The Christy Award has been around since 1999. And while I try not to put too much stock in winning awards, I’ll confess to really, really hoping for a Christy. And last week A Shot at Love from The Christmas Heirloom novella collection was nominated. The award, intended to honor Christian novels of excellence, imagination, and creativity, is named for […]
My soon-to-release novel, When Silence Sings, is set in part in Thurmond, WV. While there’s plenty to make this southern WV town interesting, one of the main things is that in the early 1900s it was a rich boom town. Today, it’s essentially a ghost town owned largely by the National Park Service. Of course, the thing that’s nifty about […]
Last weekend I had the pleasure of meeting Sharon Robinson, baseball great Jackie Robinson’s daughter. I HOPE you already know what a huge impact Jackie Robinson had on the civil rights movement by breaking the color barrier in sports when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But you may not know that he went on to be a key player […]
It definitely feels like summer today in the mountains of Western NC. But even as I sweat, I’m noticing signs pointing toward a rough winter. Last week I saw my first wooly worm. All black. This morning I saw another just the same. Acorns are already falling and the walnuts are abundant this year as well. Add to that the […]
My next full-length novel will release on November 5–less than two months away now. I’m excited to introduce readers to the Harpes and McLeans–feuding families in southern West Virginia. I found it oddly refreshing to write a character who’s . . . well . . . a little bit terrible. Inventing Serepta McLean was the most fun I’ve had writing […]
When my brothers and I were little we had a “play-house” inside a HUGE rotted out stump. The tree had fallen long ago, but the shell of the stump remained and it was big enough for all three of us to get inside. It was cool and mossy and taller than I was. The stump was in the woods below […]
I recently read an article suggesting that it’s harder to lose weight today than it was in the 1980s. Yeah. Made me do a double take, too. Here’s the sub-headline: “A new study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter.” What?? I read on. The gist of the article is that our microbiomes have changed over the past couple of decades. Like me, you may be wondering what a microbiome is. To oversimplify, it’s the bacteria living in your gut. The bacteria that should be living in your gut. Turns out we NEED bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and viruses living in harmony with our innards. And, it would seem, our diets are changing our microbiomes for the worse. Chemicals and prescription drugs along with the hormones and antibiotics that have been rampant in our food for so long are changing or outright killing off our microbiomes. And scientists now hypothesize that as a result we simply can’t process food as efficiently. And it’s making us fat. I was following right along with the article, grateful to have been raised on homegrown farm food and glad I live in an area where people pay attention to such things. Then I came to this statement by Jennifer Kuk, a professor of kinesiology and health science at Toronto’s York University: “The fact that the body weights of Americans today are influenced by […]
