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Sunday, January 21, 2018

New Book Release - Friendly Persuasion, by Jo Huddleston




JUST RELEASED! Friendly Persuasion

A romance novella set in the 1950s in Tennessee and Miami is out in eBook and paperback and available at 
http://amzn.to/2CsRpOA or read for FREE with Kindle Unlimited at http://amzn.to/28YRXR4  


Enjoy This Short Excerpt



Six weeks later, on a day after her flight schedule had returned her to Miami, she stood in the kitchen and sorted through her collected mail. She had a letter from Wayne and put it aside while she went through the remainder of the envelopes. Finally, she opened the most important mail first—Wayne’s letter.

He wrote about more trivia than usual, seemingly to fill the page: his work kept him busy, the usual hot weather for the end of July, he’d taken his car in for servicing. Then on the second page, Joyce read the heart of his letter: I’ve met someone.

Those three words hit her like a physical blow to her midsection. The letter slipped from her hands onto the floor. She instinctively hugged herself and bent over at the waist. Rushing to the bathroom, she sank onto the cold tile floor on her knees and heaved into the toilet. Afterward, she rolled off a handful of tissue to wipe her mouth and then stood at the sink. She splashed cold water on her face and then cupped a handful into her mouth to rinse it out. Absently, she reached for a towel to dry her face.

Then bracing both hands on the sink, she stared into the mirror. The image there mocked her. You told him he’d probably be married and have kids when the next reunion rolled around. Remember? He’s just followed your advice, Miss Smarty Pants. He offered his heart to you on a silver platter, and you didn’t reach for it. Like it or not, you’ve created a situation you’ll have to learn to live with if you want to keep Wayne’s friendship.

Tears ran down her cheeks and dripped into the sink. She didn’t try to stop them. Throughout the years, their friendship had never caused her to cry. Until the reunion and now after reading his letter. Until she’d admitted to herself she loved Wayne. Why did loving someone have to hurt so much? Oh, she’d been so wrong about everything. She should have resisted the fear his kiss had brought about and kissed him back. Giving into her fright and refusing his love had been her biggest mistake.

To learn more about Jo Huddleston, visit her website at http://www.johuddleston.com/



What Readers Are Saying

January 9, 2018
Format: Kindle Edition


Tuesday, January 2, 2018

New Book Release - Your Goal Setting Guide to a More Successful Life

Now is the perfect time to pick up this planner from Amazon from award-winning author Pamela Carmichael.




Reflection Questions to Prepare for your New Living Success Year!
This is a very exciting time of the year for me! I love this time of celebration but also see it as a time for reflection, thanksgiving, and planning. During the year-end season and even before, I take time to look ahead to the New Year. I start this process by spending a few minutes reviewing the past months.
In my Make Your Year a Living Success Goals Workbook I have a section called, “What Made the Year Great (Or Not So Great)?” I use these questions as a time to celebrate the past, give thanks to God, say goodbye to the ugliness of the past and pave the way for a good future. The intention of this exercise is not the dwell on failures or shoulda coulda's but learn from the past and do things differently going forward.
Ask yourself the following questions to help you review the previous year:
1.      What am I most happy about in the past year?
2.      What kind of sweet surprises did I experience?
3.      Three things that I am most grateful to God for doing in my life.
4.      What new dream or goal did I achieve?
5.      Looking back, what would I have done differently?
6.      Where did I let fear hold me back from accomplishing a goal I had?
7.      Are there any regrets or disappointments that I keep rehashing and need to let go of?
8.      Is there any unfinished business that I need to resolve? When will I do it? (E.g.    relationship resolution or forgiveness, apologies, goals not yet achieve,           decluttering, financial reviews, etc.)
9.     What new and inspiring people did I meet?
10.   Who would I like to get closer to in the coming year? (Remember, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose wisely!)
Apart from answering myself these question, I write a letter to the Lord. Every December 31 morning (or a few days before the year-end), I would rise up earlier to spend time with the Lord and to do write this letter. Usually, I would focus on what I am thankful for. But often I would recall some of the events of the year and write how I saw the Lord working in these times for my benefit. Through this writing, there would be pauses to verbally express thanks, to wipe the tears from my eyes and to just bask in the presence of God.
Apart from the questions above, consider taking some time out to write a love letter to God to honour Him for all He is done in your life in the previous year. Through this, you will see how much you have grown over the past months and be motivated to keep moving forward towards your upcoming life plans.
As you write the answers to these questions and/or write a love letter to God, you’ll experience joy and gratitude even at the small stuff.

