On the Hunt for Bargains

Bargain - a thing bought or offered for sale more cheaply than is usual or expected.

Folks all along US 127 have been either offering or looking for bargains all week. The worlds longest yard sale goes from Alabama to Michigan with Kentucky right in the middle. Last week, scenes like the one above were scattered all along the road that runs through the county where I live. People set up booths full of everything but the kitchen sink and I imagine there were even a few of those sinks for sale here and there. Landowners with an accessible piece of property rented out spaces with an eye to this new cash crop and the hope that it wouldn't rain too much so that the bargain hunters' wouldn't get stuck in their fields. And the bargain hunters came. 

I'm not a yard sale person. Not even much of a bargain hunter. I shop when I have to - food, grandkids' birthdays and Christmas. I have been to yard sales a few times in years past. My daughter and I explored a few when she was first renting an apartment to see if she could find some cheap dishes, etc. I've even bought a few things I really like at yard sales, but I didn't dip my shopping toes into the 127 Yard Sale this year. My husband did. He likes bargain hunting much more than I do. Of course the bargains he's hunting are way different than the bargains I'd be hunting if I decided to join the shopping fray.
 
But there are other ways to find bargains besides on the 127 Yard Sale. Bargains pop up every day on the internet - especially if you are an e-book reader. Books show up free every day and sometimes are only free for a day so you have to grab them quick. Other times, they stay free for weeks, even months like my Hollyhill book, Scent of Lilacs. Still free on Amazon, Nook and Christianbook.com. 

But that's not the only bargain going on with my books right now. My story set in Louisville in 1855 that has more romance than some of my other books, Words Spoken True, has been at the reduced price of 99 cents at Amazon for a couple of weeks now. May end today. I don't know, but right now it's a bargain. 


And then there's the e-book version of Angels at the Crossroads, the only nonfiction book I've written, that stays at a bargain e-book price of around three bucks. That book is a friend's powerful life testimony of forgiveness and redemption that shows how the Lord never gives up on us no matter how we mess up. Instead he puts people in our paths to help us choose the right direction when we stand at those crossroads in life. 

You can even find bargains out there in print books. The internet has made bargain finding in books so much easier. Unfortunately, that has also made it hard for many brick and mortar stores to compete, but that's part of the free enterprise system. For months now, readers have had the opportunity to buy the print version of Small Town Girl at Christianbook.com for a low price. 


So the book bargains are out there. For my books and for many other writers' books too. The price per word of these bargains is almost too low to figure and free is free. Of course, they have to be words you want to read or the bargain isn't a bargain. But if you're a bargain hunter, you don't have to get out and fight the 127 traffic. You can just cruise around on the internet and find some book bargains and then settle down out on the swing or glider on your porch with a tall glass of sweet tea and enjoy some stories at a bargain price.

Crossroads in Writing

I've been thinking about crossroads since I'm trying redo my cover for Angels at the Crossroads. So I've been looking at pictures of crossroads and road signs while trying to decide what's best for Jerry's story. Someone suggested a new title might be best, but some things can't be redone. Too many people have already bought the book titled as is and I wouldn't want them to see a new title and think it was a new book. The new cover art will be enough of a confusion for people who already have the book. I've seen books that were re-issued with new covers and I'm never absolutely sure it's the book I've already read or not. The cover often times brings up a clearer memory than the title. Of course I have picked up books I've already read years before and when I started reading them again, I wasn't sure what happened in the story but it all seemed to echo in my head. I'm not one to read novels over. Too many books out there I want to read and too little time.

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But the idea of crossroads in writing has been playing around in my head. Maybe because I'm at one of those crossroads right now. It's time to decide what road I'm going to follow for my next story. I've got to pick a time. I have the place since I'm writing another book set in my Shaker village of Harmony Hill. I have one name for a Shaker sister and I see this character or rather I'm reading her journal entries in my mind. But that's all I have. And I need a lot more than that. I need to stand at the crossroads of story possibilities and decide which road I want to wander down.

