WELCOME ADA BROWNELL

Please join me in welcoming Ada Brownell, author of Joe the Dreamer.

A.B. Brownell has been writing for Christian publications since age 15 and spent much of her life as a daily newspaper reporter. She has a BS degree in Mass Communications and worked most of her career at The Pueblo Chieftain in Colo., where she spent the last seven years as a medical writer. After moving to Springfield, MO in her retirement, she continues to free lance for Christian publications and write non-fiction and fiction books. 

BEHIND THE BOOK: IF I REALLY BELIEVE, I NEED TO GET TO WORK

“You can’t stop there!” the junior high student erupted during my summers and after-school session of The Dunamis Academy. “I can’t wait to see what happens!”

It was only a chapter break. It was nearly time to go home.

I established the after-school and summers program after writing too many news stories about latch-key kids, juvenile delinquency and young people who turn away from God.

 “Lord, why don’t you give the idea for this ministry to someone else?”

But I observed children with little productive to do in their spare time, such as becoming established in the faith. So I contacted the director of our church day care to see what she thought.

“We need something for the upper elementary students and a few older ones,” she said.

My vision was to build up our church kids spiritually, but I was surprised to discover a large number of Social Services children in that age group enrolled.

The first summer, the director taught a class on how to make friends, and our children’s pastor answered my call to teach puppet ministry one day a week. I led devotions, coached intense Bible memorization, and taught faith-building classes.

I wrote the curriculum:  “Dynamite Decisions for Youth,” “God in American History” and “Love is Dynamite.”

But they needed something relaxing in the afternoons and Joe the Dreamer was born.

I hoped to impart in them a love for God’s Word and a desire to read it on their own. The story begins with a mystery. Joe’s parents disappear. Joe prays God will bring them back, but his faith is weak. So while he and his little sister, Penny, live with their uncle, Joe reads the Bible every night. When he falls asleep, he often slips into the skin of a Bible character.

Lions breathe down his neck. He stands in a furnace of fire, but is not burned. He lands in a cistern and ends up in slavery. Then he walks on water with Jesus. Several times Joe sees angels.

Yet, Joe’s days become a living nightmare. Somebody is after him. The police are hunting for Joe’s dad—not because he’s missing but because he’s accused of stealing valuable software for a brain chip to control seizures. Because Joe screams and shouts in the night, his uncle believes he has a mental illness and Joe is committed to the state mental hospital.

In the subplot, the reader sees Joe’s parents imprisoned at a nearby castle by radicals who want to erase Christianity from America.

Then there is the teen gang Joe joins—the Gallant Guardians—dedicated to solving and preventing crime by using ordinary harmless things like marbles, water, noise, rope and a pet skunk.

I learned my experience as a newspaper reporter could be used. The brain chip came out of interviews I had with neurologists about seizure control. Except the radicals want a chip to cause seizures in influential Christians.

The scenes in the mental hospital grew out of my reporting on the juvenile ward in the mental institute.

That wonderful student who was so excited about Joe’s story didn’t discover how the story ended because I didn’t complete the manuscript then. If you set a book aside, it could be years before it is published, if at all.

Yet, if we believe in something and get to work, we’ll see our dreams become reality.

About the book, Joe the Dreamer: The Castle and the Catapult

Enter an area where people are missing and radicals want to obliterate Christianity from the earth. After Joe Baker’s parents mysteriously disappear, he finds himself with a vicious man after him. Joe and an unusual gang team up to find his mom and dad. The gang is dedicated to preventing and solving crimes with ordinary harmless things such as noise, water, and a pet skunk instead of blades and bullets. Joe reads the Bible hoping to discover whether God will answer prayer and bring his parents home. In his dreams, Joe slips into the skin of Bible characters and what happened to them, happens to him—the peril and the victories. Yet, crying out in his sleep causes him to end up in a mental hospital’s juvenile unit. Will he escape or will he be harmed? Will he find his parents? Does God answer prayer?

