Be Still (A Seriously Write Blog Post)

Sometimes, you just have to stop. Stop writing. Stop reading. Just stop.
And be still.

That's when God reveals His plans.

I attended the 2015 Florida Christian Writers Conference last month. This was my 5th year attending. It’s close to my home, allows me to commute, and fits within my budget. All good reasons to go, right?

Learned a lot about the ever-changing face of the crazy world we call “Christian Publishing.” E-books are reaching a plateau (flatlining maybe?), unless you practically give them away. A year ago, everybody thought e-readers would become little Terminators and take over the publishing world. Now, it appears a simple business model may have actually done what John Conner struggled to accomplish in three movies.

Thank you, Kindle Unlimited.

Paperbacks are on the rise, especially with millennials, those twenty-somethings who always have their nose in a…, uh…, phone. Go figure. They like the “feel.” Paperbacks don’t turn off or keep beeping with notification sounds. It also seems highlighting sections of an online textbook and then trying to locate them later is a little difficult on an e-reader. Huh? Who knew? (And no, I’m not going to make any blonde jokes about putting white-out on the screen.) Other younger non-student-type-folks are finding that holding a book works better with the brain. “I know I saw that somewhere. It was on the left-hand page, right-hand column, halfway down, next to the picture of the liver.” Ever been there? Done that? (For more details, you can check out The Washington Post Article link below.)

Said all that to say this: Nothing is concrete. Nothing is unchangeable. Except God.

Book publishers come and go. Contracts get violated. Trends are just that. Trends. Sometimes they devolve into “Fads.” People scramble to catch the next big wave, but most waves only hit the shore and fizzle. Even tsunamis go away eventually.

Then, there’s those “Christian” people in the publishing world who sometimes don’t do “Christian” things, like taking the notes of workshop leaders and then hitting the lecture circuit, pretending THEY came up with all that knowledge. Oh, yeah. It’s happened.

Or what about publishers and bookstore chains who “go under” or file for bankruptcy? It happens. Some events are just unfortunate. Others may have been prevented if the business model was better. Point is, this crazy world of Christian publishing changes with the proverbial wind.

I learned one very valuable lesson this year. It’s a personal one for me. One I cannot elaborate upon in print for the world to see. Too many contractual issues involved, not to mention biblical teachings to follow as well. Suffice it to say, that there comes a time in every writer’s life when he or she has to step down, off the platform, and allow God to speak to him or her off stage. It’s not necessarily that God wasn’t controlling their life or directing them in their journey, and therefore God had to “grab the hook.” It’s more of a season wherein everything was humming along, and then God stepped in and said, “Okay, I have a plan for you, and it’s going to look a little different from this day forward.” I heard several people tell their stories this weekend. The message was eerily similar. Like a “movement” was afoot. Like God was cooking up something special. I, too, fell into that category. It’s not that I’m saying goodbye to writing. Instead, I am saying hello to other doors I had not considered or pursued before. Doors that seem to be open right now because of other ones God has closed.

So, what’s a writer to do when the tumult of the publishing world rages? Be still. That’s what you do. In Psalm 46 (NIV), the director of music, of the Sons of Korah says, “He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” When the oceans rise and thunder roars, when the publishing houses close their doors and sales flit about like a water bug on a pond, be still. “The LORD almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress” (v. 7). He will guide. Like Moses and the Israelites, when Pharaoh’s army stormed closer, He will be exalted amongst the nations. And He will be exalted in your writing. If you’re still. And allow Him to bring you to the place where His Glory may be shown.

For more information on FCWC, go to www.word-weavers.com/floridaevents

“Be Still and Know” by Steven Curtis Chapman

Annoying Marketing (A CAN Blog Post)

Grace and Peace to you!

Does anything annoy you when it comes to authors marketing their own writing? A barrage of Facebook posts, perhaps? Sent out like Hootsuite clockwork to all the pertinent reader groups? “Buy my book! Buy my book! It’s only 99 cents for another two-and-half-days.”

