By Emily Conrad Bats whirled through the air as I left the shelter of our car to walk the short path to the overlook. In pre-dawn Joshua Tree National Park, the fluttering creatures were the only movement I spotted. In a hazy blue distance, the lights of some small city glowed. Opposite that, a soft yellow preceded the sun. I …
Leaving Harran
By JPC Allen God has a lot of nerve. I thought of this when my kids and I were rereading the story of Abraham and Sarah. Actually, they were still Abram and Sarai at this point because we were reading the part in Genesis when God tells Abram to leave Harran and become a wanderer, living in tents for the …
Self-Promotion: The Ugly, The Bad… and The Good?
By Michael Anthony Torres Thanks to Steve Laube for the questions that inspired this meditation. The increasing demand for self-promotion is arguably a by-product of the internet and the democratization of publicity. Surely, there are many more who could speak to this from more of an industry insider’s perspective; but when I was a young adult reader, I don’t recall …
Battling the Self-Doubt Virus
By Laurel Blount When I was in college, the local water supply became contaminated with a particularly unpleasant parasite. Soon the infirmary was jammed with moaning students, all of us dealing with the tummy bug to end all tummy bugs. Because the illness was linked to the water system, nobody was immune. Pretty much everybody got it. See where I’m …
Dancing
By Christine Sunderland It is said and it is written that Jacob dreamed of angels descending and ascending a ladder between Heaven and Earth, and that later he wrestled with an Angel of God. Just so the Christian writer dreams and the Christian writer wrestles. For we dream of Heaven but are rooted on earth; we wrestle with God’s spirit …
When “No, Thank You” is Really “Not Yet”
By Kathleen Y’Barbo You keep track of my sorrows. You have collected my tears in your bottle. You record each one in your book. Psalm 56:8 The process from idea to publication is sometimes much more difficult than a writer expects. Fresh plots become words on a page. Those words are polished, deleted, and added back until the manuscript …
What Is the Message?
By Jean Kavich Bloom As an avid fiction reader and a fiction editor with more than thirty years in the Christian publishing world, I understand the power Christian fiction can have. Perhaps that’s one reason I’m concerned about a topic that can be a Pandora’s box of emotions and opinions—the message a fictional character’s response to sexually oriented advances sends …
Ensemble Cast
by Christa Kinde In our books, the main character rarely operates alone. Depending on the needs of the story, we provide them with friends and neighbors, romantic interests and rivals, critics and supporters. The first book in my new YA trilogy is steadily building an ensemble cast of mongrels and misfits. All of them are needed. The story couldn’t happen …
What Do You Do in the Calm After the Storm?
By Glynn Young It’s the calm after the storm. For months, it’s been days and weeks of intense writing, rewriting, editing, re-editing, adding to, and subtracting from. I thought novel #4 would be a relative slam dunk, since large chunks of it have existed for more than a decade. All I had to do was add a few thousand words …
Surviving the Sophomore Slump
By Laurel Blount When I sold my debut novel A Family for the Farmer to Love Inspired in August of 2015, I was over the moon. I had finally stepped through the golden door of publication, and I felt sure from now on I’d be dividing my time between signing books, signing contracts and signing royalty checks. But then my …