What's up in 2024?

It's hard to believe but 2023 is fast coming to an end. In just a few days we will have a new year laid out before us with all of its opportunities, ups, and downs. Every year at this time, I look ahead and give you a glimpse of what the new year looks like in my writing world. This is only an abbreviated list of the writings that I know at this time will be published in 2024. Many more writing opportunities will come up as the days go by. 

January:

·        A memoir article looking at my brief involvement with the Miss West Virginia pageant titled, "Musings on my Pageant Days" will be published in Goldenseal , West Virginia's state magazine.

·        Two devotions I wrote will be published online in Arise Daily .

·        A devotion I wrote will be in The Secret Place magazine.  

February:

·        My co-writer, Shirley Crowder and I will be up to our neck in edits for our new devotional book that will be releasing soon. Also, I will have hand surgery. (I have arthritis in my fingers which have required numerous surgeries already and now another. This one will replace the knuckle in my left index finger.) 

·        Two devotions I wrote will be published online in Arise Daily

March / April: 

·        An Article titled, “Sometimes All You Need Is Ice Cream” will be published in Blue Ridge Country Magazine . This magazine is a regional magazine that sells in about ten states in the Blueridge Mountain area and Eastern Seaboard.

·        Shirley and my new book, “Wonder and Worship” will release from Entrusted Books . We do not have a release date or cover yet but I will share these with you as soon as we do.

·      Midsouth Christian Writers Conference  MSCWC is happening in mid-March. Though I am on the board and had been slated to be on the faculty as a mentor, I will likely have to miss it this year due to my hand surgery recovery. It’s my favorite writers conference and I hate to miss it!

·        Selah Finalists are announced.

May / June

·        Seven Devotions I wrote will be published in “The Quiet Hour” June 3-9

·        Selah Awards in late May

July / August:

·        My first children’s book, “Made for the Middle” will release from Elk Lake Publishing . When I know the exact release date and have a cover to share, I will. 

·        An article I wrote titled, “How God Works” is tentatively slated to be published in Bible Advocate magazine.

*This is as far as I can see ahead, but in addition to what is listed, I will have devotions in Arise Daily at least monthly, and probably will have more published in “The Secret Place”. They only notify me quarterly of the next quarter but have published one of my devotions every quarter for over ten years. Also, I have a contracted article that will be published in Answers in Genesis but I do not have a publication date yet.

 

A Quick Answer

I have been freelancing short pieces--devotions, articles, short stories, etc--for many years now. In June of 2009, I attended a writers' conference where I sat in a workshop on freelance / article writing. I came home from that workshop determined to try my hand at it. I made my first submission in July of that year and got my first paying contract in the fall of the same year, and I've been doing it ever since. As a child I loved to go fishing with my dad and it feels a little like fishing to me: I cast my submission out in the waters of the unknown world of magazines and sometimes I reel in a catch. :) 

In all those years of sending out submissions, only a few times have I had a quick positive response. Oh, I've gotten a handful of quick negative responses where the editor fires back a "no thank you", "it's not a good fit for our magazine", or "we aren't accepting submissions right now" to me but out of what is fast becoming hundreds of published pieces (in other words, hundreds of times editors or magazines have said yes to my submissions) I can count on one hand the times those yeses have come quickly. Usually, I don't get a response for weeks and sometimes even months. 

One of those quick yeses happened yesterday. 

Two days ago, I saw a post on a Facebook page that is for people who live or have lived in my hometown of Bluefield, WV. The post had a picture of a prescription written by a doctor for an ice cream cone. The man posting it said that back in 1957, when he was five, he had been playing outside and ran into a yellow jackets' nest and gotten stung multiple times. His mother took him to the doctor who after checking him out decided all he needed was an ice cream cone to feel better. So the doctor wrote him a prescription for it and even gave him the dime he would need to buy it. 

That kind doctor, as it turned out, was my dad. 

A story this sweet just drives me to my keyboard to peck out a heartwarming human-interest article about it, esp if the doctor was my own sweet father. And that's exactly what I did. I whipped up a 750 word article and sent it along with some pictures to "Blue Ridge Country Magazine" and then I made supper for my family and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I had a "yes" waiting for me in my inbox. It will be published in spring or early summer of '24. 

I was able to let my almost 95 year old, still healthy father know and look forward to sending him a copy of the article when it comes out. 

Hello Autumn!

 

The calendar has slipped into September. How can it be fall already? I'm back working part time as a substitute teacher but still writing too. In fact, just a few days ago I got an email from the publisher of "The Lutheran Digest" that another of my articles will be published by them in December and I got a contract from David C. Cook to write seven more devotions for "The Quiet Hour". These will be published in spring of '25. Meanwhile, some I wrote previously were included in their recent Sept '23 issue. 

