This week, the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance is introducing Embrace Me (Thomas Nelson March 4, 2008) by Lisa Samson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lisa Samson is a Christy Award-winning author of 19 books, including the Women of the Faith Novel of the Year, Quaker Summer. Lisa has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a talented novelist who isn't afraid to take risks."
In Embrace Me, the latest novel by acclaimed author Lisa Samson, readers are privy to the realization that regardless of outward appearances…hideous, attractive, or even ordinary…persons are all looking for the same things: love, forgiveness, and redemption.
This story explores a world that is neither comfortable nor safe, a world that people like Valentine know all too well. Masterfully crafted by Samson and populated by her most compelling cast of characters yet. It is a tale of forgiveness that extends into all spheres of life: forgiving others, forgiving oneself, forgiving the past.
She lives in Lexinton, Kentucky, with her husband and three kids.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Biting and gentle, hard-edged and hopeful...a beautiful fable of love and power, hiding and seeking, woundedness and redemption.
When a "lizard woman," a self-mutilating preacher, a tattooed monk, and a sleazy lobbyist find themselves in the same North Carolina town one winter, their lives are edging precariously close to disaster...and improbably close to grace.
Valentine, due to her own drastic self-disfigurement, ahs very few friends in this world and, it appears as if she may be destined to spend the rest of her life practically alone. But life gives her one good friend, Lella, whose own handicap puts her in the same freakish category as Valentine. As part of Roland's Wayfaring Marvel and Oddities Show, a traveling band of misfits, they seem to have found their niches in an often curiously cruel world.
Residing in a world where masks are mandatory, Valentine has a hard time removing hers, because of her disfigured face but more so because of her damaged soul. It is much easier for her to listen endlessly to different versions of a favorite song, Embraceable You, and escape reality. Yet, life has more in store for her when she meets Augustine, replete with the tattoos, dreadlocks, and his own secrets. With his arrival, Valentine's soul takes a turn.
If you would like to read the first chapter, go HERE
Check out Lisa's blog for a list of book signings.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
CFBA Presents Embrace Me by Lisa Samson
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Louisiana Saturday Night With Rosalind Foley
Every now and then we come across a writer we know is the publishing world's loss. Rosalind Foley is that writer for me. I can't remember when I met Ro, but I do recall sitting on my sofa totally captivated by her novel, Hero's Welcome. I didn't budge until I finished it and very few days go by that I don't think of some aspect of the story. When I'm asked about my favorite book, Hero's Welcome springs to mind. Ro and I have been friends for years, critique buddies and conference pals. I can't tell you how pleased I am to share her with you today.
1. You've written some articles, essays, poetry, screenplays and novels, some of which have been published. You co-authored a memoir, now in its second edition. How did you learn to be so prolific?
Curiosity, I guess. I wanted to see if I could. I come from a family of readers. Words matter to us. We moved a great deal and I went to a lot of different schools where I think I got a fairly broad education.
2. You did a lot of research for your novel that I particularly love, Hero's Welcome. Tell us about it.
It started when a neighbor happened to mention that her dad used to drive German P.O.W.s to work in the rice fields of Acadia Parish (i.e. county, outside Louisiana). I hadn't known there were POWs here in WWII. I had one of those "what if?" moments when I wondered what it would have been like for a Cajun rice farmer to wake up his first morning back from the war hearing German voices.
The more I learned, the more intrigued I was by the elements of conflict. There's a rice farming area of Louisiana which was settled many years earlier by Germans who live side by side with Cajuns. That where I planted my characters.
3. Didn't you get involved in a very extensive research project?
Yes, when I discovered the POW experience was much larger than I could have imagined. It had never been documented. (There were 49 POW camps in Louisiana with thousands of captured Germans in them.) I teamed up with History Professor Matt Schott to collect everything we could on that remarkable era, both here and in Germany. Recently, we turned over all our interview tapes, correspondence, other papers, photographs and memorabilia to the ULL archives.
4. Did your novel get published?
No, but I'm still hoping. And it led me into screenwriting which I find really satisfying. I'd always felt Hero's Welcome had great dramatic potential. An earlier version of the novel took first place in the Deep South Writers Conference contest. The feature length screenplay version finished second in a Shot in LA contest at Loyola, New Orleans.