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That doesn't mean my creating feet will stay on that road. Backtracks are certainly allowed in writing. If an idea isn't working, I can go back and take off down another path. But I need to give the path a chance and not let the wilderness area in front of me make me too timid to keep going. Wilderness area, you ask. That's the part ahead where I might not have the foggiest idea of what's going to happen or who might pop out of the trees alongside the road. I do usually have a direction in my stories. In the book I just finished, I knew this one thing was going to happen but I didn't know how. And I thought it would happen much earlier in the story. And that event was a crossroads in my story. Because of that happening the direction of my characters' lives was changed forever. There was no going back for them to try a different path.

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Writers face many crossroads. Not only in plotting but in character development and writing and even revising. This word or that word. This character or that character. And if a writer isn't careful or perhaps confident would be a better word (see those choices), then she might stand too long in the crossroad of creation and let the story slip completely away from her.

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One way I make those crossroad choices is by reading history books about whatever era I'm writing about. So guess it's time to crack open some history books and get my feet moving down a new path. Hope you are walking down some interesting paths yourself this week. Thanks for reading.

A New Book Cover

Have you ever put something off that you needed to do? Over and over again? For almost a year now I've been planning to give my book, Angels at the Crossroads a cover make-over. Angels at the Crossroads is the only non-fiction book I've ever written and probably will be the only non-fiction book I'll ever write. I like making up my stories. But this book is different. It's the life story/testimony of Jerry Shepherd who used to sing in the Patriot Quartet with my husband. Some of you may have read his story.
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Anyway after The Scent of Lilacs was published and we were riding around on that big old bus getting to know everybody in the group almost too well, Jerry would talk about what happened to him when he was a teenager and young adult. He messed up, plain and simple, got mixed up with drugs and alchohol and because of things he did a man died. Jerry ended up in a Georgia prison for murder at the age of nineteen. He could have given up there and lost all hope, but the Lord wasn't through with Jerry. He gave him a second chance by putting people in his path (earth angels, if you will) to guide him back to hope and forgiveness. Because of that love and forgiveness, Jerry promised to tell his story any time he had the chance to keep others from making the same mistakes he made. Even before he got out of prison he was witnessing about how the Lord had forgiven him and helped him step out on a new road. It's a powerful story. Not because I wrote it but because of how the Lord worked in Jerry's life.
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So after I wrote that first Hollyhill story and had heard the great news that Revell wanted to publish it, I had the strong feeling that the next story I wrote down should be Jerry's story. And I promised Jerry if he let me write his story I would make sure the book got published - one way or another. My editor read the finished story and turned it down saying it wouldn't have the market appeal they needed to publish a book. Other editors turned it down. And I was left with my promise. So I went the self-publish route, but I made one big mistake and that was the cover. It's not right for the story. As one reviewer said it looks like the cover of a collection of homilies. Jerry's amazing story is inspirational, but at the same time it's gritty and raw. And while a sunrise does play a part in his story, I should have rejected the cover and held out for one that gave a better representation of the story. That's where I am now. We've about sold out of copies and I don't want to print any more with the old cover. I've known that for months. For months, I've put off doing anything about it. I think I kept waiting for a sign. Somebody to come grab the book and say here's the perfect idea for a new cover and we're going to make it happen. Well, unfortunately that hasn't happened. I finally had to realize that if the book got a new cover, I was going to have to get things rolling. I have pushed the start button - at last. Now I just have to decide what to suggest for the cover art. Not pink for sure. I keep seeing an open prison door. Other people have suggested a police car with lights flashing. Somebody said a deserted car with the door open. Perhaps at a crossroads. If you've read the book, what would you suggest?
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Thanks to all of you who entered my book giveaway. Details are on the Event page of my website, http://www.annhgabhart.com/. I'll be drawing for the winners on Tuesday, but you can still send me an e-mail to enter or leave a comment here.
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Hope you're having a beautiful Sunday. Talk to you again next week.

Love Letters

~~Did you ever write any love letters? Or get a love letter? Do you like to read other people's letters? My daughter has been reading the love letters her mother and father-in-law wrote each other while they were dating. She says they were so in love.

