The power of fiction, the beauty of words, and the God who made us to wield them for His glory.

Wordpainting – Creating the Mood

As an Australian, travelling in Europe is awe-inspiring.  Walking into places like Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame, breathing in their history, singing in services that have been taking place in these building since before my own country was fully charted on the world map… It is a deeply visceral experience that I struggle to put into words. In Davis Bunn’s latest release, The Fragment, the main character, Muriel Ross, is offered the opportunity of a lifetime when she is asked to accompany a long-time family friend to Paris in the early 1920s.  Her hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, seems ‘trapped in

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20 February 2016

Word Painting – The Weight of Sorrow

Sorrow can be a crippling emotion.  One of the things I love about good fiction is that it allows us to experience and learn how to process heavy emotions from a ‘safe’ vantage point – one that involves us emotionally without involving us physically.  It can also be just plain cathartic. The Feathered Bone is all that and more.  I will have a full review up in the next day or so, but I wanted to share one description that elicited a physical response when I read it. With each step my chest caves deeper against my heart. What a

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8 February 2016

Word Painting – A Sticky Residue

Have you ever woken up knowing that you had an uncomfortable dream, and then tried to explain it to someone only to find that you really can’t remember any of it – or at least enough of it to actually make sense when you actually try to verbalise it? Now imagine trying to describe that experience in a book.  You could try writing something banal like I did just a moment ago, or you could write this: I’d never been one to remember my dreams, but you didn’t have to remember a nightmare to know you’d just had one.  The

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11 January 2016

Word Painting – Sometimes it’s the Little Words

I love a good metaphor, don’t you? Have a look at this sentence I read recently in the upcoming release The Silver Suitcase by Terrie Todd: She lay awake far too long, trying in vain to push waves of grief back into the vast ocean called Sorrow. There is such a sense of hopelessness embodied in this imagery (especially when it ends the chapter, like it does in this book).  You don’t have to have been to a beach to know the impossibility of trying to stop waves from coming to shore; the relentless incursion. But do you notice that

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2 January 2016