Teens. No fantasy. No wizard. Suspense. Christian payload. Joe the Dreamer: The Castle and the Catapult http://buff.ly/XeqTvH or https://www.createspace.com/3962829

The book is also available at Barnesandnoble.com, and is listed at Goodreads.com

You can find Ada on the web at:

Swallowed by LIFE: http://amzn.to/Jnc1rW

Confessions of a Pentecostal: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0088OP460

      Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/AdaBrownellWritingMinistries

     Twitter: @adellerella

     Blog: http://inkfromanearthenvessel.blogspot.com

DANCING WITH GRIEF PLUS FIVE YEARS: part two

This is taken from a my WIP, The Blessing Factor, and is also adapted from a much earlier blog post.

THE GIFT OF GRIEF

A Mother’s Story

My daughter Jolene died at the age of twenty- three.

            She didn’t die of disease, or accident, or even murder. I guess you could call it murder. She murdered herself: she committed suicide.

            I know grief on a first name, call-in-the-middle-of-the-night basis.  

            The first time I read the beatitudes after her death, the words slapped me in the face. “Blessed are they that mourn.”

            Oh, I understood the comfort part. God comforted me, in spades, giving me strength to carry on and using me as a testimony to the people around me.

            But losing a daughter in the prime of her life did not feel like a blessing. Today, almost five years later, it still feels wrong, unnatural, unnecessary, heart-rending, life-changing. All of that, and more.

            I wrestled with the idea of grief as a blessing. Mourning and grief are feelings; I didn’t “feel” happy, no matter what word Jesus used in preaching the Sermon on the Mount.

            Jesus didn’t deny my feelings, discredit them, or tell me to be happy when my heart had been ripped from my chest. Instead, He blessed me with His actions, with facts that took on a whole new reality. Ten months after the tragedy, I took stock of the rock-bottom truths which had gained a new depth.

·         Jesus died to give me eternal life.

·         Jolene has eternal life because she placed her trust in Jesus.

I had witness her decision to follow Christ, I have heard her testimony from her own lips and read her words. She is alive.

·         Jolene is in heaven, where tears and pain are a thing of the past.

Even if Jolene could return, I would never ask her to. She is healed of the Borderline Personality Disorder that made her so uncertain and unhappy.

·         Jolene is watching me as I continue to run the race before me.

Jolene wants my happiness. She is cheering me on. I am the missing generation—she is there with her great-grandmother and her grandmother.

·         I will see Jolene again.

The more of my loved ones go ahead, the more I want to join them. What a reunion!

·         Because God became man, He understands my pain and mourns with me.

I knew Jesus had experienced grief—look at Lazarus. He might have also known the pain of losing someone to suicide. He cried right along with me.

·         Jesus welcomed Jolene home.

Jolene wrote about Jesus hugging her in His arms. As life ebbed from her body, He cradled her in His lap.

            I have always accepted these facts as part of my believe system. With the blessing of grief, facts traveled from my head to my heart and etched themselves on the raw nerve endings, seeking to scab over as I healed.

As if all of those biblical truths weren’t enough of a blessing, God added another to enrich the life-from-death truth of the gospel: my first grandchild was born nine months’ after Jolene’s death. Jordan Elizabeth Franklin will never meet her aunt this side of heaven, but her smile, her bouncing brown curls and bright brown eyes, her giggles—she is God’s gift here and now.

Holidays have come and gone. Each Resurrection Day reminds me of my loss; we learned of Jolene’s death on the Monday of Passion Week. With Christmas came a different kind of celebration. What I enjoyed wasn’t the trappings of Christmas—presents and lights and trees seemed hollow without Jolene... I went through most of advent praying, Lord, just let me survive.

Even the things that gave me joy faded. How could I sing my favorite Christmas carols without remembering the caroling Jolene and I did each year, waiting at the bus stops after a night of Christmas shopping?

How could we decorate the tree without crying over each and every memory? Baby’s first Christmas 1984. A hand-crafted tree-top angel made out of a lace doily. A blue delft disc reminded me of the visit we made to the Dutch Festival, and the golden boot with the Olympic rings brought back vivid memories of going to the Salt Lake City Olympics.           

And yet, as I struggled, Christmas became more real than ever. God became man.

The incarnation—God becoming man—that is the blessing of grief for me. 

DANCING WITH GRIEF: FIVE YEARS

My mother would have celebrated her 81st birthday this week. I'm a month short of the anniversary of Jolene's death.

And the news is: I wrote a post for http://christianfictionhistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/ for Tuesday, the 12th, and mentioned that my mother and Abraham Lincoln shared the day as their birthday.

