Paperback Dropped and a Give-Away!
The paperback of Paint Chips is in the hands of people across the country. Wow. Wow. Wow.
So, I need some help spreading the news. And I need your help.
A Fabulous Paint Chips Tote Bag! Seriously, folks, you can’t find this kind of beauty at stores…
So. You wanna know how you can enter to win?
I thought you might.
1. Post the link to Paint Chips from either Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Paint-Chips-Susie-Finkbeiner/dp/0983455694/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366202522&sr=8-1&keywords=susie+finkbeiner OR Barnes & Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/paint-chips-susie-finkbeiner/1113729799?ean=9780983455691
Make sure you tag me or add the link to your link in the comments below. You get an extra entry for each time you post between now and the end of the contest.
2. Share the book trailer! It’s gorgeous. It’s fabulous. And I’m really proud of it! Again, make sure you tag me when you post it!
3. “Like” my author page! I’m at 480 likes. I’d LOVE to get to 500! Oh…and extra points for asking your friends to “like” it too! Go HERE to “like” it.
4. Come up with some other creative and fun way of telling people about Paint Chips! Let me know what you did in the comments for 2 extra entries into the contest.
Thanks, Friends. You all make this a very fun and exciting adventure for me!
Contest ends at Midnight on Sunday, April 21. The winner will be announced on the blog the next day.
Soup and Hurt Feelings
The other day, my husband made soup. The kind of soup that cleans out the cupboards and refrigerator. He let it simmer and stew and eventually, he used the immersion blender to smooth it all out.
Then, after it chilled in the fridge over night, he reheated it and served it to the kiddos.
It was spicy. Some kind of pepper had made its way into the mix. My boys didn’t want anything to do with the soup. My daughter, however, is up for anything.
She ate a bite. Then, she cried.
“Is it too hot?” Jeff asked. “Does your mouth hurt?”
She shook her head “no”. She continued to cry. Broken hearted crying.
“What’s wrong?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t want to eat it. But I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” she answered.
Oh. Her sweet little heart.
Hm. Sweet heart.
Maybe that’s what’s missing in so many interactions. A sweetness of the heart. Thinking of how our words might impact others. How we might hurt them.
Putting their feelings before our right to freedom of speech.
Considering our words as a way to serve others and build them up. Not claw them apart.
Now, I’m not saying that we should be lily livered and not speak truth. We need to do that. But, I think it’s a good investment to speak that truth in love.
Love puts the other person first. Love uses words that heal, not words that destroy.
Love doesn’t troll around, starting fights.
Love seeks peace.
Love doesn’t toss acid on the wounded. It doesn’t jab at the suffering.
Love seeks to comfort.
How can we let love inhabit our speech? Our interactions? How can we speak the truth in love, not in the desire to be right or to elevate ourselves?
Saggy Middle – Part 2
You might remember the first time I wrote about my saggy middle…
If not, you can catch that post (along with a really flattering prego picture of me) HERE.
Here’s Part 2…Doing Damage.
Two pregnancies have made a doughy mess of my midsection. Well, especially since the second pregnancy yielded a set of (adorable) twins.
Since my twins will celebrate their fifth birthday this June, I thought it was about time for me to start working on that tummy a little. And I mean REALLY tighten up the middle. I’m talking “feel the burn” type exercises. The kind that doubled me over in pain.
After a few weeks, I noticed that my stomach was getting BIGGER.
“The muscle develops, pushing the…ahem…fat further out. Eventually, the muscle will burn the…ahem…fat away.”
Thank you, oh wise internet.
So. I kept going. And my stomach kept getting bigger. I got more frustrated.
Then Pinterest revealed the issue.
Muscle separation. Common among moms. Especially moms of multiples.
And most abdominal toning exercises cause the muscles to spread even more. And that causes the tummy to pooch. Even. More.
All of my work made my saggy middle even saggier.
I’m sure you can imagine how frustrating that was. Learning that, while trying to do something good, I had been doing damage. And I’d even worked up a sweat doing those work outs. Ugh!
Has this kind of thing ever happened to you?
You’re trying to improve something. You do what, to you, seems the BEST thing to do. Then, sadly and with much frustration, you realize that you’ve been messing yourself up?
When you make your saggy middle saggier, it is SO EASY to give up. To decide that the effort just isn’t worth the outcome.
But this is precisely the time to keep going. To figure out what is needed to fix the problem. And to ask for help.
