Welcome to my Coffee Corner, where we can kick
back and chat over caramel mocha lattes--how about double whipped cream?
Need a smile to chase away the blues? Check out my wedding story
Dam It All, Anyway which won the 2004 Erma Bombeck Global
Humor Award, my other
magazine articles, or samples of my
newspaper humor column, "
Coffee Corner."
Ride with Me into Christmas a National Award Finalist!
Have you ever experienced
Christmas in July? I did when the American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW)
notified me that my novella,
Ride with Me into Christmas, was nominated
for their celebrated Carol Award - especially exciting because
Ride with
Me was my first published fiction! When Barbour Publishing's senior editor
Rebecca Germany surprised me with my first contract at the conference in 2009, I
never dreamed the resulting novella would earn this honor. Much of the credit
goes to my novella partners: Eileen Key, Becky Melby and Cynthia Ruchti, as well
as my mentor Kim Peterson, who all helped critique my story. Now, like a kid
counting the days till Christmas, I await the 2011 ACFW conference in September,
when the winner will be announced.
A Door County
Christmas, the collection which includes my novella, also won a
Readers' Choice Award in Family Fiction e-zine. Eileen, Becky, Cynthia and I
love to write the stories, and we're thankful readers like them, too!
A Quaker Christmas
I'm excited to announce the release
of a historical Christmas novella collection,
A Quaker Christmas,
including my novella
Pirate of My Heart, in which a Quaker girl with a
yearning for Christmas and adventure finds both when two very different brothers
from a family of Ohio River pirates seek her hand. In researching this story, I
found myself climbing-alone [gulp!]-around in a large pirate cave on the shores
of the Ohio near Cave-in-Rock, Illinois. What stories those walls told me!
All four nineteenth-century Quaker Christmas stories in the collection,
including Lauralee Bliss's story
A Crossroad to Love, Ramona Cecil's
Simple Gifts and Claire Sanders'
Equally Yoked will take you
to the 1800s, when Friends cherished simple pleasures such as hospitality and
weaving, yet willingly faced persecution for their faith and dared help runaway
slaves escape during the pre-Civil War era.
Women of the Bible
It was my joy to co-author a reference book,
Women of the Bible, this year.
They didn't receive as much press, but the women of the Bible contributed amazing
things to human history. How did these women survive-and move ahead-in their
male-dominated societies? Why was Jesus's treatment of women so unusual for His
time and culture? Carol Smith, Ellyn Sanna and I are glad to give readers a
fascinating glimpse into a world very different from, yet in many ways similar to,
ours today.
Need Inspiration?
Invite me over for coffee at your club, group or church. We'll inspire each other!