And I didn't cry. I didn't even feel sad. I simply wrote the words, as if it was any other day.

As I look back on Jolene's death, I realize how very blessed I have been. I am falling in love with a man who lost his son to murder two years ago.

I'm three years further into the process of healing than he is. But even at this stage, I can see how isolated he has been in his grief, and how it has stunted him on every level. Meeting me, the love God has given us to share, is opening him up, allowing him to feel joy and peace and hope again.

I am there. Jolene is firmly fixed as part of my past. She is also part of my future, the day when I shall reunited with Mom, Grandma, and Jolene.

But for now--she is a beloved memory, a force in shaping who I am today, a person who is still reaching and touching others through her words--but she is not a daily source of tears.

Although I come close to crying as I write this.

Please pray with me, as I write about Jolene, and my walk through grief, as I write about the blessing for "those who mourn." 

WELCOME LENA NELSON DOOLEY

I am pleased to introduce Lena Nelson Dooley as the first Wednesday guest to "Behind the Book." Lena kindly shepherded a nearly-new author through her first novella, Snowbound Colorado Christian, and has remained a staunch supporter in the years since.

Award-winning author, Lena Nelson Dooley, has more than 700,000 books in print.

Helping other authors become published really floats her boat, with over 20 signing their first book contract after her mentoring. Three of her books have been awarded the Carol Award silver pins, and she has received the ACFW Mentor of the Year award. The high point of her day is receiving feedback from her readers, especially people whose lives have been changed by her books.

Her 2010 release Love Finds You in Golden, New Mexico, won the 2011 Will Rogers Medallion Award for excellence in publishing Western Fiction. Maggie’s Journey appeared on a reviewers Top Ten Books of 2011 list. It also won the 2012 Selah award for Historical Novel. Mary’s Blessing released in May 2012. It recently appeared on a review site’s Top Five Reads in 2012 list. Catherine’s Pursuit is coming in February 2013.

In addition to her writing, Lena is a frequent speaker at women’s groups, writers groups, and at both regional and national conferences. She has spoken in six states and internationally. She is also one of the co-hosts of the Gate Beautiful blog radio show.

Lena has an active web presence on Shoutlife, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Linkedin and with her internationally connected blog where she interviews other authors and promotes their books. 

Let's go BEHIND THE BOOK, Catherine's Pursuit. (By the way, I've read it, and it's a great story which will capture your mind and your heart!)

Did You Know This About the Old West?

©2013 Lena Nelson Dooley

I know authors who really don’t like the research involved in making historical novels authentic to the time period. I am not one of those authors.

While writing my McKenna’s Daughters series, I found out a lot of things I didn’t know. And I love the minute details of life that I discover. I try to work them into the story. Here are a few of the things I found and used. Of course, there were a large number of other things, and this blog post couldn’t possibly hold them all.

In the prologues in both book one and book two, I had to research the Oregon Trail wagon trains, then choose the route that would work best for my story.

With Maggie’s Journey, book one, I researched the transcontinental railroad system, especially the part that was in the western United States. I had to figure out how long it would take to travel in 1885 from Seattle, Washington Territory, to Little Rock, Arkansas. The characters stayed in actual hotels of the time period in Denver, Colorado, and St. Louis, Missouri. They had to go east to St. Louis, then travel south-southwest from there to Little Rock.

I also had a hard time picturing Seattle in that time period. The adult reference librarian in the Seattle Public Library helped me find websites that were gold mines of information that I needed. So almost all the streets, stores, hotels, schools, hospital, etc., were all part of the city in 1885.

For Mary’s Blessing, book two, I spent quite awhile researching Oregon City and Portland. There were a number of interesting things in the books I read. In that time period, some people trained goats to pull sleds. I found a picture of one such goat team. They were planning on using them to pull sleds to the gold fields in Alaska. I didn’t find any information about how successful they were with that endeavor.

I also had to research medical practices of the time period, farming practices around Oregon City, and transportation between Oregon City and Portland. I had the hero and heroine go from Oregon City and Portland by trolley. My editor questioned that, because the information she had said that the electric trolley wasn’t built until 1890. I found pictures of the trolley station and actual trolleys in 1885. The trolleys were pulled by horses or mules along the right-of-way where the tracks were later laid for the electric trolley cars.

