Bill Sanderson's Blog

My wife is a volunteer with an outreach mission to homeless people and the conversation often turns to some of the challenges that face people on the streets. In December, Environment Canada issued a wind chill warning advising that the temperatures could drop below minus 45.

The person speaking with my wife made the offhand comment that he hoped the police were stepping up patrols near the strip clubs because a lot of the girls on the street would probably hang around trying to pick up a guy who could offer them a warm bed.

That got me to thinking about what sort of girl would be that desperate and what sort of white knight would come to her rescue.

Cassandra finds herself married to her workaholic prince and tossed into the deep end of his dysfunctional family and high society life. Frank, who is a committed Christian, really does fall in love at first sight with his underage Cinderella with trust issues.

There are seeds of love on both sides and with careful nurturing, mutual respect and some false starts along the way, their relationship grows deeper, until Cassie finally trusts Frank enough to fully commit to him.

It's been interesting trying to imagine the challenges inherent in a marriage between a 31 year old successful businessman and a 17 year old young woman who is returning for her last year in high school.

There was one such couple that I knew, although not well, and they waited until after she graduated high school to marry. Very few people thought it was possible that they were actually in love with each and there was some malicious gossip that she'd had a miscarriage shortly after they married. For the first ten years of their marriage they were seldom seen together in public because of it. The last I had news of them, they'd celebrated their twentieth anniversary and I hope that they will be able to celebrate number 38 this year.

I won't give a timeline for it to be completed but the writing is going well. There are 14 complete chapters and about 80,000 words of a planned 98,000 or so.

In the mean time, if you'd like to read some of my work, both Running Home and A Brother's Duty are free at Smashwords, the Nook Store, and other ebook retails.

My distributor, Smashwords is having its annual sitewide promotion - Read An Ebook Week - from March 3 to 9.

I have entered a 100% off coupon for The Vicar's Daughter and 50% off coupons for my other books.

Please visit to see what some of my fellow independent romance authors are writing. Many of them have also registered 100% off coupons to tempt you to give them a try.

To my readers and especially to those who have taken the time to give me feedback via ratings and reviews, thank you for your support in the past year.

Christmas is a time when we count our blessings and give thanks for the many gifts that God manifests in our lives. I would like to thank my family for their support and to my many friends, colleagues and acquaintances for their stories, some of which mutate and conflate to become parts of my books.

May He always bring you blessings, even the ones that seem like the darkest trials at the time, and bring you joy and contentment in their season. Christmas is a reminder that great things come from humble beginnings and that temporal power and riches are no guarantee of long term success. May your prayers always be answered and may He always teach you to recognize when they are.

Merry Christmas everyone and may God shower his blessings upon you each and every day.

It's published and I've already found three typos in the .epub version I'm reviewing.

For now, it's only available through Smashwords. Click here to go to the page.

I've decided that this book should also be free.

I hope you enjoy it but regardless I'd like to hear your thoughts via reviews or ratings.

Update:

Now available at Kobo.

I wish I was a trained artist. I have a concept for the artwork for Brother's Duty but my hands won't obey my imagination.

Good visual images are both a sales tool and an indicator of the content. But far too often the covers can be somewhat misleading.

Recently I read a book that featured a protagonist who is described as having Native American features. The cover shows a very handsome man but neither his skin tone nor his features looked remotely like any of the many Native Americans I've known over the years. Another book described the heroine as having straight dark auburn hair and amber eyes but the model in the cover photo was a redhead with pale blue eyes. I can't imagine the authors were entirely happy with the covers.

Suffice it to say that it may take longer than I was expecting to release A Brother's Duty because I'd like something more attractive than the kinds of plain bindings common in the 1800s.

A Brother's Duty is now complete but too long. It's sitting at around 90,000 words but needs to be tightened up in at least three places, expanded in two then put on the back burner to let it simmer for a while before I do the final formatting for publication.

I'm still hoping to have it available for Christmas, which means up on Smashwords around November 20 or so.

I'm very pleased that I can get a full book from idea to obsession to publication in four months while writing part-time. I'd still like to find a compatible editor and an agent to help me sell my books but I'm not going to worry too much about that.

I think I may be ready to finally complete Small Battles then start serious work on Faith Huxley's story which has the working title of The Schoolmistress' Son.

It would be nice to be able to publish in a cycle of Christian contemporary, Christian-friendly contemporary and Christian-friendly historical. At some point I have to write at least one of the two concepts for a sword and sorcery fantasy so my darling wife will be tempted to read my books.

Thanks again to all of my readers who have taken the time to give me feedback and reviews.

I have a love/hate relationship with certain of my characters. Despite all my careful planning they don't always want to go where I do.

A Brother's Duty is the working title of my now 47,000 words of sidetrack. I will get back to my other projects but John MacLeish and Lucinda Wilkinson have other ideas for how much of my brain is allowed to be used for things like work, cooking and interacting with real humans.

Without giving too much away John has to reevaluate his life when his hopes for working with his older brother in a construction business is dashed when Rob is killed in action. Lucy has to reevaluate her life when her career is stolen from her and she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant by Rob's friend Nick, who is also killed in action.

Before dying, Nick makes Rob promise to find and help Lucy. Rob extracts a promise from John to try to help Lucy if he doesn't make it back and John feels that it is his duty, a brother's duty, to honour his late brother's promise to his late friend.

When John finally tracks her down, she isn't what he expected. Underneath her piercings and tattoos is a vulnerable woman who is dealing with some real hurt. Unfortunately for him, John is what she expects, at least at first. Stern, rigid, judgemental and far too conventional, she dismisses him as being like all the other 'good Christians' she'd ever encountered.

