by DiAnn Mills @DiAnnMills Writers seldom become successful and create a marketable book—overnight. At least that wasn’t my experience. Highways, speed bumps, and traffic lights are a part of the writing life. The victories and triumphs are waylaid with rejection slips, disappointments, and lots of rewrites. But when the first…

By Penny Reeve A number of years ago, when I was just learning how to blog, I wrote a series of posts called ‘Whatever is lovely’ in which I made a deliberate effort to seek out, notice and write about the things that defied brokenness to represent the essence of…

by Heather Kreke @HKreke Some of the most common questions authors get asked are why, when, and where do you write. While the answers to those questions are as varied as the authors who hold them, they are important questions that every writer should ask themselves.  Most of the time…

By Penny Reeve I remember it clearly, the day I gave up. The day I ran my hand over the top sheet of my children’s fiction manuscript, shut the folder and slid it out of sight. It was a good book. It had tension, heart, pace and great chapter hooks.…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky One of the first things an amateur writer hears is the age-old adage, “Write what you know.” It’s a simple statement, suggested plainly, as if we must take it at face value, but it’s an assertion that goes far beyond what we first take it to…

by Sandy Kirby Quandt @SandyKQuandt While driving north through Alabama on Interstate 85 last year to attend the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers Conference, my husband and I looked for blossoming mimosa trees. We do this every time we drive to the conference. Most years, the trees are covered with…