Or what about constant twits from the infamous Twitterverse? “Buy my bk! Buy my bk! Only .99 4 2.5 more days.”

Okay, so I jest. A little bit. We’ve all probably been guilty of this kind of annoying marketing at some point. It’s one type, according to Jonathan Gunson, fiction authors should never do on a regular basis.

As I read Gunson’s article, I thought of my morning routine, getting ready for work as an assistant principal. While shaving, getting dressed, etc., I normally watch a local news channel to catch up on the news and weather. There is one aspect of this morning ritual I have grown to despise, however: All the local dealership commercials and car manufacturer ads. Not only are most of the local commercials cheesy and poorly done (the scripts are horrible!), but it seems that every commercial break has at least four. Sometimes, back-to-back-to-back. If you want to know who’s got what on sale, just ask me. It’s been drilled into my brain, like a jack hammer in the hands of my dentist.

Does that make me want to run right out and buy a new car? I think you know the answer to this one. And that’s why I drive a 2006 SUV…

What became crystal clear to me while reading Gunson’s article was something my Bible reading has been preaching to me for months. It’s all about relationships. Gunson mentions the fact that a writer must become “interesting” to his or her readers beyond—and often before—the reader ever picks up the author’s book and actually reads it. Just tossing Twitter salvos into the masses and hoping someone says, “Oh, wow! I’ve got to get me a copy of that!” is pie-in-the-sky thinking, to put it mildly and politely.

Think about it. How did you come across your favorite authors? What drew you to them? Many times, you hear about a book via word of mouth, which is still the best kind of advertising ever, bar none. So, let’s say that’s how you heard about Author X. You follow through and buy the book recommended to you by your best friend or colleague at work. You read it and like it. What do you do next? Check to see if Author X has anymore books, right? If Author X does, you buy another. However, all the while, what else are you doing, if you are a normal reader? You’re finding out about this author. Besides the author bio in the back of the books, you go to Author X’s website when you get a chance. You may even check out Author X’s Facebook/Twitter/Etc. pages.

Now, here’s where it gets real. If you, the reader of Author X, find the author interesting, if you find the author engaging, if you find the author maybe has similar interests or writes about other topics—maybe on a blog or in a monthly newsletter—that help you deal with someone or something, then a relationship is formed that goes beyond the normal, average “author/reader” relationship. You may even seek this person out when he or she is in town to get a book signed. You may even travel many miles to hear Author X speak at a conference or convention.

If you’re like me, you’re not an expert on this field. I’m an author. So, by nature, I’m an introvert. I have “loner-type” tendencies which border on being vehemently hermitic (If I may coin a term). I function best in the world of imagination and the crafting of words. I’ve had jobs in sales before, and I’m glad I can do others things. Otherwise, my family would have starved to death years ago. I’m not a salesman, never been a salesmen, and have never played one on TV. I couldn’t sell a heater to an Eskimo in January during a blizzard.

And yes, my publisher wants me to help sell my books. You just have to grin and bear the logic.

This relationship piece, though, is something I can do as a writer. Over the last several weeks, a thought keeps resurfacing. You’re an assistant principal in a public school, and a real good one, too. You have a plethora of things to offer folks who have children and/or grandchildren in school. Writing about education from the inside may not be what I write about when I take off my A.P. cape and slide in front of the computer, but could it help others better prepare their children for success in the ever-changing world of public education? You betcha. Could it help build relationships with folks from all walks of life who otherwise may never hear of C. Kevin Thompson, the author of fiction? Sure. Would I also be opening doors to other writing ventures not yet real or imagined? Possibly.

No matter how I slice it, it all boils down to relationships, not slick marketing techniques which often have an adverse effect over time. I don’t want to be known as “that annoying author who always sends me the same advertisements over and over again. He’s worse than the Toyota dealership!”

Instead, I want to be remembered as the author who helps readers, too. “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12; New American Standard Bible). Then, when I do have a new book launch, I can alert my new “friends” and allow them to be my mouthpiece. It’s that kind of marketing a reader can truly appreciate. Why? Because they are helping a friend.

