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Dana, Please tell us about your most Recent Book.

DESCENDED- ULRICK is the 4^th and last book in the DESCENDED series, in which we encounter four men with angelic DNA – but they’re no angels. They act as “boosters” on earth to fight evil, particularly as it applies to sexual slavery and abuse, and they have supernatural powers (ULRICK can walk and see through any object, among other talents). They use their gifts in some pretty unique ways, though none of their powers can stop them from falling in love.  It’s Romance, folks ?

I’m also about to release IRELAND ADAMS, (under my pseudonym Elaine Dwyer) about an adrenaline junkie lawyer who falls in love with the boss’s daughter, Audra. It’s the second in a series, but these are stand-alones.

Why do you write what you do?

I can’t not write, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. As for why I write romance, I have no idea other than the love story in any book or movie has always been the element that draws me in. The dynamic between a man and woman, the sexual tension, are like magnets to me. And a resolution in the form of a commitment…what’s better than happily every after?

What are you currently working on?

SCOTLAND ADAMS will be next in the stand-alone series, followed by his sister, AMERICA (imagine, the only girl with 3 older, protective brothers, lol). I’m also bouncing between several others in various stages of completion.

How does your work differ from other work in its genre?

Well, the DESCENDED series has been classified as Christian romance. And while it is Christian, I don’t like that label because in the past the genre has received – I believe, sorry CF authors – a deserved reputation for being sugary sweet and dry. Out of touch with the real struggles of people in this world. My fiction is nothing like that. My tagline even says “It’s not your mother’s Christian fiction.” My books have something to offer everyone and I want readers who aren’t Christians to read them as well.

My secular work, same thing. I try hard not to work with the romance fiction “pattern.” If I see one more story where the girl inherited a piece of property and the sexy carpenter/contractor/cowboy steps in to help her, I just may vomit, lol.

How does your writing process work?

Most often I have a scene in mind. Could be an ending, could be a love scene, or maybe just a line of dialogue I want to use, then I place other things around it until I think, “Hmm, is there a story here?’ I kind of work from the inside out, you could say. I’d love to say I was one of those authors who wake up with full novels, start to finish, in their head, but that’s not me.

BIO:

God has blessed me with a wonderful husband and three dynamic children, all of whom are destined to make wide, colorful splashes in this world. We share our New Jersey home with three dogs. I have no hobbies to speak of, unless you include writing. I don’t.

“It’s not your mother’s Christian Fiction.”

LINKS: https://www.amazon.com/Dana-Pratola/e/B005G40TAQ/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1454258802&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=elaine+dwyer

For the average writer, sight, is typically the easiest of the five senses to describe. Our world is filled with a menagerie of colors, people, plants, animals, buildings, and things. Each of those objects are finite and can be described visually, making sight easy to relate on paper.

But describing the sense of sight doesn’t have to be bland. Take for instance, the picture below.

What do you see?

Most people see a whitewashed glacial landscape void of personality and excitement. Some would describe this as, “snow and ice covered the ground and tall snow-capped peaks stood far off in the distance”.

In fairness, that is an adequate description, but it lacks pizazz. It lacks personality. And more than anything else, it lacks a developed sense of sight.

Take sixty-seconds and write what you see in the scene shown in the aforementioned picture.
What do you see now?

How would you describe the shallow turquoise lake as its color darkens to a chilly cerulean blue before disappearing into the midnight depths of the central crevice?

What about the mountains? Are they snow-capped? Or does the snow creep down the mountainside in wispy white fingers before being swallowed by the soulless shadow mountains?

Is it a snowy white glacier? Or do you see the pockmarks, the spashes of dirt and sediment, and the areas smoothed by the run-off?

Take a deeper look. Imagine you are standing on this glacier. See the lake. Peer at the mountain. Watch the wind blow across the landscape.

Now what do you see?

Leave your unique description of what you “see” in the comments below. And make sure to take the time to always peer into your scene, setting, or storyworld and describe and your characters in an exceptionally engaging way.

Great authors write using the five senses. They are masters of drawing their readers deeper into the world, scene, or setting of a story by embracing the intricacies and subtleties of the five senses.

The senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and feel are available to almost all writers. Utilizing proper description of each of the five sense in your manuscript will greatly improve your story, and will drastically improve your chances of getting your manuscript published.

