Becky Wade's Blog, page 28

Average Joe

We talk a lot about story on this blog because we are novelists. But some of the best stories play out in real life. And we all love those, too, don’t we? 

The movie Average Joe arrives in theaters on October 11. My husband and I have been privileged to be part of this real story that happened to real people. Let me share a bit about it, then I’ll share the trailer. 

Going on ten years ago now, the non-profit law firm my husband helps lead took the case of a high school football coach fired for taking a knee on the fifty-yard line and saying a silent prayer alone after games. Seven years later, the case was argued at the US Supreme Court. When the decision came down, the majority of justices agreed that his action did not violate any laws and was, in fact, protected as both religious liberty and free speech under the US Constitution. The decision overturned a “test” used to limit religious free speech that had been used for over 50 years.

Of course, that’s the short synopsis. The longer story involves a family whose lives were upended for seven years as Joe Kennedy chose to continue the fight for his right to pray. And it was a rough seven years. 

Even though Jeff was gone from the firm for the middle five of the seven years, I’m so glad we were able to be there at both the beginning and the end. God truly did amazing things—in people, through people, for people. Because in the end, every lawsuit involves people. For lawyers, it’s just another day at the office. But for the plaintiff or defendant, it is a grueling ordeal that spills over into so many other aspects of their lives. Even more so when the lawsuit is very public and involves a divisive issue. 

I’m so thankful Joe and Denise endured, for the ruling on his behalf opened the door for others to be able to act on their beliefs as they see fit.

So if you want a bit of encouragement of what God can do—what He has done—check out the movie Average Joe at theaters near you starting October 11. 

What are your favorite “based on a true story” movies? 

Inspired by Scripture

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Fall Feelings! (+ a $25 Starbucks card giveaway)

I’m delighted to introduce you to Kelly D. Scott! I’ve been meeting with a small group of writers here in Dallas for years and Kelly has been a member of that circle since the beginning. Fall is my favorite season and so I think it’s wonderful that she’s joined forces with several other authors to release a FREE ebook collection of romantic fall stories. Be sure to grab a copy of the collection and leave a comment on this post so you’ll be entered to win the Starbucks card. Happy fall, y’all! -Becky

I was recently invited to be part of an autumn themed short story collection along with fellow writers Hayley Elliott, Jessica Kate, Kimberly Duffy, Ashley Clark and Kristi Ann Hunter.

Each of us contributed a story and when we took a moment to read each other’s work, I realized that fall means something different to each of us.

Here’s what each of us had to say about fall where we live:

“Fall looks like not walking outside into a sweltering mess. It’s being able to open a window and not have to get in your walk before ten a.m.” – Kristi Ann Hunter in Georgia

“Fall is usually still pretty hot, but we like to pretend the weather is cooler through autumn decorations and fall festivals.” – Ashley Clark in Florida

“Fall is my favorite season! Usually by October it’s cool enough to need a jacket. We go apple picking and to the pumpkin patch. I make a ton of spice cakes and soups and ginger cookies. We try to go to Hocking Hills at least once while the leaves are at their prettiest.” – Kim Duffy in Ohio

“Aussies don’t tend to celebrate changing seasons the way Americans seem to so that’s something I really enjoy when I visit! We have a few trees change leaves and that’s about it, but there’s one street in town where the colors are quite bright so I like to make the drive down there at least once every April which is when the leaves are changing.” – Jessica Kate in Queensland, Australia

“Fall can be anywhere from freezing temps with ice on the trees or seventy degrees and sunny. And it all can happen within the span of two days. Our weather is so temperamental, but on the average it tends to be in the fifties to seventies with colorful leaves for about two weeks before they fall. We have several pumpkin patches in town hosted by farms or various churches and festivals with family games and activities. Most people decorate inside and out with fall or Halloween themes. We love taking family walks through the neighborhood counting all of the pumpkins. As a family we drink lots of apple cider and make snickerdoodle cookies or pumpkin bread/muffins/pancakes.” Hayley Elliott in Oklahoma

“I feel like we only get two weeks of true fall weather in Texas since the summer temps don’t break until late October. As a family, we love going to pumpkin patches and sitting outside when it’s cooler. Nothing says fall like a watching a Sunday afternoon game of football, chili simmering on the stove, and a cozy blanket to snuggle up in on the couch.” Kelly D. Scott in Texas

In honor of fall and the release of our short story collection, I invite you to enjoy Autumn Kisses. CLICK HERE to access your copy!

To celebrate the release of Autumn Kisses, I’m giving away a $25 Starbucks gift card so you can grab your favorite fall drink. To enter, simply leave a comment below. The winner will be randomly selected on Tuesday, October 1st. Best of luck!

What does fall look like where you live? What are some of your favorite activities to enjoy during the fall season?

For the Love of Travel

I’m preparing to head off for a season of travel through mid-December. I’ll be taking one trip per month, and while it’s a lot of travel for me, I’m so excited about it. I love to travel, see new places, visit with friends, and gather with writers. This quote is one of my favorites. 