 

To see this article on the Christian Authors Network website, click the link below:

 Annoying Marketing.

Don't be shy...you can leave a comment here or there after you read it.

Have a blessed day!

Everything You Need to Know about Writing You Learned in Kindergarten (A Seriously Write Blog Post)

Show & Tell.

Remember those days? Girls holding stinky, pet rabbits named “Fluffy”? Boys opening shoe boxes only to have their pet frog jump out and terrorize the class? Each stood before the class, giving you all the pertinent data, like how old the animal was, how much they ate, and where they got it.

In each case, you were TOLD all the details. You never saw the frog eat. You didn’t witness the birth of the rabbit, so its age was suspect. You just had to believe them.

We, as writers, are often guilty of Kindergartenitis. We TELL our readers what’s happening instead of SHOWING. It’s a common mistake. We TELL the reader the character’s age, her nationality, and what she’s driving down a crowded interstate. We leave little to the imagination.

Why do we do this? The answer is two-fold. First, we don’t trust our readers to “figure it out.” We’re afraid they’ll get it wrong. That’s why another common mistake follows closely: Detail overload. We feel we have to “make sure” they get it, so we go on and on explaining the diameter of the rivets on the airplane.

Boring.

Second, we get lazy. It’s easier to say, “The grungy, treacherous man sat at the table playing Solitaire, waiting for the ill-kept boat to rendezvous with the human traffickers.” We add the ten-dollar adjectives to spice it up. “That makes it real,” you say?

Yeah. Real boring.

SHOWING versus TELLING is subtle, but powerful, if done correctly:

On the other side of the table, playing cards, sat a skinny, tanned man. He wore a thin, white tank top t-shirt, blue jeans, and a filthy, diseased-looking ball cap. His sweaty, unbathed body exuded a raunchy, rancid odor which reminded Jacob of the locker room at the gym his dad took him to from time to time. But this stench was much worse. A hand gun rested on the table next to an open can of soda. The man hummed some Latin tune as he flipped card after card, occasionally shifting some once in a while from one pile to another.

 

Did you notice the game being played? Can the reader figure it out from the details? Sure can. This adds the tension to reading most readers crave. What do I mean by that? Not only do readers want the overall storyline to be engaging, but they want the mystery of the words to be engaging as well. They want to figure out the little details as much as “Whodunit” in the end.

Did you get a sense for the character of the characters? Smelly man’s the bad guy, right? What’s his profession? Can you guess it? Jacob is young, right? Goes to the gym with his father…

Can you smell the smells? See the scene in what I like to call “the movie screen of your mind”?

I’m not saying this paragraph is perfect. It comes from the third book in my Blake Meyers series, tentatively entitled The Tide of Times, which is presently in manuscript form and has yet to be edited fully. So, it may look different once published, but you get the point.

Don’t short sale your readers. Give them credit. As a writer, don’t forget what it is to be a reader. The things that other authors do which tick you off royally as a reader are probably the same things you should avoid when you write.

Now, go catch that frog!

To see this article on the Seriously Write website, click on the link below:

Everything You Need to Know about Writing You Learned in Kindergarten

Confessions of a Struggling Reader

I’m an educator. Assistant principal. I have a Bachelors Degree, two Masters Degrees, and I’m ordained. I’ve written two published novels so far (more on the way) and have a non-fiction Bible study for writers being shopped to editors by my agent as we speak.

I’m not bragging (and if you knew me, you’d know that’s not my M.O.). I’m making a point.

Growing up, if you would have read that first paragraph to any of my teachers and asked them, “This is going to be one of your students at age 52. Which student is it?” My name would never have come up. Not a mention. Not a whisper. Not a chance.

Why? Because I was your typical boy.

Rambunctious. Often rude. Spoke my mind when it wasn’t in gear and kept my mouth closed when I needed to answer. Was intelligent but often applied it incorrectly. I didn’t know God and was a terrible reader (I would have been an Intensive Reading student if they had such things back then).

Would you want me in your class?