I need to talk to {gasp} a doctor to make sure I’m doing the very best thing for my body. To make sure I’m strengthening my core to benefit my health.
In my writing life, sometimes I need to ask the opinion of a friend/editor that I can trust to help me see the right and very best thing for my project.
How about you? Have you ever been in this situation? Who do you turn to for help?
Phonetics, Oreos, and Bacon…Ask Susie Fun
I’m having a little too much fun with the movie maker on my computer…
Ask Susie…
Sneaky Little Weasels
They are everywhere. Striking when you least expect it. Sneaky. Damaging. Terrifying.
Weasel Words.
You know you’ve seen them.
You’re reading a book. Suddenly, you realize that the author has used the words “arching brows” on EVERY SINGLE PAGE. Or that characters keep “slouching into” various articles of clothing. Perhaps every bit of dialogue begins with “Well” or “So” or “As I was saying”.
Weasel Words make me nauseous.
Especially when I find them in….GASP….my OWN WORK!
Lately, I’ve noticed the word “just”. “He just couldn’t believe…”, “She just walked on over…”, “Just like her mother, she just couldn’t be just her just self. Even just for a just a minute…”
AAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCKKKKKK!!!
Thank goodness writers get several chances to eradicate the sneaky little weasels.
Tell me, if you’re a writer, what are some of your weasel words? Are you a reader? What weasel words have you encountered in a book? Do you talk? What weasel words pop out of your mouth?
Feeling The Gunshot
Easter was super, awesome, exciting, exhausting fun. We loaded up the kids and headed home.
The way home is on The Beltline. A LONG stretch of road that cuts through farm land, forest, and city.
By the time we traveled down The Beltline in our mini-van, we were well past bedtime. My kids love staying up late.
One of them pointed out the police car ahead. Its flashing red and blue cut through the dark.
As we passed, I noticed the deer on the shoulder of the road. It lifted up its head.
We felt the police officer’s gunshot after we were passed.
I’m so glad my kids didn’t see the deer or know what they felt. The end of life. Right there on the side of the road.
But I heard that gunshot. Instantly reminded of the popping sounds at the rifle range at summer camp. The echo of a hunter’s gun in the woods. The bang from my neighbor’s house when he shot my brother in the leg over 20 years ago.
Felt the pop of air pressure. Memory of panic and isolation and loss.
“So sad.” It was all I could say.
“He had to do it, Sweetheart,” my husband said to me. “He put it out of its misery.”
I know.
Compassion doesn’t always come easy.
It seldom looks the way we wish it would.
In the van. Feeling the gunshot.
Knowing that, sometimes, mercy is all at once painful and beautiful.
As One.
Now, I don’t fancy myself a theologian. I’ll leave that up to somebody else. But I do love the Word of God. Maybe that makes me sound like a good-two-shoes. Perhaps I’m exactly that.
A lot of that Word confuses me. All the stoning of sinners and wrath and grace mixed in. Don’t get mad. Sometimes, I don’t know how it all works together. The Bible is full of mysteries and I pity the person who claims to understand it all.
It’s good to wonder. It’s good to question and doubt and turn to God and say, “I don’t get it”. Because if we 100% got it, would we really be in need of Jesus?
But what I do understand is that Jesus prayed for us. Those of us who would believe in Him because of the witness of the ancient apostles.
He didn’t pray that we’d win the debate.
Or that we’d split up into millions of congregations.
He didn’t pray that His followers would make themselves a “brand”.
Or that we’d be really good at convicting others of their sins while hiding our own behind a veil of self-righteousness.
He prayed for us. Us. And hours before His temporary death. He prayed that WE would be AS ONE. Like He is ONE with the Father.
We’ve blown it.
That’s how I feel on this Good Friday.
We have failed. We hate each other. Fight. Try to be right (not righteous…right). We kick each other when we’re down. We don’t turn the other cheek or walk the extra mile to serve our enemy. We ignore the least of these. Even say that they deserve their suffering.
We put more hope in our government than it deserves. More hope in our government than we put in God.
We put so much energy into fighting against something which is out of our control and forget to do what is most important. Feeding the hungry. Loving the unloved. Keeping our eyes on our marriages.
We are hated. Not because of our devotion to Jesus. No. We are hated for how very unlike Him we are.
Jesus prayed for us to be as one. He died for us. Our sins are covered.
And we keep messing it all up.
