Looking Forward ... And Back

Welcome 2019! Today is the first day of a brand-new year. We have 364 more days ahead of us to live, laugh, love, and maybe cry a little before this year is behind us. As I think about the days to come, I can't help but also look back.

2018 was a mostly good year. I had some not-so-wonderful moments both personally and professionally but many more wonderful ones that far out-weighed the less than wonderful days. This blog is focused on my writing journey so that is what I will talk about today as I let you know some of the highlights of 2018 and things to look forward to in 2019.

2018 was another good year for freelancing. I had numerous articles published in an assortment of magazines and sites and even taught a workshop on freelance writing in June at the Kentucky Christian Writers Conference. One highlight was getting my first acceptance in a regional magazine for an article that will not come out until late summer '19.

On the book front, 2018 saw the release of one book and re-release of another, both by PixNPens. The most recent release, Prayer Warrior Confessions is an anthology compiled (and partly written) by Shirley Crowder and me. It has been received well by readers, has just finished a blog tour, and is garnering many great reviews. Another book that has been quite successful this past year is Prayer: It's Not About You. This book remains my best-selling book, actually, partly because groups of 10 or more often buy it for group Bible studies. Last August, a men's small group studied it and the leader emailed and told me he intended to teach it in a Sunday School class he leads this spring.

What were the less-than-wonderful moments in my writing world? Well, I did receive a few rejections of submitted articles (which is the norm for freelancers but stings just the same) and I learned that SEEK magazine will be folding. It has published so many of my articles. Also, my husband and I had a couple of disappointments with large traditional publishing companies who gave us every indication they were going to publish our book, "A Stand for Truth" but in the end, they did not. One actually sent a contract but it differed greatly from what we had discussed with them and was not a contract we could sign.

So, I start 2019 with much hope and great expectancy. Here is what I know already about my writing journey in the year ahead:

Freelancing:
I will be receiving contracts from both Focus on the Family and David C. Cook in January for articles to be published sometime in the coming year. I still have articles coming out in SEEK in Jan, Feb, April, and May before they close their door in August. And I know of other articles I wrote coming out in May in Purpose Magazine and in August or September in Blueridge Country magazine and devotions in both the winter and spring issues of The Secret Place.

Books:
My husband and I are moving ahead with the publishing of A Stand for Truth with the help of Gregg Bridgeman at Olivia Kimbrell Press (the press that worked with me on my novel, The Whisper of the Palms) We do not yet have a release date for A Stand for Truth. And speaking of my novel, it will be featured in a friend's blog in mid February and will go on sale at that time too.

My co-writer on many of my books, Shirley Crowder, and I have been and will stay quite busy again this year. We are in the process of writing the Glimpses of God series of devotional books; four in total--winter, spring, summer, and fall. We have winter all done and turned into our publisher. It will release next fall. (It will keep us busy in the summer when it hits the publisher's editing schedule.) We are putting the final touches on the spring book and hope to have that to our publisher in February and are just starting on the summer one which has a deadline of next August. So, while it may be winter outside, my thoughts for the next few months will be filled with summertime!

Lessons from the Trail--Part 2

By 2010, the writer in me had come alive. I don’t know if writing was something that lay dormant and finally hatched, a treasure God buried deep inside of me that He finally revealed, or if it was born a fresh, but whatever the case, it had become alive and active by this time. And I had found an outlet for my writing in freelancing small pieces which I began doing regularly.

 

The serendipity? I had a growing list of writing credits, some cash coming in from articles and devotions, and a slowly growing platform. But I still saw no hope of ever securing a book contract for my manuscript. So it sat on the shelf, in the forms of a hand-written notebook and a word document on my computer.

 

In the spring of 2011, I saw a contest for unpublished manuscripts and entered mine. It was the 2011 “Women of Faith” contest. Out of over 750 entries, mine was named as one of only 30 finalists. However it was not the winner and the winner received a book contract. So, other than giving me a sense of accomplishment, it did not change my reality. My manuscript was still on the shelf.

 

Last spring I attended a writer’s conference for children’s writers, even though I do not write for children. I attended to help my sister, a budding children’s writer, get her feet into the writing waters. At the conference I met Tracy Ruckman, owner of Write Integrity Press and Pix-N-Pens Press, Tracy publishes children’s books as well as all sorts of other genres. Though we had not met in person before, I knew her already via the web, because I had submitted a story to her, which she used in one of her anthologies.

 

As we talked, she asked about my writing and then asked me to send the first three chapters of my manuscript. A few weeks later, she asked for the entire manuscript and then to my incredible joy, said she wanted to publish it under PixNPens, the nonfiction side of her company.

 

So today, I am able to enjoy all kinds of writing. On the freelancing side, I now have over a hundred and fifty published pieces. (I’d have to stop and count but I know I have 100 published devotions, give or take a few, and probably close to 50 articles and stories.) I speak to women’s groups, and lead workshops at writing conferences on freelancing and devotional writing. I have two books coming out this fall, “Prayer, It’s Not About You” and “Glimpses of the Savior”, a seasonal devotional I co-wrote with childhood friend, Shirley Crowder. And I am 40,000+ words into my first novel.

 

God has been good to me!

