Becky Wade's Blog, page 73

Ask Dr. Angie

I love theology. Years ago, when I was writing a book with a theological theme, I realized that I had better get it right–wouldn’t want to have to explain to the Lord how I figured it out all by myself and gave people the WRONG answer.

So I went back to school. Got a master’s in theology, then completed two doctorates–one in theology proper, and another in biblical studies. I certainly don’t know everything, but I know more than I did when I started.

That’s when I realized that many of the things I’d been taught growing up were just . . . wrong. Not wrong enough to destroy my salvation, but wrong enough to misinform my thinking about God. And once I came to a clearer understanding of Him . . . well, for at least two years, I couldn’t sing praise choruses in church without bawling.

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. 2 Timothy 2:15.

You see, I’d grown up feeling a quiet pride that I’d had the good sense to choose Jesus as a child. But after studying the Word, I realized that I didn’t choose HIM, HE chose me! Not because I was good or worthy, but simply because He extended mercy toward me.

That simple realization turned my perspective upside down. My pride–which wasn’t so quiet after all–vanished, and was replaced by amazement, humility, and gratitude. Despite all my faults and failings, God decided to draw me to Him (John 6:44).

My next novel, The Woman from Lydia, features Lydia, the seller of purple. And the Bible tells us that “The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message.” The Lord initiated the action! So when you pray for lost friends and family, ask the Lord to open their hearts.

All that to say this: if you have a theological question you’d like to ask, leave it in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer it in a coming post. Like this one, from a previous blog post:

Dear Ms. Hunt; 

The question that April asked is something that I’ve often wondered myself and I haven’t been able to answer it whenever nonchristians intentionally or unintentionally try to challenge my faith. You said, “He often ordains that men carry out evil deeds according to his will (example: the crucifixion of Christ).” 

My question is . . . if it God who ordained for men to do evil even if it is for His purpose, then why are they punished for something beyond their control? When I say punish, I mean in an earthly sense. I understand that no matter what one has done if they confess and believe that Jesus is their Lord and Savior then they will be saved from the fires of hell but that doesn’t mean that they’re exempted from being punished according to the law. And if it is God who uses the evil for His will, then is it no longer something that is evil? For God is perfect, I would think that He’ll be incapable of doing evil. I understand that because we’re only human, we can’t possibly fully understand God and the things He does but I was just wondering what your opinion will be in this. God Bless You!! –Esther

Dear Esther:

Thank you for your question. It’s a tough one, but I think we have to realize that this is something we won’t fully understand for a while. God’s thoughts and reasons are far above ours. But lest that seem like a cop-out, I’ve come to realize that it works a little like this (an idea I tried to express in The Novelist): we are like characters in a story. God has created our characters, our personalities, and our “bents.” He knows what we will do in any given situation, and he directs our path and orders our steps. As the Author of our lives and of Eternity, He is completely sovereign–in complete control. He doesn’t sleep, He doesn’t get distracted, He doesn’t close His eyes. 

Just this morning, my gaze fell on Proverbs 20:24: “How can we understand the road we travel? It is the Lord who directs our steps.” 

We live on a lower plane. On our earthly plane, we live and work and move and make decisions, often completely unaware of how God is working. We have–and exercise–free will. We are responsible for our decisions, because we freely choose to do good and evil. We cannot escape responsibility for our actions, nor do we deserve to. God offers grace and forgiveness for those who trust Him, but if we break the law, we still have to face the consequences for the evil we’ve committed.

So–though men crucified Christ according to God’s plan, they weren’t aware of that plan. They acted, on their own plane and of their own volition. They exercised their own free will, even though it was all part of God’s plan.

And–you mentioned that Christians believe in Jesus, they’ll be saved from hell yet still be punished . . . on earth, but not in heaven, thank the Lord! The Bible says “there is no condemnation waiting those who are in Christ Jesus,” so when we stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ, we will be clothed in His righteousness. We are forgiven, and our sins have been removed “as far as the east is from the west.” We will be judged, but for our works, for the good deeds we have done–did we do them for the glory of God, or for the praise of men?