~~When my husband and I were dating, he was off at college and I was still in high school. We wrote letters back and forth all the time. My daughter won't be able to read our letters because those letters got lost over the years, but now I sort of wish they hadn't. Reading back through them would have taken me back to when I was a different person. That's what reading old letters can do. Take you back. Show what was then.

~~I have used letters in my books. Some actual letters like the ones Jerry wrote his mother in my nonfiction book, Angels at the Crossroads. Those letters were invaluable to me as I tried to get inside Jerry's head to know what he was going through during his hard times in prison so that I could write his story. And the letters I include in the book just as they were written by Jerry help the reader see how Jerry changed from a mixed up kid to a Christian man ready to accept responsibility for what he'd done and start living a better life even while he was still in prison.

~~When I was writing my upcoming book, Angel Sister, that will be published in 2011, I read a book of letters a soldier wrote home to his wife from World War I that helped me write about my character's memory of being in that war. And in my Shaker book, The Seeker, that will be released in July, I have a whole chapter of nothing but letters between the two main characters. Not exactly love letters since one of the characters is living in a Shaker village and love letters would definitely be a rule breaker for a Shaker, but the hints of love are there for the discerning reader.

~~I love letters. I love writing letters and getting letters. I probably have every letter I ever received from a reader. Guess that lets you know the mailbags weren't too full coming to my door. But I can' t say that I have all my readers' e-mails. I've had too many computer crashes that chewed up the e-mails and took them off to the computer graveyard. And while e-mails might have replaced the everyday letter and perhaps even love letters, you have to think that it's unlikely any bundles of those e-mails will be found in the attics of the future just waiting to take us back into another life. Then again, perhaps our attics will be electronic and the bundles of e-mails even more accessible to the reader who wants a glimpse of the past.

~~But there's something special about taking pen in hand and writing "I love you." Or "I loved your book." Or "I'm proud of you." Or "Roses are red. Violets are blue. Angels in heaven know I love you." Or "thank you for reading." I do, you know - thank you for reading.

~~P.S. You've still got time to get in the drawing for my book giveaway the end of the month. Just send me an e-mail from my website or leave a comment. Thank all of you who have already entered. It's always so much fun hearing from you.

~~P.P.S. I'll be at a book club in London, KY Friday. I love book clubs. I'll have to send them a letter telling them so.

Writing That First Draft

Hi everybody. How do you like my new look? On the blog page, that is. I was tired of that brown wallpaper. You're probably thinking that's just like a woman to want to rearrange furniture. Not me. I set a piece of furniture down it stays there forever unless I'm having company and have to move it to clean the rugs.

Now words, that's different. I rearrange words all the time. Sometimes to better places and sometimes just to throw them out. I'm beginning to think I need to throw some of my current words out the window in my new book. But I need to keep my finger mostly off the delete key right now. That comes after I get the story down the first time. Then I can figure out what I need to slice and dice. I read an article by a writer the other day in one of the writers' magazines. She wrote her first draft by hand and just let whatever she was thinking come out with arrows pointing here and there and every direction. She said she needed to spill her story out as fast as she could to begin with. I'm all for that. I've read about other writers who say they rework as they go and by the time they're finished with the first draft then they're mostly finished with the story without having to do a lot of rewriting. I'm somewhere in between that, I suppose. I do some rewriting as I go, but mostly I want to push the story out of my head onto the paper. Well, okay electronic paper. Then I can rework and polish and make it better. At least that's always my plan.

Oh, yeah, and about those words I wonder if I should throw out, I have to tell myself not yet. I nearly always go through a spell in every story where the doubts begin to crowd in. That old saying that you don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water is certainly true for writers. You want to hang onto the baby of your story and help it grow with lots of tender loving care and pen (or key) strokes. I'm ready for my story to be at least toddling along now or even better, mature enough to be skipping and running. I don't care if it runs so fast I get out of breath trying to keep up. That would keep my writing muscles in shape.

