Guess What I Found!

Graduation...check. Summer camp...check. Now to pack and get ready to head to Texas for six months. I decided to spend a few minutes updating books I've read on my Goodreads Profile and guess what I found!

Do you know?

Ok, I'll tell you.

I found THIS! A page for my upcoming sequel to Side By Side. It is called Door to Freedom and, according to Goodreads, will be released in February, 2017! I better start writing it. Just kidding. I've written it, but I am doing final polishing on it and appreciate prayers for that!

I think it's basically a place-holder because at the moment there is no cover displayed (pssst! It's a pretty cool looking cover and I can't wait to share it with you...but it's not quite fully finished) and also the description has a few issues, like stopping in mid-...

So...a little work left to do on it, but the other exciting news is that I am expecting an offer in the mail for a contract for Book 3 which will wrap up the series. I am so excited about this as well, because Book 3 is going to be fun to write.

Want to find out news about upcoming writing without having to come to this blog to check? You can sign up for my newsletter here.

WINNERS!

Thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed Side by Side so far! I'm happy to announce the five winners of copies of the book were chosen.

Congratulations to:

Jen Colson
Erin Riley
Rachel B
Charlotte Perotti
Stephanie Chauncey


Winners, please email your mailing addresses to info@litfusegroup.com, or keep an eye out for an email from Litfuse ( don't forget to check your spam folder just in case!)

Happy reading!

In Case You Missed It

Here are a few BLOG TOUR bits in case you missed it:

The SIDE BY SIDE giveaway is almost over, but you can still sign up HERE. The winners will be announced here on May 12.

CLICK HERE to listen to my playlist on Spotify. The five songs included are related to SIDE BY SIDE. I like Leali and Salib Fuadi because they are Sudanese and I love the very Sudanese Arabic sound. Takes me back to Khartoum! Halleluia is in Arabic but not Sudanese so the accent is different. The liturgical sound reminds me of the more traditional churches in the Middle East. I chose the final medley for the song "He Knows My Name" because it reminds me that God knows and loves the Halimahs of the world.

You can see pictures of my writing area where I did a lot of editing for SIDE BY SIDE RIGHT HERE.

Sunday Refreshments is a blog of devotions written by various authors. You can see mine by CLICKING HERE.

And here is a blog post for "The Books Authors Read" HERE.

And don't forget to check out the pictures on PINTEREST. It's like my virtual photo album that goes with the story.

See you on May 12!

I Figured It Out! (sort of)

So, I figure out some stuff about a Blog Tour! And it's not even over yet, that's how skilled I am :)

I got some links for you...

• You can enter to win a FREE copy of Side by Side! Even if you already have one, you might as well get a free one so you can give it as a gift to a reading buddy :) To do that, you can CLICK HERE.
• Here is "The story behind the story" about the novel. You know, why I wrote it and that sort of stuff. If you are interested in that you can CLICK HERE.
• If you want to check out the blogs on the BLOG TOUR you might find some interesting bloggers to follow. To do that, you can CLICK HERE and then click on the "Reviews" bar under the book info and the bloggers will drop down. You can see their blogs and the posts about SIDE BY SIDE by clicking on their links. More will appear over the coming days, so keep checking!
• Also, you can check out my garden and writing space at Novel Garden. Just CLICK HERE. I am the featured author at the moment, but you can still see my pictures after the feature by CLICKING HERE.
• And finally, here's a cool graphic with a quote from the book. You can see this and more fun stuff about SIDE BY SIDE on Pinterest by CLICKING HERE.

BLOG TOUR!

What's a blog tour?

...

No, it's not a question I'm answering here. I'm asking YOU!

Seriously, what's a blog tour? I am SO walking through this whole publishing thing blindly. Wow.

My answer is: a Blog Tour is something I'm doing from TODAY through MAY 10. Perhaps on May 11 I will post an answer and tell you what a blog tour is. Until then, I'm stumbling and Googling my way through.

For starters though, and you better hurry up and get your name in on this one...you can WIN a free copy of SIDE BY SIDE! As my husband says when I'm trying to find a good deal on something, "Cheap is good, but free is better". That's why I found myself crocheting a rug out of old bed sheets. Yes, really. I don't have time to go into that right now because I'm on blog tour. Remind me to post about it later.

