Wednesday, September 27, 2006

CFBA Blog Tour: Violet Dawn by Brandilyn Collins

Well folks, it must be Wednesday. From September 27th thru the 29th, the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance presents Violet Dawn by Brandilyn Collins.

Violet Dawn, which released in August of this year, is published by Zondervan and is part of Brandilyn's new Kanner Lake series. There are two other books to come...Coral Moon, releasing in March of '07, and Crimson Eve, releasing in September of '07.

You must also stop by and visit Scenes and Beans, the REAL blog for the fictional Java Joint coffehouse in Kanner Lake.

This is a unique marketing tool for the series, involving about 30 other
writers (including several of our CFBA members), and eventually involving readers of the series who want to audition posts.

Now, I've made you wait long enough. The book is classic Brandiln Collins Seatbelt Suspense. It grabs you from the very beginning...



Something sinuous brushed against Paige's knee. She jerked her leg away.

What was that? She rose to a sitting position, groped around with her left hand.

Fine wisps wound themselves around her fingers.

Hair?

She yanked backward, but the tendrils clung. something solid bumped her wrist. Paige gasped. With one frantic motion she shook her arm free, grabbed the side of the hot tub, and heaved herself out.


I'm telling you that this is suspense at it's finest! Brandilyn has a group of friends that she affectionately calls the Big Honkin' Chickens Club, because the women in the group are unnerved by Brandilyn's writing. This new series is a prime example of that kind of work!

Paige Williams slips into her hot tub in the blackness of night...and finds herself face to face with death.

Alone, terrified, fleeing a dark past, Paige must make an unthinkable choice.

In Violet Dawn, hurtling events and richly drawn characters collide in a breathless story of murder, the need to belong, and faith's first glimmer. One woman's secrets unleash an entire town's pursuit, and the truth proves as elusive as the killer in their midst.

You can go HERE to read a first chapter excerpt. But using Brandilyn's famous tagline....."Don't forget to breathe..."

Review written by Bonnie Calhoun

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

CFBA: Something that Lasts by James David Jordon


Well friends it's time for another blog tour for the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance. This week we're reviewing Something That Lasts published by Integrity, May 2006.


It is the first novel written by James David Jordan.To quote James, "I was tired of Hollywood and the popular press treating adultry like a harmless frolic, while Something That Lasts is a positive, hopeful book, it also paints a realistic picture of the devastating impact that adultery has on families and children."


The main character of the novel is David Parst, a gifted preacher with a knack for marketing. His innovations propelled his little church to regional prominence. At the age of 42, he had been named one of the fifty most influential leaders in the area.


Everybody had something to say about this man, including Ted Balik, who rose during a Sunday evening service and pointed a finger. "The Bible says, 'Those who sin are to be rebuked publicly...That's why I'm here tonight to rebuke the biggest sinner of all: our own preacher!"



And with a temptation in a moment of weakness, that single bad choice, David Parst leaves a trail of ruined lives, a scandalized community, and his wife, Sarah, and son, Jack, destroyed.


Shattered and separated, the Parsts embark on a quest to regain their faith, their hope and their family.


Jordan uses a very interesting tool in this book. The background of baseball and its rules serve as a metaphor for the fundamental principles of faith. The family's enjoyment of the game...and their pursuit of something that lasts...leads them to discover that faith is all they ultimately need.

This review written by Bonnie S. Calhoun.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Fun Quiz







What Spirit of Emotion Lives Within You?




The spirit of hope lives within you. You are gentle and optimistic, never losing faith, always searching for a way to make things better and, even when things are terrible, you hold onto the belief that they will improve.
Take this quiz!








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Squat by Taylor Field

Have you ever been in a big city and noticed a homeless person? Did you cross the street to avoid him? Did you give him money thinking that he would probably go blow it on alcohol or drugs? Did you wonder if you should just take him out to dinner? Did you think about bringing him home to give him a shower, a warm meal, and a place to lay his head?

Did you ever wonder how he lives? Where he eats? What he does during the day?

Did you question why our government with all its projects hasn't helped out these people better? People with mental problems, health problems, alcohol problems, drug problems, or abusive problems? What about those who just need a helping hand to get them a job and a place to live?

What about Christians? Why aren't we helping them more? Why are we ignoring the hunger pangs of the people in our back yard?

Taylor Field has some answers to these questions in his novel, Squat, that came out September 1st.

Squat brings you through 24 hours in the life of a homeless man named Squid. Taylor Field brings the reality of New York's inner city to light. He doesn't leave out the smells, squallar, and ugliness. He doesn't leave out the alcohol, drugs, and self-abuse. He shows it like it is because he knows what it is like. Taylor Field has worked since 1986 in the inner city of New York where he is pastor of East Seventh Baptist Church/Graffiti Community Ministries.

