Welcome, reader friends! I have a special guest to introduce you to today. Stacy Monson is the author of Open Circle, a novel which releases on Thursday 21 June, and she’s here with me today to share how her faith has strengthened her writing. So without further ado, I’m going to hand over the reins. Welcome, Stacy!
Welcome to First Line Friday, hosted by Hoarding Books! We have a theme this week—diversity, in honour of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (although you can feel free to share non-theme-related first lines too!)—and I couldn’t help reaching for a classic. I studied Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in high school here in Australia, and I think it may have been the first time I realized the ugly depths that racism went to and the kind of injustice that people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were fighting against. I think it’s one of those books everyone should read at
Well, I haven’t had one of these posts for a while, but I finished reading Chris Fabry’s latest release, The Promise of Jesse Woods, yesterday, and found myself chuckling over some of the descriptions and the pithy observations made by the characters. Make sure to watch for my review in the next couple of days! Anyway, if you have ever been involved in choirs or singing – participating or merely observing – or even if you just have a love of music, you will most likely find this description tickles you as much as it tickled me. The context is
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
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
When it comes to male romantic leads, it can be a challenge to come up with descriptions that aren’t clichéd eye-rollers, particularly if the guy is supposed to be. . . shall we say, easy on the eyes? It is all too common to rely on standard physical descriptions like chiseled jaws, and bulging biceps. That’s one of the reasons I love this description in Meant to Be Mine by Becky Wade: He looked like living, breathing temptation, like a red-blooded male who drove a truck, had a strong appreciation for women, and drank testosterone for breakfast. There’s just something
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
Smiles can be so expressive, can’t they? When we interact with someone, reading their smile plays a significant role in the impression we form of them and the way we interpret what they are saying. For the writer, there are any number of adjectives that can be applied to smiles: wry, embarrassed, half-hearted, coy, smug, gloating. There are also several synonyms for smile, each of which will create a slightly different impression in the reader: grin, beam, leer, smirk. Using the right word or combination of words is important if you’re going to convey the right image and tone to