God is perfectly holy and he does not sin . . . and he is sovereign over all of his creation, including evil and evil beings. He allows people to commit evil and uses that evil for His purposes. And sometimes–especially when we consider things from an eternal perspective–the evil we suffer turns out for our good.

Remember how Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery? Joseph later told them that what they intended for evil, God intended for God. During that famine, Joseph not only saved his family, he saved Israel and much of the known world. No evil can touch the believer without God’s permission.

~~Angie 

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.

Giveaways and Movies — Oh my!

GIVEAWAY

Have you ever entered to win books in Goodreads Giveaways? If not, you might want to begin with a couple that I’m running in the month of March, both for a chance to win copies of my upcoming release, To Enchant a Lady’s Heart, the launch book for a new series, The British Are Coming.

From March 2 to March 14, you can enter to win one of 100 Kindle copies of the book. Click below to enter.

Click Here to Enter the Giveaway

The second giveaway will begin on March 16 and end March 30. The prize that time is an autographed paperback copy of the book. I will share the link for that giveaway in my next blog post.

MOVIE

On Wednesday, I took time off from writing to go see The Jesus Revolution. I cried more than once during the film. It felt so very personal to me.

You see, I came to Christ at the tail end of the Jesus Movement. I know the music. I know the clothes and the hairstyles. While I wasn’t baptized in the ocean and I was never a hippie, I was a beneficiary of some who were part of the movement in California.

As I watched the movie, I couldn’t help but think of the Asbury revival meetings, of the young people having radical encounters with the living God today, even as I write this blog post. 

O Lord, fan the flames of revival. Bring us a new Jesus Revolution.

Have you seen The Jesus Revolution? If not, what was the last movie that took you to the theater?

~robin

PS Yesterday, the finalists for the 2023 Selah Award were announced, and (hoping I didn’t miss someone from the video) three of the Inspired by Life and Fiction authors were among them.

Angela Hunt, The Apostle’s Sister, Historical Biblical category
Deborah Raney, Breath of Heaven, Contemporary Women’s fiction category
Robin Lee Hatcher, I’ll Be Seeing You, General Fiction category

In Her Sights

Here are those details I promised you about my new indie project!

I’m teaming up with my blogging buddies at Petticoats & Pistols to launch a multi-author, sweet western romance series called the Pink Pistol Sisterhood. Each story centers around a legendary pistol once owned by Annie Oakley that passes from woman to woman from 1893 to contemporary times. The series gets its name from the pink, mother-of-pearl grip on the pistol that has been customized for more than just shooting.

My novella will kick off the series with the pistol’s origin story along with a romantic adventure with Tessa James (from A Tailor-Made Bride) and Jackson Spivey (from Stealing the Preacher). Shanna Hatfield, one of our participating authors, designed the majority of our covers, and I had fun incorporating the field of daffodils surrounding my heroine into my story. Notice the pink handle on the pistol. That’s my favorite detail!

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He’s sworn off love, but she has his heart in her sights and doesn’t intend to miss.

Stained by his wastrel father’s legacy, Jackson Spivey lives on the fringes of society. Townsfolk tolerate him since he keeps the local hotel supplied with fresh game, but mothers coach their daughters to avoid him. After tasting consistent rejection, Jackson spurns all attempts at courtship. The only things he can count on are his guns and his God.

Tessa James has been secretly in love with Jackson for ages, but trying to gain his favor only pushes him further away. When she learns Annie Oakley is traveling through Texas, Tessa seeks lessons from the famed markswoman. If Jackson’s life revolves around guns, taking up shooting might help her engage his interest. Too bad she can’t hit the broad side of a barn.

When Annie loans Tessa a custom pistol, however, things begin to change. The lore behind the mysterious weapon fosters hope that Tessa might finally hit the target of Jackson’s heart. But when danger threatens, she might be forced to use the pistol for something other than finding love.