5. What does it take to be a screenwriter?
The ability to think as the camera sees. A certain degree of masochism, because it's just as difficult a market as literary fiction!
6. You submitted work and were accepted in a class taught by Ernest Gaines. What did you learn from him?
To write "clean", and how one small just right detail can speak volumes.
7. What advice would you give?
Two books every sincere writer should read and re-read whether writing fiction or screenplays: Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, and Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey.
8. What are you working on these days?
Marketing. A series of short stories imagining events around minor Biblical characters. My most recent screenplay is set in colonial Louisiana. It's the story of a woman of color, the mistress and great love of a French planter. Unable by law to marry her, he is forced by his family to let her go. With incredible willpower she develops the piece of land he gives her, becoming successful in her own right and swearing never to rest until all her children, too, are free. Truly a liberated woman.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Louisiana Saturday Night with Author Jeff LeJeune
I have an enormous amount of respect for writers who hold full time jobs and still manage to turn out books. I know there's a drive and passion inside them that every writer must have to succeed. So...it gives me great pleasure to introduce Louisiana author, Jeff LeJeune--a very busy man with a passion for writing.
1) Tell us a little about yourself and your book. How does living in Louisiana influence your writing?
My first book, The Final Chase, is more of a parable and includes stock characters that combine to create the desired allegorical effect. Since it is in parable-form, the symbols and settings used are not Louisianian, though of course the human elements can be applied anywhere. My second book, Postmarked Baltimore, set for release this summer, does have some surreal elements to it, but it is much more based in a real-world setting than the first book. Baltimore was chosen because of the main character’s affinity to Edgar Allan Poe, but the main character is actually from Louisiana. His parents divorced and he moved to Baltimore before the story’s beginning to get a fresh start. My father’s stories of milking the cow before basketball games when he was a child provided the inspiration for the scene where Perry (the main character) talks to Noel about his days on the farm. No other Louisiana influences are readily visible, but I do hope to tap into the rich culture and heritage of our state in future novels.
2) Tell us about your path to publication. Was it difficult or was it a breeze?
It was terribly difficult. I originally tried to get published by sending manuscripts out on my own, but I received a lot of stock responses, pre-prepared letters I think every author has had to read at some point or another. “If you like my book so much, why don’t you publish it?” is, I imagine, the common question we ask ourselves. A domino-effect started in the spring of 2003 when a colleague of mine introduced me to a man in Houston whose nephew is a literary agent. I was introduced to this nephew, and he worked for a year before SterlingHouse Publisher finally made contact and an offer. I was at the end of my rope in terms of hope for the book ever being published, but I truly had faith that God would see it through if it was his divine will. A comforting tagline to grasp when you’re floating in life, I guess, but it sure does work.
3) You chose the self-publishing route instead of traditional publishing. Tell us how you came to the decision to go that route, and do you have any regrets? I was fortunate enough to sign with SterlingHouse Publisher, which, though independent, is a traditional publisher.
4) How much do you know about how your books are going to be structured, who the characters are, and what the plot is going to be, before you actually start writing, and how much comes to you during the writing process? In other words, are you a plotter or do you sit down and just start writing to see what happens?
I’d say it’s about half-and-half. Certainly, there is a plan in mind, but without freedom to breathe, characters will become stale. It is one of the things I struggled with with my first book because I needed to keep the characters in a somewhat static form to keep the parable-form of the novel in tact. With Postmarked, two stories going nowhere—A Gentleman Named Lucifer and The Candlewax Romance—were combined in the initial stages to form The Phoenix Always Rises, an early version of the novel that will be released in June. Two major and two minor revisions and a title change later, I have what I think is a first-rate story I can be proud of.
5) If you could go back and talk to yourself when you were a beginning writer, what advice would you offer?