In the modern world sound is everywhere. You can’t get away from it. Popular studies have shown that spending just thirty-minutes in a room void of sound can drive a person crazy and cause them to hallucinate. It is near impossible to find an area with an absence of sound. You cannot avoid even the faintest whirr of air-conditioning fans blowing, the tick of a clock, or even your own heart, and neither can the characters in your manuscript.

Sound is everywhere, even in your made up reality contained within the pages of your story. The reality of this is a great benefit to your writing. Your readers know and experience those same sounds in their daily lives. It gives you common ground from which you can connect your scene or setting with the mind of your target audience.

As an exercise take sixty-seconds and write what you hear in the scene shown in this picture.

What did you hear?

Did you hear the metallic clash of the blacksmith’s hammer pounding against the red-hot metal? Most people do.

What about the laborious grunts emanating from the blacksmith as he exerts all of his effort into reshaping the metal? Not as many people hear that sound when they look at this picture. You have to look deeper. Put yourself into the scene to see it.

Can you hear the singing sounds of sparks blasting away from the impacts?

What about the sizzle of the blacksmith’s sweat as it drops from his forehead onto the molten metal?

Or the scrunching of thick leather in the blacksmith’s apron as he moves and twists?

Look again at the picture and picture yourself in the scene. Close your eyes and experience the blacksmith working. What do you hear?

Hopefully, your mind allowed you to embrace the setting in a unique way. Maybe you heard the roar of the fire just outside the picture, or the screeching of metal as the blacksmith readjusts his grip on the hot metal using the tongs.

Did you hear an assistant chattering in the background? Or music playing on an old radio?

If you didn’t hear any of these things, don’t worry. It takes practice. But the more you open your mind to the reality of the sound around you, the more you will be able to describe it in your manuscript and pull your reader further into your story.

Take one last look at the image and write in the comments something unique that you can “hear” in the setting, that you didn’t already hear the first two times.

The publishing industry doesn’t give any free passes. Ever opportunity, conversation, meeting, email, and phone call has a price. Nothing is free for anyone.

What is the price? Time.

Time is the most valuable currency that a writer, publisher, editor, or agent has to give. Those emails, phone calls, etc. also have a finite price tag. Someone is on the clock somewhere, but those dollars are not as precious as time.

When a writer meets with an agent or editor at a conference, it takes time away from that persons other tasks, family life, and/or work schedule.

When an author pitches an agent, it takes time. Every moment that agent spends looking over your submission is a slice of time they cannot devote to another task or project.

Writers need to honor the value of other people’s time. Make it work for you and not against you. Don’t prod, prompt, or pester an editor or agent for more time. Be prepared to utilize every moment you have to connect. Treat time like a commodity.

One of the most frustrating things for an editor or agent is to spend time reviewing submissions that are unprepared, not suitable for the agency or publisher, or ill-crafted. They can’t get that time back and it will cause your name to have a negative association with those persons.

Instead, take time to ensure you submit only adequate work that is well suited for your potential agent or editor. Don’t waste their time.

Remember also how limited time is and refuse the yearning to email the agent or editor for a detailed response or critique. That is not the role of an agent or editor and your lack of knowledge could be considered disrespectful of their time. Make sure to thank the agent or editor for the time he or she committed to your project and share that you look forward to submitting more projects in the future, if and when you have a project appropriate for their agency or publishing house.

Every conversation, contact, or email leaves a mark. The mark you want to leave is one of a respectful writer who understands the industry and respects peoples valuable time.

Many different magazine article ideas swirl around in your head. As I recently wrote, magazine ideas are everywhere. How do you select which one to write about?

First ask yourself, does the idea drive you wild? Does the idea motivate  you to begin researching or writing the article? The experience doesn’t always have to be so dramatic. Yet occasionally it is the case. You have to find a piece of paper or get to your computer and write this particular idea.  If you’ve not done much magazine writing (or even if you have done it), it’s perfectly OK to write the entire article—as long as you have several things in mind when you do it:

• When you write, always keep the reader firmly in your mind. What will they take away from your article?
• Who is the potential market for the article? Where will you try and get it published? Some publications read full manuscripts while others will only read query letters.
• The most likely possibilities for magazines are ones that you often read and are intimately familiar with their contents and their readers (since you are one of these readers).
• Keep in mind the standard length for these target publications. It will not help you to write 3,000 words if the longest article in the magazine is 1,000 words.  In general, magazines are using shorter articles.
• In general, magazines are planning their content about four to six months ahead of their publication date. For example if you have a Valentine’s Day experience which you want to write, that’s OK. I’d encourage you to write it—but plan on it getting into print in some February 2018 publication.

