Please welcome this weeks guest Paula Mowery for The Journey. She answers the question: How have you seen God work in your writing journey? Growing up, my mother worked at a Christian bookstore. She would bring me books to read and also journals to write in, so I suppose she is partially responsible for my love of reading Christian fiction and my love of writing. I wanted to pass on this love. As an English teacher for middle school students I urged them to find books they could get into, … [Read more...]
Happy Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving. It's a time of year where families gather round their tables to eat a big feast of turkey, ham, yams, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, apple pie, pumpkin pie, or whatever family tradition yours might have. But before you eat, many families will go around the table and say what they are thankful for over the past year. Five years ago on this very day I remember how hard it was for me on that first Thanksgiving with Mari gone. (Click here to view the post from … [Read more...]
The First Blog Post I Ever Wrote
Blogs. There are so many of them out there today and the plethora of topics that each one is on can seem to never end. After my daughter pasted, my grief ran so deep. I bought a new diary (yes, I still call my journal a diary :) ) to write all those thoughts constantly swimming around in my head. I needed an outlet to be able to just vent. Then approximately three months later I had all those words I just had to get written down. So I sat down at my dining room table and began to write those … [Read more...]
The Journey with Mary Hamilton
Please welcome this weeks guest Mary Hamilton for The Journey. She answers the question: How have you seen God work in your writing journey? Early in my writing journey, the church I attended put on an annual dinner theater as an outreach to women. I’d only written a few articles for take home papers and magazines when they asked me to write the next play. The idea was scary (what if I failed?), but enticing (what if I succeeded!). With lots of prayer, I agreed to try. My hour-long play was … [Read more...]
Day 170: The Dangerous Place
It's interesting but if you think about it the life of a writer is one of being solitary, alone, by yourself for long periods of time. Can you handle being along like this for anything length of time or would it drive you crazy. When you have any kind of job from home or business from home, you ultimately have to work by yourself as there isn't anyone around you pushing you to do whatever needs to be done. As a writer this is even more so. Who's going to tell you to write. Typically, just … [Read more...]
Quitting A Bad Habit
If I could quit one bad habit I have it would be to quit being a procrastinator and just get things done. Why do I wait until the last-minute where I'm running around frantically trying to get done whatever it is I'm doing? I have no idea. I think part of my problem is time management and how I can easily eat away at my time when I should be doing something else. When you work outside the home for someone else you are forced to be accountable with your time because if you don't the chances of … [Read more...]
Day 168: Hero (or Heroine) Story
To try to put into words what today's post is about, I don't know if I could give it the justice it deserves. Here is what I read for today: When he was fifty-one years old, Reynolds Price learned he had a ten-inch malignant tumor in his spine, and he believed that his happy life of writing and teaching was over. Surgery and radiation left him a paraplegic, in unspeakable pain, and not sure that he would survive. But he did survive and was able to manage his pain through hypnosis. He then … [Read more...]
The Journey with Susan J. Reinhardt
Please welcome this weeks guest Susan J. Reinhardt for The Journey. She answers the question: How have you seen God work in your writing journey? Man's Ideas vs. God's Plan "Your writing is good, but this book will never be published." These were not words I wanted to hear. After eight long years working on The Moses Conspiracy and honing my skills, they represented the ultimate rejection. I seriously considered going the self-publishing route, but there was no peace in my heart. One … [Read more...]
Day 167: Writing Space as a Metaphor
It's interesting that in life how different we all really are. No two people will do something the same way. Even as writers, we must remember to be true to ourselves instead of trying to copy another writer as it will come off fake. In the end, we must keep our own voices when we write. Reader can tell when we don't. Well, my writing space, typically, is in my living room in my big comfy cozy rocker/recliner with my feet up, my lapdesk on my lap with my laptop on top of that, my mousepad and … [Read more...]
Day 166: Blocks
In life we can take those things we need or want to do and put them into blocks, like blocks of time. Depending on the block is whether we get right to it or we end up procrastinating about it all. I tend to be a procrastinator, even though I don't want to be. When it comes to writing, I can put my fiction into one big block and nonfiction into another big one. Then those big ones break down into smaller ones where Mari's book is one and then the fiction book I'm writing now is another. At the … [Read more...]