I believe the more we travel, the more we experience, and it broadens our horizons. Anything that helps us grow helps us be better writers. Travel gives us a wealth of experiences to draw from for our stories. It lets us soak up other cultures and customs, and it expands our knowledge in turn. As writers and readers, we have a particular gift of traveling to conferences, author-reader events, and writing retreats.  

I’m flying today, weather permitting (there’s a tropical storm headed our way, so I’m flying out a day early, and I hope that’s enough. Prayers appreciated) to the Faith, Hope, and Love Christian Writer’s conference. I’m both extremely excited and extremely nervous as I’m one of the keynotes. 

I love speaking and sharing with writers, but I’m always a nervous wreck on the inside. It’s the strangest combination of the anxiety of the thrill of sharing alongside flat-out anxiety. Again, if you don’t mind praying for me. 

I’ll also be teaching a workshop on The Heart of Suspense, and I realized I’ve never taught on suspense before. Yikes! I have it written out, but I’d still love to know if you’re a writer, what you’d love to know about writing suspense. If you’re a reader, I’d love to know what draws you to a suspense story, what you love best about them, what keeps you turning the pages, and what makes a satisfying ending for you? 

Thank you so much for joining me today. I always love spending my blogging days chatting with you.

Writer Retreat & Events

Last week, I rode with sister-Minnesota writer Erica Vetsch to Southwestern Missouri at the invitation of author-friend Michelle Griep. Together the three of us brainstormed, wrote, commiserated, and caught up on each other’s lives.

And ate. A lot.

Michelle is an amazing hostess who spoiled us rotten. That 9-hour drive was definitely worth it!

We also did two speaking events while we were there. We first spoke at a meeting of American Christian Fiction Writers Missouri-Ozarks chapter (Thank you, Erin Mifflin!), and later participated in a Literary Festival at a public library.

Our talks went well, and I enjoyed chatting with writers and readers, as well as spending time with likeminded friends. Here are just a few of the folks we talked to: Melissa and Amber.

Have you spent time with friends lately, too? Please let us know in the comments and thank you for stopping by!

Going Back to Caledonia

Going Back to Caledonia. Hmmm. That might make a lovely book title some day. But this past week, it was the “title” of our weekend. Many of you will remember that six years ago, my husband got the bug to get a camper. It did NOT sound like my idea of fun. But he talked me into a trial run, we rented a camper near St. Louis and made our way toward our daughters’ homes in Southeast Missouri. (You can find that blog post HERE.)

Along the way on that maiden voyage, we came upon the town of Caledonia, Missouri, and that charming tiny village may just be have been the tipping point that convinced me camping could be fun.

This weekend, we went on what Ken calls a “shake-down cruise”—a two-night trip just to make sure everything is working right on the camper before we embark on a month-long trip later this fall. We visited beautiful Missouri sights like Onondaga Cave State Park, Maramec Spring Park, and Montauk State Park. They were all so unique and beautiful, this time of year especially.

As we headed toward home late Saturday morning, we realized that we would drive very close to Caledonia again. And in fact, it would only be an 8.5-mile detour to visit the town that charmed us so much.

So we went. We parked in front of the General Mercantile, which has to be one of the coolest stores in the state, if not the country! What a great, old-fashioned mercantile!

Caledonia hasn’t changed much in six years, but it has grown and improved with new shops and new places to eat. And the town was hopping on a Saturday. We had delicious quesadillas at Roma’s and they were big enough to be Sunday leftovers the next day.

Here are just a few more scenes from the General Mercantile.

Caledonia was a good reminder that I shouldn’t have been so negative about Ken’s idea of traveling and camping. We’ve come to a great compromise and I’ve learned and grown so much.

Is there anything in your life that you initially resisted but that ultimately turned out to be something you now enjoy and are glad you did?

Inspired by Scripture

This Sunday feature is brought to you by ClashVerseoftheDay.com. You may sign up to receive a beautiful photo with Scripture in your inbox each morning or view the verse each day online.

FUNNY BOOK ERRORS

I recently did an interview after my book, To Enchant a Lady’s Heart, won the Heart Award in the novella category.

The interviewer asked me to share my funniest typo. Sometimes I’m asked questions that leave me scratching my head for a while. It can take time to dredge up an answer. But I had a fast reply for that question. I thought I would share that story with you plus one other, the second one making it into print.

1) Funniest typo. Caught in time.

In my manuscript for the book, How Sweet It Is, I meant to type, “Releasing another sigh, she …” But what my fingers typed was, “Releasing another thigh, she …”

Thanks to my line editor, that typo didn’t make it into my sweet Christian romance. Funny how one word can paint a completely different picture in the mind than what I intended.

2) Major error. Made it into book.

About thirty years ago, I wrote a series set in a small town. The hero and heroine of Book #1 were secondary characters in Book #2. Not an unusual choice. Hero #1 appeared in quite a few scenes.

After Book #2 was published, I got a letter (this was before emails were a common thing), and the reader mentioned the scene after Hero #2 and Heroine #2 were married. Turns out my couple went to bed at the end of that chapter, just as they should have, but the first scene the next morning had Hero #1 in bed with Heroine #2.