But the tomb is empty. He is not dead. He has risen.
And our messed up body of Christ can be resurrected. Healed. Brought back to life.
You know what we need to do?
Stop fighting to stay in the tomb. Stop pushing the stone back over the entrance. Stop whitewashing over the outside and start thinking about the inside.
We’ve blown it. But He will redeem it.
And one of these days we’ll realize how beautiful it is to be as one.
This Good Friday, I despair. Sunday morning, hope.
Introducing Christy Barritt!
My friends, today I am excited to introduce you to Christy Barritt. You might already know of her. She is a multi-published author whose most recent release The Good Girl hit the ebook world just a few weeks ago with WhiteFire Publishing. Christy agreed to hang out with us today. I’m very pleased to welcome her here!
I wrote The Good Girl ten years ago as Hurricane Isabel was ravaging Virginia, the state I call home. My brother and his wife were going out of town and had asked me to come to Minnesota to dog sit. I didn’t have any kids back then, so I said yes, looking forward to the chance to get away and explore a new place.
Their house wasn’t what I expected. It was older, had squeaky floors, and no curtains on the windows. One night, I heard the gate outside my bedroom window mysteriously open. Another night, someone rang the doorbell past midnight. Just a few little quirky things like that had happened during my stay and got my brain whirling.
That’s when I got my idea for The Good Girl. In The Good Girl, superstar Christian Tara Lancaster comes to dog sit for her sister, who’s traveling Europe with her flavor-of-the-month boyfriend. Tara, a preacher’s kid, has always followed all of the rules, and life in return seemed especially blessed. Then everything came crashing down—her marriage, her career, her reputation. Her sister, on the other hand, followed none of the rules and her life seems seamless and blissful. Every idea Tara had for how her life would turn out is wrong. The story goes from there.
I really had a great time writing this book. As I said earlier, I wrote it several years ago. It made the rounds at several publishers, one of the editors even writing, “Someone is going to snatch up this book. I wish it was us.” I could never give up on this novel, though. Something about it just gripped me.
Of all the books I’ve written, this one has the strongest faith thread. Tara is really struggling to understand if God really loves her not. She’s struggling to know if God is even real or if her whole life has been build on a false premise. Add a ghost, fame-hungry friend, and hunky neighbor to the mix, and you’ve got of my favorite stories I’ve ever written.
People have asked me, “Are you Tara?” The answer is no, I’m not Tara, but I have drawn on parts of my own experiences. I definitely put too much weight into what people think of me at times. I can also be a perfectionist. I’ve been wounded by my brothers and sisters in Christ, deeply at times. God is working on me, though, and my goal every day is to become just a little more like Him.
I hope people will read The Good Girl and walk away examining themselves, and their faith, and how they treat other Christians. The early feedback on the book has been positive. People have said that the book was not only entertaining, but it caused them to think and reevaluate their own thought patterns and actions.
To find out more information about the book, visit my website at: www.christybarritt.com.
The book is available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
Thanks so much for having me here!
Bio:
Christy Barritt is an author, freelance writer and speaker who lives in Virginia. She’s married to her Prince Charming, a man who thinks she’s hilarious–but only when she’s not trying to be. Christy’s a self-proclaimed klutz, an avid music lover who’s known for spontaneously bursting into song, and a road trip aficionado. She’s only won one contest in her life–and her prize was kissing a pig (okay, okay… actually she did win the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Suspense and Mystery for her book Suspicious Minds also). Her current claim to fame is showing off her mother, who looks just like former First Lady Barbara Bush.
When she’s not working or spending time with her family, she enjoys singing, playing the guitar, and exploring small, unsuspecting towns where people have no idea how accident prone she is.
The Good Girl:
Tara Lancaster can sing Amazing Grace in three harmonies, two languages, and interpret it for the hearing impaired. She can list the Bible canon backward, forward, and alphabetized. And the only time she ever missed church was at seventeen because she had pneumonia and her mom made her stay home.
But when her life shatters around her and her reputation is left in ruins, Tara decides escape is the only option. She flees halfway across the country to dog-sit, but the quiet anonymity she needs isn’t waiting in her sister s house. Instead she finds a knife with a threatening message, a fame-hungry friend, a too-hunky neighbor, and evidence of…a ghost?
Following all the rules has gotten her nowhere. And nothing she learned in Sunday School can tell her where to go from there.
susiefinkbeiner.com 