One thing would be to not let my personal life get in the way of the revising process. Once the book goes to press, that’s pretty much it, unless you become really famous and can dictate whether or not you want to run a second edition of your book. I allowed some emotional distress to distract me and it made me apathetic to the changes that I needed to make. Another thing that I would do, something I did well with, I think, in the second book, is to let go of some material. Sometimes I spend so much time working on a story or even a paragraph that I don’t want to delete it when the revising time comes, no matter how much I know it doesn’t belong. I think that’s the creator’s nightmare, to destroy that which took so long to create, but it must be done. A tip to beginning writers that helped me get over this: create a “cuts” file that you can cut and paste into. That way, you can convince yourself that you may “use it later” in this novel or another. Even though you know deep down inside that you’re never going back to that file again, you’ll know that at least you didn’t have to completely dispose of it. It’ll always be there, never to be read, but there.
6) Do you have or have you ever had a critique group? What advice do you have for those writers who live and breathe critique groups?
I have never been a part of a critique group, but I would like to join one. I’ve sometimes wanted to ask colleagues of mine to look at my work, but they have their own 130 papers to grade and I really don’t want to take their time away, knowing how valuable it is. As far as living and breathing a critique group, I think an author has to have a healthy balance between being willing to accept constructive criticism and knowing when to trust his or her creative instincts.
7) Do you blog? How does blogging/MySpace and websites fit in with your writing and has it helped you market your writing? Can you tell if your website/blog has raised your profile as a writer? If you don’t do any of this, then share your favorite marketing advice with us.
I just joined a Writers Group on Facebook and ended up getting 50 personal friends on the regular account in just a few days. It is quite nice to chat with former friends, but it is difficult to get into marketing the book when it has been so long since I’ve talked to them. I’m hoping the Writers Group, originated by some of my publishers’ employees, will stimulate some interest for my book in more states and in more networks. I am still learning the marketing business of my book, but I do know that word of mouth and simply requesting that your friends email news updates to their networks helps a great deal in getting the word out there.
8) What piece of writing advice have you been given that you still bring to mind each time you sit down to start a new book?
It’s funny, but I actually remember advice that I don’t end up following. I watched this movie once called Finding Forrester, and the writer in the story tells his young apprentice to write first, think later. I have tried to be less meticulous as I write, to let chapters sit as rough drafts for some time before I get back to the novel as a whole for revisions. It’s just really difficult for me to do that, and I admire people that can. I often find myself rewriting a chapter for a couple days before moving on. I guess this is better than I used to be; I used to spend several days on individual chapters before finding the guts to move on. Maybe that was it: not necessarily overwriting, but postponing the inevitable plunge into foreign ground in the story, which can always be daunting.
9) Do you have a career or job outside of writing and if so, give us a typical day. How do you fit writing into your schedule?
This is one of the frustrations of my life, that I enjoy teaching 11th grade English at St. Louis Catholic High School and going back to McNeese for my Masters Degree so much that oftentimes new writing projects are put on hold. It takes all of my energy to teach, grade, write and read for school, try to market the upcoming novel, and, oh, yeah, love my wife. A typical day has me waking up between 6 and 6:15 and showing up for work at 6:45. I meet with any students who have missed class or have to make up tests until 7:45. I teach until 2:40, when, during the winter and spring, I go to track practice (our Girls won the state championship this year, 2008). After that, depending on the day, I go to class, do homework, grade, work in the yard, or spend time with my wife, all things I must do around eating and cleaning and praying, which I don’t do enough of, I must confess. It’s bedtime at around 10, and I usually wake up at around 1 am for a refreshing hour of thinking about teaching or new novel ideas. I need to work on that last one; it’s about the only thing I don’t enjoy in my day.
10) What is the last book you read and why did you read it?
I finished Paul Austere’s Travels in the Scriptorium for a review I had to write in my graduate-level class. I re-read I Am Legend in order to be refreshed on the story enough to teach it. The last book I read for pure pleasure was It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium, a memoir written by John Ed Bradley. All three are books I recommend.
11) What professional organizations do you belong to and why? Or how have they benefited you?
Unfortunately, I am not a part of any professional organizations. Maybe that’s the next step in marketing myself as an author.