 

Lessons from the Trail

In future blog posts, I will share more insights about prayer that I learned in my quest to better understand it. Today, however, I’m continuing to share my writing journey.

 

Writing is a new work God is doing in my old age. It’s a huge blessing to me and I can only hope it will bless others along the way too. I thank Him daily for opening these doors, even though as is often the case, it was born out of a difficult and even dark time in my life.

 

I have a close friend named Susan Siami, whom I love to quote. I find her spiritual insights so inspirational. She once said, “I am so committed to my own agenda. And that agenda is zero pain for myself and those I love. God’s agenda is far greater than mine. He is producing a work in me and through me and often pain is the very means He uses to produce it.”

 

That certainly was the tool God used to begin my writing journey.

 

In 2009, I attended the Kentucky Christian Writer’s Conference, hoping to learn how to get my manuscript on prayer published. I came home thinking that goal was unachievable, at least at the time. I could self-publish but I had learned three things: 1) I knew very little about the publishing world, even after the conference, 2) I have editing issues. 3) I didn’t have a platform

 

I now know that I can pay an editor, and hire out other parts of the publishing process. And in fact I am in the process of self-publishing a small devotional book co-written with a friend. But at the time, getting a book out seemed impossible.

 

Writing still intrigued me. Actually, it did more than that; it pulled like a magnet. I had words I wanted to share and had spent the previous four years honing my ability to put them down on paper. (Learning to write on a computer came later. My 60,000+ word manuscript and my first few articles and devotions were all hand-written and transcribed onto a computer.)

 

The wheels started turning in my head. If I could start getting small pieces published, then I would be scratching that writing itch while building a platform too. A platform, for those of you who are not writers, was defined to me as the number of people who would read something simply because it was written by you. For me at the time that number was a big zero. Well, my mom and dad would probably read it, so maybe that number was more like two. J

 

So, I sat at my kitchen table one day, shortly after returning from the writer’s conference, sharing my thoughts with my daughter. I sheepishly told her about the great workshop on how to freelance small pieces and confessed my desire to try my hand at it. But who did I think I was fooling? I was not a writer.

 

My daughter looked up from her orange juice and said, “You know mom, the average American reader only reads at a sixth grade level.”

I burst out laughing and replied, “I can write at that level!”

 

And I sat down immediately and began transcribing a devotion I had hand-written in my journal onto my computer to send to The Upper Room. That devotion, titled, “The Day of Small Things” based on the question posed in Zechariah 4:10, “For who has despised the day of small things?” became the first piece I ever submitted. It was not the first piece I ever had published, because it takes a very long time from submission to publication with some devotional magazines. It was published a year and a half later in the February, 2011 issue of The Upper Room.

 

 

 

 

 

Who Knew?

Last weekend I had the privilege of serving on the nonfiction panel at the Kentucky Christian Writer’s Conference. One of the participants directed her question to me, asking about my journey to publication. As I shared with that group, I realized some of my readers might like to hear the story too. I will tell it in a series of blog posts in the coming few weeks. Today I am reposting a condensed version of an article I wrote a few years ago titled, “Who Knew? I Became a Writer After All.” The original article was published in Writer’s Weekly, May 2011. It tells some of my writing journey but I will tell more in the next few blogs. Here’s the article:

 

The year was 1976. Our nation celebrated its bi-centennial anniversary and my community held a writing competition. Students from several area high schools were asked to write short essays called “Bi-centennial Minutes.” I participated because I had to…it was a required assignment in my English class. A few weeks later, a reporter and a photographer from the local newspaper walked into my high school and interviewed me. Why? –Because I had won the competition!

 

Another spring a year or two earlier, at my high school’s awards ceremony, my name was called as a “Laurel Leaf” winner. This award, given to a written piece, which I had submitted because, again, it was required in my English class. In other words, I had to. No one was more surprised that I won than me! You see, I could not spell or punctuate–at all. I punctuated written pieces like some people sprinkle salt and pepper on their food; I just sort of sprinkled some around in my written pieces, or so it appeared. I loved to write, but I grew tired of all the red marks my papers collected so when college came, I majored in nursing.

 

Several years ago, someone I loved struggled severely and I struggled along side of her. I longed to be able to pray more effectively for this person. I began a personal study of prayer, journaling as I gained insights. After a few years, my friend was better and I had a manuscript written. I discovered I loved writing, now that we have computers that can spell and punctuate for me.

 

A few summers ago, I read a newspaper blurb about an upcoming writer’s conference in my area. I longed to attend but I was not a writer, at least not a published writer. I showed the article to my husband, sheepishly confessing my new silly dream of becoming a writer. He encouraged me to attend. I laughed as I made plans to attend. I decided I would simply declare myself a writer.

 

The conference was wonderful! The speakers were great. I came back greatly encouraged and more excited than ever about writing. In one of the sessions, took a class taught by Lettie Kirkpatrick-Burress http://writingforhim.com/ where I learned about writing small pieces like magazine articles and devotions, as well as how to find magazines in need of articles and how to write query letters.

 

I came home and tried what Lettie taught and to my surprise, I began getting contracts for my submissions. The money I spent on the conference was earned back and turned a small prophet in the first year. And guess what? Though no one saw it coming, I turned out to be a writer after all!