There are several different basic types of magazine articles.  If you have decided to write the article, often one of the strongest types is the personal experience article. The story is written in first-person and you tell your personal experience—yet in a targeted way so you have a single key point or take-away from the reader.

Other types of magazine articles include service articles (to promote or tell about a new consumer product or service), how-to articles (how to do some activity), personality profile article (often focused on some well-known person or someone who has an interesting life or life experience), “as told to” article (where you write in the first person tense of another person and write their story) and the celebrity interview (often done on assignment).

And what are the two good choices that I started this article? The first choice is to write the full article. Let your enthusiasm for the topic carry you to move ahead and write your idea. You get the words out of your head and on the screen or paper. From my years in this business, writing the article is a good choice. The second good choice is to channel your enthusiasm about the idea into a one page letter called a query letter. I’m going to give the details of how to write a query letter in my next article in this series.

For now,  I would get your magazine ideas down on paper and written.

________________________________________

1. Terry Whalin, a writer and acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing, lives in Colorado. A former magazine editor, Whalin has written for more than 50 publications including Christianity Today and Writer’s Digest. He has written more than 60 nonfiction books including Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams. His latest book is Billy Graham, A Biography of America’s Greatest Evangelist and the book website is at: http://BillyGrahamBio.com Watch the short book trailer for Billy Graham at: http://bit.ly/BillyGrahamBT His website is located at: www.terrywhalin.com. Follow him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/terrywhalin

As a literary agent, I routinely get asked which is more important platform or the quality of the writing?

For writers who are looking to get published, this is an important question to debate. It may be the most important question.

The correct answer is not as easy as it may seem. The winner of this important debate between platform and writing ability can change more frequently than the tide. For the purposes of this post, I will look at this great debate from a traditional publishing perspective as it pertains to unpublished authors. For self-publishers, a third-party candidate weighs into the equation—marketing/networking.

Unpublished Authors

I have looked at a great number of submissions from first-time/unpublished authors and wanted to scream because their work was sooo good, but they had zero platform. Zilch, nada, nothing.

No website. No Twitter. Not even Facebook.

Sure these are extreme examples, but I can’t sell books written by authors who have no platform. It’s very difficult to sell books by authors with a small platform—many times near impossible.

If you have an excellent book and no platform, some agent may be able to sell your book, but your success rate will be low and that path will be paved with a lot of rejection.

Writing is a Business

You have to remember, your book is your business. It’s a marketable and sellable product. To sell your book you need to have influence enough to convince potential buyers to purchase your product. And you have to understand that a real-world business with no influence doesn’t get sales, because it has no platform.

If you owned a small business with no buyer influence, would you risk going on the television show Shark Tank and attempting to get billionaire investors?

No of course not.

Those billionaires would tell you that you had no proof of concept. No sales potential.

It’s the same way with most publishers. They want to see that the book has sales potential to an audience or fan base that you are already connected with. Maybe through speaking, YouTube, instructional classes, blogging, etc. and at the bare minimum they want to see that you understand platform and you are actively working on growing your writer’s platform.

As an unpublished writer, if you want to sell your manuscript to a traditional publisher, you need to spend 60%+ of your time and effort building your platform. If it’s not your passion, learn to love it. Learn to make platform-building part of your passion.

There is only one winner in the debate between platform and writing ability as it pertains to an unpublished author—platform.

What percentage of your writing time do you spend working on platform? How can you make platform your passion?

I was one of those early readers your child psychologist warned you about. All my pals lived between the pages of books. My first such friends were a sweet-spirited pig, an ingenious spider, and a rat with an attitude. I read E.B. White’s classic, Charlotte’s Web, when I was … well, really young. I won’t tell you my age. You wouldn’t believe me.

