Archive for the Writers Tag

All These Silent Years (What My Mom Taught Me about Voice)

Sit with me. Just one moment.”  I sit, wondering what we’re looking at. Her hand covers mine and I recall my old selfish attempts to deny her—denials of home. Now we’ve come here to watch all these silent years pass between us and she’s exactly how I imagined my mom would be at this age.  “Sit,” she says. But she really
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What a Frog Knows

This morning, I headed down to the pond and caught a frog. I'd never have seen her if she hadn't leaped from the wooden bridge. But when she landed amongst the rocks and ferns, I trapped her with the girls' butterfly net. She was big and made no sound, so I assumed her female, an orangey-brown wood frog with a
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First Do No Harm.

If you're writing a true story, sometimes you don’t know who you hurt. It's easy to say " I just share the truth," but sometimes that truth downright smarts. So I want to look at how to write honestly and transparently about your life and not hurt the people in it. Having helped many write their true stories, I deal
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This Dangerous Platform

Writers who are honest feel fear about self-promotion. The initial excitement and hope fades into something else, and those fears can blossom into putrid black blooms. (Did you know there's a guy leading seminars on how to make videos go viral who intentionally falls off a stage and posts the videos on YouTube as examples? The quest for fame does
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The Spiritually-Interested Publishing Revolution

Christian publishing may be more recognized than ever. But that doesn’t mean anyone knows how to sell to the avowed-unaffiliated, spiritually-interested audience. In fact, there’s strong evidence a big house can’t because more readers are moving “off the grid” every day. Someone said recently that a quiet cultural revolution is underway, especially in publishing—the anti-establishment sentiment seems to be at
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