Lorinda Gray April 8th Meeting Speaker

So excited to share with you that Lorinda Gray will be our featured speaker this month.  You will be getting an emailed flyer with some pertinent  information.  I don't want to steal the thunder from the flyer but I'm EAGER to hear what she has to share about e-zines (electronic magazines).  She publishes one that is extremely well done.  And what a writer she is!  If you want a preview you can go to www.ragamuffincreative.com

Also, if you have an iPad, or some such thing, Lorinda has requested that you bring it. I have no idea what she has in store for us, and that anticipation makes it even better.

Hope you will all come and welcome her and learn all about e-zines.  And who knows... there could be cookies!

Keep reading.  Keep writing.

Book Signing and Talk with Shellie Rushing Tomlinson

This is the first book signing and talk by an author that I have attended. It will not be the last.  Linda Scisson and I are reading Hearts Wide Open. Linda has a hard copy and I have an e-copy in my iPad.  So, Linda got her autograph but I decided Shellie probably shouldn't sign the screen of my iPad.  So I had no choice.  It was completely out of my hands. I had to buy two of Shellie's books just so she could write something to me.

Shellie shared with us her path to getting a publisher and it was so interesting and encouraging. She chose to self-publish her first three books. When Penguin Publisher noted how well her books were selling, they approached her and invited her to write for them. Amazing.

Shellie remembers her L O V E of reading as a child. Her family lived in a rural area and the Bookmobile from the Library came only once a month. They were allowed by the staff to check out six books for the month. She, being a desperate reader, agreed to do her two sisters' chores if they would let her check out their quota of books. Oh yes, they agreed. (Huckleberry Finn had nothing on these girls.)  And Shellie would lug 18 books to her house and devour them during the course of the month before the Bookmobile lumbered back down the road.

Shellie is a committed believer in Jesus Christ. She lives what she shares in her writing. She began by writing humorous books (I've got two of them) and Hearts Wide Open is her first Bible Study book.  It has a workbook (print or download)  and the teaching DVD is coming out soon.

We thoroughly enjoyed meeting Shellie Rushing Tomlinson and we are so grateful that she took the time to come and to talk with us. 

Now, about the Purple Cow.  Great burgers. Great shakes. Great rootbeer and Great de-caf coffee.  Fun company. 

Keep Reading. Keep Writing

Party ‘Til the Cows Come Home

By Linda L. Scisson

A Book Review of Heart Wide Open

by Shellie Rushing Tomlinson

Dorothy Hill and I did not exactly party ‘til the cows come home at The Purple Cow on Wednesday, March 26. But we had good food and fellowship, before making the 100-yard dash across the street to Barnes & Noble for Shellie Rushing Tomlinson’s 7 PM talk and book-signing of her latest book, Heart Wide Open: Trading Mundane Faith for an Exuberant Life with Jesus (WaterBrook Press, 2014).

“Exuberant” is an appropriate adjective not only for the book’s sub-title, but also for the author. Shellie Tomlinson is an enthusiastic speaker and enthusiastic participant of life. In Heart Wide Open, Shellie writes that we can find exuberant life here on earth, as we continue to live “in anticipation of seeing Him in the next” (page 21).

 And that stretches our margins of gratitude for the Great Exchange: Jesus traded His death on the cross for our eternal life.

To trade mundane faith for an exuberant life with Jesus: The first step is to admit one’s faith is mundane. This takes humility, which attribute is seen in the first few pages of Heart Wide Open.

Shellie admits to a season of feeling as if her faith were “compartmentalized.” She felt a “disconnect” between her Sunday morning faith and her everyday experience, although she retained “a healthy respect for the teachings of the church” (page 4). But she was looking for something more than “biblical head knowledge” (page 6). She was looking for something more than “the church-lady gig” (page 5). Why? — Because she had an “aching faking heart” (page 7).

So Shellie embarks on “some serious soul searching” (page 7), as she ponders the words of Jesus in Mark 12:30: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (NIV). 

