Winners, Friends and Writing Programs

Thanks to those of you who left your sweet comments behind to be entered to win a copy of Chicken Soup for the  Soul: Devotions for Wives. 

And the winner is (randomly picked by myself via scraps of paper!)… Chaunie! 

Chaunie and I met almost two years ago at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan. She is a super sweet gal who was quite pregnant with her third child when we met.  We shared stories about writing and how to best navigate Disney with kids (she had already been, we were planning our first trip!), which seems completely fitting given our roles as mommas and writers!

Chaunie brought the manuscript of her book Tiny Blue Lines: A Guide for Young Moms to that conference and wound up finding a publisher! Her book is due to be published next Spring (May 2014). WooHoo!

I admire her tenacity and commitment to writing and to being a fantastic mother…and how she is striving to find a way to balance and manage it all. If you have a chance you should check out her very cute blog at www.tinybluelines.com. 

If you are a reader and writer you should also consider checking out the Festival of Faith and Writing. It is a biennial (I just learned that "biennial" is the proper term for happening every two years!) conference that brings in some fantastic writers and speakers. This will be my fourth time attending the conference and I always leave feeling inspired and having met some WONDERFUL people. Several of the women I have met at that conference have become wonderfully encouraging friends.

While we are on the topic of writing I finally purchased some writing software for my computer. The program is called Scrivener and it is supposed to be a fantastic writing tool (so fantastic that the very well known Michael Hyatt apparently now uses it to organize ALL of his projects, which is definitely saying something!) and it seems very cool. The problem is that I need a one-day intensive on how to use it so that I can actually start organizing my ideas in it!

I may opt for the Scrivener for Dummies book!! (I'm not joking!).