J.Rhett Lively

As we enter the fall season, while I won’t be partaking in the Pumpkin Spice nastiness, I am shifting my life a bit to start a new day. I’ve taken a job that will require me to work at night, which honestly is my preferred time to be awake anyway. I worked nights for a long time, stopping when I decided to get married and eventually have kids. Now that the kids are getting older, and I need to get back into a routine that allows me to get out of the house, work, and have cheaper insurance than I am paying out of pocket for right now, I’ve decided to get back to the nocturnal lifestyle I have always loved.

Living at night makes it easier to be someone who like to shut himself in a room and write, paint, draw, crochet, and generally be who I am without interruption. At night people are asleep and will leave me alone, whereas in the daytime, my phone is constantly going off, people are always around, and people expect me to be up and doing things when I all really want to do is be left alone.

I know, as a father and husband the two don’t really mix, but it can. I plan to sleep when the kids are at school and in the summer when it’s too hot to do anything anyway. I plan to get home in time to take the kids to school and still be there to pick them up and have dinner with them each night. Even if I worked a day schedule, I wouldn’t see my wife many days until the evening time anyway due to her work, so we’ll see each other in that same time frame, only she’ll be ending her day as I’m getting started with mine.

With this new schedule, I do plan to spend more time writing, creating, and generally doing the things I enjoy. With this new schedule, I am turning a page in my life where I actually plan to focus more on what I want, what I dream of, and what I long to do with my life rather than push all that to the side, putting everyone else first.

Current Projects

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be concluding the “Back to Life” series with “Open Music” and “Dirty Hands.” These will explore how we can better our own and our family’s health by spending time together singing, reading and playing and by taking the time to reconnect with the earth with a garden. Time spent together as a family and time spent watching a garden, no matter if it’s a flower garden or a vegetable garden, grow can have more benefits to our mental, spiritual, and physical health than many people realize. We’ll talk about the effects on our relationships, how depression seems to melt away, and the joy that comes in cultivating both our relationships and our gardens can bring.

Upcoming Projects

Following the Back to Life series, I am going to tackle some of my “Parenting Hottakes.” As a last-year GenXer, I do not agree with the current paths that parenting experts, schools, and society as a whole are leading the world down. Children need discipline, and no that does NOT mean beatings and abuse, but actual discipline to help them learn to not only cope with the world around them, but become productive people as they transcend into adults.

During this series, I’ll talk about a wide variety of topics including, food, chores, sports, school and homework, church, sex, movies and media, and drill down to even hotter topics right now such as phones at school and even my thoughts on the current reading programs that are being pushed across our country.

I know this will raise some eyebrows because I believe that we have room for improvement in all of these topics and I will say things that will offend and anger people throughout this series. The beautiful thing is, what I’m putting out there through this series is my opinion, my beliefs as I’ve learned from my mistakes and triumphs through life and while they won’t always align with all of you, that’s ok. Your opinion, your way of doing things is your right (at least as long as the child is cared for and not abused). I’m simply putting my thoughts out there for anyone trying to what is best for them and their families. And I encourage those people to keep looking, keep reading, and do a lot of praying that God will show them the way that’s right for them and their family.

For Halloween, we’ll explore the “Fales Faces” we hide behind in our lives. Coming out of an age where I hid my own thoughts, my own hopes and dreams in order to ensure everyone else was happy, this series is more about exploring these mistakes in my own life.

Putting on a face is a learned process. We push our kids to be someone they aren’t all the time, because what they want to wear and do doesn’t make sense in our minds. Our friends at school push us to be someone and something we aren’t because to do anything else would mean we would become an outcast, often bullied and ridiculed because we had the mind to be our own person. Our jobs, our spouses, our families continue doing this as we become adults. The person we were a year ago has to continually be put on as a mask even when our experiences have changed our hearts and minds, because to admit the change would put a strain on relationships, on promotions.

Our churches, even in the best of times, are some of the worst causes of these “Fales Faces.” Our image at church is defined by our clothes, the form of bible we carry, the amount of money we give, and who we socialize with at church events.

This series is going to be a fun 8 weeks of writing but also a fun 8 weeks of movie watching with my kids along the way for ‘research.’

And also…

I plan to continue and almost weekly series which I’ve entitled “Trying Again…Again.” This series is simply a placeholder for me to get my thoughts about current events both in my life and in the world out, the last couple of weeks have been a little gloomy as I’ve looked illness and death, but that’s real things in my life and hopefully the future will bring somethings that are more fun and exciting along the way.

I am also starting to layout the plans for a series to follow up “False Faces” called (mostly to annoy our pastor) “Count Your Blessings.” This series is still up in the air so much that I am not even going to elude to possible topics right now.

Inesperada

And the main goal of this season is to write “Inesperada,” my debut novel. I had planned to write and finish another novel as my debut, but the story of that novel doesn’t need to be a debut, it’ll come later.

“Inesperada” is a friends-to-lovers story set in a fictionalized world set in the very town I grew up. Some of the landscape in the story doesn’t actually exist back home, but that’s ok, it’s my world and I can change what I want to.

I’m excited to get this one written. It’ll be fun to take daydreams that have happened in my head over the years and put them on paper for those brave enough to see what goes on in my head.