The best thing about this book is that all author proceeds from Squat will go to Graffiti Community Ministries, Inc., a service arm of the East Seventh Street Baptist Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where Field preaches.

"We live in a squat. We don’t know squat. We don’t have squat. We don’t do squat. We don’t give a squat. People say we’re not worth squat."

If you want to know more, please visit The SQUAT Website!

To order Squat, click HERE.

Monday, September 11, 2006


HAPPY 11TH BIRTHDAY KEEGAN!

You are such a colorful boy and a huge blessing. We love you SO much!

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Moving...AGAIN!

Ug. I hate packing. It is so disruptive to my homeschooling schedule. It is also disruptive to writing, rewriting, drawing, and blogging. The worst of it is that we have no idea where we are moving to. We need to be out of the house by October 1st. Lovely.

I'm trying to be semi-optimistic because I know that God has a plan. I'm trying not to worry. Not to fret. Not to go, "Okay, NOW WHAT???"

This is why I've been pretty out of the blog-o-sphere. If you've visited the Bible Study Blog, you can see that I haven't been around much. I'm taking a hiatus from it until we are moved. I'm still doing FIRST, of course. And I will be posting for the CFBA...but I won't be around much more than that for a while.

If you think about me, please pray. Pray we find a spacious home with low rent. Pray I don't hate my parents. Pray I can pack and move without tearing all my hair out. Pray that God opens doors for us. And pray that I hear about my book soon...yes, pray. Please.

Friday, September 01, 2006

FIRST Day Blog Tour: SQUAT by Taylor Field



It is September 1st, time for the FIRST Day Blog Tour! (Join our alliance! Click the button!) The FIRST day of every month we will feature an author and their latest book's FIRST chapter!

This month's feature author is:
Taylor Field

"We live in a squat. We don’t know squat. We don’t have squat. We don’t do squat. We don’t give a squat. People say we’re not worth squat."

Taylor Field has worked since 1986 in the inner city of New York where he is pastor of East Seventh Baptist Church/Graffiti Community Ministries. He holds a M.Div. from Princeton and Ph.D. from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. Among his previous books is the award-winning Mercy Streets. Field and his family live in New York, New York.

If you want to know more, please visit The SQUAT Website!

To order Squat, click HERE.

Author interview contact is Andrea Irwin at Broadman & Holman.


Please Note:

All author proceeds from Squat will go to Graffiti Community Ministries, Inc., a service arm of the East Seventh Street Baptist Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where Field preaches.

Back Cover Copy:

In the shadow of Wall Street’s wealth, homeless citizens with names like Squid, Saw, and Bonehead live in abandoned buildings known as "squats" where life is hand to mouth, where fear and violence fester. The light in lovable Squid’s obsessive-compulsive mind’s eye is Rachel, a loving soup kitchen missionary who tells him about faith and unfaith, hypocrisy and justice, the character of God and finding identity in Him.


But among the squats and so many other abandoned lives, will such talk be enough to make Squid believe that his life may actually amount to something?


CHAPTER 1

CALMLY, THE GIRL on the sofa reached out and pulled up a flap of skin on the little boy’s thin arm. It could have been a gesture of affection. But then she pinched the skin and twisted it. Hard.


“Ouch!” He whipped his pencil in front of her face once, like a club, and then cracked it on her forehead. He pulled the pencil back, ready to strike her again, crouching against the back of the couch like a cornered weasel.


The little girl wrinkled up her round freckled face but did not cry out. She looked toward her mom, who was talking to the receptionist. The boy’s mom, seated across the room, didn’t look up. She continued to look through the pages of her magazine, snapping each page like a whip.


“You could have put my eye out!” the freckled girl hissed.


The boy rubbed the two blue marks on his arm. He looked her steadily in the eyes and growled.


His mom called him over. “Come sit by me, honey, and stop making so much noise.” She patted his hair down in the back and smiled at him. She wore lots of eyeliner and widened her eyes to make even sitting in a waiting room seem like an adventure. “You’re such a big man, now,” she had said this morning as she combed his hair and helped him put on his best shirt. She was humming “Getting to Know You” even though her voice quivered just a little. She had put a lot of extra perfume and sprays on this morning. She smelled like the women’s aisle in a drugstore.


Once the little girl’s mom finished with the receptionist and returned to the sofa, the little girl started crying with one soft, unending whine.


The boy rolled his eyes and looked for a book to bury his head in.


“What’s wrong, honey?” the mom asked as she swept her little girl up.


“That boy hit me.”

A stuffy silence reigned in the waiting room except for the sound of the bubbles in the aquarium above the magazine table. The girl’s mother glared at the boy and then at his mother. The boy picked up a children’s book with some torn pages and began studying it seriously. His mom hadn’t been listening to the girl. She was still snapping through the magazine’s pages.