What I remember most wasn’t the events of the story. It was crying for four straight hours when I finished it. I wailed until my grandmother came downstairs and asked my mom, “What’s wrong with him?”

And so for the first, but definitely not the last time, my mother answered that question with the phrase, “His book ended.”

What could be sadder, huh? Humans are story beasts. We consume stories as hungrily as we do steak and potatoes. Despite (because of?) the modern world’s reliance on data, the power of the narrative continues to shape culture – informing us what to buy, what to wear and who to vote for.

Are you a non-profit fundraising writer or an advertising copywriter looking to write compelling text? Choose the narrative. It will accomplish what you set it free to do. A narrative strategy that has worked for me in business and professional writing is one that appears in the Hebrew Bible, the letters of St. Paul, Beowulf and the Harry Potter series – Ring Composition.

          Ring Composition is a form of literary structure that makes your text compelling and readable. It takes two ideas and arranges them into the following pattern: ABBA. Like the Swedish rock group, but I digress.

The first idea (A) introduces and closes the piece. The second idea (B) is repeated twice in succession. The pattern can be recurrent and can be expanded – ABCCBA, or even ABCDCBA with multiple ideas leading to and then away from a central concept. Unlike an essay, your central point falls in the middle of the text not at its culmination. Forget the old line graph model of a text. Think of it as a strand of DNA, circling itself, but headed in one direction.

Ring Composition originated among the ancients when most stories were orally transmitted rather than privately read from a book. Ring Composition gave the story its cadence, which helped the storyteller remember the order of events.

Genesis 26:34 – 29:9, the Jacob marrative, offers an excellent example of Ring Composition with a central theme – deception uncovered – occurring smack in the center before the storyteller wends his back through the events in reverse order. In the beginning, Esau is the son of his father’s favor. The story leads through deception to the climax and then back to its origination point – the father with his son of blessing. Only it’s a different son this time. Now, Jacob has wealth and blessing and Esau has nothing. Rather than putting the crisis at the beginning or the end, the storyteller inserts his crisis, his moment of change, in the middle.

Try it. Put the change point in the middle of the story you tell in your non-profit’s appeal letter or your advertising copy. Wend your way back to the beginning.

Confused about what your crisis moment is in advertising copy? Here it is: when the reader intervened.

          Your story’s hero is your reader. Its crisis is the moment the reader made a decision to give, buy or volunteer.

For non-profit fundraising writers, the lowest emotional point of your story occurred just before your donor arrived on the scene. That means the first half of your thank-you letter retells the exact same story you used in your request. You’ll arrive at the crisis, the incendiary moment, in the middle of the letter. For example, “This is how bad things were for a family living under the bridge. But then YOU came and changed everything.”

When you are writing with Ring Composition, stick the main point in the middle and don’t repeat it. With repetition comes deafness. Make your main point once, and leave it alone.

          Once you create a crisis, echo your plot points from the center back to the beginning; this is the “BA” in “ABBA” or the “CBA” in “ABCCBA.” This last half is when the reader is most engaged, seeing herself as the hero who takes action to change things – whether that’s by donating to your charity and changing a life or buying your product and improving her family’s well-being. The last half of your ring-structured narrative should consistently build your reader’s emotional engagement.

          One warning: Never make yourself, your client or your organization into the story’s hero. You are incidental. Your text is a story about a descent into something bad (for ad copywriters, that might be using rough toilet paper instead of your client’s softer option), a hero’s intervention (which feels like the reader’s own intervention), and a climb back up the same slope they descended with help from the hero-reader.

The Harry Potter story is ring composition in a class by itself. Harry’s crisis moment occurs in the middle of each book and the middle of the series with the story echoing itself from the crisis to the conclusion. It’s a novel instead of advertising copy, so Harry is clearly the hero of each book and of the series, but the plot itself resists moving outside this structural boundary. The story’s Ring Composition gives the reader an unconscious map by which to navigate the magical world.

Your advertising or fundraising copy, using narrative structure, can capture your reader’s imagination and compel her to take action. Let the crisis fall in the middle of your story, build backwards and watch your reader’s interest – and potential investment – grow. You may even follow in the footsteps of that dear old spider Charlotte, an unparalleled advertising writer, whose web-woven work followed a little Ring Composition theory itself. Don’t believe me? Read her words again. Be sure to bring tissues.