Tell us what's new on the horizons for you, any hopes or dreams or goals you want to achieve, where we can buy your book, whatever you want us to know. :) I love writing stories and I hope to be able to do more of i
t once I relax some of my load in teaching and finish my Masters Degree plan. I do have two stories working right now, one in particular that is over 70,000 words in. Right now, already, it is longer than either The Final Chase or Postmarked Baltimore. I hope to find time to finish it this summer. My dream to see my novels go to film, as I am a very visual person interested in art and film. I realize that to do that would take either a lucky break or a whole bunch of people buying the books, so if anybody reading this wants to help out, please feel free! If you’re not a web-buyer, the books are available through any bookstore.
Thank you for taking the time to read a little bit about me.
Check out Jeff LeJeune's website where more information can be found about him and his work.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Something to Think About
Many of life's failures are from people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. ~Thomas Edison
Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed. ~Corita Kent
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all. ~Edward de Bono
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing. ~George Bernard Shaw
It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success. ~Havelock Ellis
I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody. ~Herbert B. Swope
Remember, no man is a failure who has friends. ~From It's a Wonderful Life
Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied. ~Pearl S. Buck
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. ~Peter Drucker
We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery. ~Samuel Smiles
According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The criteria for failure are heavily dependent on context of use, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. A situation considered to be a failure by one might be considered a success by another, particularly in cases of direct competition or a zero-sum game. As well, the degree of success or failure in a situation may be differently viewed by distinct observers or participants, such that a situation that one considers to be a failure, another might consider to be a success, a qualified success or a neutral situation.
Something to think about when we feel we've failed.
My reputation grows with every failure.~George Bernard Shaw
Friday, May 2, 2008
Louisiana Saturday Night with Bev Marshall
I'm very excited to share my in-depth interview with Louisiana author Bev Marshall. We all know time is precious to a writer so I appreciate Bev's detailed response to my many questions. Don't skip a word. There's wonderful, interesting info in every sentence.
1) Tell us a little about yourself and that wonderful little town of Ponchatoula. I've been there once and thought it was so charming.
I grew up in Mississippi and married my high school boyfriend, who became a pilot in the USAF and we’re still happily together forty-three years later. During his military career we moved from coast to coast to England, and after retirement, landed back here in Ponchatoula, where he began a new career as a pilot for Delta Air Lines. We fell in love with the town ten years ago. There’s Old Hardhide, the caged alligator downtown, antique stores, crafts and art galleries, and the famous Paul’s Café where we often eat great country lunches with the colorful locals. There are deer in my backyard, egrets, blue herons, a red-tailed fox, rabbits, and the requisite Louisiana armadillos. Perfect setting for writing and I hope to die here someday . . . but not any time soon.
2) What do you write and tell us about your path to publication.
I began my writing career in non-fiction, penning lifestyle pieces for various military publications. After earning a Masters Degree in English with a creative writing thesis at Southeastern Louisiana University, I began publishing literary short fiction. When one story I was writing grew longer and longer, I realized I was writing a novel and that as a gregarious storyteller this was the genre for me. My three published novels are WALKING THROUGH SHADOWS, RIGHT AS RAIN, and HOT FUDGE SUNDAE BLUES.
The path I traveled on to publication is a serpentine one, winding from encouragement from Tim Gautreaux here in Louisiana to Douglas Glover and Nicholas Delbanco at The New York Summer Writers Institute to my agent, Lisa Bankoff at ICM in New York. I met my first editor at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, published with MacAdam Cage and moved to Random House for books two and three.3) How much do you know about how your books are going to be structured, who the characters are, and what the plot is going to be, before you actually start writing, and how much comes to you during the writing process?
My father, a great storyteller with a prodigious memory, trades stories for food. I feed him pot roast and he tells me a story or gives me an idea for a character. Some of my stories, however, begin with a voice, a story idea that is vague and often not the story I write. I’m not schizophrenic (at least I’m not on medication) but I hear the voices of my characters and rely on them to tell me their stories. Although I have a concept of how the story will end, it oftentimes isn’t the ending I supposed. I love the surprises that continually arise during the process of writing. I’m a reviser junky. I wrote WALKING THROUGH SHADOWS from one point of view, that of the young girl Annette, and then threw out over 200 pages and rewrote it from the points of view of five different characters, so I learned early on that imposing a specific structure on a book isn’t the best course for me.