With Catherine’s Pursuit, the book that released earlier this month, I found equally interesting details in San Francisco, which I used in the book. I also researched steamship lines of the day. There’s one on the cover, and the hero is a steamship captain. San Francisco had electricity and telephones in 1885, but Portland and Oregon City didn’t.

If you want to see what life was like in 1885 in Seattle, Portland, Oregon City, and San Francisco, travel with my characters through these places and see how they lived.

 The search for her sisters will become a spiritual journey for the entire family.

Raised by her father, Catherine McKenna has never lacked for anything, surrounded by people to take care of her every need. On her eighteenth birthday she discovers that not only did her mother die when she was born, but she has two identical sisters. Although her father vowed not to look for his daughters, Catherine made no such promise. Setting   on her own with one clue and her maid in tow, she's determined to find her sisters.

Collin Elliott has seen better days. After losing his ship to a violent and unexpected storm, he is trying to recover--physically and emotionally. When Angus McKenna sends him to find, follow, and protect his daughter, he wants nothing more than to finish his task and return home. Can he help her find her sisters?

And will the discoveries they make along the way teach them both what's most important in life?

Buy links:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621360199?ie=UTF8&tag=lenneldoochaw-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1621360199

http://www.christianbook.com/catherines-pursuit-mckennas-daughters/lena-nelson/9781621360193/pd/360193?product_redirect=1&Ntt=360193&item_code=&Ntk=keywords&event=ESRCP

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/catherines-pursuit-lena-dooley-nelson/1111647814?ean=9781621360193

NEW BLOG! CHECK IT OUT!

For those of my followers who love historical fiction - check out http://christianfictionhistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/

We are 30 bloggers strong, including two of my critique partners, Susan Page Davis and Cynthia Hickey.  I will be posting on the 12th of each month.  We will be sharing some of the fascinating historical tidbits that we uncover in the course of our writing.

BLINDERS

This past week I have been walking (well, wheeling) through life with blinders on.

That's what deadlines do to me. Golden Dreams was due to my editor on February 1st, and I was going to get that done. No monthly concerts or resident council meetings where I was the topic of conversation were going to stand in my way. Certainly not the needs of my fellow residents.

I did turn in the  manuscript on time. I even finished my second goal for January, which was to finish the rough draft of the material I need for the nonfiction book proposal for The Blessing Factor.

But every now and then I have to remind myself to take the blinders off and look at the people around me.

I feel so helpless when our oldest resident, at 94, shouts at me from across the room. "You'll do that, wont'cha?"  I don't know what "it" is. She doesn't understand I'm no more mobile than she is. I do seek to get an aide to help her, but she doesn't communicate her needs to them any better than she does to me. And I sit here and wish she didn't call out so constantly, so helplessly, to me. And feel guilty when I shut out her pleas to work.

This week our gravely ill resident who has been a source of cheer and compassion for everyone around us left--to go to live with his recently discovered father. Hallelujah for him. But . . . I missed his final goodbye. He came to me, personally, to tell me he was leaving at 11 a.m. The next thing I knew, it was lunch time . . . and he was gone.

Or how about our calling bird, who day after day sings our favorite songs and looks to me to join her in song? I tell her I refuse to sing during meals (she doesn't eat enough) but that means I need to listen and join her at other times--like when I'm working.

Or even when the man who is quickly becoming the love of my life said, "I wouldn't tell anyone about us without your permission."  And it took me until he came back to realize perhaps I should tell him, Go ahead! Tell anyone you want to! 

(P.S. I didn't think it was a secret. Not when he announced "I love you more and more each day!" in the lobby, where anyone could hear him.)

The book is done. It's time to take the blinders off and see and listen with all my heart.

P.S. PLEASE VIEW THE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT BELOW ABOUT A NEW WEDNESDAY POST, BEHIND THE BOOK.

ANNOUNCEMENT!!! NEW WEEKLY POST!!!

Starting this Wednesday, every Wednesday we will hear from my fellow writers. They may have a new release, or discuss an old friend, or they may still be hunting that first sale. For all of them, we will learn about the person
BEHIND THE BOOK. 
My good friend and great mentor, Lena Nelson Dooley, will be my first guest this coming Wednesday.