I'm blogging early this weekend because I'm supposed to go with The Patriots to their gospel singing concerts tomorrow. Of course it is s-n-o-w-i-n-g! Can you believe that? And there was ice hitting the window earlier. Looks like March is going to come in like a lion. Anyway the guys have a new tenor and tomorrow is his debut singing with the group. I've heard a CD they made at practice. They've definitely got a new sound, but it's a good sound. If you want to know how their old sound was you can go to their website http://www.patriotquartet.com/ and listen to some of their songs. You can even order their music from there as well as an autographed copy of my book, Angels at the Crossroads. That's the true life story of their first tenor, Jerry Shepherd. Jerry is singing with them on all their CDs except "Standing for God and Country" and "Classics 2."

Jerry has an amazing testimony of God's grace in his life after he made some very bad choices and ended up in a Georgia penitentiary at the age of 19. Even before he got out of prison, he promised to tell his story every time the Lord gave him the opportunity in the prayerful hope that hearing his story might encourage others not make the kind of mistakes he made. That's why the Lord put us on that old quartet traveling bus at just the right moment in time so that I could write his story down for him. His testimony of grace and forgiveness has inspired a lot of listeners and readers.

Anyway, back to the Patriots. They're pretty good. The low down guy is my husband, Darrell. He's been singing bass in gospel groups for over 35 years now. He loves singing in a group with that old time four-part harmony. So I'm skipping church to go hear their new sound in person.

Hope it doesn't snow and ice us out. After the nasty ice storm we had to start February, I'm sure everybody in Kentucky was cringing at the sound of ice hitting the windows today, but it's supposed to change to snow and not be as bad as that storm was. All of us and especially the electric linemen are hoping that turns out to be true. Those workers did a heck of a job in some terrible working conditions. In some places they'd get a new pole set to replace one broken by the ice and before they could move away from that location, they'd watch another pole further down the line snap and break. The ice was so heavy on the lines that in places people said they saw poles falling across the fields like dominoes. A lot of us are appreciating electricity more these days and what it takes to keep it lighting up our houses.

Till next time, I hope you have sunshine and joy in your lives - no matter what the weather outside is like.

Being True to the Word

December 1st. Ready or not, Christmas is on the way. I don't think I'm ever really ready with everything done, but Christmas gets here anyway. Thank goodness. I wouldn't want the special season of joy to have to wait on me. But I will get some of the Christmas preparations done. Actually the grandkids were here Friday night and helped me get out the first phase of my decorating. I've got a Santa collection that I put up on a shelf and then the kids love to set up my nativity sets.

I bought a special wooden one so they could move everything around without their parents holding their breath. I mean don't you think Jesus wants to be a hands on Savior even as a baby in the manger? I don't think He wants to be on a shelf just to be admired and dusted off now and again. He wants to be right there in the middle of our lives every day, holding our hands, cheering us on, loving us.

I don't have the tree up yet, but I brought the ornaments down from the attic. That's a first step. Actually several steps. Now when I get tired of tripping over the box, I might actually drag the tree up from the basement and put it up. As you can tell, I'm not a big decorator. I admire people who are and love to look at their beautiful trees and yard decorations, but I'm quite satisfied with the one tree (when I get it up), the nativity scene, and my shelf of Santas. As I told another writer on a blog this morning, I'd rather write. Any day.

And I need to be writing to get my new story going. The characters are beginning to talk in my head, but I need to do some more fleshing out for them so I can know them well enough to introduce them to you. And then there's all that research to get things right. I suppose time management and carving out that writing time has always been my biggest challenge in my writing career from way back when I was just beginning to seriously try to sell my writing. It's often been a juggling act, but I wouldn't change much. Except I would have begun to write for the inspirational market long before I did. But it does no good to regret the wrong turns I might have taken. I can only look forward and hope to take the right turns ahead.

I did get the Baker Books summer catalogue with my new book, The Believer, featured along with all the other new publications for the summer months. The cover and spread looked good. I hope the story will sound good to readers and bookstore buyers.

