The book signing for The Welcome Committee of Butternut Creek was great, thanks to friends and church members and writers who showed up. Sadly, the camera didn’t work well so we have only one clear shot of the signing. Fortunately, my hair looked good from that angle.
Watching are dear church friends and adventurers, Karen and Bob Jones.
Wayne Gretzky (hockey player) said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” That’s always been my philosophy of writing as well. If you don’t write and submit, you’ll never publish. That isn’t easy. No matter how much you submit, that doesn’t guarantee a publishing contract, but you’ll never sell if you stop writing.
Come by Seekerville http://seekerville.blogspot.com/ today where I’ll be blogging on the low points of my writing career–believe me, there were a lot of them! Exactly like Wayne, I just kept taking the shots–although we do differ in some other significant ways.
And tomorrow best-selling RS writer Laura Grinffin will be visiting Notes from Butternut Creek. Hope you’ll stop by.
Now that I’m attempting to get back into my normal schedule, Tuesday I’ll write my usual blog. Normal and usual sound so good after all the running around I’ve been doing!
Then back to running around again. One Thursday, I’ll be guest on the Seekerville blog and am really delighted. The bloggers are a group of authors for Love Inspired which I used to write for. Many are writing friends.
On Friday, the talented Laura Griffin will be visiting. She’s a lovely woman with a handsome husband and darling daughters–who writes some really tough romantic suspense stories. She’ll try to explain that to us.
Just for fun, I’ve inserted a cute picture because it livens up the blog and because. . . well, I love cute kittens.
Hope you’ll come back and visit often. I love hearing from you.
I haven’t been around much recently. Because my first book in the Tales of Butternut Creek came out April 3, I’ve spent a lot of time on promo. Friends were lovely enough to invite me to their blogs to promote the book. The publicist at FaithWords set up a blog tours for me and I’ve been tweeting and facebooking.
One of my firsts blogs was about my fear of using social media. During the last few weeks, I’ve learned a lot and am much braver about using it.
TWITTER; Can be fun. Can also be a waste of time. While I’m working on a particularly difficult scene or I have a bunch of line edits to do, my brain says, “Hey, let’s run over to Twitter and see if anyone retweeted you,” Takes great discipline not to take a break. PROS: Twitter is a great way to do promo; I’ve meet interesting people; people post articles I enjoy; it’s a good break when the brain is overloaded. CONS: Because lots of other people use Twitter for promo, many tweets are boring and the sheer numbers is overwhelming. No one can read them all because they just keep coming. The worst part is that there are a great number of retweets. At one time, a man I’m following retweeted SEVENTY messages in a row–I counted. Fortunately, there is a button that blocks retweets from individuals and I used it! LESSON: Write content people will enjoy instead of constant self promotion.
FACEBOOK: Can also be fun. I’ve found this to be less overwhelming than Twitter. I love keeping up with friends and seeing photos, but it can take up a great deal of time. LESSON: Don’t save every cute animal 
picture that’s posted.
BLOGGING: There are many wonderful blogs out there. The publicist had me blog at http://dimplesandtangles.blogspot.com/ and http://www.delightingintoday.com/ Both were gorgeous and had links to other sites I didn’t know existed.
I survived. I’m back home, a grizzled veteran of social media. I’d love to know how you feel about Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. Do you have any blogs you’d recommend?
Here I am at a romance readers’ social February 25, 2012, at the library in Pflugerville, TX. Patrice Sarath stands on the left and April Kihlstrom on the right in her Regency gown. Sadly, my eyes are closed. Oddly, I seem to be doing something unspeakable to the cardboard figure of Fabio. I really wasn’t. I was holding him up so he wouldn’t fall over.
I can’t remember whose face the librarian had placed over Fabio’s. Any one recognize him?
Words have always fascinated me. From childhood, I’ve read voraciously. I’ve taken courses on linguistics, and, in the classes I teach, I bore my students endlessly by showing them the history of words and how words are formed.
Words! They are amazing. The words I’m typing now have never before been put together in this way. Even more amazing: when you read these words at sometime in the future, you’ll know exactly what I was thinking at this moment.
It’s magic.
The most exciting example of the power of words I’ve been part of was from 1985-87, when I taught English in a school for pregnant teenagers. The majority of the students were African-American, most lived in poverty and many had struggled in school. But, with the coming of a baby, each courageous young woman came to this program to complete her education and give her child a better life.
In tenth-grade English, I taught The Diary of Anne Frank. We’d read Shakespeare, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom they enjoyed, but they really loved this play. Even those who couldn’t read—and there were several–listened, spellbound. The story of a Jewish girl who lived in the 1940’s and who hid from the Nazis in a tiny attic room spoke to my students like nothing else we’d read.
Through her words, Anne Frank, isolated in her ghetto created by prejudice, reached out over forty-five years, fromAmsterdamto these minority students shut up in a ghetto inLouisville,Kentucky. My students understood Anne Frank and were astonished to discover that another young woman had suffered from the prejudice that surrounded them. Anne Frank became one of them and they joined her in that attic.
This is what storytelling is: reaching out over the years and through the differences and divisions between people to touch emotions and open the reader to new ideas.
And we are the storytellers, the ones who transmit the heritage, who transport our readers beyond the barriers of time and place, who deal with the truths of our experiences, who share and interpret the struggles we all face.
As writers, we are magicians. We create worlds that have never existed before and populate them with characters that spring from our imaginations. We fiddle with our creation’s lives. They get sick, suffer, fall in love–all with a few keystrokes on our computers.
The words we write make people we’ve never met laugh and cry and think and sometimes get angry. What tremendous power words have. What an amazing, awesome craft this is. To be magicians. To work miracles.