Anyway, ENTER NOW!!! CLICK RIGHT HERE.

If you are a Kindle or Nook kinda person, no worries, you can buy an ebook version. You'll get a head start on the folks who are waiting to see if they win :)

Winners will be announced on May 11.

#H54F: High Five For Friday

This Friday our family is super happy because...

#1 It's the beginning of SPRING BREAK! Yay! The boys are so excited to have a week free of homework, school work, and busy schedules.

#2 Kris left Sunday night on a trip and returned Wednesday night. That makes for a busy week for him. We are glad to be together as a family for the coming week.

#3 I actually received a copy of Side By Side! I am so happy to get to hold in my hands the product of a lot of work. A dream come true :)

#4 Parent/Teacher conferences this week. I'm happy to report that all the boys are on high honor roll. High Five for the Kelley Boys.

#5 My computer is well again...I think. That's a relief and definitely worth a high five.

What was your week like?

It Arrived in the Mail!

Look what has arrived! It's a real-deal book y'all! Sadly, I have not seen it yet. The woes of living overseas. But my family has seen it and I'm pretty sure they are telling me the truth :) These are my advanced copies. I asked my mother-in-law to send me two copies and it cost a whopping $18 in postage so those books better get here because good grief. I can't afford to pay the postage for my own book!

Today I got on Amazon and noticed the book is no longer labeled as "pre-order", but the kindle version is. What? So, perhaps if you order it now they will actually send it to you now!! How cool would that be? Except, so much for a grand "Book Release Day" because apparently it has already released. Oh well.

So, in honor of all of us totally missing release day...whenever that was, you can apparently order it now. And I'd BE SO PUMPED if you would get on Amazon and put a review on there. That would be great!

Now, another exciting thing was that last night I met via Skype with someone from the publisher to record an interview for an upcoming podcast. Wow, that's a first for me. They wanted audio AND video. Yikes. That's unfortunate because I don't like my hair. But it's supposed to be about the book anyway so I decided to get over it and agree to the interview.

Besides the issue of my hair, there was the issue of where to set up my computer. Not in my "office" because it is more of a "crawl space" behind a giant wardrobe. And it's very messy. Not the living room because of three students doing homework and a dog that would want to sit in my lap and I don't want to be a crazy old dog-lady. Well, Kris is gone, so I took over his office.

Next problem. His office.

How to make a man's office look like a cozy living room...amazingly, I sort of did it! Look at this!

Can't you sort of think that I am sitting in a cozy living room or at least in a very cool looking office. I mean, awesome wall-hangings, a fresh ivy, family picture, cool looking lamp. "Welcome to my livingroom, all five people listening to this podcast!"

Look, I even brushed my hair and put lipstick on! I had to hunt for lipstick because seriously, who wears lipstick over here? I was once told (in a very Southern drawl) that "A Southern girl ALWAYS wears her lipstick for a picture..." (awkward pause) "you do have lipstick don't you?" To which I replied, "Does chapstick count?"

So I hunted down and actually found...well, it was more of a tinted chapstick, but pretty darn close to lipstick. I slathered it on my lips and immediately got grossed out and wiped off half of it with a kleenex. At any rate, this is what I looked like for the interview. Cozy, professional. Well, at least decent.

But to appreciate the efforts I went through, you need to see the full picture. This is what it actually looked like in there:

Yea, note the golf clubs shoved over to the left, papers barely out of camera shot. My soccer shorts go nicely with my fancy top, right? Don't you wear soccer shorts and flipflops when you are being interviewed? Hey, don't judge. If you had to do it at nine o'clock at night, you might have done that too. 

I also had to instruct my kids not to play their loud music or talk loud, puleeeeeeez, for half an hour. And I had to steal the dog's new squeeky toy that she carries in her mouth at all times and when she sleeps, she lays on top of it so no one will steal it. So she was distraught for half an hour last night. I shut the office door and could still hear her sniffing through the crack between the door and the tile floor.

Well, thankfully, the internet across 10,000 miles apparently makes the video a tad scratchy, so maybe the scene will look like a cozy living room and my hair will look awesome. I plan to post the link here whenever they put it up. They said it would be closer to the release day. 

Which brings me back to Amazon, who says they can now send it...and today it says only 2 left in stock, more on the way? What? 

Is this part of being a new author? Being in a perpetual state of confusion? At least I'm enjoying the ride!

