Did You Picture Them Like This?

Campsites, Cribbage, AI Renderings, and a New Giveaway

Friends,

At our campsite on Lake Pend Oreille, we were nowhere near wi-fi, so my trusty yellow tablet held these thoughts until I could send them your way.

Twice a year, for two weeks at a time, we loop memorable routes through the Pacific Northwest with a group of friends, all of us intent on exploring new areas (and revisiting others), rock-hounding, bird-watching, and biking abandoned railroad lines through some of the most breathtaking country you’ll ever see.

They’re celebration trips, gratitude journeys, during which we savor pristine landscapes, wildlife, and life together.

Including my sweetheart’s birthday. He’s not on social media, but any notes you drop for him here, I’ll pass on—and I assure you he’ll receive each as the best sort of gift.

Because he’s a happy, grateful guy, who has lived long enough to know what matters and what doesn’t.

One thing that doesn’t? Besting me at board games. Or cards. Makes no difference to him if he wins or loses.

Specifically, at cribbage.

I, however, am far less magnanimous.

As my pseudo-smile and jaundiced squint attest. On this chilly evening in the foothills of the Cascades, I had just lost our evening game to him for the fourth night in a row.

As I enter this letter online, I’m up to seven consecutive losses. Or eight. I’ve lost count.

Good grief. Does he win by chance? By skill? By holy permission?

There’s a lesson in this for me somewhere. 😆 An opportunity, if I’ll quit my squinting and hunt for it. Maybe even a blessing in, or after, my losses.

True for more than cribbage. Stakes are far higher for Burnaby and Celia’s love story in my novel Leaning on Air, where Burnaby views life through his brilliant lens of autism—and where Celia’s often adrift. Their unusual marriage carries them through loss in a way that one reader described as an experiential synthesis of A Beautiful Mind and The Notebook.

I like that.

After a recent book club discussion of Leaning on Air, members told me how they imagined the pair. While I keep AI’s paws away from my stories, I thought it would be fun to see how artificial intelligence interpreted the characters’ physical descriptions. When I got home, I sent ChatGPT to work.

I’m new at this AI thing, so when I asked it to clean up Burnaby’s hair around his ears, they gave him grizzly ears, instead. As in grizzly bear ears. I ditched that rendition . . . and kept the one below:

And here’s Celia:

Did you picture them like this? I’d love to hear.

Marriages. . . grizzlies. . . Segue with me to other wildlife we spotted along the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes. How about these cattail browsers? (Oh, for my long lens right then!)

Best of all: a mooseling nestled in the grass nearby.

Too, we passed lodges engineered by flat-tailed chewers, whose muddy paths crossed our trail. Given the girth of this attempted pine, one of those beavers has even greater ambitions.

All while giants looked on . . . and brought a promise to mind:

“You shall go out with joy

and be led forth with peace.

. . . and all the trees of the fields

will clap their hands.”

—Isaiah 55:12

📙 📙 📙 BOOKISH NEWS:

I know, I know . . . I already mentioned Leaning on Air, but— to encourage you to pick up the novel—may I add bit more?

I recently learned that the book won SILVER in the Large Publisher Fiction Category of the 2025 Nautilus Awards! I’m beyond grateful to those judges . . . and to God for giving them favor for the story.

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And now for a NEW GIVEAWAY!

Three subscribers to these Saturday Letters will win a copy of The Gospels, excerpted from The Message Women’s Devotional Bible, which will release through NavPress this August!

Reply with the word MESSAGE in your subject line, and I’ll enter you!

Alongside a devoted assembly of women, I had the joy of contributing a few reflections to this fresh look at Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase. I’ll include one of them here next month.

Reply with the word MESSAGE to enter!

***

Thanks SO MUCH to all of you who applied for What the River Keeps' Launch Team. I so wish we’d had room to say yes to everyone.

If Team Manager Jaime has already welcomed you to the team, please check your email from her on May 29. She wrote you about some technical issues with NetGalley. Please reply to her asap?

Gotta run, but you remember our neighbor girl, right? Before we left on our trip, she popped over and launched a paper airplane at me. It just hung in the air, eerily suspended.

“It’s stationery, “ she giggled. 🙄

Love,

Cheryl

Word Count on Novel #4: Zero. As can happen, I started the narrative too early in my characters’ timeline. Doing so helped me know their backstory, but I sent those thousands of words packing.

I’ll begin again next week.