By Shirley E. Gould It’s 2020! Happy New Year to you, my writing friends. With 2019 behind us, we are facing a clean slate. That should make us happy. We have another opportunity to succeed in relationships, in our spiritual journey and in our writing endeavors. To succeed, we must prepare. I’m a planner. I make diet and exercise changes …
A New Year, A New Attitude
By Cindy Patterson Today is the last day of the year. But not only is it the last day of the year, it’s the last day of this decade. As I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to post about, my mind has taken me in all different directions. That could be because 2020 and the beginning of a new …
A Blurred Starting Line
By Shirley E. Gould According to the calendar, today is the first day of winter. With the variety of weather conditions across America you could have three feet of snow on the ground or be basking in the warm sunshine along the coast. We, in middle Tennessee, had an endless summer with a serious drought, basically two weeks of fall …
The Joy and Surprise of Writing With
By Chandra Lynn Smith A couple of years ago at the ACFW conference I was privileged to take Allen Arnold’s continuing session. It was a most amazing blessing! (That’s my exclamation point use for the day.) During our opening session he had a stack of spiral-bound notebooks. He walked around the room and gave a notebook to each of us. …
The Legacy We Leave
By Laurel Blount A few weeks ago, I noticed a book by Sue Hubbell discounted on BookBub. I’d enjoyed one of her other books, so I purchased A Country Year: Living the Questions and settled down to read. The writing was every bit as good as I remembered, but as I savored the words, my mind kept flicking to a …
Writing with Integrity: Remaining True to Yourself and Others
by Kathy Harris For most of us, life is moving too quickly right now. We have what seems like a thousand things on our to-do list and little time to do them. Each moment of every day is about last minute detours, do-overs, and deadlines. And that’s without even thinking about writing. And it’s not just during the holidays that life is …
Encouragement for Older Writers
By Laurel Blount A long, long time ago when I was in my twenties—back in the dark ages when there was no internet, no cell phones, and no social media—I submitted a book proposal to a well-known publisher. I was overjoyed when I received a request for the full manuscript, but ultimately, I got a kind rejection letter. Deeply disappointed, …
Who Told You That?
by Henry McLaughlin Remember the old cliché? from childhood: sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me? Not true. Words and names can actually do much more lasting damage. Cuts and bruises heal. Words and names create self-images that linger and poison for years. They can become prophecies we fulfill whether we want to or …
And Your Readers Are?
By Lynn Hobbs Years ago I was taught to write to a certain group selected to be your target market. Various writing workshops and writing conferences included this type of training. Age and gender or ages and genders were to be strictly adhered to for whatever you were writing. Consistency was of utmost importance. The argument was believable, and presented …
Beyond Writer’s Block
by Preston Shires A lot of people talk about writer’s block. To be honest, and I say this whispering, I really don’t know what they’re talking about. However, I do know that in order to write, one must have the perfect atmosphere, and you must stay in place to take advantage of it. So, I think I’ll write about that. …