The Master's Artist

Second Looks, Second Thoughts, Second Chances...

Most of you know a bit of my story. Our family has made two cross country moves in the last nine months and are currently sharing a small, temporary apartment while selling our previous house and looking for a new one. Yes, that means yet another move before we're through. If we make it into a new house by April that will put us squarely at three moves in a year. Not an easy transition for a family that had laid down some pretty deep roots back in the Pacific Northwest.

Finding our footing again has been a tricky business, and we've learned some valuable lessons along the way - the most important of which seems to be that nothing ever looks the same the second time around.

How will the Battle of Amazon Macmillan Affect Authors in the Ebook War?

  Unless you've been on a vacation then you know that the publishing world shifted slightly on its axis when Steve Jobs announced the iPad last month. Honestly, when I watched the announcement online I had no clue that two days later Amazon and Macmillan would go to war and Hachette would join the battle with Macmillan a week later. But when Amazon quietly conceded this weeked to Macmillan, thereby raising the price of ebooks I wondered not what concessions Amazon was getting to seal this deal, but how would these changes affect authors?

All the world's a stage...

 
Last week, I got the train into the city to collect a couple of new scripts from a theatre company in Dublin. The company commit to reading and giving feedback on every unsolicited script they receive and being well established, they receive quite a few each year. They recently invited me to be on their reading panel, which involves reading each script and writing up a report on it. I took with me a copy of Marina Carr’s Marble to read on the journey, which premiered at the Abbey Theatre last year.

Where the two become one

No, this is not a post about weddings, though Luke and Sarah's is only fifteen days away. (The reader will please note that my finely tuned sense of professional decorum prevented my putting the last eight words of the previous sentence in all caps followed by a high five. But just barely.) As I was saying, the title refers not to a wedding, but rather to an intersection. The place where two roads meet. The patch of asphalt that is as much the road you're crossing as the one you're traveling on.

Intersections are rather amazing, don't you think? It's almost like watching a ballet, as long as everyone pays attention and takes their proper cues. And most people do, because no one likes a collision. At least, not between moving vehicles. Some things are meant to collide. They're meant to become one. On their own they may be fine, but put together they make magic. Hot rolls and butter. Tenor and alto. Luke and Sarah*.

Art and faith.

What do you think of free?

Daisy Chain, by yours truly, is being offered free on Barnes & Noble and Amazon for the Nook and Kindle for the next 2 weeks. (And if you have an iphone or an ipod touch or a pc, you can download apps to be able to read books, then get a free download.) Please pass this information on to your friends and family who enjoy great books!

iMistake - How Important Is A Name?

Americans were visibly shaken last week when Steve Jobs made his (first ever) marketing error – naming Apple’s new product after a feminine hygiene item.

Jokes spread faster than bacteria in the seventh grade boys’ locker room– “Does the iPad come with wings?”

January Wrapup

For those of you interested in what the Master's Artists are up to:

Deborah Gyapong: I'm still writing for Catholic newspapers in Canada and recently filed a long piece on how the church in Canada is handling priestly sexual abuse since the first scandals came to light in the late 1980s.   There's a link here:  http://www.catholicregister.org/content/view/3826/
 
I'm also blogging with The Anglo-Catholic, (www.theanglocatholic.com) a group blog to reach those Anglicans who want to accept the Pope's offer for them to become part of the Catholic Church while retaining their Anglican patrimony.

Melanie Clark Pullen: I've got a day's work on a local soap here in Dublin which should pay a couple of bills. I'm starting to write for Vox magazine now and then, a new Irish magazine for the evangelical Christian market, which is miniscule but there all the same. I've also been invited to write on theatrical topics for the award winning Dublin Community Blog. I'm hoping that more might come out of the research I did last year into theatre writing in the Irish language. I'm also helping to facilitate the growth and development of the artist's collective I'm a part of called Abri Creative. I've applied for a week's residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre with some international theatre practitioners as part of a mentoring scheme in March. I hope to be able to make some breakthroughs on my one woman theatre piece 'Girl on a Blue Bicycle'. So along with still trying to complete my Methodist local preacher's training and share the care of a toddler, life's pretty full!

Mary Demuth: I’ll be the naked one starting February 1st when my memoir, Thin Places (Zondervan) releases. I’ll be speaking at a women’s conference at the beginning of the month, appearing on several radio stations, hosting 8th grade boys for a discipleship weekend, and doing a book launch at an independent bookstore in Dallas on February 18th. I’ve just launched a new blog called A Daily Recipe (http://adailyrecipe.blogspot.com) with a recipe per day + a conversation starter. I recently signed a new contract for a novel and am shopping a YA novel right now. And in the back of my mind, I’m noodling on another memoir.

Dee Stewart: My story "Short Ride to Sanctuary" will be featured in Sistahfaith (Simon & Schuster, Feb. 2009). I also was just offered a 3 book deal with Kensington for my Evangeline Crawford bounty hunter series (spring 2011).

Donna J. Shepherd: My children's book, Poodle and Doodle, has been released. I've gotten so many wonderful emails about the book. This month I'll be teaching at the Greater Harvest Workshops on February 27. If you're in the Cincinnati-Dayton area, check out our blog at http://www.greaterharvestworkshops.com.

What's In A Name?

I want to take a few minutes to talk about a problem that has been sweeping our nation. It’s particularly pervasive amongst writers… It’s called identity theft, and I’ve personally felt the sting of this problem in my own life.

It started about four years ago…

In 2006 I was finishing the rough draft of my first novel–a novel that took five years to write. Not five writing years, mind you. But rather five long, anguish-filled years that took their toll on my mind and heart and found their voice between its pages. In fact, I was such a different person from the time I started writing that novel to the time I finished it that it read as if it’d been written by two different authors.

DeeChat with Rhonda McKnight on First Love & Faith

I receive many emails from aspiring writers and published ones about assistance and support, particularly about finding critique partners and good writer's groups. God is very good to me, because He gave me what I believe is the best Write-or-Die chicks in the land. These ladies have prayed, championed, tough loved and pushed me to be who I am. So I am honored to chop it up with my friend Rhonda McKnight, who I have dubbed the Book Club Queen. Since Valentine's Day, American Heart Month and my birthday are just around the corner she was the perfect choice for my first author interview of the decade.

Heartquake

Last week, Simon and I went to see The Road, the new screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel.  The Road tells the story of a man and his son in a post-apocalyptic world where each day is a struggle to survive. They face hunger, disease, cold, natural disaster and danger in the form of others who have resorted to cannibalism to survive. It literally feels like the end of the world. The father and son keep on moving believing that there is some hope or light if they can just reach the sea.