By Donna K. Rice My other career is as an estate planning attorney. In that capacity, I’ve spent many hours visiting with clients about what will happen when they pass away. To me, the personal matters, family values, and legacy development are most important, but money is what most people think about when considering estate planning. With that in mind, …
Stimulus Plan: Five Tips for Re-Igniting Your Writing Career
By Janice Hanna Thompson Many writers-even published ones-go through career stalls. Things fizzle out. Interest (among editor, agents or readers) wanes. Some authors face tough times, even after experiencing great success with a first or second novel. Still others feel the downward spiral after being on the best-seller’s list. I know, from personal experience, that these seasons can be discouraging. …
A Time to Write
By Loretta Eidson God must think our time is extremely important for the Bible to reference it with such repetition. In Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (NIV), a brief explanation of time is mentioned twenty-nine times, and thirteen of those are found in the first four verses: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: A time …
When No Becomes Yes
by Davalynn Spencer During my first fiction-writer’s conference, I didn’t know what I was doing and I’m sure it showed. Hoo boy, but I did not want to be a rookie in a new field-a freshman-especially as a seasoned journalist with a master’s degree in my back pocket, two grown children, and the ability to parallel park and back up …
Modern Day Parables Without Preaching
by Cathy Gohlke We all crave stories that raise our moral bar, lift us higher, that show us clearly how we, too, can live cleaner, purer lives with hearts on fire. But no one wants to be preached to in a novel. And yet that’s just the challenge Christian writers face. We’re desperate to share the love, the very breath …
Life Happens
by Melinda Inman I didn’t want this gig. I didn’t want to write about how life is messy and complicated as we pursue our publishing dreams. Rather, I wanted to write about how the sun shone, the birds sang, the flowers bloomed, and all was right with the world. But life happened. Cancer, hospice, death, Epstein Barr, and now Chronic …
Talk Your Way Out of a Jam!
By Bonnie S. Calhoun Have you heard novelists say their story was bogged down by inactivity, or that they felt lost in a long drawn out narrative? Well never fear! I have a totally sharp solution…conversation. Write out the narrative and then make it a conversation between two or more people. That’s write (right). Dialogue is considered to be an …
Beating the Post Conference BLUES
By Susan May Warren Are you home from the ACFW conference? Finally unpacked? I hope you came home filled with encouragement and new ideas on how to make your writing breathtaking. Now what? Conferences can be overwhelming, between the requests for proposals or full manuscripts, new story ideas, craft lessons, marketing epiphanies and loads of new friends. Where and how …
Publishing vs. Encouraging
By Ane Mulligan According to a song lyric by Linda Rondeau: Home, home in the industry Where the writers and publishers play Where seldom is heard An encouraging word And the skies are so cloudy all day Thanks, Linda for letting me borrow the lyric. Yes, I’ve experienced discouragement in my writing journey. Maybe it was a rejection, or comments …
Dreams Really Do Come True!
By Lillian Duncan I wrote another post with this same title after receiving my first contract from a traditional publisher. It took 15 years of writing before I received that contract. So you can well imagine I was a little bit excited. Now three years and seven contracts later, I still get excited. I just don’t cry quite as much! …