I wake up fairly early every day, by 8, for sure. Sunday is a lighter writing day than the weekdays, but I still wake up and write for about an hour, beginning right around 8. I definitely have coffee first, and then I start writing. I do think it's ...
There's always room for your hard-core country songs, and that will always shine through, and I'll always have those on my albums. And then I'll have fun stuff that gets people up and dancing that some people may want to say, 'Well that sounds real p...
Naturally all of us don't think we deserve very much. We don't believe that things will go well for us in the future, generally because they may not have in the past. Our natural bent is to expect the worst. Our natural tendency is to be negative and...
Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It...
Years ago, I picked up figure skating. How hard could spins and jumps be, I thought? It's just applied Newtonian physics. After repeatedly falling on my rear end, I realized it was harder than I thought. But it had an upside. That is how I met my wif...
Ah,well," Said Abe, idly studying his fingertips. "I have it on good authority there's going to be a new 'gate' opening up soon over on the south side of the wall." The truth dawned on me. "Oh lord. You're the one who's been doling out C4." "You make...
Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the...
When you think yours is the only true path you forever chain yourself to judging others and narrow the vision of God. The road to righteousness and arrogance is a parallel road that can intersect each other several times throughout a person's life. I...
Reputation is what others think of us; character is what God knows of us. When you have spent what feels like eternity trying to repair a few moments of time that destroyed the view others once had of you then you must ask yourself if you have the pr...
Then she tells me that Jesus is still here because Jesus was once here. And parts of Jesus are still floating in the air. She tells me Jesus' DNA is part of the collective DNA. She tells we are all part of Jesus, we are all Jesus in part. She tells m...
People who make snide comments to authors like "anyone can write a book" or "well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can't be that hard" or poke at a book because it's "romance" or "genre fiction" and act like that somehow makes it substandard becaus...
I am prepared to discuss the things that I believe we need to do not just to raise the debt limit. Raising the debt limit is the easiest thing. That's one vote away. The hard thing is to show the world we are serious about putting our spending in ord...
So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve ...
I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass ...
Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and ch...
My family tree spreads wide as well. I am a great ape, and you are a great ape, and so are chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos, all of us distant and distrustful cousins. I know this is troubling. I too find it hard to believe there is a connectio...
The truth of God's Word cuts through the good and bad of our lives like a trowel digging up hard-to-remove weeds without damaging the plant.
Love myself I do. Not everything, but I love the good as well as the bad. I love my crazy lifestyle, and I love my hard discipline. I love my freedom of speech and the way my eyes get dark when I'm tired. I love that I have learned to trust people wi...
I'm thankful God has given us the technology where we can see each other through Skype on the computer. It's not the same thing, but at least we can see each other. Imagine the time before when that wasn't available and people had to go defend our co...
Life hands us a lot of hard choices, and other people can help us more than we might realize. We often think we should make important decisions using just our own internal resources. What are the pros and cons? What does my gut tell me? But often we ...
We were brought up Protestant, and I went to church three times a day on a Sunday. My parents weren't Bible-bashers, but we all have a strong belief in God and a strong faith. We had a huge garden; our house was a bit like a scene from 'The Good Life...