About Holland Webb

I love telling the stories that people put down so they go take action. I’m an advertising copywriter by day, an aspiring novelist by night, a parent, a dog-lover, a prison volunteer and a follower of Jesus.

Next week I will take a long and worshipful moment to count my blessings. The third and final book of the Deer Run Saga—Legacy of Deer Run—will release.

It has been a long journey with this saga that began in 2007. In fact, it became a “saga” all its own. I began my writing career knowing virtually nothing. I knew I felt called to write and I knew the topic to write about, but that was as far as my knowledge went about editing, publishing, or marketing.

Marketing? What’s that??

I was beyond ignorant. Since I knew so little, I took what I considered to be the easy path to publication: Self Publishing. It turned out to be expensive and the industry is filled with companies that want more of your money all the time. I fell for some of their schemes, until I grew wiser.

The first two books in my saga were published this way and the third was picked up by a reputable small publisher but I was responsible to find my own editor. So the original series received many kudos from readers, but little acknowledgment by the professional industry. At the time, self-published books were akin to those in the Bible who suffer from leprosy. It made me feel like I was carrier of the disease.

Then I started to attend writers conferences. I met many editors and publishers and soon connected with those in the publishing world who actually gave helpful advice. I was so grateful! I signed contracts for Fields of the Fatherless and Bethany’s Calendar. A whole new world of publishing possibilities bloomed like my garden in spring.

But I always ached a bit when I viewed my Deer Run Saga sitting on the shelves. I loved the stories, but it needed more: Better edits, new covers, and a Christian publisher who believed in it. God blessed me with all three when I approached Tamara Clymer of CrossRiver Media. She loved the series and I am forever grateful that she looked past the deficits and envisioned what it could be.

The first book, Road to Deer Run, re-released last December. It was followed by Promise of Deer Run last June. And now, Legacy of Deer Run will join its sister books, complete with new covers, excellent editing by Debra Butterfield, and even book club questions at the end of each novel. The series, loosely based on my ancestors from the American Revolution, has now been given new life. And I am feeling blessed beyond measure.

Thank you, Tami Clymer and CrossRiver Media for giving me this special joy this Christmas!

Here is a brief synopsis of Legacy of Deer Run:

The year is 1800.

A young man makes weapons for the defense of America, still a fledgling nation. He also protects his heart from the allure of a young woman whose station in life keeps her out of his reach.

The lady fights her own battle against loneliness and grief. Despite her finery and airs, she is drawn to the young armory worker who is distant yet disarming.

Love is not the only entanglement. The nation’s enemies are afoot. They creep within the very walls where America’s defenses are forged. Who are they? When will they strike? Who will survive their terrorism?

Intrigue of the heart and intrigue of the times are only part of this compelling story—Book 3 of the Deer Run Saga. This series finale is a gripping mix of romance and deception, faith and forgiveness, transgression and trial.

Author Bio:

Award winning author Elaine Marie Cooper is the author of the Deer Run Saga—Road to Deer Run, Promise of Deer Run and her newest release, Legacy of Deer Run. Her other books include Saratoga Letters, Fields of the Fatherless, and Bethany’s Calendar, a memoir about her daughter’s battle with brain cancer. She has been captivated by the history of the American Revolution since she was young. She grew up in Massachusetts, the setting for many of her historical novels.

Cooper has been writing since she penned her first short story at age eleven. She began researching for her first novel in 2007. Her writing has also appeared in Fighting Fear, Winning the War at Home by Edie Melson and the romance anthology, I Choose You. She has written articles for Prayer Connect Magazine, Splickety Prime Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, and Life: Beautiful Magazine. She began her professional writing career as a newspaper freelancer.

You can read more at her website/ blog, www.elainemariecooper.com

www.facebook.com/ElaineMarieCooperAuthor

twitter: @elainemcooper

The bulk of my magazine writing is done on assignment. How do you get an assignment? Which magazines do you read on a consistent basis? Your familiarity with these publications and the types of articles that they publish, gives you some needed background.

Pull out the magazines that come into your home.

Organize them with several months from the same publication. Then study the contents. What types of articles do they publish? How-to articles? Personal Experience? For example, at Decision almost every article is a first-person, personal experience story. If you send them a how-to article which is not written in the first person, you are asking for rejection. Or if you write a story about someone else in the third-person, you will again invite rejection.

