I was trying to catch my mother’s attention in a crowded room one day. I called “Mom! Mom?” and since probably half the people who heard me were moms, I attracted the attention of every mom in the room except for my own. So I finally called her by her actual name, and lo and…

Did you ever do the color chart that tells you whether you’re a summer, winter, spring or autumn? I am a winter, apparently, because those colors listed under the winter chart are what look best on me, according to the friends who attended a little party I had decades ago. Orange was definitely NOT on…

How was your weekend? We had a great time Saturday with our friend and best-selling novelist, Kristin Billerbeck, fighting freeway traffic to play for a few hours in Scottsdale. I’m glad Kristin drove. She’s a city girl from the Bay Area, whereas we are country bumpkins who grew up on Missouri Ozark farms and don’t…

Mel and I recently took a research trip for a possible new setting for a book. We have moved to the edge of the sand hills in Western Nebraska and had been told that the real sand hills were to the east of us. We had a map. We had gas in my car. Mel…

Originally Posted On May 14, 2017 I once was told by an editor that when a true story is written into a novel, it was called factionalization. My dictionary tells me that’s not a real word, but it fits me. I recently read a rich and detailed novel based on fact about a couple, a doctor…

I have never been a gardener. The last time my mother made me work in the garden pulling weeds, I pulled out all the carrots. And not on purpose to convince her to stop making me work. When we moved to a place with a pre-planted flower garden, many of the flowers were already gone…

Let me show you some pictures of our recent miracles, then let me tell you how these little miracles came to us, specifically. This was not my plan, of course. Kittens? Another stray cat? We’ve had ten come to our home in the past eleven years. Some of them were old when they came to…

I always loved the book of Ruth. It includes the best types of conflict but it also has a happy ending. Today is Valentine’s Day. What a fitting day for a book about Ruth, Redeeming Grace, to be released. If you like Biblical fiction and you’ve never read a book by Jill Eileen Smith, you…

Picking up where I left off two weeks ago, I’m still following tracks outside in the snow. But the snow has melted quite a bit since last week’s storm. What was once so light and powdery that I had no trouble shoveling has now been pressed down to a wetter level by the sun’s rays.…