Also, Glimpses of God, Autumn, our award-winning devotional, is on a blog tour. Yay! I love blog tours. Authors and publishers like to get their books on a blog tour mostly for the exposure it gives as well as to increase their number of reviews. (Amazon reviews are so helpful to writers! They increase the exposure a book gets on Amazon, especially once a book gets 50 reviews.) Blog tours do not usually bring a significant increase in sales of that book but "Glimpses of God, Autumn" appears to be the acceptation to that. My co-author, Shirley Crowder and I are experiencing a much-welcomed bump in sales right now, which we are tickled pink about. 

Keeping Busy

It's been a busy summer for me writing-wise. I work as a substitute teacher when school is in session, so summers are a nice time to focus more on just writing. I have three books coming out in the next two years, so I certainly have stayed busy this summer in spite of having a break in my subbing work. And what are those three books that will be releasing in '24 and '25? Well, I'll tell you a little about them. But first here is the release schedule to the extent that I know it: 

April '24: "Wonder and Worship" published by Entrusted Books, an arm of Write Integrity Press 

Summer '25: my yet unnamed debut children's book published by Elke Lake Publishers 

Sometime in '24: "Wonder and Worship through the Year", Entrusted Books

The two devotionals will be a two-book series of devotions written around small strange and interesting Bible facts that I call Bible nuggets. I am co-writing both of these with Shirley Crowder whom I have co-written devo books with before. The devotions she will contribute will be based on a hymn that relates to the Bible nugget or theme of the ones I write--hence: wonder (my Bible nuggets devos) and worship (her hymn based devos.)

The children's book will be a picture book for K-3rd grade. The main character in it is Hannah, a middle child who is trying to figure out if there is anything special about her. After all, she is not the oldest or the baby like her two sisters are. And she is not an only like her older brother is. (He is the only boy in the family.) She is just sort of stuck in the middle. What's special about that? 

These are all in different stages of writing. The first devo book manuscript is finished and turned into our publisher. Next winter and early spring I will be up to my nose in edits for it but for now it is considered completed and set aside. Book two in that series is in the writing stage and has occupied a lot of my summer break, and the children's book is in the editing stage. SI have also been doing some freelance writing too. So yeah, I've kept busy juggling my various writing projects this summer. Good thing I love to write! 

A Second Trip to the Selah Awards

Over the past few days, I made a second trip to the Selah Awards held at Ridgecrest Christian Conference Center in Black Mountain, NC. What a beautiful place! My husband and oldest son traveled with me. The three of us had a delightful time. I was humbled and honored to receive a third-place award for an essay I wrote for "The Lutheran Digest". 

Book News!

 Yesterday I received a contract from Elk Lake Publishing for a children's book I first submitted to them a year ago. I am ecstatic! I worked harder on these approximately 800 words than about anything I've ever worked on, or at least any other 800 word group I've ever worked on. And I am sure the real work is only just beginning. Elk Lake will be my third publisher with Write Integrity Press and Olivia Kimbrell Press being the other two. I's so happy to join the Elk Lake Family!

More Contest News!

 I have also recently learned that Glimpses of God Autumn, one of the devotional books I co-wrote with my lifelong friend Shirley Crowder, is a finalist in the Ames Award! 

Contest News!

I learned yesterday that I am a Selah Award finalist again this year! Woohoo! The Selah Awards are industrywide awards designed to honor the best in Christian publishing from the previous year. It is given in many different genres, I finaled in the essay category with a piece that was published in "The Lutheran Digest" in '22. I'm pretty excited! 

 

Writing Updates

 

A few things have happened in my writing life since my last post. 

The big news is that Shirley and I will be writing a second book in a new two-book devotional series that will be coming out next year. We contracted with Entrusted Books in '22 for the first one. That manuscript is now written and turned into our publisher. We pitched a follow up book to that one making it a two-book series and our publisher gave us the green light to move forward. Though we have not signed the contract yet, our publisher did give us tentative release dates. The first will come out in March of '23 and the second in either fall of '23 or spring of '24. You will be hearing much more about these two books in days to come. 

The second news is that I will be teaching a workshop on magazine writing at the MidSouth Christian Writers Conference on Friday March 17th. The conference should be great, and I am so looking forward to attending an in-person conference again.

And speaking of writing for magazines, I got word that an article I wrote about Louisville baseball player, Felton Snow, will be published in the Kentucky Monthly magazine in April. Felton was a player and coach in the Negro League in the 1930's and '40's. In his years as a coach, he coached some of baseball's greats including Satchel Page, Jackie Robinson, and Roy Campanella to name just three. After he retired from baseball, he worked in a barber shop in Louisville until his death in 1974 and was then buried in an unmarked grave. Last summer the city of Louisville along with certain sponsors, gave him a beautiful marker as well as a celebration of his accomplishments which included the Louisville miner team, the Bats, retiring his number and hanging a jersey with his number in his honor at the stadium. In writing that article I went to the cemetery where he is buried and snapped a picture of his new marker. That is the picture at the top of this post.