On this day of your life, I believe God wants you to know that the greatest waste in the world is the difference between what we are and what we could become.

Ben Herbster said that, and he was right. If you know what you could become, it would leave you breathless. Or maybe you do know…and are just waiting to catch your breath.

Okay, then. Rest for a while. Catch your breath. Yet move as soon as you can, yes? Your soul awaits what you could become.

Neal Donald Walsch www.CWGPortal.com

5 Writing Tips: Dinaw Mengestu

By Dinaw Mengestu

Apr 25, 2014

Dinaw Mengestu is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, was one of the New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40,” has won the Guardian First Book Award, and has a whole host of other accolades. His new novel, one of 2014’s best, is All Our Names. Check out his writing tips below.

1.  Be generous to your characters: kill them, save them, break their hearts and then heal them. Stuff them with life, emotions, histories, objects and people they love, and once you’ve done that, once they are bursting at the seams, strip them bare. Find out what they look like—how they stand, talk move, when they have nothing left. Now put them back together, fill them once more with life, except now leave enough room for the reader to squeeze their own heart and imagination inside.

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2.  Believe that a good writing day can be one passed entirely in silence, with hours spent staring at a blank screen, or glaring at a single word or paragraph, knowing there is nothing you can add or change at that particular moment. Listening is writing’s occasionally overlooked and undervalued companion, and when not clacking away at the keyboard, comes the chance to sit in sometimes awkward, sometimes painful silence with the characters and world you’ve struggled to create. Even if not a single word is written, you have shown up, you’ve affirmed the simple fact that you care and have the patience to endure.
3.  Don’t think about how your characters sound, but how they see. Watch the world through their eyes–study the extraordinary and the mundane through their particular perspective. Walk around the block with them, stroll the rooms they live in, figure out what objects on the cluttered dining room table they would inevitably stare at the longest, and then learn why.
4.  The older I get, the fuller and more complex my life becomes with family, friends, students, and above all children. I’ve learned now not to be precious about the conditions I work in. I’ve learned not to wait for the total silence, which on the vast majority of days, will never, ever come. And so forget about hoping to find the proper weather, or the light that pleases you best of all colors (to steal a phrase from William Carlos Williams). Abandon the desire, masked as need for perfectly pressed coffee. Write in crowds, in alleys, in the back seats of crumb-filled cars. Steal time from the crowded world even if it’s only a few minutes, or a blessed hour. Take being tired and emotionally exhausted as an excuse to take excessive liberties with language, with your imagination.
5.  And in case it’s possible to forget—remember the world does not need your book. The world will go on just fine without it. There are plenty of wonderful novels, poems, stories, essays for many lifetimes of extraordinary reading, and so write out of necessity, out of personal privation, because you, and perhaps only you, needs to read those words.

Words from Pep

Cleft of the Rock

The climb was steep and randomly blocked by alders. Occasionally there was an erupting boulder covered with spongy yellow/grey lichen sitting heavily within the talus providing a respite, something to lean against, catch my wind, refill my lungs with the breath of life. From my canoe I had glassed the face of this cliff for some time before deciding on a route. Finally, reaching the top of the rock debris along the base of the cliff I stood overlooking the boreal forest below. A carpet of larch, spruce and pine stretched to the horizon. No towns, no roads, no human sign visible. Here and there a birch reached above its cone-bearing neighbors and spread its light green canopy to catch the sun. Each step upward brought freedom to my heart and love for life.

Along with several black flies, I waited a few minutes for what feeble breeze there was to dry the sweat in my shirt, cool me off. Below, a thin ribbon called the Michipicoten River, my highway into this area, curved out of sight around the bluff to my left. Kinew (eagle) glided over its surface seeking carrion, anything that was easy pickings. I turned and looked upward into the ascending cleft of the rock that would lead me to the top. It was here I would put my faith.

All stones now gave way to near vertical solid granite. I reached upward taking hold of a slender root tracing a crack. With its help I placed the toe of my boot on a lip of stone and began my levitation to heaven. Behind me and above came the cry of Kinew, “Come up higher!” My spirit soared with her and I found a finger hold for another boost, and another, and another. Pressing my check against the stone I turned to look outward. I was unsecured, without tether, yet the higher I rose the more fear dissolved. Was I a fool?  A misstep and gravity will have its way. A diagonal fracture gave me confidence and upward I ascended. Soon the remaining face became smooth, polished. I reached as far as I could, feeling, searching for a way to finish the climb. At first there was nothing. Finally, between the tips of my fingers I barely caught hold of another rootlet and gently, inch-by-inch drew it into my palm. Slowly testing, I determined it was anchored up and over the edge. “Come up higher!” she cried again. Then, as if the root itself lifted me into the throne room of God, I found myself in the realm of spirits.

Kinew echoes the heart of our Father, a heart calling us to “Come up higher – into the Love.” From nowhere a refreshing current of wind blew past and was gone. Far below I could see my small craft on the shore of the Michipocoten. The “Cleft of the Rock” had led me safely upward. www.theteacherwithin.com

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ONE WORLD  –  ONE FAMILY OF MAN  –  ONE CREATOR OF ALL

50th Annual Georgia Author of the Year Nominee Buzz Bernard, SUPERCELL

Winners and finalists will be announced at the banquet and ceremony on Saturday, June 7, at the KSU Continuing Education Center in Kennesaw. Sponsored by the Georgia Writers Association since 1994, the Georgia Author of the Year Awards is the oldest literary awards in the southeastern United States. Go to authoroftheyear.org for more information.

