Amazon's 2011 contest

Well the breakthrough novel award contest is on again. I'm thinking of entering Vengeance as it did so well last year and this year one of the judges is a historical major which means that interests her. I feel that "Goldfish" would be better received after reading the first book. I also feel the Vengeance is better in the plot and character development. What do you think?

I agree with you. Also, I think the first one is your best work so far.

Perseverance my friend. I have not followed your novels closely but I have read many of your personal true-life stories both here and on the AP. You certainly have a gift for relating events to an audience in a captivating manner.

Some time around 2001 a former co-worker started writing following her disability retirement. She had written two novels and no publishers picked them up. She was very frustrated and continued writing while also attending writing seminars. I was familiar with her writing skills as at the time I was her immediate supervisor and her job was to write policy, procedures etc. for the police department and I would review her work product and make necessary corrections. She had a good grasp of grammar and punctuation but her sentence structure was sometimes weak.

She said her writing style was described as "cozy" and the novels had a Christian message and her target audience was Christian or people struggling with placing their faith in something other than themselves. She used her experiences and knowledge as a police officer in her novels. She used her k-9 experience in her first novel.

In 2007 she got a novel published by a new and un-renown publisher. Then in 2009 her 2nd novel was published by the same company. Neither book was a big seller on Amazon and I believe the publisher may have gone under.

I purchased and read her first book but I have not yet purchased her 2nd book but I intend to do so. I don't do a lot of book reading and sometimes it takes me months to work my way through a book. My friend is a good writer but it took me several months to get through her novel. The story was good, but it never captured me to the point that I didn't want to put it down. Your ability/gift of expression in the stories I have read do a much better job of catching my interest than did her novel.

I started off saying, "Perseverance my friend." My friend has continued pursuing her dream of becoming a novelist, constantly writing and having her work critiqued and constantly attending writing seminars in order to improve. A few months ago she wrote me asking for prayer as she was in contact with Tyndale Publishers, a major Christian publisher and they were reviewing her work to see if they wanted to publish her novels. A few weeks later she wrote to say that she had signed a contract with Tyndale to write three novels. She's not big-time yet, but with perseverance and God's will she finally has her foot in the door and hopes to make a living using writing as her ministry.

Thank you for the encouragement. I'm still participating in writer's forums and am almost done with the property. They inspected the electrical breaker box and meter that I installed and said, "It's too high, drop it down some to eye level."

Well eye level for me is about 5' 5" and that's what I did, but it is a lot of work. Everything I did had to be taken apart and redone. I'm almost finished and will finish that today. Then I have to tile the living room and stretch the fence after the electric company puts in one more pole.

I generally do most of my writing in the winter when it's too cold and nasty to get outside, we are supposed to be in the 20's this week.

We upgraded our electrical and had a new meter put in several years ago and my job was to contact Edison and ask about location. The Edison guy came out and said 6' and facing the street. Hopefully your inspector won't be 6'6" tall and ask you to raise it to his eye level....

I downloaded the specs Mikey, it says 5' 6" to the center of the meter can. I'm within an inch or so, they just pointed and said "eye level" I'm sure it will pass this time. I now need to run the 2/0 wire up the conduit and through a weather head, then attach them to the meter can. That's 18' times three at $3.00 per foot for the wire. Copper is expensive which is why we keep hearing about people burglarizing churches and pulling the wiring.

Our general contractor who put in our new meter had his Romanian buddy pull in the hot wire from the telephone pole. He said hot lines of that voltage scare the bejeebers out of him but "those crazy Romanians" aren't afraid of anything....