4) Who are some of the writers who influenced you?
Like most English majors I fell in love with the literary giants like Shakespeare, Dickens, Proust, Faulkner, Porter, Welty, and so on, but I was most influenced to write my stories when I began reading the work of contemporary Southern writers like James Wilcox, Ellen Gilchrist, Clyde Edgerton, Lee Smith, Kaye Gibbons, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown. And today I’ve fallen in love with writers Silas House and Ron Rash, and too many others to name who are writing fine fiction today.
Were I a beginning writer today I’d deliver the same advice I gave to myself all those years ago: Read read read, believe in myself and my work, be dogged, and most importantly, have the courage to write through the fears and the angst that writers encounter when they write from their hearts. I tell my students who receive rejections that rejections are only opportunities to try again. Hope cures disappointment.
6) Do you have or have you ever had a critique group? What advice do you have for those writers who live and breathe critique groups?I’m still in the writers group I co-founded nearly twenty years ago. I value my critique group and rely on them for revising, support, and fun, too. Through the years I have learned that a group needs guidelines to function successfully, and having seen many groups fail for various reasons, I wrote a guide for writers groups entitled, SHARED WORDS, which includes advice for maintaining a successful book club as well. I will be selling them on my web site as soon as I can find the time to set that up. For the moment they are only available at Bayou Booksellers in Hammond.
7) Do you blog? How does blogging fit with your writing and has it helped you market your writing? Can you tell if your website/blog has raised your profile as a writer?
I admire faithful bloggers and wish I were one of them. I’m a lackadaisical blogger on our writers group blog, The St. Tammany Writers Group, at blogspot, and I write journal entries on my own website. I learned that the journal on my website receives the most hits there, but as to whether it raises my profile, I haven’t a clue. I enjoy posting and that’s primarily why I do it. I feel connected to my readers and other writers each time I post a new entry.
8) What do you find to be the hardest part of writing?
9) What piece of writing advice have you been given that you still bring to mind each time you sit down to start a new book?
Breathe.
10) What is your work schedule like when you’re writing? Do you have a job outside of writing?
I am the writer-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, but I only teach one class and that’s my joy and inspiration. Occasionally, it interferes with my writing time as do appearances for speaking engagements and readings. I attend book clubs, conferences, and festivals routinely and enjoy interacting with other authors and readers, but when I’m working on something, I become manic. I write all day every day, and even if I’m not at my desk, I’m writing in my head as I go about my day elsewhere.
11) What is the last book you read and why did you read it?
Amy Tan’s SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING. I wanted to read it when it first came out and then forgot about it. When I was browsing the shelves in our local bookstore, I came upon it and was thrilled to rush home and begin reading. I admire Tan’s talent to blend humor and pathos in her work. I’d also add here that one of the bonuses of being an author is that I have the privilege of reading a lot of Advanced Reading Copies of books that haven’t yet been published, and there are some great ones coming out this year like MOON IN THE MANGO TREE by Pamela Binnings Ewen, who’s a Louisiana writer, too.
12) If you could change the publishing industry in any way, how would you change it?
There are so many things wrong with the publishing industry today I hardly know where to begin. I would like it to revert to the days of yore I suppose when I imagined a tweed-suited, pipe-smoking editor who invited authors to lie on the leather couch in his office while he read their manuscripts before taking them out for martinis and fine dining. Today the sales team drives the train of publishing and it rolls through the big chains and arrives at destinations where decisions are based on nothing more than profit and loss statements. The days of nurturing first time authors and their careers are no longer and authors have become the products as well as their work. Sadly, I think most editors feel the same as the authors, but the monoliths who own the publishing houses are the ones wearing the conductors’ caps. I’ve been very fortunate to have wonderful editors and great support from my publishers, but I know scores of other authors who cannot say the same.
13) What professional organizations do you belong to and why? Or how have they benefited you?