After you have studied the publications, then write the publication for their writers guidelines. Almost every magazine has guidelines for their author. Write a simple letter asking for guidelines and enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope for the response. You can find the address for the publication usually on the masthead of the magazine under editorial offices. Or use The Christian Writers Market Guide by Jerry B. Jenkins. This guide is a critical tool if you are going to write for the Christian marketplace. After reading through the guidelines, you will have some additional information. Does the publication accept query letters or prefer full manuscripts? Some magazines have a query only system. This means that you have to write a query letter and get a letter of request from the editor, before sending the full manuscript. Other publications like Decision do not look at query letters but only completed manuscripts.

What’s a query letter? Entire books have been written on this topic and one of the best is Irresistible Query Letters by Lisa Collier Cool (Writer’s Digest Books). A query is a single-page letter which sells your story idea. It has a four paragraph formula. The first paragraph is a creative beginning for your article. You don’t write the entire article–only the first paragraph which captures the reader’s interest. The purpose of this first paragraph is simply to capture the editor’s attention. I won’t walk you through the day of an editor but since I’ve been one for years, I know they are involved in a multitude of tasks. For editors to read query letters, it is often done at the end of the day, late at night or in a car pool on the way home. It must be interesting.

The second paragraph includes the main points of how you will approach the article. The third paragraph gives your personal qualifications for this topic and your writing credits (if any). It basically answers the question, why should you of all the writers get this assignment? Highlight your own area of expertise in this paragraph.

The final paragraph says how soon you could write the article (give yourself enough time for example, “three weeks from assignment”) and says you are enclosing a self-addressed, stamped envelope and looking forward to their reply. I often send the letter to as many as ten different publications at the same time.

Within the magazine business, there is an on-going discussion about simultaneous submissions (where you send the same finished article to several publications). If you do this, you may end up on the black list of authors. Each publication has a list of people that they will not work with. You don’t want to be on that list. Also each publication has a list of authors they use regularly and call with ideas. Your goal is to get on this particular list of regular contributors.

From my perspective, a simultaneous query is not the same as a finished article. Go ahead and query several magazines at the same time on the same topic if you think you can write several different articles on the same subject. One magazine may ask for 500 words on the topic while another may approach it from an entirely different viewpoint and ask for 2,000 words. Your illustrations and information will be considerably different. If you send it to ten magazines, you may get ten rejections. On the other hand, perhaps you will get an acceptance or two, or at least a request to see the entire article on speculation. “On speculation” means that the editor is not under obligation to purchase your article if it doesn’t meet the periodical’s standards or expectations.

While it’s great to learn about magazine submissions, the real proof of this article is taking action. Take a few minutes and plan to target some publications then write query letters on a regular basis and send them. If you don’t send out your ideas, then no editor will consider it and no assignments will come. As a writer, you have to learn this skill of pitching your ideas, and then constantly put it into practice.

Terry Whalin, a writer and acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing, lives in Colorado. A former magazine editor, Whalin has written for more than 50 publications including Christianity Today and Writer’s Digest. He has written more than 60 nonfiction books including Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams. His latest book is Billy Graham, A Biography of America’s Greatest Evangelist and the book website is at: http://BillyGrahamBio.com Watch the short book trailer for Billy Graham at: http://bit.ly/BillyGrahamBT His website is located at: www.terrywhalin.com. Follow him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/terrywhalin

“Hello, this is Carlton your Doorman.”

The often-heard but never seen character was a staple of my childhood in the ‘70s thanks to the sitcom Rhoda. It was the first time I had ever shared my name with a popular character, and it made for interesting conversation. I even had an uncle who referred to me as “doorman” for years. To this day, when I hold the door for someone, I usually say, “this is Carlton your Doorman.” That shows my age, as not many people get the reference these days.

I always wondered what Rhoda’s Carlton looked like, and, being a country boy from Kentucky, I couldn’t believe someone’s actual job was holding the door open for people.

Lately I’ve been Carlton the Doorman, but I haven’t been opening doors for others—I’ve been waiting for doors to open for me. There’s a saying going around social media: when God closes a door, praise him in the hallway.

