Category Archives: ATS LIVE

Serendipity: a happy accident or pleasant surprise. Our lives are full of accidents and surprises. Being able to see the happy and find the pleasant in them– that’s the hat trick. More than a decade ago, after filling away yet another rejection letter, I squared my shoulders and took another path. I spent the next several years working feverishly to build a platform for my writing. Progress was painfully slow. Little by little I obligated myself here and committed myself there until one day I found myself back into the proverbial corner. I’d worked myself into a position where I had to create content week in and week out for my website and radio affiliates. All Things Southern became a burden. I began chaffing at the demands of my own creation. She was requiring too much effort, too many words. I felt sure I was spinning my wheels. I longed to lay it down and write the books I felt sure she was preventing me from writing. Despite having felt that ATS was my mission field from the onset, that I was meant to lighten loads and ease burdens with weekly stories and chuckles wrapped around little nuggets of devotional thoughts, I began negotiatingwith God. I’ll lay this all down, I told Him repeatedly, if He would just give me the okay. He wouldn’t. I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to say that. But I’ll do ladies’ seminars and concentrate on teaching the Word, I told Him. You know how I love that! All I got from heaven was a big fat no. In the middle of that season IT finally happened. I became a published author. After having self-published my first three books, I now found myself with a for real agent and a contract with a for real publishing house. Booksellers and readers embraced Suck Your Stomach In and Put Some Color On, (and I’m eternally grateful), allowing me the privilege of working on a follow-up, Sue Ellen’s Girl Ain’t Fat, She Just Weighs Heavy. Still, I persisted in kicking against the weekly deadlines. I continued dreaming of the “other things” I wanted to write that All Things Southern was keeping me from writing. One day I’ll tell you the story of how I came to lay my want-to down. God and I didn’t “strike a deal.” I yielded. I decided to want what He wanted before I wanted it. And then I asked Him to make it so, to move my heart by what moved His. Ever so slowly I began to value the weight of All Things Southern that was always forcing me to cry out to Him. And strangely, that led me to gratitude for the very demands I’d been resenting. Talk about your pleasant surprises! Oh, and those words I had been hammering out week after week? With my new perspective I began to see how they had become the bones of those first two Penguin releases. That whole time in the trenches–…