I hope you'll get a chance to read Side By Side and will spread the word!

P.S. Oh, and I created a hashtag which is hilarious seeing as how I don't really know what to do with it. But those of you who do and want to help me spread the word, you can use #SideBySideNovel.

Book Tour

No silly! I'm not going on a book tour. That's for writers who know what they're doing. I am giving a tour of the books in my life. We used to read a lot when I was a kid. We'd all gather in the living room at night and Dad would read to us. We lived in the boonies, y'all, and didn't have anything else to do at night. I'm glad we did it. I learned to love books.

If I have a lot of time on my hands-which is absolutely never, but I feel like at some point I did because I have this faint memory of it-I will enjoy all sorts of books. Nowadays my time is short. I want the book to be really excellent if I'm gonna spend my time reading it. The problem is, I haven't figured out the formula for what I consider awesome, so I can never figure out what book to start reading. I end up spending my reading time perusing Amazon or Goodreads trying to figure out what would be worth the short time I have to read it.

I want to know about the author. So then I start looking up their websites and making decisions based on the author as well. As if I need one more stipulation to add to what book I should choose. That's why recommendations from people I know are also biggies for me. If someone else-that I know y'all, not just a random person-read it and liked it, maybe I will too.

I like to learn something. I actually don't really want to read a story just for the sake of a good story. I want to read to the last page, close the book, and feel like I've learned something about history, a country, a group of people, or something.

As a child I loved the Betsy, Tacy & Tib books. I thought they were so cool and loved how much time they spent together. And what cool names y'all! I wanted to rename my best friend Tassy. Or Tib! Who wouldn't want a best friend named Tib? My best friend was named Susan and she only spoke Indonesian. But she lived two doors down from me and she didn't think I was too weird, even if I was the only white girl in the whole little Asian town I was raised in. So, you don't think I'm weird? Best friends we are!

As I got older I loved CS Lewis' space trilogy and The Screwtape Letters. I remember scenes from those books to this day. They helped me to better understand my Christian walk by giving me a creative way to look at life. And also it was very cool to love CS Lewis. Very grown up. Like drinking coffee. Which I started doing at summer camp because all the returning college kids drank coffee and that was very grown up. Like reading CS Lewis.

In high school I had to read I Loved a Girl and I Married You by Walter Trobisch and found them to be very interesting. Probably some of my first non-fiction reading began then. I was taking a Marriage class. In high school. Strange right? Looking back on it that does seem strange. But whatever. It was a good class and I learned a lot about relationships from those books.

College was way too busy. Good grief who reads books for fun in college? It's reading for class and then hanging out with college buddies. College was a four year hiatus from reading for fun. I did read some famous stuff, during the short period of time that I considered English Literature as my minor. Then I had to read Edgar Allen Poe and some other creepy authors.

And worse than that, we had to discuss the deeper meaning of every piece. Really? What if the author just wanted to write about a big tall oak tree and it had nothing to do with her deeper need for acceptance that she never got from her mother? What if a tree is just a tree because the author looked out her window and saw a tree and wanted to put it in her story? So I quickly learned that I had nothing to contribute to discussions in class.

Also my main professor was a little creepy himself. He drove an old station wagon with fuzzy dice hanging in the front windshield. He gave me a necklace with a gold heart for my birthday and also asked me what I would say if he asked me out. I told him I would say no and I promptly switched my minor to Psychology.

I didn't read again until our second year of marriage and that was when we lived in Africa. We were the only foreigners in a town in the middle of nowhere. OK, there were two Peace Corps girls, but they were our polar opposites so we didn't really cross paths. Our first year there, we didn't speak the language and no one spoke much English. So I read about two million books. Or maybe around 50. I think I averaged a book a week. To which I say to my previous self - Good grief Jana, get out and meet the people already.

But somehow God blessed us anyway and we did eventually pick up the language and start making friends. My favorite book from all the many books I read while there was Out of Africa. Perhaps I remember that book in particular because I was able to travel to Kenya and actually see the house and some of the area where Karen Blixen lived.

Nowadays I read a little here and there. I think it's good to have a book or two in process. I like to have one "serious" book and one fiction book. I guess I like travel books and suspense type books the most. The verdict is still out on suspense. I like suspense movies, does that count?