To our advantage, Shellie hoists us on the highway of a holy enterprise — to trade the mundane for the exuberant — in the first of the book’s eight chapters, titled “When All You Can Bring Him Is A Broken Want-To.” 

How does she do that? She discovers a way to conquer the mountain of the mundane. She embraces “the blessed challenge” (page 11). She asks herself:  “What am I collecting?” And she finds a “clear directive” in Matthew 6:20: “. . . collect for yourselves treasures in heaven” (page 11).

 

One simple prayer to regain a “heart wide open” to God is: “Help me to value and love You more.” And one practical step that we can take toward this goal is to remember, which means “to recollect.” We remember by collecting again (p. 15).

 

In other words, as we treasure God’s love for us, we will experience “the biggest adventure of all time” (page 9) — such as the “freeing [of] me from me” (page 125), as well as “the sweetest of addiction” to God’s friendship (page 21) — because “joy and contentment are found in Him” (page 19). 

 

Yet, to actually know God will probably not result in a 24-7 party ‘til the cows come home this side of heaven; but there will be indication of something favorable, something significant, something exuberant, as the Holy Spirit supernaturally ignites the lukewarm heart, as He woos us back to the Father.

Perseverance Pays Off

By Linda L. Scisson

Author Deborah Howard spoke at our March meeting on Monday, the 17th, rather than the original scheduled date of March 11, 2014 (the 2nd Tuesday of the month) because of hazardous road conditions caused by ice and snow.

It was worth the wait.

For one thing, this lady knows a lot about another kind of delay: the delay in being published. Deborah said she literally wall-papered a wall in a room in her house with rejection slips she received upon first trying to get published. Yet through a lot of hard work and perseverance, her Wall of Rejection transformed into a Wall of Perseverance.

Her 2005 book Sunsets: Reflections for Life’s Final Journey is relevant to everyone, because death touches everyone’s life. As a certified Hospice and Palliative Nurse, Deborah writes what she knows about.  Sunsets is a composite of different patients with a fictional character introducing each chapter.

Deborah’s book Where is God in All of This?: Finding God’s Purpose in Our Suffering (2009) is like a first cousin to Sunsets. It dives into a question many of us ask ourselves at one season or another.

Another book by Deborah is much shorter; it’s only four chapters in length. The title is: HELP! Someone I Love Has Cancer (2010). And HELP! Someone I Love Has Alzheimer’s (2012) also comes in a compact size.

And we look forward to the release later this year of HELP! I’m So Lonely. While Deborah shared that she has never been plagued with loneliness, she interviewed a lot of people who have.

Besides nursing and writing, Deborah (Mrs. Theron) Howard divides her time with editing, ghost writing, and lecturing. She mentioned a book that she ghost-wrote and emphasized the importance of being like-minded with the author. But she was not an unseen ghost, as Deborah’s name appears on the book’s front cover: It’s Not Fair! Finding Hope When Times Are Tough by Wayne A. Mack with Deborah Howard (published in 2008).

Deborah gave us advice on getting published. First and foremost, we are to read and keep reading. Writers love to read; that’s a given.

Secondly, buy an updated edition of Writer’s Market. Check the submission guidelines carefully. Use the editor’s name in your correspondence, rather than simply writing “Dear Editor.”

Third: Enter writing contests. Fourth: Attend writers’ conferences and ghost-writing conferences, as Deborah specified some of the “How To’s” one learns at these conferences.

Her final points of advice were to get an agent, and to keep marketing your own books, as generally a publishing company markets their authors’ books for only the first six months, and that’s it.

Hopefully, with Deborah’s appearance at our writers’ club, she will see an increase in sales of her books, as they are worth our time to read. And whether we look up from our reading and see snow and ice or Bradford pears and forsythia, let’s keep reading and writing.  

Today's Meeting

Today's meeting was all about blogging.
We learned how to

• log in
• create a blog
• edit
• publish

We also learned about linking objects and html.