Father Peyton’s Rosary Prayer Book: The Family That Prays Together Stays Together by Patrick Peyton If you want to invigorate your love of the Rosary,…
2 CommentsRelevant Fiction for Body & Soul
Author: CAstfalk
Carolyn Astfalk is a wife, mother, and author of contemporary Catholic romances, including her latest, All in Good Time. She formerly worked as a communications director and now works just to keep her head above water. Find her books on Amazon and her other words scattered around the blogosphere and social media.
Welcome to the September 2022 edition of An Open Book, hosted both at My Scribbler’s Heart and CatholicMom.com! I’ve been listening to Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood while…
4 CommentsI’ve been married 25 years, and I brought a couple of small pets into marriage that died before we’d even had children. We had a…
3 CommentsWelcome to the August 2022 edition of An Open Book, hosted both at My Scribbler’s Heart and CatholicMom.com! Somehow, I squeezed in a lot of reading…
8 CommentsMy husband recently participated in a home brewing contest. While there, I did something I’d never done before – poured beer for hundreds of people. Observing the brewers, their families, and their interactions, I realized they had a lot in common with the writing community. Namely creativity, camaraderie, affability, and their support and encouragement of one another.
Throughout the day, I observed many parallels that translate easily from beer to books.
Lesson 1: Presentation may or may not be indicative of content quality.
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Summer’s here, and it’s time for a road trip! If the price of gas is keeping you close to home, take a virtual trip with a fictional road trip. Here are several I recommend:
This Life by Jennifer RodewaldIf you’ve read books 1-3 in the Murphy Brothers series, you probably didn’t care much for cold, snooty Kate and Jacob. Especially once you learned that they’d betrayed Jackson Murphy. There’s a world of pain and insecurity hiding beneath that hoity-toity veneer, and Jennifer Rodewald exposes every last drop of it by letting her characters hit rock bottom and then sending them on the road, where simplicity and intimacy is forced upon them.
As the story says, the worst times can end up becoming the best times, once we’ve stripped away all the excess that has been distracting us from what’s most important: God and relationships being at the top of that list.
This Life also delves into a theme I’ve not often seen in romance – the dignity of work. God made work for man, not the other way around, and that’s ably demonstrated here.
This isn’t your typical romance – the characters are already married – but it’s an important story about redemption and second chances. And even if you’ve never declared bankruptcy and boondocked across the American West in a schoolie, you may recognize yourself in Jacob and Kate – your shame, pride, cowardice, and your resistance to complete honesty and vulnerability, even with those closest to you. Even your spouse. I know I saw a little of myself there, and I’m better for having read This Life.
Relevant Fiction Reviews: Road Trip Romance! Avoid the pain at the pump and take a fictional ride. Share on X Leave a Comment
Writing is a notoriously solitary occupation, but bringing those polished words to the page or the screen is not.
Tapping furiously at your keyboard in your comfy clothes, crumbs dusting the keyboard and your favorite beverage at hand may eventually result in a first draft. Chances are if you didn’t need help and encouragement getting that far, you will if you want to push that draft over the goal line as a published product.
There are all sorts of writing communities out there. Some are as loosely associated as a shared hashtag. Others involve dues and duties. A plethora fall in between. You can find groups built around genres, locales, and various media.
For Catholic writers, a community built around faith can offer the support, encouragement, and development you’ve been seeking.
Almost ten years ago, with a couple of novels in various states of readiness for the world under my belt, I joined the Catholic Writers Guild. It is the single best thing I did to further my writing.
Leave a CommentWelcome to the July 2022 edition of An Open Book, hosted both at My Scribbler’s Heart and CatholicMom.com! My husband has been doing a bit more…
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