March Madness

March has already been a wild month for me, and I'm not talking about March winds and storms or basketball. I've juggled church activities with being a writer, and both have gotten even more hectic than usual. All the things have been positive, but even those can overfill available time.

The first weekend in March, my association hosted "On Missions Connection," where missionaries were brought in to share their experiences. My church participated, and Jim and I hosted a missionary in our home. We also attended the association meals on Friday evening, Saturday noon, and Saturday evening, as well as the mission fair Saturday afternoon. It was a good weekend but busy. The time around Easter always gets busy for pastors and their spouses.

The following weekend I attended the Carolina Christian Writers Conference in Spartanburg, SC. Besides attending sessions, I was able to meet with Sam and Tim Lowery, the heads of Ambassador International (my publisher) and three other editors. I also met with a social media and blogging expert who looked at my blog. She loved the layout and design of it but said I was probably blogging too much to post a daily blog. She suggested that I only blog three times a week. I plan to try that, posting on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

The three editors I met with agreed to consider some of my manuscripts for publication. I love Ambassador and hope to remain with them, but it takes a long time to bring a book out. We've been working on Uprooted by War for months and it hasn't gone to the printers yet. If I can find another publisher for some of the manuscripts in other genres, it will help speed up things, since I still have a backlog of unpublished books.  

Two of the editors want book proposals. The proposal for the one who agreed to look at Promise, a Christian, contemporary that could fit the young adult market, was fairly simple. I managed to get it off a few days after I got home. The other proposal for From the Top of the Mountain to the Bottom of the Sea: Lessons from Elijah and Jonah, was long and involved. It had 17 components and ended up being 41 pages long. I feel good about it, however. I think it fits this publisher well. We'll see what happens. The one considering Promise said it would be 12 weeks before she could get to it. It will be about a month before the non-fiction proposal can be read.

While all this was happening, I had two book promotions, a presentation and signing at the Ahoskie Women's Club and a book signing at the Flanagan House Bed & Breakfast in Murfreesboro, NC. Both went well. Despite the busyness, I consider all these things as blessings and opportunities that make the life of a writer better. 

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