When you’re done, leave a comment below and share a little of what you’d love to accomplish in the New Year.

*~*~*~*

I have been looking for a workbook like this since I saw the Dragontree Journal on Facebook. But as a Christian, the Dragontree Journal is too New Age-y for me. When Pam Carmichael asked me to review her workbook, I jumped at the chance to compare it to another new Christian journal I had just purchased.

The reflections are very personal and Christ-oriented, which is what I was looking for. It also has organizers, metacognitive visualizers to think, brainstorm, and be productive. I love that Carmichael reminds the user to leave room for God to intervene in your plans with his plan. Perfect!  She also has Goal sheets that she reminds the 
I'm very thrilled with this product, better than the one I had purchased.
~Diane E. Tatum, Amazon Reviewer


*~*~*~*~*


PAMELA CARMICHAEL is a financial services professional with over 18 years experience. In her Christian walk, the burning question to God has always been: Why do Christians struggle with finances? With a desire to see Christians grow in the area of personal financial management, she wrote "Financial Empowerment: Realign Your Finances to God's Will". She hopes that you will grow and become financially empowered as you apply God's principles to your personal financial management strategies. You can visit her website at http://www.pamelavcarmichael.com/

Friday, December 8, 2017

Book Review for Carol Round Grow Confidently in Your Faith devotional


Growing Confidently in Your Faith
A lifelong journey to becoming more like Jesus
Carol Round

c. 2017
ISBN-13: 9781975751487
$12.95 Print

52-week Devotional Workbook


Buy on Amazon US 

About the Book
This 52-week devotional, organized by month and theme, is designed to be used with a journal. Each Monday, you will find a devotional followed by questions for reflection. I suggest you read the devotional on Monday and scan the questions at the end. On the following days, work at your own pace, continuing to reflect on the questions and journaling your answers. You may need to reread that week’s devotional before answering the questions. You can complete the questions in one sitting or spread them out over the week. The choice is yours.

Lisa Lickel’s review
This interactive devotional works more like a study guide. The author takes you through a year-long commitment designed to show the reader that be a Christian is more than a name, more than church going, even more than a lifestyle. Growing in Christian faith is never finished. It is an ongoing process filled with reflection and wonder and joy and grief with every breath.

The book is divided by month with catchy titles such as Renew, Recommit, Rejoice in January; Feed, Focus, Flourish in July, or Eliminate, Enlist, Enrich in August. For each week in the month, Round focuses on a passage of Scripture and offers a reflection. She challenges the reader to seek out a unique way to stretch and grow our faith, with Follow Through statements and questions according to the monthly theme. Round offers personal reflection, examples, and demonstrations to encourage readers to continue to live more Christ-like.

Keep a notebook handy and commit to spending a few moments every day with this book. After a year, growing in faith will surely become a habit. Good gift!

About the Author
CAROL ROUND, self-syndicated columnist, Christian author and inspirational speaker, began her journey with the Lord in October 2001 when she admitted her need for His guidance. Since that time, she has sought a deeper relationship with Him through reading scripture, Bible study and the personal discipline of keeping a daily prayer journal.

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Book Review of Seventh Dimension - The Door: A Young Adult Fantasy, Book 1 - FREE on Amazon Kindle

I found this review of my book Seventh Dimension - The Door by a book reviewer/blogger, and I loved his review, so I'm sharing it here on my blog. 

Glenn Haggerty's website is Christian Books for Tweens and Teens, and he reviews a lot of Christian books. You can check out his website for his favorites, and if you have a Christian YA book you would like for him to review, you can contact him on his website. 




At fourteen, Shale Snyder has a secret clinging to her like a gob of cotton candy. Someone is stalking her. Or is that in her head? After a run-in with her nemesis, Judd, and a suspension by school officials, her only friend, Rachel’s parents forbid them spending time together. Alone, she follows a strange puppy into the woods behind her apartment into a beautiful garden with talking animals. However, wicked underlings drive her from the garden into a land far away and long ago. There, she meets a boy, Daniel, a wicked stepmother from another dimension, and eventually her real father. Although Daniel is kind, an alter ego, also resides in her new home to torment her. As the adventures unfold, Shale must confront demons within and demons without, and find answers that are bound up with the mysterious personage that the animals call “The King.”
"The Door" is an account of a young girl coming of age, exploring romantic feelings, finding deliverance from bondage and spiritual enlightenment. This story has cuddly animals,
horrific creatures, and interesting characters woven into a transformational journey. Another fun read.


