Clarice, tell us how Party of One came to be? I was widowed in 1998, around the same time the movie The Sixth Sense came out. Every time I saw the trailer and heard the line “I see dead people walking around; they’re everywhere,” I would think, “I see lonely people walking around; they’re everywhere.” Fifteen years later, I still do. During the eight years I was widowed, God gave me a heart for single adults—especially those who have slipped through the cracks between active couples and busy families. You know who I mean. They’re the ones who volunteer to…
Tying the Past to the Present
The theme of this website is “Tying the Past to the Present: looking through the lens of history to learn lessons for today.” As a Christian historical writer, I’ve learned many things through historical research that have informed and enriched my life. They’ve given me a better appreciation of people who lived in different times, and made me thirsty to learn more. As an educator, lessons were a daily part of my life for almost a quarter of a century, and each lesson I designed was created to help students gain the skills they needed to better interact with, and…
To Blog, or Not to Blog: That was the question
I knew when I switched careers from teacher to writer there would be new challenges, learning, and expectations. Instead of dealing with students, parents, other teachers, counselors, and administrators, my world is now populated with readers, other writers, critique partners, literary agents, and publishing house editors. It made me nervous to think of starting over at the bottom of the pile, and I wondered if I was ready for the change. Did I have the necessary skills? Could I grow a skin thick enough to take rejection in stride and learn from it? Could I meet deadlines? Would the energy…
The Impact of Career Choice on My Writing
CHANGING CAREERS I was an English Language Acquisition teacher for almost twenty-five years. During this time, I worked with students from many different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. How these students communicated with me and each other, and when and why bilingual people chose to code switch, or alternate between two or more languages in a single conversation, have been sources of on-going interest and fascination for me. Randy Pausch said, “The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It’s not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or…