by Ifueko Ogbomo @inspirologos I love LOVE! As a poet and historical romance novelist, love inspires most of my storytelling, so it’s a subject I often ponder. (It definitely inspired my award-winning debut novel—A Divine Romance—which was released one year ago, today!) I’m admittedly a romantic at heart, but I daresay even the least romantically inclined individuals are forced to …
Branding: Isn’t that for cows?
by Melody Morrison Apparently, nearly everyone on the planet has some degree of ADHD or ADD. We have a society that requires it. The speed of life and volume of input is dizzying. Most of us never knew a name for it besides “scatter-brained” or disorganized or distractable. The good news discovered by educators rests in strategies. Categorizing, using planners, …
A Storyteller’s Tale
by Tanara McCauley There once was a teller of magnificent tales. He traveled vast lands and orated to diverse peoples, regaling them with stories of war and tragic love, of villains who could be mistaken for heroes, of whole nations ruled by lions or destroyed with song. Renowned for his audacity and for recitals that never failed to surprise and …
A Different Kind of Cover Story
By Deborah Raney @AuthorDebRaney I just love stories about how a book cover came to be—the process of working with a publisher’s design team and models, or for some of the more creative among us, how you designed your own cover. Or in my case, how my husband designs the covers for my books. (He designed these beauties below!) But …
Five Things I Learned from Launching a Book
By Felicia Ferguson @Felicia_writer 1: Marketing a book is more than hosting a launch party. From guest blogs, to book reviews, to social media posts and ads, the author must be 70% marketer and 30% writer. Yes, I know. Most of us writers didn’t major in PR or Marketing in college. If you’re like me, you have nightmares that book …
The Scent of Manual Typewriter Ribbon
by Jenny Powell MD Twelve men sat around a large, round table. I typed out the sentence, hunt-and-peck style, on my father’s manual typewriter. The paper was legal- size, the blank side of a form no longer used at my father’s office. He had brought stacks of it home, as suited a child of the Great Depression: never waste what …
Reflecting the Gospel Through Our Characters
by M.D. House @Real_HouseMD At first blush, this doesn’t seem like such a difficult task. But when we examine the recent success of The Chosen—and all of the painstaking work which has gone into not just the cinematography but the storytelling itself—we realize the steep challenge involved in securing the sweet promise of that goal. Such stories and their characters …
The Poetry in our Fiction
by Susan Lyttek @SusanLyttek On the day I’m writing this, I just wrote a personal blog post about our poetic God and how God uses poetry to communicate with us and through us. But the day this will be posting, I will be boarding a cruise ship with my husband to celebrate our fortieth anniversary and unable to see this …
What is Stronger than a Mother’s Love?
by Ifueko Ogbomo As a writer of Biblical Fiction, I often ponder about the lives of the Bible’s heroes and heroines. Given that it’s Mother’s Day tomorrow, my musings today surround biblical mothers and their sons. Most famous of them all is Mary. The virgin who became a mother in the most unexpected and unique manner and would have surely …
Stretch Your Brain for Creativity
By Terry Overton As a new writer curious about the craft of writing, I aspired to learn all aspects of writing fiction. Authors’ voices, writing styles, and uniquely developed characters are fascinating. How was Hemmingway’s writing different from Fitzgerald or Austin? How are the styles of contemporary fiction authors different from writers of years past? How can authors have such …