Friday, December 1, 2017

The Prescience YA Fantasy series continues with Lorilyn Roberts

Seventh Dimension - The Prescience: A Young Adult Fantasy (Seventh Dimension, #5).

FREE OFFER! - read the interview below to see terms.
The Prescience 
By Lorilyn Roberts
Inspirational Young Adult Fantasy

Print: $14.95
EBook: $.99
November, 2017

Buy on Amazon

About the book:
Seventh Dimension – The Prescience, A Young Adult Fantasy, is the fifth book in the Seventh Dimension Series that combines contemporary, historical, and fantasy elements into a Christian “coming-of-age” story. When bombs fall on Jerusalem, Shale and Daniel rescue an orphan and return to the first century. Amid supernatural tribulation, they hope to unravel the mysterious disappearance of Daniel’s father and the goal of the New World Order. When multiple realities collide, God reveals once again time is an illusion until the appointed times.

Lisa Lickel's review:
This is so far my favorite of the series. Although you do want to know what went before, it’s not necessary in order to immerse yourself in this story’s possibly real near future—the big one, where no one survives. The series takes a contemporary young lady, Shale, on journeys back in time, mostly to the biblical time of Christ where she experiences life in the first century AD. She meets and falls in love with a young man whose family is involved in the time portals responsible for these adventures. Shale and Daniel are on an ever-increasingly amazing rush toward the biblical end times.

Daniel knows he’s one of the special chosen, the 144,000 Jews of the book of Revelation, who will make the final stand against evil. He’s in love and wants to marry Shale. Problem, besides needing to find his father who may or may not be part of the events, is that the chosen are men who have not been with a woman—unmarried, or virgins. He needs to respect his calling, as well as Shale. This leads to a new phase in their relationship as they travel back to biblical times and other traumatic eras to unravel family secrets.

Temptation, more chariot racing, supernatural powers, good guys, bad guys, scary guys, and time dancing all make this thrilling next-to-last edition of The Seventh Dimension series a great inspirational read.

Told through multiple viewpoints, The Seventh Dimension series is geared for Young Adult readers, but anyone will enjoy the books. The Prescience is part of a series.



An interview with Lorilyn Roberts:
Question:  You’re near the end of the Seventh Dimension Series. Share with us some of the challenges and joys of writing a series.

Lorilyn:  The joys far outweigh the challenges. I’ve enjoyed spending the last five years with these characters talking to me in my head. The overarching story compelled me to search for answers to questions that arose as the series progressed. I wanted everything to be as historically accurate as possible. Many afternoons and evenings were spent reading the Bible and Christian nonfiction books, and I’ve watched dozens of YouTube videos about hard-to-understand topics like the Book of Revelation. Young people who read a lot have probably read scores of books about vampires, dragon slayers, and witches. I wanted to raise the bar. I wanted realism in my series, but I also wanted a taste of fantasy because that opens possibilities.

Writing the Seventh Dimension Series has allowed me to explore far more than could be covered in just one book. With only The Howling left to complete the six-book series, I’m looking especially forward to finishing it. I believe the ending will capture the reader’s heart, mind, and imagination. I never thought when I wrote the first book, Seventh Dimension – The Door, that I would end up writing six in the series. God kept showing me insights and great plotlines, so I just kept writing.

Probably the biggest challenge has been keeping track of what the two protagonists knew and when they learned it. Three books have been written from Shale’s POV and three will have been written from Daniel’s POV when the sixth book is finished. So they learned different things at different times and interpreted things differently from each other. So I’ve had to go back and re-read chapters along the way to make sure my memory was accurate. When I do that, I’ll find something that I think could have been written better. So I never quit editing my own work, even after the book is published, and that drives me crazy. I want my writing to be perfect, but there probably has never been a perfect book written except the Bible.

Question: Do you have a favorite scene in The Prescience?