I am a board member for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans, and a member of The Hammond Regional Arts Association, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. They have all benefited me in various ways. As I said earlier, I met my editor at the TWF, but just as importantly, I’ve also made numerous friends over the many years I’ve attended the festival, and the same is true for the other organizations to which I belong. The contacts for a career are an obvious advantage, but that is less important to me than if I enjoy the members and believe in their goals. Organizations like these have become the last bastions of support for the arts and I’m proud to be an advocate for creative work in all mediums.
14. Tell us what's new on the horizons for you, etc.
My personal goals right now are to get SHARED WORDS out into the world via my website and to finish the novel I’m working on. It’s a sequel to RIGHT AS RAIN, working title, RAIN BEFORE SEVEN, and it’s set in the eighties and continues to follow the lives of the characters I fell in love with so long ago. It’s a great joy to work on this book. I also have a failed memoir about being a military wife during the Vietnam era which I may revise. I may also work on becoming a better blogger although I doubt I can ever aspire to the excellence on this site!
Thanks for the interview. I enjoyed answering the thoughtful questions you posed
Promotion Isn't for The Squeamish
Promotion is a thorn in our sides, isn't it? We hate it. We love it. And publishers can't get enough of it. We use bookmarks, flyers, conferences, book trailers. We chase our tails running from one book signing to another and we speak to civic groups on whatever they want us to speak on. There's nothing we won't do to sell the books we've put heart and soul into. When you really think about it, promotion is a brave thing to do.
My friend Lesa Boutin is a brave woman. I met Lesa several years ago when she'd just started her writing career. She was working on her first book, Amanda Noble, Zookeeper Extraordinaire. She won a few contests, including one with Highlights Magazine so she trekked off to New York all alone to take advantage of what Highlights could teach her. I thought that was pretty brave.
She took on the presidency of a writers group before she really knew much about writing. I thought that was pretty brave.
Today Lesa is working on the sequel to Amanda Noble, Zookeeper Extraordinaire. She's also up to her eyeballs in promotion. She volunteered at the Houston Zoo for research--don't tell me that's not brave.
To show you just how courageous my friend Lesa Boutin is, take a look at these pictures.
I would never do this. I know it's not smart to say never, but believe me, I would never do this. Lesa Boutin is an author after any publisher's heart. You go, girl!
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
CFBA Presents The Big Picture by Jenny B. Jones
This week, the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance is introducing
The Big Picture (NavPress Publishing Group April 15, 2008) by
Jenny B. Jones
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jenny B. Jones is the author of A Katie Parker Production series. The other books in the series are In Between and On The Loose. Though now an adult, she still relates to the trauma and drama of teen life. She is thrilled to see her writing dreams come true, as her previous claim to fame was singing the Star Spangled Banner at a mule-jumping championship. (The mules were greatly inspired.)Jenny resides in Arkansas, where, as a teacher, she hangs out with teens on a regular basis.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Sometimes there’s a fine line between comedy and tragedy—and Katie Parker is walking it.School is winding down for the summer but Katie Parker is having a bad day. After leaving the drive-in, where her imploding love life was the main attraction, Katie arrives home to a big surprise on the Scott's front porch. Her mother, Bobbie Ann Parker, a former convict and recovering addict, wants to take Katie away from her family, friends, and church. Now Katie's life will be changed by a series of dramatic choices as she struggles to understand what family and home really means. Katie is forced to walk away from In Between, leaving behind a family who loves her, a town drive-in to save, and a boyfriend who suddenly can’t take his eyes off his ex. When the life her mother promised begins to sink faster than one of Maxine’s stuffed bras, Katie knows she needs to rely on God to keep it together. But where is he in all this? Can Katie survive a chaotic life with her mother—and one without the Scotts? And if God is there, will he come through before it’s too late?
A Katie Parker Production series offers teen girls real-world fiction balanced by hope and humor. The The Big Picture helps us realize that the difficult chapters in our journey are only part of God's big story for our lives.You can read the first chapter HERE
"A heroine to love. Jones just gets better with every book, and The Big Picture is her best one yet."~BARBARA WARREN, author of The Gathering Storm
"Such inspiration in a package of fun and faith!"~EVA MARIE EVERSON, author of the Potluck Club series
You won't be able to walk away from these characters; they stay with you a long, long time. ~Jess