Writing Annie Oakley into my story was such fun, though it was quite daunting to bring such a legendary character from history into my fictional world.

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In Her Sights is now available for preorder!

Click here to preorder on Amazon.

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Currently, the e-book version is the only format available for preorder, but if you prefer paper, I have a print version in the works. It will be available on the official release date – March 30. It will be a slim volume since it is only a novella, but I’m matching the size to my other full-length novels so those who enjoy collecting, can have a consistent size.

The rest of the books in the series will be releasing every ten days after mine hits the digital shelves. All of the books will also be available in Kindle Unlimited, for those of you who subscribe to that service. If you want to keep up with series and participate in all of the launch party fun, consider joining the FB group for the Pink Pistol Sisterhood here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2143576775865837

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Free Magazine!

The Fillies at Petticoats & Pistols will be releasing a series of four free magazines over the next month. These magazines contain all kinds of fun content including free first chapters, recipes, games, author interviews, a map to help you track the pistol’s movements, and even some original short stories.

The first issue introduces the entire series and highlights my novella as the story that will kick things off on March 30. Inside, you’ll find my first chapter, which serves as the origin story for the pink pistol, along with an author interview, a delicious apple muffin recipe, a fun word scramble, and more.

Downloading the free magazine will not subscribe you to any author newsletter. It’s purely for fun!

Download Your Free Pink Pistol Magazine Here

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How You Can Help Promote

Since this is my first indie project, I’d really love to have your help promoting, if you are willing. Here are a few super easy things you can do to make a big difference:

Share this post on social media. Just click one of the share icons at the bottom of this page.Share my preorder graphic on social media.Add In Her Sights to your “Want to Read” list on Goodreads.Share the link to the free Pink Pistol Magazine.Once the book becomes available on March 30, if you read and enjoy the story, please leave a review on Amazon and other bookish sites like Goodreads and Bookbub.

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What do you think of the new series?
Have you ever read a novel that featured Annie Oakley as a supporting character?
What do you think of the cover for In Her Sights?

Uncurated Research

Last week, I got to experience something I haven’t before—I got to sift through a pile of uncurated documents and photos. 

A trunk full of odds and ends.

‘Uncurated?” Some of you might be asking. “What does that even mean?”

Well, uncurated is the opposite of curated. Curated documents and photos are ones which have been “selected, organized and presented using professional or expert knowledge.” (According to the Oxford Languages dictionary.) In other words, documents and photos in a museum or historical society or research library are generally culled through before being made available for perusal. They might discard (or at least archive and not list) some of the more mundane pieces of information. Such as, for example, a grocery list. 

But you know what? I find those “mundane” things quite fascinating and revelatory. And that’s why I was so excited to get to do this research. The photos and documents I looked through are simply the remains of a woman’s life kept together by her long-time friend and employee since she had no direct descendants.

That friend and employee was my friend’s dad. 

My friend Kathy and an old movie projector. Kid gloves! So soft. Evening purse. I love it!

I got to spend several hours sifting through handwriting pages, old photos, even old evening purses and kid gloves! Everything was fragile. Some of it worth treasuring. Some of it purely mundane (like old bank books!). But none of it had been deemed unworthy by an expert. It was all just there. The important and the unimportant jumbled together. 

Leather bank account book. Can’t wait to see if I can figure out who this is!I love old advertisements.

While I sifted, my friend sat at her computer and Googled people or events or places we didn’t know anything about. Some of those questions were answered quickly—like the significance of Port Arthur (not the one in Texas, the one that sits between China and Korea and has been fought over by the Chinese, Japanese, and Russians). Others will require more research to bring clear (hopefully) conclusions. 

This experience excited me for several reasons. 

I just like old stuff and the insight it gives into life in other eras. This woman had a particularly interesting life in the early 20th century—connections in DC, finishing schools, travel all over the world, in the motor corps of the women’s auxiliary in 1918, etc. This woman lived in Dallas, and I would very much like to write a (or a series of) stories set in Dallas in the late 1800s-early 1900s. 