Finally, she threw it down with disgust and looked at her watch again. “I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette, honey,” she said, oblivious to the stares of the mother and daughter across the room. She stood up, adjusted her dress with an efficient tug, and stepped outside the office. They gaped at her departure with their mouths open, like two goldfish.


The aquarium continued to gurgle. In the following silence, the little boy became dramatically interested in the book in front of him. It had been pawed over by a lot of children waiting in this doctor’s office, and the first few pages had been torn out. The pages that remained had rounded corners and smudges along the edges. The little boy squinted his eyes in exaggerated concentration. He preferred the smudged pictures to the astonished fish eyes of the adult across the room.


He studied a picture of a man who wore a robe down to his ankles. He had a beard and a sad look in his eyes. In front of him was a young man with no beard, lying on a stone with his hands tied. The man with a beard had a knife in his hand and had his hand raised high up as if he were going to stab the boy. Out of a cloud an angel was reaching out to grab the hand of the man. The angel hadn’t touched the man yet, but his hand was getting close. The man didn’t yet know that the angel was there.


The boy forgot about the girl and her mother. The color of the man’s robe was so deep and blue. The angel’s wings were more gold than his mother’s best bracelet. The boy on the stone had a robe that was silvery-white like clouds. The sun in the background was redder than any sun he had ever seen. It was as red as a hot dog. The little boy felt he was swimming in this world of rich colors and robes, a sleepy world tempered by the sound of the bubbles in the doctor’s aquarium. The boy put his finger above the picture book, to the right of the book, and then to the left of the book. “One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three,” he whispered to himself, touching each of the three points three times.


His mom opened the door and came back in. The summer heat from outside reached in to bathe him in warmth. She shut the door with exasperation. She sat down beside him, reeking of cigarette smoke and hair spray. She adjusted his collar and gave him a nervous smile. “You’re such a big man now,” she said and patted his hair again.


The boy pointed to the man in the robe in the picture. “Mom, is that boy that man’s son?”


“I don’t know, honey.” She picked up the same magazine again and started ripping through it at lightning speed.

“What’s he doing with the knife, Mom?”


His mom gave a half smile and looked at the picture absentmindedly. “He’s protecting his boy from someone who might hurt him. Stay still, honey. Why is the doctor making us wait so long? If he doesn’t see us by twelve, we’ll have to leave. He ought to pay us for making us wait.”


The boy studied the picture again.


“That’s Abraham, stupid,” the little girl stage-whispered from across the room.


The boy looked at her and scowled. “Yeah, like you know.”


She stuck her tongue out at him and turned it upside down.


His mom backhanded a few more pages, put the magazine down, and looked him in the eyes. She beamed. “Honey, I have a surprise for you. I’ve been waiting to tell you, and I’ve been looking for the right moment. I guess no moment is really the right moment. At 12:15 today we are going to see Sammy again. He’s come back. He’ll be waiting for us at our place. Isn’t that exciting? Everything will be different. You’ll be nice to him, won’t you? Honey, don’t bite your thumbs, you’ll make them bleed again.”


The boy wouldn’t look at his mom. He stared down at the picture of the man with the knife. Then he looked up at the clock above the receptionist. The little hand was close to the twelve and the big hand was on the eight. He turned the page of the book and another page was torn out. The next page after the torn one had a picture of a man sleeping with his head on a rock. He didn’t have a beard and he looked scared. His robe was a dull gray and looked dirty, but in the background, angels were coming up and down out of the sky on a shimmering stairway.


“I want to camp out on my own like this guy does, away from everybody, away from the house,” he told his mom.


“That’s sweet, honey,” she said as she finished the magazine again and looked at her watch.


The little boy’s lips moved as he carefully scrutinized the words beneath the picture of the man camping out. His eyes got wider. He traced a word with his finger. He almost forgot where he was. “I want to be like this guy,” he whispered.


A man in a suit breezed in and talked to the receptionist. Immediately his mom sat up straighter. The man finished with the receptionist and turned around and looked for a seat. His mom widened her eyes and smiled at the man. He smiled back.


The next page of the book was also torn out. On the following page was the best picture of all. A youth was wearing a beautiful robe with many different stripes of colors. He seemed so happy and looked as though nothing bad would ever happen to him. A man with a white beard was smiling next to him in the picture. The boy stared at the colors in the book for a long time. If he focused his eyes beyond the page, the colors blurred together like rainbow ice cream. Somehow looking at it kept his stomach from hurting so badly.


“Mom, I want a coat like this one.”


His mom looked at the picture for a moment. Her tone sounded much more patient with him now that the new man was in the waiting room. “Everybody wants a coat like that, honey. You’ll get yours one day.”


