5-Book Contract!

I am so excited to let people know that my childhood friend, Shirley Crowder and I have just signed a 5-book contract for a year long devotional series! The books include a re-vamping of our original holiday devotional titled. "Glimpses of the Savior" and four more books that will cover devotions for winter, spring, summer, and fall These books will be released by Pix-N-Pens Publishing late this year, as well as in 2019 and 2020.

A little about Shirley and my writing journey:

A few years ago, Shirley, a lifelong friend, contacted me suggesting we collaborate on a devotional book. We ventured into the unknown world of indie publishing. At that same time, I had a contract

on Prayer: It's Not About You but it had not been released yet. Shirley and I learned a lot about writing a devotional book, including the fact that we work quite well together.

After my book on prayer was released by Pix-N-Pens, the nonfiction arm of Write Integrity Press, Shirley wrote a study guide to it for use in her own work as a women's Bible study leader. She sent it to me to ask permission to use it since she quotes my book in it. I loved the study guide and sent it to my publisher who then contracted with Shirley to publish it.

After that Shirley and I began working on two other prayer related books which our publisher also contracted. One, a devotional book titled Glimpses of Prayer, was released last fall and the other, an anthology, will be released later this year.

By now Shirley and I have learned that we enjoy co-writing so we moved into a discussion with our publisher to write devotional books, including re-working our original one and bringing it under the PNP name. Today that venture begins.

We each have books we have written or co-written independent of each other and will in the future but I'm pretty sure we will also do more co-writing. Certainly, we have a lot of it ahead of us right now!

New Release!

I have another book releasing! It's actually releasing on Dec 5th (and I am posting this on the 4th) but it's the news of the week and month!

The book is a themed devotional on the topic of prayer co-written by my childhood MK friend, Shirley Crowder and me. It makes the third in our prayer series with the others being Prayer: It's Not About You written by me, Study Guide on Prayer: A Companion to Prayer: It's Not About You written by Shirley. We are currently working on the fourth and final book in this series. It will be an anthology that we hope to have released by PixNPens in summer '18.

But the interesting thing about this new release is that it straddles two different book series. Shirley and I currently have a seasonal devotional that we hope to rework and also add two more to cover the  year. Those three, "Glimpses of God in the Winter/ Spring", "Glimpses of God in the Summer/Fall", "Glimpses of the Savior" which takes the reader through the end year holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas and the New Year, and the book releasing tomorrow, Glimpses of Prayer will also make a four-book devotional series.

And as a special bonus, all of the Glimpses books will be illustrated by my talented daughter, Kristin Michael.

I will not always partner with Shirley nor she with me. I have other ideas in the works, some I hope to write alone, and one I am collaborating with someone other than Shirley. She has another devotional she just released that she co-wrote with someone other than me. So, we are not always writing partners butt we do work well together and have future plans for quite a few more collaborations. Meanwhile, we celebrate the latest one!

Here's a pictur of us a kids ... long ago in a faraway land. (Shirley is kneeling in the plaid dress, I am standing behind her, next to the really tall boy.)

 

I'm happily working again with partners I have worked with before.

Shirley Crowder is a lifelong friend. We grew up together in Nigeria in mission houses that sat directly across the dirt road from each other. We were constant playmates. Shirley teased once that the pickings were slim as far as playmates went, considering there were only a handful of missionary families and we children were not allowed off the two compounds (seminary compound and hospital compound.)

That was true actually, and consequently the few of us who lived near each other were and remain the closest of friends.

A few years ago, Shirley and I decided to collaborate on the devotional book, "Glimpses of the Savior" and we soon learned that our writing styles compliment each other. She is great at all that technical stuff that I am not, and I help her wordsmith.

She is a Biblical counselor and leads many Bible studies. As soon as she read my recent book, "Prayer: It's Not About You" she suggested we collaborate again on a study guide. I thought it was a great idea and asked my publisher about it. She loved the idea too.

Giving credit where it's due, Shirley is doing the lion's share of the work but it is based on and uses many quotes from my book.

This past weekend we both attended the annual reunion of the Baptist Missionaries in Nigeria--always a highlight of my year! While there we both signed the contract with Pix-N-Pens Publishing and I am happy to announce that this study guide is set to release in early 2017.

It’s Here!!!!!

“Prayer moves the arm that moves the universe … Prayer is the greatest privilege man can have.”

This a quote cited in the book, “Soldiers of the Cross” by Kent D. Dollar. Dollar found this quote in a hand-written journal from a soldier in the civil war by the name of Edward Owings Guerrant. I don’t know whether this was Guerrant’s original thought or if he had heard someone else say it.

I found the book by Dollar about ten years ago in the gift shop of a civil war battle site just outside of Washington D. C. while visiting my son who lived in D. C. at the time. The book in general and this quote in specific grabbed me. I could just picture a soldier in the throes of war, sitting by himself contemplating prayer and writing about it in his journal.

I can relate. I may not have ever fought in a physical war but I have been in spiritual wars contemplating and journaling about prayer.

For four years, in fact, I did just that.

At the end of those four years I had a manuscript written on the topic of prayer. Then, it took another almost eight years working on turning that manuscript into a book. It garnered a special recognition along the way when it finaled in the 20011 Women of Faith” unpublished manuscript competition. But until now it had not made it into book form.

Today, at last, I am thrilled to announce that the book is finally out! It can be purchased in paperback and will be available in e-book form in a few more days.

Here’s the link: Prayer: It's Not About You