A native Oregonian, Buzz attended the University of Washington in Seattle where he earned a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science while also studying creative writing. After leaving active duty with the Air Force, he and his wife Christina lived in New England and suffered through its winters for two decades before heading for the milder climate of Roswell, Georgia, near Atlanta. It’s much warmer there!

HAROLD W. BERNARD

SUPERCELL

Fiction Novel

www.buzzbernard.com

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THE BIGGEST MISTAKE BEGINNING WRITERS MAKE

By Buzz Bernard

http://buzzbernard.com/2014/04/biggest-mistake-beginning-writers-make/

Wally Avett and Murder in Caney Fork!!

Jim Powell, a well-known artist in North Georgia and currently an editorial cartoonist for several weekly newspapers, did this marvelous caricature of Wally Avett holding a copy of his new release, Murder in Caney Fork.

“He did this bobble head — how, I don’t know —and he is an old friend of mine. Jim was raised in his grandfather’s country store, where he listened to never-ending discussions on country life, weather, farming, politics, etc.  He taught school at Blairsville, and was editor of the weekly paper at Hiawassee when I got to know him.  Great guy, we traded stories (and sometimes pocket-knives) when he made his weekly trip to Murphy to get his paper printed on our big web press.”

Jim Powell lives with his writer-wife Roxanne (married 45 years) in the mountains near Young Harris.

Murder at Caney Fork

by Wally Avett

It’s the trial of the century in a 1940’s North Carolina town.

Rape. Murder. Vigilante justice.

War hero and law student Wes Ross has to save his uncle—but hide the truth.

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Published by BelleBooks www.bellebooks.com

Represented by Loiacono Literary Agency www.loiaconoliteraryagency.com

The Man Called Brown Condor by Thomas E. Simmons is now available at Wal Mart online!

Published by Sky Horse Publishing

www.skyhorsepublishing.com

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Indie Bound

The Man Called Brown Condor is the biography of John Charles Robinson, known in the media of the 1930s as The Brown Condor of Ethiopia. This is the true story of Robinson’s struggles to overcome the racial prejudice that all but closed the field of aviation to Blacks. His outstanding success in accomplishing his dream of flying, his influence toward the establishment of a school of aviation at Tuskegee Institute (there would have been no Tuskegee Airmen without him) and his courageous wartime service in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion in 1935 are brought to life.

It was during Robinson’s service to Ethiopia that he took to the air in opposition to the first Fascist invasion of what would become World War II. This remarkable American Hero may have been the first American to oppose Fascism in combat.

KD McCrite’s midgrade series, Confessions of April Grace, now available at Wal Mart online!

www.kdmccrite.com

Confessions of April Grace: In Front of God and Everybody

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Buy all three!

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published by Thomas Nelson/Harper Collins http://www.thomasnelson.com/in-front-of-god-and-everybody.html

In Front of God and Everybody video trailer http://youtu.be/Ak0sKk4acmg

Confessions of April Grace: In Front of God and Everybody is a midgrade novel and the first of a series of stories about a rural community in the Ozarks and April Grace Reilly, who changes everything. Centered on the Reilly Family who has lived there for generations and the St. James who reluctantly moved there to start over, it is a true “country mouse” meets “city mouse”. The challenges of tolerance and acceptance and the miracle of saving grandma because of it make this a endearing novel. You will be as captivated by The Reillys as we all were with The Waltons in the 70s.

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Confessions of April Grace: Cliques, Hicks, and Ugly Sticks!

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by KD McCrite

published by Thomas Nelson/Harper Collins http://www.thomasnelson.com/cliques-hicks-and-ugly-sticks.html

Just when April Grace thought the drama was over . . . After an automobile accident, Isabel St. James—resident drama coach and drama queen—needs help putting together the church play. Mama insists April Grace and Myra Sue will help. April’s fall is now devoted to spending every afternoon with Isabel and Myra Sue—if anyone is as big of a drama queen as Isabel, it’s Myra Sue. Plus, she’s dumb. (Okay, not dumb, but “older sister dumb.”) If that’s not enough, Isabel is wreaking havoc in the community trying to get Rough Creek Road paved, the new boy at school will not leave her alone, and then Mama drops the biggest bombshell of all . . . April Grace is no longer going to be the baby of the family . . . Girls will completely relate to April and love her sense of humor as she deals with siblings, boys, and the many changes that come with growing up.

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Chocolate-covered Baloney

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by KD McCrite

published by Thomas Nelson/Harper Collins http://www.thomasnelson.com/chocolate-covered-baloney.html

The last thing April Grace wants is more change in her life–but that’s exactly what she gets! Plus, April has a new mystery to solve when Myra Sue starts sneaking around and acting very suspicious! From snooty new neighbors to starting junior high to getting a new baby brother to having her grandmother get a boyfriend, April Grace has had enough change to last until she is at least 87 years old. But when it rains, it pours, and April Grace is in for the ride of her life when her prissy, citified neighbor Isabel becomes her gym teacher and a long-lost relative suddenly reappears and throws everything into a tizzy. On top of that, April’s sister, Myra Sue, has been hiding something and sneaking around. April needs to find out what is going on before her silly sister gets herself into trouble again. More important, will April find the grace she needs to handle her topsy-turvy life and forgive past wrongs?

Buzz Bernard’s Tornado Almanac – Watches and Warnings…

www.buzzbernard.com