Lorilyn:  I have one scene that’s particularly special to me. It’s a garden scene where Shale and Daniel are waiting in the train. The scene comes from something in my own life. When I was seven, my adoptive father wanted to take me on a train trip to see the fall colors in the North Georgia Mountains, but the train never left the station because of a broken coupler. Through the years, from time to time, I would think about that train trip that we never finished, wistfully longing that someday we would. Then, when I was thirty-seven, Gene was diagnosed with a brain tumor that we knew he wouldn’t survive. Through a series of events God orchestrated, we had the opportunity to make that train trip shortly before he went to heaven.

While the scene in the book has no direct correlation to that, the broken coupler happens in the story, and what Shale learns through waiting is something God has been trying to teach me my whole life. I’m just a slow learner. Because it’s such an unusual scene, I think readers will remember it long after they read the book. At least I hope so.

Question:  You’ve been through a life challenge while working on this story. Has your experience changed your writing style?

Lorilyn:  Absolutely. I wrote the first couple of chapters at the end of December 2016 and was diagnosed with breast cancer the first week in January. I wrote like crazy through January and February to get the first draft completed before my surgery on February 22. All I could think about was if I didn’t survive the surgery, I wanted the story to “live on.” I was still consumed with it after my surgery because I didn’t quite get the first draft completed, and then when I got to ninety thousand words, I realized I couldn’t complete the story in one book. It would have to be stretched into two. So I slowed down and began editing, editing, and editing—and finally relaxed. I began to realize God wasn’t in a hurry for me to complete it. He wanted me to make the most of each day, rest in His arms, so to speak, through my treatment, and give Him the glory for every trial I encountered along the way.

I remember many, many years ago, when I was about ten, I read a book that I’ve never forgotten. I can’t remember the title or the author, but the plotline was about a young girl who was in a hurry to grow up. She got her wish and grew up really, really fast, but she regretted it in the end because she missed out on so many things.

As I’ve gone through this last year, I found I couldn’t rush the treatments. I had to take each day as it came, and make the most of it. If I wasn’t up to writing, I didn’t feel guilty. If I couldn’t blog as much, which I definitely couldn’t, it was okay. So I’ve learned, I think, to be more patient, to take my time, not work as much, get more sleep, and spend more time with friends and family. I love to write, and it draws me near to God when I do, but God wants me to find my joy in Him completely. I can’t do that if I’m in a hurry all the time. That means taking the time and not living under compulsion to accomplish something every single minute of the day. Psalm 46:10 says: “Be still and know that I am God.” God made me slow down, and to be honest, I think it’s made me a better person. I have more defined boundaries.

Instead of captioning seven days a week, I now caption only five and a half. I’m on a daily reading schedule to read through the Bible in a year. I went to see a movie with my prayer group, the first one I’ve been to in at least five years. My daughters and I have gone to three theme parks in the last couple of months. I’m learning how to live again and not work all the time. How does that translate into writing? I think it makes me more productive when I do write. I’m not so tired and not so drained. It’s hard to be creative when you’re working night and day, seven days a week.

Question:  Can you share a hint about what we might expect for the next book in the Seventh Dimension Series?

Lorilyn:  The final book, Seventh Dimension – The Howling, is written from Daniel’s POV and takes place in the future. All the characters that have been introduced in the previous books will make an appearance, including the animals. The fate of all the main players will be revealed, and the reader will be left with much to ponder as he contemplates his own future. I also promise this:  The ending will be glorious!

Question:  What are you reading now?

Lorilyn:  Currently I’m reading Gone Missing from Emma Right’s Dead Dreams Series, and when I finish that, I want to read The Landlord by Cheryl Colwell. I’ve read books by both Indy authors and like their style of writing. If readers have authors they love who write suspense, mystery, or fantasy, I hope they will leave their recommendations in the comments section below. If I see one I decide to pick up on Amazon, I’ll send him or her a free coupon for a Kindle copy of Seventh Dimension - The Prescience as a thank you. 


About the author:
Lorilyn Roberts graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Alabama in 1993 with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Humanities/Social Sciences. She won an award for "Outstanding Senior Project" upon graduation for her coursework that was done at the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. Ms. Roberts received her Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Perelandra College and is a graduate of the Institute of Children's Literature. Follow her Facebook Fan Page, https://www.facebook.com/LorilynFanPage/, and visit her website, http://www.lorilynroberts.com