Then, one summer, we took a little weekend vacation to Daytona Beach. Got there on a Friday, and it was raining. So, that night, we stopped at a little mall after dinner. My mom, a big reader, dragged us into a bookstore, and I browsed around, lamenting our current state of affairs, until a book caught my eye.

Jaws.

It was 1975, and the movie had just come out in theaters. I wanted to see it, so I picked up the book. When I started looking at it, my mom, after surviving the small coronary she must have experienced, walked over and asked if I wanted her to buy the book. She had already promised to take me and my friend to see the movie, so she probably thought she’d capitalize on this rare opportunity.

Mom had purchased books for me in the past. Beautiful Joe by Marshall Saunders was the first one I remember reading. I struggled through it. It was about a dog being abused, told in first person by Joe himself. I liked dogs at the time, but not reading about them. So that became a swing and a miss for Mom.

Jaws, on the other hand, was entirely different. I devoured Jaws (pun intended) in less than two weeks. A speed record for me. A home run for Mom.

That book became the key which opened the doors to reading for me. After finishing Jaws, I was left wondering if sharks really do jump on the back of boats and if they really can get 25-feet long. That sent me on a quest to find answers because, deep down, I wanted to be a marine biologist at the time. What my mother didn’t probably understand was she, unwittingly, had tapped into something which I was DEEPLY interested.

That’s the key. If you’re like my mom and have a struggling reader, find that key. That interest buried inside. It may not be buried very deep, but for some reason, no one has taken the time to listen and hear the heart for reading, beating just underneath the surface. Once the key is found, find the reading material that revolves around it. Those of us who are struggling readers have tricked ourselves into thinking, “I hate reading.” It’s not reading we hate, actually. We hate being force fed things in school that we have no interest in. Year after year. Grade level by grade level. Until finally, we are convinced there is nothing good out there to read, or someone surely would have introduced it to us by high school, right? The system breeds a disdain for reading, ironic as that may seem.

If someone would take the time to find out what our interests are, then as we start to read about things we ARE interested in, and we start LEARNING new things. The key slides into the lock and unlatches the mechanism that has held us hostage far too long. Then, as we are afforded materials to read at this critical juncture, it’s not long before we’re finding them on our own…and the doors get blown off the hinges because LEARNING is FUN and ENGAGING. Comprehension increases, reading becomes easier, grades often improve, life becomes wondrous.

Now, here I sit. The doors to reading were blown off the hinges years ago. Yet, I’m still a slow reader. I only finish a handful of books a year. As a Christian, I often think to myself, “If I had not become a student who realized I love reading after all, where would I be in my Christian walk?” For us to grow in Christ, what must we do?

Read. God’s Word.

No small feat for a struggling reader, especially if you’re handed a King James version or are not a big World History aficionado. And worse if you still hate to read.

Yet, I think Satan has known this from the time Moses put quill to papyrus (pen to paper for us modern folks). “If I can get them to sin,” he probably thought early on, “and have the writings of God destroyed (Early Israeli history at the bottom of Mount Sinai), and if I can cause them to be carried off into captivity so they have no access to God’s writings (Babylonian-Assyrian periods), and if I can confound the writings of God with bureaucratic duplicity (from emerging Greek and Roman Empires through Constantine’s reign), and if I can make the people ignorant so they don’t understand God’s writings (Middle Ages when so much was written and preached in Latin), and if I can eventually make reading a nemesis for young people by capturing their hearts with an electronic age, filled with computers and gaming and cell phones, then just think of how many of these dolts I’ll separate from God for all eternity?”

By not taking the time to get our young people interested in reading so that they can read for themselves, in essence, we develop a de facto “peasant state” who has to believe the “lords” and “governors” of the region because they can’t read and think critically for themselves.

Aristotle said, “It’s the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

May I say, it’s a the mark of a Godly mind as well (Read 1 John 4:1-6; Galatians 1:6-10; Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28, 33-35, 38-39, 43-44; 6:1-4, 5-6, 16-17, 19-20).

You can’t know what God’s Word says if you never read and comprehend it.

