I noticed something interesting as we made our way through New Orlean’s restaurant scene last spring, and it’s transforming the way I think about my writing career: the highest rated restaurants were known for one good dish. New Orleans is an old city, and many of the highly rated dining establishments have been around for…
When I began blogging it was a very solitary experience. Yes, I was putting work out there for the internet to see, but for the most part it was largely written in isolation and then sent out to a void with very little feedback. Which was fine at first. Still is much of the time,…
When I joined Google+ last year, with tongue-in-cheek I listed my occupation as Domestic Opposer of Entropy. For that is what I do: I hold back the chaos. As a stay-at-home mom, I pick up the strewn, I wash the dirty, I tidy the messed, I soothe the hurt and I untangle the knotted. All…
Women’s lives are busy. You came to this website because you suspect God has called you to write. But what if you work 40+ hours per week? How do you squeeze one more thing into your already-bursting schedule? We fantasize our best-seller enabling us to hire a housecleaner and write full-time, but that’s not usually…
As cross-cultural missionaries, one of the questions most asked of my husband and I is, “How can we pray for you?” Christians know that prayer is a powerful way to support, network with, and/or minister to another person. As James writes, prayer “has great power as it is working.” Regardless of who we are or…
When I recently transitioned from pastoring to writing, the learning curve was much steeper than I anticipated. I foolishly assumed that since I had been crafting sermons and talks on a weekly basis, I would be able to seamlessly redirect my creativity. I been warned about how insanely competitive and arduous a writer’s life could…
“I’m mad at God.” It felt right and true as the words came out, even though I had had no such thought just moments prior. I was huddled on my comfy couch with 3 women, one of whom I had met a mere hour earlier, to watch the live stream of IF: Gathering. Months before,…
We were raised to be timid, most of us. In the tiny white churches speckling the countryside, we were taught to be cautious, to be courteous, to be kind and good and avoid even the appearance of evil. Being a good Christian looked like wearing clean, pressed clothes to Sunday School, like going to grandma’s…
What dreams do you have for your writing life? To publish a book? Become a best-selling author (with your dream book)? To change the world? Writers are dreamers. Whether we write fiction or not, we live in a world of imagination. We imagine our readers and how our words will entertain them, move, them, inspire…
“When women were birds…we knew our greatest freedom was in taking flight at night, when we could steal the heavenly darkness for ourselves, navigating through the intelligence of our own stars and the constellations of our own making….” —Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds I’m a stay-at-home mom to three sons (ages 6,…
I’m three years and counting into the development of my first novel. Today I found myself laughing out loud at the sheer insanity of time invested with little promise of a future, short of Jeremiah 29:11. Everyone in America is writing a novel and very few are getting published the traditional way. My living room…
As of this moment I have dozens of drafts saved on my hard drive. Drafts of articles, drafts of essays, drafts of book chapters, even the draft of a novel. Hopefully this sounds familiar. It’s the life of a writer, right? We draft and revise, draft and revise, and revise some more, and then finally…
This post is for our Redbud readers who write. Read on & comment below… With big plans to make my mark in the world as a writer, I naturally wanted my adoring fans to be able to Google me with ease. Suddenly the name I’d been perfectly happy with for eleven years of marriage, Margot…