“If you love writing or making music or blogging or any sort of performing art, then do it. Do it with everything you’ve got. Just don’t plan on using it as a shortcut to making a living.” (Seth Godin) This is my 544th post on One Writer’s Journal. When I started this blogging adventure in January 2008, I only posted …
Old Time Sunday Afternoons
What I miss today more than anything else – I don’t go to church as much anymore – but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.~ Ernest Gaines I got to eat breakfast with writer friends Lonnie and Roberta Simpson …
Life is Better with a Dog Named Oscar
Dogs have a way of finding the people who need them, filling an emptiness we don’t even know we have. ~Thorn Jones Some of you have been asking about how my dog, Oscar, is doing. About a month ago, one of the men working on a room remodel here at the house ran over Oscar. He was parked beside the …
Christmas in April, New Book Covers, and Pet Words
Happy Monday morning! I’m late with this post because I was out of town yesterday. So to make up for it, let’s be early and talk about Christmas. I got the galleys on my Shaker Christmas book last week. So I’m going to have to invite the snow and chill winter winds into my imagination for a few days as …
Spring Blooming All Over
It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! ~Mark Twain Spring was late in coming this year, but it came in a hurry this week with …
Mystery Pictures and Writing Puzzles
Have you ever seen those close up, really close up, pictures of familiar objects and had no idea what you were looking at? I’m giving you a less challenging mystery picture tonight. Do you know what it is? Let me know what you guess. Or it could be you know what it is at first sight. Sometimes writing is like that. …
The Winners but the Biggest Winner – Me
Tonight I’ve finally got the winners of my Scent of Lilacs Celebration Giveaway. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. I pick the winners by random numbers. Each e-mail I get goes into a special folder and the sender gets numbered according to when I receive the e-mail. Well, imagine my extreme distress this a.m. when I click on that …
Sunshine, Traditions, and Easter
Family ties are cherished things, forged in childhood days, by love of parents, deep and true, and sweet familiar ways.– Terri Burritt Easter Sunday – a day to celebrate with our church families and a day to gather with our extended families. Thinking about Easter gatherings seems to fit right in with my Grandmother theme the last few weeks. Did …
Grandmothers Say the Funniest Things
All right, what funny things did your grandmother say? I know there’s probably something. Some odd turn of phrase or perhaps mispronunciation, something that still makes you smile when you remember. Jackie called her grandmother’s wise little saying “grandma-isms.” So here are a few of those grandma-isms I gleaned out of your e-mails and comments. Susan said her grandmother would load …
A Jewel of a Grandmother
“The history of our grandparents is remembered not with rose petals but in the laughter and tears of their children and their children’s children. It is into us that the lives of grandparents have gone. It is in us that their history becomes a future.” ~Charles and Ann Morse One more week to enter my Scent of Lilacs Celebration Giveaway, …