Out loud, I said, “No way!!” I rushed up the stairs to the library where the copies of the new book were kept. I opened the book and flipped through the pages until I found the scene. Sure enough. I had used the name of Hero #1 in place of the name of Hero #2. Of course, it was a silly error, and most readers knew it wasn’t really Hero #1 where he shouldn’t be. It was a typographical error. But oh my goodness. The mortification!! So awful, I just have to laugh or else I would cry.

Sometimes I think my fingers are totally disconnected from my brain. They can type the weirdest things. Thankfully, most of them never make it into print. But when they do, I try to find the humor. I hope readers do too.

Have you found a funny typo in a book lately?

~robin

My Morning Was Hijacked by a Mystery Novel!

Exactly one week ago today, I had the strangest morning.

It all started with a thin glowing light emanating around the attic access panel in the hallway outside my bedroom. It hadn’t been glowing the night before when we went to bed.

Then a mysterious moisture covered our lawn, indicating the sprinklers had run but not on their assigned day. We’d not had any recent power outages to explain the glitch.

Then when I returned from my morning walk, the attic light was OFF. I asked my husband if that was his doing. He said no.

As I drove to work, I spotted an unfamiliar man walking in the street, dressed suspiciously nice, and pushing a baby stroller. No. Not a stroller. And he wasn’t actually pushing it. It was some kind of James Bond-esque self-propelled golf caddy cart. Very nefarious indeed!

To top it all off, the fog rolled in, and I could barely see past the hood of my car as I drove to work. We get fog about 3 days a year, so that fact that it came on that particular morning spiked my suspicions that I somehow woke up inside a Jaime Jo Wright novel.

Now, I’m sure there are rational explanations for all of these things. We had an air conditioning tech in our attic a couple weeks ago, and it’s possible he left a light on, and it might be one of those lights that when overheated turns itself off. Our sprinkler system has been glitchy for several weeks and even though we checked the night before that it was set correctly, when we checked that morning, it apparently went backward to Tuesday instead of forward to Thursday. My husband has since checked the attic, and the light was off, so we’re still not sure about the “ghost light” as our dear friend Mater would call it. We did, however, put to rest Jamie Jo’s theory that a stranger was living in our attic. Whew!

My working theory is squirrels. Squirrels in the attic teasing us with the light. Squirrels setting off the sprinklers. Even squirrels powering the caddy cart. There could easily have been squirrels running inside hamster balls hidden in the bottom of that bag. Not sure how the critters are responsible for the fog, but I’m not ruling them out. Ever seen Ice Age? I rest my case.

What creative explanation can you create to explain all these strange happenings?

Mirror image?

Because I am always reading more than one novel at a time, I often notice book similarities. It is not unusual for me to discover that the main character in one current read is named the same as a supporting character in another! But recently I ran across a book similarity that initially took me aback, and I wanted to discuss it here. 

The truth is, there are only so many stories to be told. As Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.” So many authors or to-be authors get freaked out at this point, terrified they’ll write the same story as someone else or someone else will write their story. 

I long ago learned that while two stories might have similar bones, they will never be identical. (Unless there is plagiarism of course, but I’m not talking about that.)

A few weeks ago I started listening to All My Secrets by Lynn Austin. It’s a story set in 1898/1899 New York. There are three POVS, three generations of woman—grandmother, mother, daughter. There are secrets. Secrets the daughter must learn from both her mother and grandmother in order to make sense of her life and of the women who love her. 

A little while later I picked up The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery by Amanda Cox. It’s a story set in present-day small-town Tennessee. There are three POVs, three generations of women—grandmother, mother, daughter. There are secrets. Secrets the daughter must learn from both her mother and grandmother in order to make sense of her life and of the women who love her. 

Crazy, right? While at the beginning of each book, the similarities were startling. And yet, knowing what I know of publishing timelines, the 2 1/2 years between these book releases means that both stories were likely in progress—at least in conception—on overlapping timelines. 

In spite of it all, I continued to read both books. Although one big secret was the same in both books, the results were quite different. Other secrets were not the same. And the century or so separating the two stories resulted in differences as well. As did the social/financial status of the two families. And their geographic locations. 

But even if more of those distrinctions had been similarities, these two stories would never be the same. Why? Because they had two different authors. Authors of different generations and backgrounds and experiences. These two stories seemed to be so similar—and yet they were so very different. 

Years ago, back when I first started attending writing conferences, I heard about a book called What the Wind Picked Up. The subtitle of this book–Proof that a Single Idea Can Launch a Thousand Stories–sums up this exact point. Each author wrote from the same basic idea, yet the stories are all different.

Because each writer is unique, each story will be unique in some form of its presentation. So if you are a writer, no need to worry that your story and someone else’s will be the “same.” And for readers, even if you see similarities between books, take heart! They will not be the same story. 

Have similarities between the situation or plot or characters of two novels ever jarred you? Did it put you off one, or did you read both?