The little girl stretched her freckled face up as high as she could so she could see the picture. “That’s Joseph, you toad,” she said hoarsely from across the room. “Don’t you ever go to church?”


Her mother pulled her back close to her lap and said, “Hush.”

The boy looked at the clock. The big hand was on the nine. “Mom, let’s just stay here. It’s nice and cool and our air conditioner doesn’t work at home. I like looking at the books here. I like the fish. Let’s just stay here and not go back home. It’s too hot there.”


His mom looked at her watch again. “Why are your hands so clammy, sweetie? You’re making the book wet. What’s wrong with you? Stop biting your thumb or you’ll make it bleed right before we see the doctor. Do you want to get me into even more trouble?” She smiled at the man as she got up and walked past him to the receptionist. “Could you tell me how much longer it will be until we can see the doctor? I have another urgent appointment.” She conferred with the receptionist for a few minutes in hushed tones.


The boy found an envelope in the back of the book with all the colorful pictures. It had bright green writing on it and a red border. The envelope said you could send off for more books with other stories. The boy looked up at the little girl across the room. She was yanking on her mother’s sleeve and whispering something in her ear. She was probably talking about the boy’s mom. While making sure the girl was still looking at her own mom, he carefully folded the envelope once and put it in his jean pocket.


The girl was staring insolently at him again. He wanted to do something to the book. He wanted to add a character to protect the boy from the father with the knife. He reached in his other pocket and pulled out half a red crayon. He wanted to draw a picture in the book. He wanted to put someone in there to help that angel keep that boy from getting cut, but he knew that the girl on the opposite couch would never let him get away with drawing in the book. He pulled out his stack of baseball cards as she continued to stare. He carried only Yankees. He pulled his prize Reggie Jackson card from the stack and began to place it in the book but decided against it. He pulled out a relief pitcher, Dick Tidrow. He would be a good enough guard to help the angel. Then he put the card carefully in the page where the sad man was dressed in the long robe and holding the knife. He made sure that the edge of the card was exactly parallel to the edge of the book. He knew the girl was watching him. He closed the book very slowly and with great respect. Very quietly, with just one finger, he touched three sides of the book again, three times. “One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three,” he said under his breath. He put the book down gently on the table and then put both hands on his stomach and doubled over until his head touched his knees. A groan came out of him before he knew it.


The little girl sneered at him, “You’re nuts!” Her mom held her closer and made a shushing sound.


The boy looked at the clock again as his mom plopped down on the sofa with a snort. The big hand was already past the eleven. “Mom, let’s stay here. We’ve already waited a long time. Let’s stay.”


“Straighten up, sweetie. Why are you bent over? Everything is going to be fine. Soon we will see Sammy and everything will be different. It won’t be like last time. You’ll see. Everything will be fine.” She looked at her watch again then got up to talk to the receptionist. She seemed to be talking faster and faster. Finally she marched back to her son and said firmly, “We’re going now. We’ll have to come back another day. Let’s go, honey. Straighten up and stop frowning.”


She grabbed his hand, but he grabbed the arm of the sofa with his other hand. The arm of the sofa had padding on the top, but a metal support on the side. It was just right for grabbing. She pulled and his knuckles whitened. “Come on, sweetie, don’t be silly.” She smiled at the man and the other mother. She was petite and could not get her son to loosen his grip. He was small for an eleven-year-old, but his grasp was almost as strong as his mother’s. She reached to loosen his grip with her hand, but he simply grabbed the arm of the sofa with his other hand.


She smiled sweetly to the man and said, “Would you mind helping me, please?”


He hesitated, got up awkwardly, and began to loosen the grip of the other hand. The aquarium began to rumble like a volcano, and both the receptionist and the other mother stood up. The boy was stretched out like a cartoon as the mother pulled and the man pried his fingers from the sofa. In the middle of the hubbub, the little girl came up to hold his torso, as if to protect him from falling. Where her mother couldn’t see, she grabbed the sensitive skin next to his ribs and pulled and twisted at the same time as hard as she could.


In the tussle, the book with the men in robes fell to the floor and the little girl slipped on it. The baseball card slid underneath the sofa. The receptionist picked up the phone to call someone. The other mother grabbed for her daughter. The little boy squealed a high squeal; he was a desperate guinea pig grabbed by many hands.


Finally, the man got both hands loose, and his mom dragged him by the torso and opened the door. He clutched at the frame of the door but couldn’t hold on. By that time, some people in white coats came out with the receptionist and shouted as his mom dragged him out to the steaming parking lot. His mother roared back at them with a curse. He cried and whimpered for help as he got one last glimpse of the girl looking out at him from the waiting room window. She stood with her hands on her hips and her tongue sticking out.


Until he ran away from home, a number of years later, the little boy never went back to a doctor.