I still have a few more things to get through. After three hours there, I decided I needed to go home to let Dolly out. But I look forward to returning. Not only to see what other treasures I can find, but also to spend time with my very hospitable (and knowledgeable!) writing friend who became caretaker of these remnants of a life. 

Have you ever had a chance to look through “uncurated” material? Maybe old family documents or (as in this instance) someone else’s documents? Did you find any treasures? Tell us about it!

What I’m Reading. What About You?

For the last week or so, I’ve been reading a print-out of my next novel (A Winter by the Sea, December 2023) and making LOTS of changes as I go.

(Pages bleeding purple)

I catch so many more errors/repeated words/unnecessary words when reading a paper copy than when reading on screen. (If you are a writer, have you had the same experience?)

Now I’m inputting all those many corrections into the Word file. As soon as I’m done with my revisions, I’ll be ready to read some other books, like these:

The Metropolitan Affair, by Jocelyn Green. Doesn’t it look intriguing?

And I’m tardy in reading two Regency romances by British author Rachel Knowles—A Perfect Match, and A Reason for Romance.

I am also eager to read an advanced copy of friend Erica Vetsch’s next novel, Children of the Shadows. And, as a fan of the television series All Creatures Great and Small, I’m looking forward to sitting down with a cup of tea on a lazy afternoon to read James Herriot’s Yorkshire as well as Gill Hornby’s novel, Miss Austen.

What are you reading currently (or looking forward to reading)? I’d love your recommendations as I anticipate having more free time to read soon.

Thank you for stopping by today!

An Extra Special “Garage Sale”

I have a beautiful new palm tree in our dining room, thanks to my friend Barbara. She needed to get the plant out of their living room to make room for some medical equipment, and knowing how much I love houseplants, Barbara thought of me. Ken loaded the palm tree up for me, and I am so honored to adopt it. Barbara’s husband is going through some health struggles, so I am using this tree as a reminder to pray for Gary and Barbara each time I look at its beauty.

Barbara messaged me again after I’d brought the palm tree home and told me she had a little something more for me if I could stop by the house. Ha! A couple days later, I came home with a treasure trove.

Everything in the bag Barbara sent home with me was exactly the kind of thing I would have purchased at a primo garage sale! This really blessed me, especially since garage sale season has been over for a while in our area.

The “Reading is a Hoot” pillow and the sturdy blue chair found homes in the little playhouse under our stairway. The grandkids will love these additions and they’re the perfect colors to match the decor our daughters chose when they remodeled the play space for us shortly after we moved here.

Barbara also included a cutting from her beautiful Easter cactus. Thank you so much, Barbara!

I met this sweet couple two years ago when I stayed in their charming Airbnb in Cape Girardeau, Missouri for a week’s worth of days, finishing my novel Bridges. They have opened their home to so many, and they share Christ’s love with everyone who stays. I know they would appreciate your prayers for healing and grace.

Along with praying for my friends, how can I pray for you today? My prayer list has grown long recently, and I can’t add anything more to it long-term, but I would love to pray today and tomorrow for any prayer requests you leave in the comments. It is such a privilege to be able to make our needs known before the God of the universe and know that He hears our prayers!

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.

How My Cover Came to Be

When it came time to design Memory Lane’s cover, I knew two things.

I knew I wanted to go with an “illustrated” style. Not only do I personally love this style, but market trends support the popularity of illustrated covers. There are a large number of readers out there who’ve never read my books but might enjoy them if they did. I believed that lots of those readers would be more likely to try Memory Lane if I gave the novel an illustrated cover design.I knew who I wanted to hire to design the cover.Courtney Walsh. Follow her if you don’t already! You’ll find her HERE on Facebook and HERE on Instagram.