I don't like to commit to a long series, but I do like:

The Zion Covenant Books by Bodie and BrockThoene (now that's how I like to learn history)
Mrs. Pollifax books by Dorothy Gilman (I like the different locations, and also Mrs. Pollifax cracks me up)
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (although I petered out after awhile, that series is too long)

Some of my favorite fiction books are:

Nights of Rain and Stars (I think that's an awkward name for a book) by Maeve Binchey
The Book Thief (thanks for the recommendation Twyla C!)
Safely Home by Randy Alcorn
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Christmas Train by David Baldacci
Invisible by Lorena McCourtney
Monday Morning Faith by Lori Copeland
Married to a Bedouin by Marguerite van Geldermalsen (not fiction but a favorite)
Diplomatic Baggage by Brigid Keenan
Stepping Heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss
The Last Sin Eater by Francine Rivers

What do you like to read?

Read a Free Excerpt of Side By Side!

The countdown is on for the April release of Side By Side! You can pre-order it now. But you can also read the first three chapters NOW for FREE!

Just click here:

SIDE BY SIDE

FGM = Love?

Female circumcision is radical and unimaginable to most of my friends in the West. To most of my friends in North Africa, it is a normal part of life. Today I read an interesting article (FGM - An Act of Love) that sheds light on the thinking of those who circumcise their daughters.

I've written about FGM/C (Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting) in my upcoming novel Side By Side. The experiences in the book come from the true stories of young women who have undergone this practice.

As women, we should know at least a little about what more than 125 million women and girls in our world today are going through. You can read more about what FGM/C is here (this is just a fact sheet, there are no graphics, although the facts are heart-wrenching all on their own.)

It would be easy to become overwhelmed by the traumatic stories of women who have undergone FGM/C. It would be easy to become angry at those who perpetuate the practice. But I propose that the more one learns about a culture, the more difficult it is to find a black and white answer.

As mentioned in the article, "Whether we like it or not, female genital cutting is an act of love." I'm not saying that I agree that this is a healthy train of thought, I'm just saying it's worth the time to stop. Stop. Take a breath. And remember that not everyone thinks like we do.

I sat in a room in North Africa, the only white woman in a sea of dark-skinned villagers. We were attending a government-sponsored program designed to put a stop to FGM/C and tribal scarring. Most of my friends had undergone both.

The women squeeled and hid their faces when the program leaders showed us a film of a three-year-old girl being circumcised and scarred. It was gruesome and heart-breaking. But I knew that my friends who were moms would still go home and schedule an appointment for their daughters to be circumcised.

As a Westerner, I'd say it's fairly easy to form a strong opinion about FGM/C. It's well-documented as a harmful practice. I'm grateful for organizations (both local and international) that work diligently to educate and inform regarding FGM/C. It is hard for me to understand why this practice continues.

But let's bring it closer to home...

What practices do we have in our own cultures that are unhealthy or harmful, but that we guard carefully because to change it would be to go against a deeply embedded cultural norm? Perhaps you can't think of anything as huge or problematic as FGM/C, but I believe we still have unhealthy cultural norms that we do just...because. Because "that's how it's always been done," and because, "that's how everyone does it."

Some women in communities that have practiced FGM/C for centuries are taking a stand. Are you brave enough to take a stand against the unhealthy norms in your own culture? Am I?

It's worth some thought.

Look What I Found!

This week I was looking around on Goodreads. Do you know what that is? It's like a social media app for readers. It's also a fun way to keep track of books you are reading. Except that I keep adding books that I am reading, and then I quit reading them before I finish them. Anyone else do that? Well, whatever. If you are on Goodreads, let me know. I am still learning about the app, I'm definitely a newbie.

Anyway, I went to my profile to look at something--I don't remember what--and I was surprised to see THIS! Side By Side is already available for pre-order! What? So fun--and quite surprising honestly--to find this!

So I found it on Amazon and Christian Books. Woohoo! By the way, I noticed that Christian Books has the best price.There is more information about it on New Hope Digital.

At the moment it is available for pre-order for the paperback copy. I'm guessing that it will become available for e-book (Kindle etc) in April, when the book releases. I am still new to all of this as this is my first time to work with a publisher.

I am so excited. Thanks to all of you who have encouraged me along the way. I can hardly believe this dream, that began about 9 or 10 years ago, is becoming a reality!