Prodded by the Holy Spirit through a sermon on Corinthians and feeling duty bound to honour his brother's last request, John's heart is softened toward Lucy until he can see past the odd jewellery in her face.

Lucy, also prompted by the Holy Spirit although not recognizing the source, finally accepts that her choice is between bitter loneliness and taking a risk that the friendships she is being offered are genuine.

There will be problems. John needs to deal with Rob's death and his prejudices. Lucy needs to deal with her mother and her baby's father's family. They both need to deal with the public perception that they are mismatched.

I'll stop there. Suffice it to say that there will be a happy ending and the various kinds of love will triumph.

I'm fan of Piers Anthony's writing although much of what he writes is not totally congruent with the Christian way of life that I am trying to follow. In many of his books there are afterword sections which give some insight into the author or his writing or his processes. He tends to work on three or more books during the same time period so that he can always be writing something.

It didn't occur to me that I would also be one of those people who, when writer's block hits, would turn to other projects or ideas. It should have. My Meyers-Briggs profile (from several licensed tests plus the on-line mini tests) is INTP. The introvert/extrovert pair is on the mildly introverted side but the facilitators at the last session I took part in had never met someone with such decided tendencies toward intuition (N) or perception (P).

But the P can also stand for procrastination. Strong P types know that things can and do change up to the eleventh hour so we tend to think first and then do everything as quickly as possible. We're good in an emergency but we can give J types fits because they want everything ready well before any deadlines so it can be tweaked. And, although we are very rarely late for things, we do push deadlines to limits that are uncomfortable for others.

That said, there are pieces of Small Battles that I'm not happy with and there's a key scene I'm not ready to write because I don't think the villain is actually evil, just venal, at least until he's pushed into making the critical decision. The way I've outlined it is forcing the character to be someone different. So I put the problem in the back of my brain and went to work on something else.

Those of you who've read The Vicar's Daughter know that the Huxley's are a large family. I began writing the second book (#4 chronologically) about Faith but was inspired by a combination of books and a sermon about the limits of judging each other to jot down a note or two about Lucinda,a pierced and painted 'fallen' woman, and John, a hide bound judgemental small town man who's forgotten the he's also 'fallen'. She senses his judgement and puts up a wall. He quickly recognizes his error in judging a non-Christian as if she was a sister in Christ.

Well, my few notes led to a side track that I've been following for about three weeks and thirty thousand words. Unlike some of my recent efforts I don't have a plot in mind, just some characters, a number of locations and an end result. It is a romance novel, after all, and needs a happy ending.

On a side note, Running Home remains hovering around the 2800 mark in the Barnes and Noble ebook store and I'm fairly certain that I just passed 10,000 copies downloaded from all distributors. Thanks to all of the people who have rated and reviewed the book, good and bad. I think it's worth a read, even if there's a bit too much kissing for one of my reviewers.

Running Home is available free from Smashwords or through many fine ebook retailers.

Edwina by Patricia Strefling

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this book. The title character is a classic risk averse Meyers-Briggs ISTJ type who won't surrender her heart to anyone until she is very certain of the outcome. Like many intelligent people she doesn't like the uncertainty of emotions, especially the messy part before anything is said and both are afraid of rejection. It was frustrating to read in places but that is an indication of the writer's skill - she made me care about Edwina. And everything turned our right in the end despite Edwina's fears. I'm looking forward to reading her other books.



View all my reviews

Bill Sanderson
Author of Running Home

One of the best things for me while on vacation is people watching. We spent a lot of time at Parlee Beach in New Brunswick which is one of the nicest sandy beaches in the country.

It is primarily a family beach and you see many of the same people every day. Most of them have cottages or are seasonal campers but some are there for a couple of weeks like we were.

It helps authors like me to be able to describe the interactions between people with some accuracy. The beach environment allowed me to observe some things that I don't see very often.

There are differences in the ways that boys and girls interact with their parents and with each other. Not having any living daughters I can only learn about this by observation.

There was a bossy girl who I found out from my nine year old was the same age as him. She was trying to herd her two younger sisters into a group activity and got more shrill when they wouldn't listen to her. Finally she threw her hands up in the air and went to sit in the family's sun shelter. Her mother tried not to laugh while offering sympathy but only succeeded in further offending her already put out daughter.

I've had to be a single parent for a couple of days at a time but I haven't experienced the type of almost oppressive responsibility that I've observed on the faces of those parents.

One group was a young grandmother with her single daughter and a three year old son. I was close enough to overhear the daughter's worries about how she was going to get along when her teacher mother returned to work in another city at the end of summer.

It's been almost forty years since I was a teenager on Parlee Beach and my memories of the interactions between groups of teenagers are suspect and clouded by hormones.

There was a group of giggling teenaged young women who were taking cheesecake bikini model pictures of each other. They then walked the length of the beach in pairs and trios while the young men scoped them out. It struck me that it was very similar in intent to the kind of display that debutantes make at the society parties.

Last, my youngest is now seven and a half. So, the baby and toddler years, which go by so quickly and busily, are becoming distant memories.

There were a couple of young parents with their first born children ranging from three months to a year. One of the couples looked like they were in a honeymoon phase which suggests to me that the grandparents were letting them get some extra sleep.

I wasn't introduced to any of the people that I'm trying to remember as archetypes. But you may see echoes of them in my future writing.

There is so much beauty in this world. God created it for us to enjoy and I thank Him daily for it. But it is more than the beauty of the wave or the sunset or the fit young people. It is also the enduring love of the seventy something couple wading in the shallows holding hands or the giggles of a toddler escaping another application of sunscreen or the quiet satisfied pride of a mother watching her brood and their friends enjoying themselves.

It was a privilege to witness it.