Courtney is a terrific author. She also owns and runs a childrens’ theater with her husband. She also happens to be very gifted at cover design. AND she’s one of my closest friends. Courtney designed the cover for my Christmas novella You and Me. Collaborating on that cover with her was fun and easy and I was very happy with how it turned out. So asking her to design Memory Lane was a no-brainer.

Courtney will tell you that she’s a designer, but not an illustrator. In other words, she can take elements (photos, illustrations, etc) that someone else has created and then build a cover with those. So my first step was to commission a freelance artist to draw custom illustrations of the hero and heroine of my novel. I gave her information on what they looked like and what type of clothing they’d be likely to wear. I sent this photo along as color pallette inspiration….

I LOVE these colors!

The artist came up with the following designs. The heroine is wearing overalls, just like Remy often does in the book! I used the middle one on the cover and made stickers out of the middle one and the one on the right.

My initial vision for the cover was to place the characters ON a lane in order to represent the title Memory Lane. Courtney did just that and gave them an oceanside Maine setting in these mock-ups. (Mock-ups aren’t at all final. They’re quick “rough drafts” used to get a visual sense of what my idea would look like in actuality.)

Once I saw my idea, I realized this wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in, after all. Courtney and I discussed other options. In recent years, there’s been a trend toward making the title itself the star of book covers. She and I are both fans of that trend and wondered if we could make that work here. She showed me the most beautiful teal background with vertical lines running down it, and I was immediately enamored.

At that point, she created this mock-up.

I loved it. But I wondered if it would be possible to see the couple and the boat at the top of the image.

I really loved this version, too. (Those cute clouds!) But after living with both of these for several days, I decided to go with the first version–which was Courtney’s favorite, too. Initially, she’d used the above font for my name because this is the font used for my name on several of my backlist books. At the end of the day, though, it was too skinny to hold its own against such a big, blocky title font. Which is how we arrived at the final version of the cover.

To close, I thought I’d share some of the fun encouragement, graphics, and comments that I’ve received since Memory Lane’s release, a week and a half ago. It’s been a busy, exciting, and wonderful time!

Thank you, readers, for supporting Memory Lane! Do you have any questions/comments about the cover?

The Story Behind the Story

In April I have a novella releasing in a new collection Across the Shores. But the germ of this story came to me years ago. I was trying to find the original proposal idea and I’m going to guess it was about 2011 or 2012. I’d written two series of WWII novels for Barbour — Cornhusker Dreams set in Nebraska and the Ohio Brides set in Ohio. Stars in the Night was about to release, and Shadowed by Grace was an idea that I had just had or was still on the way. I was in the middle of generating lots of ideas.

One of those revolved around what happened on the Outer Banks during the early days of WWII. The novella was originally called Lauren’s Song and was submitted with a collection that nothing happened with. I almost forgot about it until I was asked by my friend Caroline Miller if I would like to be part of a collection proposal she was putting together that would follow a gold necklace through four generations. I could write a story set during WWII — really in any context, and this germ of an idea came back to me.

I’d never forgotten the idea of the U-boats bringing the Battle of the Atlantic to the shores of the East Coast, and it was time to see if that story would find a home.

It’s one thing to have the story and a completely different thing to create the book. I knew the book had to occur on the Outer Banks. The question became which one. That was a much more difficult question than I antcipated. Crazy difficult in fact! I probably changed the location three times before I settled on Ocracoke Island — a place I now want to visit because it sounds so peaceful. If you’ve been and it isn’t, I don’t want to know! You can peek at a lot of my ideas here on Pinterest. I can’t tell you how often I’ll come back to the images I pin and hope they are interesting to you, too.

One of the details that I found so interesting about life on Ocracoke. Those who lived on the island had their own language — a few people still speak it today. It’s heavy with Scottish. If you want to learn more about it, you can check out the video below. They also had only had electricty for a few years thanks to a generator that fed electricity to the homes in the village. It was so fun to dig into what made this tiny island so unique and incorporate that into the story.

Did you know that U-boats attacked and sunk boats along the coast of North Carolina? When a new book is releasing what do you love to learn about the process or the book?