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, …
When God Has Something Else in Mind
God has blessed me with a large, close family. Between my mom and dad’s brothers and sisters, I have a total of seventeen aunts and uncles. And that’s not including their husbands and wives. The number of cousins I have, that include second cousins who are actually my age, would take a while to count. If I see one of …
My Friend Writer’s Block
By Suzanne Bratcher WRITER’S BLOCK: Anything that stops our writing. My high school English teacher would hate that definition. I can almost hear her snap, “What do you mean by anything? For that matter, what do you mean by writing?” To appease her, let’s try a simile. Writer’s block is like a horse that stops dead in the road and …
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. …
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, …