I also got an anonymous letter in regard to my non-fiction book, Angels at the Crossroads, about the life of my friend, Jerry Shepherd. The letter writer said the book and Jerry's testimony had helped him realize he wasn't worthless and that the Lord hadn't turned His back on him. (I'm saying he, but the letter writer could be a she.) It is such a gift to know that the book and Jerry's story is helping someone to find the good in his life and to feel loved. Isn't that what we all want? To feel loved. And to love. That's what Christmas is all about. Joy and love in its purest forms.

That's what the Patriots sing about at their concerts. The love of the Lord. I spent most of the day with the guys yesterday as they sang in Sulphur Wells. Don't ask me where that was. I was just riding along. No, actually it's down past Campbellsville, Ky. The Sulphur Wells Methodist Church has a beautiful church built in 1916 with narrow wooden strips as the entire wall and ceiling. I talked to one of the men there who had been attending since he was a baby fifty plus years ago. He told me a story that I want to share.

Some years back, the church was heated by two wood stoves and there was a member who got up early every Sunday to start the fires so the church would be warm when the members arrived. He lived about a mile from the church and he would walk down to the church in all sorts of winter weather. Sometimes he would feel discouraged because the attendance would be low and he'd wonder if he should just stay in bed or by his own warm fire and not bother going down to warm up the church building. But he stayed faithful and kept the church fires burning. Years later a neighbor of his surrendered his life to Christ and he told this man who got up early every winter Sunday morning to start the fires in the church stoves that it was seeing his faithfulness through the years as he watched him walking to church that made such an impression that he decided he wanted to know the Lord this man served so loyally. So you see even when we don't know it, somebody is watching us. Somebody is reading us for their Bible. Are we true to the Word?

That's my devotional for the week. Now I'd better go trip over that Christmas ornament box on the way to my desk to do some writing. And thanks for reading. Remember, I'm doing the book giveaway for your choice of one of my books and Virginia Smith's Stuck in the Middle. Just send me an e-mail from my website, http://www.annhgabhart.com/ or leave a comment here to put your name in the drawing.

Talk to you Wednesday.

A Hallelujah Story and Proverbs to Live By

Hi, my book, The Outsider, is officially released Friday, but some people have already gotten it and read it. The beautiful young model on the cover is one of those and thank goodness she enjoyed the story. Her mom says she may read it again. I guess that is the supreme compliment a writer can get - for someone to read their book twice. It's good when the readers say they couldn't put the book down once they started reading. It's good when they say they are telling all their friends to read the book. But to say they have read the book twice - that ranks right up there with "I haven't read a book in twenty years but I read yours." Of course I really like to hear from the ones who read a book every week. They're my kind of readers.

The book I've actually gotten the most "I couldn't put it down" comments on is Angels at the Crossroads. That's the true story of my friend, Jerry Shepherd, who went to prison for life as a nineteen-year-old. The Lord kept his hand on Jerry even when he was trying his hardest to run away from anything to do with God. Jerry found the Lord and forgiveness while he was in prison mostly because the Lord kept putting people (we like to think of them as earth angels) in his pathway to help him to a new beginning in life. Even before he got out of prison, Jerry promised he would tell his story whenever he got a chance to try to help others make the right choices instead of the wrong choices the way he did as a young person. That's why we wrote the book. That's why he goes out and gives his testimony. He told his story this last Sunday morning at his home church in Burgin to over 300 people. He said 12 people made decisions for the Lord. Now that's a hallelujah! He has a tremendous testimony and an amazing story of grace.

But on to my Wednesday hodgepodge of quotes this week. Hope one of them makes you smile or gets you going anew on your current project or just makes you nod and agree with the timeless wisdom.

• Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars. - Serbian proverb
• Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you. - Maori proverb
• At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box. - Italian proverb
• The older the fiddle, the sweeter the tune. - Irish proverb
• Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare. -Japanese proverb
• He who is outside his door has the hardest part of his journey behind him. - Flemish proverb
• When two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers. - African proverb
• Blessed is the man who can laugh at himself, for he will never cease to be amused. - Proverb found in many cultures.

Have a great rest of the week.