Ice is beautiful and cold and dangerous, all at once.
That is what stayed with me, because that is life. The thing that makes it lovely is often the same thing that can take you apart. Nature is the thing I thank God for every single day, and during those two weeks nature came through the back of the house and across the roofline and rearranged everything I owned.
God and ice. Both were in those two weeks, right on top of each other. The title was not clever. It was just accurate.
Why I decided to make it a book
For a while I did not think anyone would want to read it. It is not a dramatic story by disaster standards. Nobody died. The house was still standing. Compared to what other people go through, two weeks without power is not much.
What changed my mind was thinking about the person sitting in a cold house right now.
Not necessarily a literal one. The cold house might be a diagnosis, a job that ended, a grief that is not lifting, a stretch of praying that has started to feel like talking into an empty room.
I wanted that person to have something written by someone who was still in it. Not a book written from a distance after everything is resolved, but one written while still walking through the storm.
