You’re invited to plan a vacation and visit us this summer in Coastal Virginia. When you do, be our guest for dinner at the Bloomshire of Gloucester. Chef Brad (me) will prepare a healthy and flavorful meal especially for you. See me personally at this year’s BRMCWC to make your…

By Katy Kauffman @katykauffman28 Like a textbook. That’s how my writer’s voice sounded when I started to write my first book. I could write devotions that sounded like a one-sided conversation, but my book sounded academic like the textbooks I had in college—factual, cold, distant. I knew I couldn’t leave…

Some time ago, I was writing a story and used a variation of the sentence, “He wished he could be a fly on the wall when they had that conversation.” This puzzled my critique partner, who didn’t know it meant. She had never heard the expression “fly on the wall”…

@DiAnnMills 'Tis the season of the turkey. If you enjoy eating the Thanksgiving bird, then you love the season. If you’re the turkey, well not so much. You’ve probably spent the past year hatching ways to disguise yourself. For the turkey, I commend his ingenuity. For the turkey-writer, well not…

by Katy Kauffman @KatyKauffman28 Outlines are our friends, or are they? I loved making outlines in my seminary class because they provided structure for the speeches I prepared. Things changed. In recent years, I dreaded making outlines as I wrote books and blog posts. They seemed to confine the feeling…

by Aaron Gansky @adgansky When an idea for a novel pops into our minds, the first thing we like to do is flesh out a few major plot points, which is fine. But, it can become a problem when we race our characters from one place to the next simply…