_____________________________________

C. KEVIN THOMPSON is an ordained minister, having served churches in New York, Mississippi, Texas, and Iowa. He is married (for 33+ years), has three daughters, two sons-in-law, and five grandchildren. He speaks in churches on occasion, presently works as an assistant principal in a Central Florida school district, and plays the drums in his church’s praise team. He is a huge fan of the TV series 24 , The Blacklist, and Criminal Minds, loves anything to do with Star Trek, and is a Sherlock Holmes fanatic, too.

Kevin is a member of the Christian Authors Network (CAN), ACFW, and Word Weavers International, and his published works include two award-winning novels, The Serpent’s Grasp (OakTara, 2012; winner of the 2013 Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers Conference Selah Award for First Fiction) and 30 Days Hath Revenge - A Blake Meyer Thriller: Book 1 (OakTara 2013), as well as articles in The Wesleyan Advocate, The Preacher, Vista, The Des Moines Register and The Ocala Star-Banner.

Website:           www.ckevinthompson.com

Blog:                 www.ckevinthompson.blogspot.com

Facebook:          C. Kevin Thompson – Author Fan Page

X (formerly Twitter):     @CKevinThompson

Goodreads:        C. Kevin Thompson

Writing with the Heart of God (A Seriously Write Blog Post)

“Why Write?”

Ever muttered those words to yourself?

“I’ve been writing for years now. Yet, my Twitter followers are few and far-between compared to secular writers. If only I had 67.2K like James Patterson.”

Ever think those kinds of thoughts?

“My Facebook friends seem fickle and flighty. When I post about a new blog entry or a new book, they say they ‘like’ my posts, but few ever say they actually read it. Hardly any of them comment on it.”

Ever wonder about these things?

If you allow yourself, it’s easy, as a writer, to throw a pity party. Every profession has their pity party planners. They circle the wagons often, making sure they encapsulate every other like-minded party goer, who can pat them on the back and “encourage them” in their defeated, idiomatic existence. I’m an educator. There are many pity party planners right now in the teaching ranks. You think you have it tough as a writer?

Yet, as I shift gears into 2015 and rethink some of my writing plans, I have been wondering how God would have fared if He approached things the way we do.

In the beginning, He writes the first set of organized words for His people in Exodus 20. Within days, those “books” are literally destroyed by His distributor, Moses (Exodus 32). So, He has to have them reprinted (Exodus 34).

Once those writings were distributed to the people, they are first met with hoopla and holiday spirit (Exodus 35-40). However, it didn’t take long for those same words to become despised, ignored, and eventually forgotten (Numbers 11 is where it all starts).

God’s readership sank to the bottom of the “Mesopotamian Booksellers Hot Releases List” time and time again. For decades, while in captivity, God’s Word was nowhere to be found in Babylon or Assyria. It finally was unearthed by Hilkiah the priest under the reign of Josiah in 2 Kings 22 (also, 2 Chronicles 34) after the Hebrews had been back in the Promised Land for some time under the reign of Hezekiah.

On and on the story goes. God’s first book, in the beginning, wasn’t very popular. Yet, did God give up? Of course not. Even when it went “out of print,” He never gave up. Why? Because He believed in what He wrote. That’s why He wrote the sequel (the New Testament).

He knew these two “books” would change lives.

For eternity.

Do you write to change lives for eternity? If so, then don’t be surprised if you’re not “popular” in this anti-God, anti-Christian world which grows increasingly darker with each passing day. There weren’t too many people getting “saved” as the Israelites were being hauled off to Babylon and Assyria. As the Romans swept across the Sinai Peninsula and descended into what is now North Africa, the “books” still languished in “sales.” When the sequel went into print, then the “sales” improved.

So, don’t walk away from your computer downtrodden because you only gained ten Twitter followers this week and lost four. It took God a long while before His writing plan “took off,” too.

Don’t give up. Write with the heart of God, and He will reward your faithfulness in the places it matters most (Matthew 6:33).

To see this article on the Seriously Write website, click on the link below:

 "Writing with the Heart of God."