The Master's Artist

Words Fail Me (Or, I Fail Words)

This is the first post in a series titled I Killed JQS, by Jennifer Peacock.

She walked in the way of young Rehoboam’s friends. Having the audacity (and naivete) of a fool who thought herself wise, she started The Master's Artist to demand that grittiness--the nicer word is authenticity--center itself on the Christian literature stage. Despite this, she somehow managed to assemble an excellent group of writers to contribute to the blog, most of whom were more gracious than she.

Before it split into two groups, the Writer's View censored her saucy talk. (You can say Kama Sutra but not red-headed bastard.) She led, then quickly abandoned, a crusade introduced on the Faith*in*Fiction blog to create a Christian literary society that would counteract what she (and others) thought was diabetes-inducing drivel that passed for literature in Christian circles.*

She mentored a writer who not only now has a successful publishing and speaking career, but who is now mentoring her own circle of wordsmiths. She had open invitations from several well-known literary agents to submit work to them any time she was ready. She not only made it into the acknowledgments page—twice!--of a Christy-award-winning author's novels, she discovered at a writer's conference she had a fan (who is now a multi-book-published author).

She was Jules Quincy Stephens (JQS).

Coming Soon to The Master's Artist!

Happy Saturday, everyone! We here at The Master's Artist are excited to share some news with our artist friends and community. As our banner states, we are many voices with a single purpose, that purpose being to explore what it means to live as an artist for Christ in the nitty gritty here and now.

In our desire to reinvigorate the conversation, we've recently made two big decisions. First, we've invited the delightfully talented and thoughtful writer, Billy Coffey, to join our ranks as a regular contributor. If you aren't already a fan of Billy's writing, you will be soon. He'll be posting here at TMA on alternating Tuesdays, starting this week. He also writes on his personal blog, contributes to The High Callings Blogs, and guest posts for the adorable and incorrigible Katdish on Mondays.

 Second, this Wednesday we will begin featuring guest posts from our friends, and we hope these will become a regular Wednesday feature. So, please stop by Tuesday for Billy's debut as a member of our community and Wednesday to partake of our first guest-catered feast. We hope you'll be as excited about these new additions as we are.

The New Look

As you can see, The Master's Artist group blog has a new look. We decided to tidy up the place and hang up some new pictures. Hope you enjoy! (If you're still seeing the old design, keep hitting your refresh button until the joy happens.) In addition, we have added new links: now we're posting Group Blogs, Journals, and Community links. Our goal is to make these lists as comprehensive as we can, so if you're an MA reader and we haven't included you, or there's a favorite journal or group blog we've missed, e-mail us so we can add them.

A Little Help from Our Friends

The Master's Artist recently moved to a new server, and not everyone has caught up to us. While you can still reach the site by visiting www.themastersartist.com, our address at Typepad is now: http://aratus.typepad.com/tma/. To get the word out, we'd like to ask for a little help from our friends:

(1) If you've linked to our site from your own site, could you double-check to make sure your links point to the new location?

(2) If you have a blog, could you post a brief notice online letting people know that the Master's Artist has moved?

We are grateful for the community that has built up around the Master's Artist over the years, and want to make sure people know where to find us. Thanks for the help!

Subscribe to our new RSS Feed

The Master's Artist weblog has changed servers, and that means we have a new RSS feed for subscribers. If you have been reading the MA via RSS, make sure you bookmark the new feed:

feed://aratus.typepad.com/tma/atom.xml

This feed includes the whole post, instead of a snippet, so you'll be able to read your favorite MA authors in their entirety. If you haven't subscribed before, now would be a good time. When you subscribe to our RSS feed, new content is delivered automatically, so you'll never miss a Master's Artist update again!