Timothy's Thoughts

D enise Hunter posted a sneak peak at Seaside Letters , a story about a woman who falls for a customer and gets into a online dating relationship with him, but doesn’t want to let him know (go figure). Actually, she didn’t steal that idea from me, though it has a few of the same elements in it as Searching for Mom . But there are some very obvious differences. The main similarities are that the love interest between a worker in a restaurant and a customer, as well as the online dating aspect of it involving deception. In my story, the poor guy didn’t even know he was in an online dating relationship.   I thought the cover was interesting. It has all the stuff wrong with it that I don’t care for with recent Christian fiction covers, such as appearing to be a stock photo, chopping off the head and too much pink. What makes it interesting is that the woman dress appears to have gotten hung on the name banner as she walked past it. So ladies, that’s why you shouldn’t wear short skir...

O n another author’s blog I mentioned that when I wrote For the Love of a Devil I outlined it backwards. When I mentioned it, I didn’t think it a particularly foreign approach, but at least one person hadn’t considered that possibility, so maybe it’s worth covering in more detail. Why Outline Backwards There are some good reasons to outline backwards anytime, but in my case, I was working with a story with a known ending. For the Love of a Devil is based on the first three chapters of Hosea . I was also dealing with an unlikely scenario in modern society. Slavery is illegal in America, though it still exists in some form. Read the first three chapters of Hosea, then ask yourself, how do you take a modern woman, married to a good Christian man, sell her into slavery and then have her husband buy her back? The book of Hosea gives us a hint, when we see that Hosea was to choose a wife of the children of whoredoms. Gomer came from a family that didn’t teach her right. But she escaped tha...