By Elizabeth Musser Dear Lord, As 2020 opens like a blank manuscript before me, please hear my heart. May the words I write this year be well-chosen and crafted to the best of my ability. Oh, I know the first draft won’t be a thing of beauty. But please renew my desire, my zeal, to spend the time thinking about, …
Happy New Year!
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. …
10 Ways a Writer can Give This Christmas
By DiAnn Mills Writers treasure giving Christmas gifts that are meaningful and personal. In the season‘s busyness, we too often become overwhelmed. We love every moment from November through December … parties, family time, worship, decorating, and the list goes on. But sometimes our ideas hit zero in the gift department. On Christmas Eve, we have nothing to wrap because …
Dealing with Depression
by Elizabeth Musser I just launched my new novel, When I Close My Eyes, last week at the Atlanta History Center, a novel about mental illness and God’s grace. The novel opens with a hitman failing in his attempt to assassinate a middle-aged novelist. No one has ever tried to assassinate me, but I share a lot in common with …
Tis the Season To Remember
by Gail Gaymer Martin As autumn passes, we remember our gratefulness as we celebrate Thanksgiving. Soon everyone’s mind turns to the next holiday, Christmas, as we again give thanks for the gift of the babe born in Bethlehem, our Savior, Jesus Christ our Lord. Yet sadly our focus often shifts to the traditions of Christmas—gift buying and wrapping them, Christmas …
A Writer’s Prayer
By Sarah Hamaker I’ve been thinking a lot about prayers and writing these past few years. I’ve always loved that ACFW has a prayer room staffed with volunteers during the conference, and I’ve taken advantage of both praying and volunteering. Prayer is also top of mind because a local writer’s group I’m involved with is working on an anthology of …
Skydiving – Shifting Our Writer Expectations
by Deborah Clack My stomach dropped, but my feet were still on the ground. Staring at a man who was four inches shorter than my five feet nine, all I could think to myself was, “This is not who I thought I would be jumping out of an airplane with.” When I initially decided to do the insane and go …