If you’re like me, you feel like a 4^th grader in trouble because of all the time you have spent in the hallway. I have been in the hallway so much I could get a job as a hall monitor.

In writing and publication, I’ve gone through some dry periods, when no one seemed the least bit interested in what I had to say. Those periods can be painful, but, as bad as I hate it, waiting for a door to open is part of the deal.

Lately God has opened some doors for me in the writing world. My policy has always been, “If God offers and wants me to write it, I will write it.”

Keeping that in mind, I’ve written standardized test questions. Instructor’s manuals for textbooks. Articles about cross country running and tennis. Plays. Skits. I have even written a set of devotions about nature, even though I enjoy air conditioning and the indoors. I would write material for the back of the cereal box if God willed it.

I can’t begin to make sense of it, but, where God has opened doors, I’ve tried to walk through them as quickly and obediently as possible.

I may never work as a doorman in a fancy New York apartment building, but you can still call me Carlton the Doorman. I’ll just be waiting and then walking through those doors.

Their are writing problems I’d like to talk about, weather your a seasoned writer or not. There problems that can take on a life of they’re own if left unchecked. Its like writing has it’s own weird rules, huh?

Are you pulling your hair out and gnashing your teeth over those sentences? Now you know how I feel when I read items with these errors.

Growing up in a small school, I had the same English and journalism teacher from eighth grade through my freshman composition courses, and he was a grammar drill sergeant, pounding correct usage of homophones into us every day.

���OKAY, RECRUITS! The words ‘their,’ ‘your,’ and ‘its’ are possessive adjectives! ‘They’re’ is actually a contraction for ‘they are,’ IN CASE YOU DIDN’T KNOW! ‘You’re’ is ‘you are’ in contraction form! ‘Its��� denotes the thing belongs to ‘it,’ but ‘it’s’ stands for ‘it is,’ YOU GRAMMAR FLUNKIES! Don�����t even get me started on ‘weather’ and ‘whether!’ NOW DROP AND WRITE ME TWENTY SENTENCES WITH ‘EM!”

It didn’t go down in that exact manner, but there (not their) were days when I felt like I was in grammar boot camp.

Now, I credit that teacher and his training for my grasp of these and other grammar rules. Those drills prepared me for my work now, but they also ruined me when I see these words used in the wrong way. I have to bite my tongue and remove my fingers from the ���keyboard trigger” all the time. Once I get a grip on myself, I realize not everyone had a teacher like I did.

Now, turn up you’re music and cue up ���Their She Goes” or “I Saw Her Standing They’re.”

Or maybe not.

I recently attended Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference in lovely Black Mountain, North Carolina. This event is like Disney World for a writer like me, and it is always great to catch with old friends, make new ones, and, oh yeah, get some writing instruction.

For many years I have attended BRMCWC. Could we get a few more letters in that abbreviation?

“Pat, I’d like to buy a vowel.”

Anyway, this year, more than any other, I noticed the hot place to be (pun intended) was Clouds Coffee Shop on the Ridgecrest campus. Every time I passed the shop it was packed with writerly types, and, if they weren’t in the actual place, the attendees were walking around with Clouds cups in their hands.

I have a confession to make . . . I don’t like coffee.

YIKES! Are you really a writer??

Many times I have read that writers thrive on coffee. They drink it all day long. They craft bestsellers while sitting in their favorite coffee shop.

I just don’t get it. If I drank coffee like some of these people, I’d be up all night and in the restroom all day (Sorry, TMI).

If I tried to write in a coffee shop, I would be incredibly distracted by the people, the decorations, the baristas, you name it.

I’ll have a large cup of Adult ADHD, with a touch of extroverted sass thrown in.

Coffee shops, especially at a writers conference, are gathering places—sites to laugh with friends, to pitch new ideas, to dissect lessons learned in and out of classes. I get that, and I actually met some friends right outside the shop to socialize on a few occasions.

I also realize God calls different types of people to write. We are all made in his image yet are unique. I may not write in the same genre as you nor drink the same beverage as you, but, like you, I’m dedicated to sharing the Good News with a hurting world that desperately needs it.

I hold nothing against you coffee drinkers, as long as I don’t have to drink your favorite beverage. More power (and caffeine) to you!

Now, does anyone have vending machine change? The Diet Pepsi is calling my name.