Jim Smith, my research source from the Old Order Amish colony of Jamesport, MO, told me an interesting story last week—a glimpse into how real-life Amish perceive these Amish books so many of us are reading and writing these days. My books have been for sale in the Christian bookstore in Jamesport, but apparently the [...]

As a child, I lived in the far reaches of the city, then in the suburbs of Chicago. I didn’t know much about the downtown area, nearly twenty miles away by electric train, except that I always looked forward to my infrequent trips there. My mom treated me every holiday, taking me downtown to see [...]

It can be hard to find balance when your biggest fan(s) are also your biggest critics.  Take my mother. . . (yeah, you know what usually goes in there, don’t you?)  But seriously.  She loves me, she wants me to succeed, and she knows that being a novelist is a crazy, complicated kind of job. [...]

Look up process on Wikipedia and you’ll see over forty definitions. The one I think most clearly relates to us as authors defines process as “activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product for customers.” In our case, that product is the story, the manuscript. Like the word process, there are different methods [...]