I just discovered that our precious friend Janet Eckles Perez wrote a devotional for Christian Broadcasting Network “Holding on to My Prince, and it was published on September fith.
You can read it HERE
Tag: Christian Authors
A Writer is Born~Part 4
Our little girl grew up to be sweet, successful, and smart and she married a good man, just as our son married an excellent woman.
I met Mary Harwell Sayler when she came to teach at a writer’s conference run by our church. Mary is a consummate poet and wonderful teacher and I drank poetry, the reading and the writing of it, like
a person dying of thirst. I signed up for Mary’s poetry writing correspondence course and as we got to be friends, she invited me to her home in DeLand, an hour away. I drove up once a month for about five years and we talked about poetry, nature, and our families and from there became associates and each other’s loyal advocates.
For another eight years I drove to Melbourne once a month to meet with Julian Lee Dulfer who taught a class in writing and copy-editing novels that I couldn’t have done without.
With all the writing I was doing I didn’t have time for much else, but then I read that writers need hobbies. That gave me permission to do something I’d always to – take art lessons. I was so excited the first night, I couldn’t wait to get my brush dipped into water and paint. I’ve been through four teachers and a lot of different kinds of art since then and I never lost the thrill of it. The gallery experience and the Art League workshop I was in were true highlights for me. I loved giving art lessons to my two grandchildren and they benefitted from them as much as I did.
One day in Wal-Mart I met a young woman, Rebekah Lyn, whose mom I’d known for a long time. I knew Rebekah had started working on a novel and as we stood there discussing writing, we made a pact to help each other. For about a year, we each brought our efforts to a meeting and read aloud, she read my manuscript and I read hers. It helped a lot. She went on to publish with Amazon and I followed soon after with my Florida Springs Trilogy. Her mother, Onisha, is our publicist and another friend is our public relations agent. Rebekah Lyn started her own book website and now four writers are represented there, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet, novelist, nonfiction writer, and teacher, Janet Perez Eckles (who is blind and who has written an autobiographical book about her experiences with the living God) Rebekah, and me.
One day in Wal-Mart I met a young woman, Rebekah Lyn, whose mom I’d known for a long time. I knew Rebekah had started working on a novel and as we stood there discussing writing, we made a pact to help each other. For about a year, we each brought our efforts to a meeting and read aloud, she read my manuscript and I read hers. It helped a lot. She went on to publish with Amazon and I followed soon after with my Florida Springs Trilogy. Her mother, Onisha, is our publicist and another friend is our public relations agent. Rebekah Lyn started her own book website and now four writers are represented there, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet, novelist, nonfiction writer, and teacher, Janet Perez Eckles (who is blind and who has written an autobiographical book about her experiences with the living God) Rebekah, and me.
Rebekah has just launched, Jessie the story of a teen aged boy who grew up in Titusville, Florida in the early sixties during the beginning of the Space Program. It’s an excellent and timely book.
Presently, I’m working on a book that takes place in Colorado in the mountains. It’s historical, western, and has a strong love story in it.
A Writer is Born~Part 3
Bill and I got engaged and he continued with his plan to go into the Navy while I started college at the University of New Mexico.
I loved my history class because the teacher was a great storyteller. I dropped out of college, however, at the end of my freshman year to marry my soul-mate, Bill. We’ll celebrate our fifty-seventh wedding anniversary September 6, 2014. I can hardly believe it, we feel exactly like the same people we always were.
When Bill got out of the Navy we moved to Inglewood, California. I’d been in beauty school and I got a job with a branch of the Magic Mirror beauty salons and worked to put Bill through school. He worked part time, too, cleaning airplanes between flights. After we had our daughter, he went to school at night and worked days at Douglas Aircraft. Reading books kept me going during this time as they always did. I read to the children, too as small as they were.
Just before he graduated, Bill came home from work and said he’d been offered a job at the space center in Florida. Believing he was kidding me, I said sure, I’d go. I couldn’t imagine moving to such an exotic faraway place, and because I didn’t like news from TV or newspapers,(it was all bad) I honestly had no idea what or where “The Cape,” would turn out to be.
Then one day Bill and I started across the country with our three-year-old and our one year old in a Corvette with bucket seats, nobody wore seatbelts or had car seats in those days, so those adorable little monkeys were all over the car and they wore me to a frazzle, but I suppose it was better than going by wagon train.
The night we crossed the narrow St. John’s River bridge on the way into Titusville was dark and stormy, and we could have sworn it was raining frogs. They were all over the road and impossible to avoid squishing with the tires. When we moved into our house after three weeks in a small motel room we discovered how beautiful and exotic Florida really was—after the Los Angeles smog and sprawl. The same kind of frogs we’d met on the river welcomed us with their croaking from our back yard and by splacking themselves by the dozens all over the glass patio doors. We heard hunting dogs baying at night in the woods behind our house as well as the screech owl’s scream which was hair-raising until we found out what it actually was—a screech owl.
At first, I was terrified of the dragonflies, afraid they’d hurt the children. When I learned their chief purpose in life was to devour mosquito larva and that they didn’t sting I welcomed them.
In the late sixties, Campus Crusade came to our church and our Bible study teacher had us read through the small booklet called, “The Four Spiritual laws.” It starts by saying, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The ending tells us that it’s not enough to believe in Jesus intellectually, but that it is necessary to receive him into your heart. I thought, okay, why not? I prayed the prayer, it made a difference for me. Suddenly the air was sweeter, the sky bluer, the grass greener, and I had more love for my family than ever before, and shortly I became an avid fan of the Bible and an avid church worker.
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Quin Sherrer, a reporter, was a member of our church who won the Guideposts writing contest and got to go to New York City for classes in the Guideposts way of writing. She taught us the simple, yet effective writing techniques that Guideposts has always been known for, and that served me well for many years when people asked for help with their writing.
The three most memorable times of helping someone write were when a young friend asked me to write a love poem to a boy she liked. Later I had two more chances to make a difference. One was when a Christian Cuban-American asked me to write a letter to his bosses because he’d been unfairly suspended from his job. Another was when a Christian African American, who had taken in a couple of his cousin’s children, asked me to write a letter to a judge explaining why it would be better for the remaining child to stay with him and his wife than for her to be handed over to her mother who had just been released from prison, but who was showing no evidence of changes.
We got good results from the letters, and I was glad to help with what I love most, next to reading and eating chocolate, of course.
A Writer is Born ~Part 2
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LOS ALAMOS
We moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico when I was thirteen. For a time, we saw atomic-bomb mushrooms from our front yard every day about noon and then it would rain. In Los Alamos we had a brand new school and the best of everything because the town belonged to the University of California. Dad was a security guard who usually worked at the main gate where everyone who went through had to show their I. D.
Our English teacher, Mrs. McCloskey, a kind and loving person, said I had an ability to write. Our Spanish teacher liked my ear for language. Biology interested me. I recall the frog I dissected and it’s tiny heart I found inside. I suppose that helped me learn to pay attention to detail. Writers need to know all these things and I’m grateful for the assistance of teachers throughout my life.
We had a memorable writing experience in our two-hour core class, which included English and History. Our teacher was young, male, and single, and we all had crushes on him. Our assignment? Turn Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into a comedy, and play it on the stage. While we wrote and compared notes, we played around and laughed a lot. That was a wonderful collaboration. On the day of the play we were having so much fun, we barely noticed that our audience filed out when school was over, even though the play wasn’t over. Maybe I learned about editing from that. Cut, cut, cut.
ALBUQUERQUE
Six weeks into my senior year dad got a job as an Atomic Energy Commission Courier and the family moved to Albuquerque. Dad was gone a great deal, and as it happened Mother’s new job took her to Nevada from time to time. My brother and I were alone on my seventeenth birthday, so I did what I always liked to do, which was to lay on my bed with Hit Parade Magazine and its lyrics and sing along with my favorite singers. There’s no telling the ways that helped my writing, but I’m sure they were many.
In my Senior year I started learning about true romance first hand. I’d had plenty of dates before, but this one guy…He was in the typing class ahead of me, and because we shared a typewriter he waited for me to get there and I hurried. Eventually he started taking me to the church his family attended and there I went forward to the song, “Love Lifted Me,” and was later baptized.