Just Dropping In For A Visit

Okay, if you’re here on my blog, you are likely noticing the paucity of recent posts. I admit it—I am a terrible blogger. Bottom line, I don’t do casual chat, or even short (which is why I write 400+ page international intrigue novels to start with!). Please don’t take this as a slam at successful bloggers. I admire bloggers who can carry on a continuous (and succinct) conversation on a variety of subjects of interest to themselves and others (I even follow a few). I just can’t keep saying something new about topics I’ve already touched or keep coming up with new topics.

Which doesn’t mean I don't continue to care passionately about the issues I've written on to date in this blog. Freedom of speech and worship. Justice on a national and international level. The consequences of actions made in fear or ignorance on my own nation's future as well as that of billions around the world. The suffering and courage and awesome fortitude of spiritual brothers and sisters whose lives have crossed mine around the world.

And, of course, my own books, what they are about, and just why I wrote them.

But the bottom line is that I’ve already said in this blog what I really want to say about those subjects. And my life is too filled already with writing assignments, as senior editor and investigative journalist for a magazine, a ministry communications department to run, and of course that next novel to write! The columns I’ve taken considerable time to write over the last years are still what I want to say to my readers. SO a simple solution comes to mind. I am posting below some of the blog entries I would encourage any new (or old) reader of this blog to browse if you really want to know what is on my heart/mind.

And when I next find something new on which I have strong opinions/feelings, I will squeeze out a serious block of time to write a serious (and likely lengthy) column on the subject. Meanwhile, if you are interested in what goes on in my daily life, drop over to Facebook. I’d be delighted to see you there! And I hope you will enjoy a few of these past blog posts.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN:

MY BOOKS: 

Congo Dawn:

When Danger and Faith Collide in a Congolese Rainforest

From An Ituri Rainforest 

Change a Heart, Change a Nation

The DMZ: Ten Years Ago Today (written 9/11/11)

Veiled Freedom: An Interview

Freedom's Stand:  

Back Stage With Freedom’s Stand

Read What Advance Readers Say About Freedom’s Stand

Freedom’s Stand Heading Your Way At Last
 

WRITERS TIPS:

Armchair Globetrotting for the Earthbound Writer

Writing Tip#2: Weaving Illusion into Reality

Writing Tip#3: Unforgettable Characters from the Eccentric,Unusual, and Just Plain Ornery

Investigative Techniques 2.0: Piecing the Puzzle

Just Do It!

POLITICAL OP-EDS:

Is Democracy Enough?

At Whom Am I Really Angry?

Who Is Sayed Moussa (Afghanistan)?

Counting the Cost (Afghanistan)

Afghanistan: No Easy Solution

Afghanistan Goes to the Polls

Good, Bad or Ugly? (India)

Still Sleeping? (global religious persecution)

While We Were Sleeping

Change a Heart, Change a Nation (Congo)

Afghanistan’s Upcoming Elections: Do They Matter?

Unintended Consequences (Iran)

Is Democracy Enough?#2

PERSONAL COLUMNS:

Dancing in the Storm

Israel: Walking Where Jesus Walked

Christmas: White As Snow

Finding Hope in Kenya, Africa

Easter: He is Risen!

Where’s Diego?

Is Democracy Enough?

Today Iraq is "celebrating" its tenth anniversary of "liberation" with a string of bombing that has already left more than 50 dead, hundreds wounded Riddled by corruption and violence, with more than 90% of its once sizeable Christian community dead or in exile, Iraq gives witness to the reality that Islamic sharia totalitarianism and "fledgling democracy" are an impossible oxymoron. A reality I predicted in a column written shortly after that initial "liberation". Here on the 10th anniversary is the original column published in a number of venues at the time. I so wish I'd been wrong in what predicted back then:

OP-ED 2004: "IS DEMOCRACY ENOUGH?"

By: Jeanette Windle

A news commentator threw out a question the other night in more of the endless analysis and rumination that has occupied our TV screens since there ceased to be sufficient combat scenes to fill 24 hours of cable news. The question: Can an Islamic democracy work in Iraq?

The commentator followed that incredible dichotomy of terms with a statement that left me stunned. “After all,” he said, “Islamic democracy is working fairly well in Iran and Turkey.”

Democracy working well? In a totalitarian theocracy where any expressed difference of opinion with an Islamic cleric can bring a sentence of life imprisonment—or execution? Where every aspect of dress, art, music, reading material, romantic relations, and private or public life is censured under the harsh scrutiny of the religious police? Where to explore another faith or philosophy than that to which one was born, or to raise questions within one’s own, is labeled blasphemy, carrying by sharia law a penalty of death?

Have we forgotten why our democracy contains a separation of church and state?

Granted, Turkey has been more successful with democracy. But only insofar as political power has been wrested away from theocratic rule. And the fragile balance of that democracy remains at constant risk from clerical authorities demanding to replace its current secular legal code with sharia law. Since the above is hardly news to any reasonably informed citizen, my danger antenna shot up immediately at said anchor’s comments. Is this member of the media’s definition of democracy—a majority vote—really what America aspires to export to the rest of the world?

If so, we—and Iraq—are in serious trouble. And it might explain why so many countries emerging from totalitarianism in recent years have proved incapable of sinking any serious democratic roots. You see, the cry we hear these days for democratization, in Iraq and around the world, ignores one simple factor. It was never democracy in its simplest definition—a majority vote—that established freedom in America.

It was justice.

Justice defined in a written system of law that guarantees, not the will of the many, the powerful, the strong, nor those who can manipulate the most votes, but equal rights and inalienable freedoms for every citizen, regardless of social standing, gender, ethnicity or creed. Justice that cannot be overwritten by any majority vote of people who are too often guilty of placing their own interests above their neighbors, of blindly following leaders with agendas of their own.

Ah, but the Middle East is different, we are told. They have thousands of years of totalitarian history, dozens of factions who have never gotten along. We cannot impose our American ideas of justice or expect them to adopt our version of democracy.

I have more respect for the Iraqi people than that. Have we forgotten our own history? America was not founded on a heritage of democracy, but by fugitives from countless totalitarian regimes. It is no racial or cultural superiority that allows 150 diverse nationalities to live in peace within our borders, including any number of ethnicities that in their origin countries are still slaughtering each other. It is the human rights and freedoms laid out in the most incredible document of law and justice ever written in the history of mankind, the Constitution of the United States of America.

Yet we state apologetically that we don’t want to export our moral and ethical ideas to the rest of the world. Why not? If we really believe that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, why should we apologize for offering that idea to the rest of the world, for encouraging it wherever and whenever we can? Or is it that too many within our political and media establishment do not consider freedom an inalienable right, but a cultural choice they are simply fortunate enough to be in the right place to possess?

I, for one, happen to believe life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not American values, but the inalienable right of every human being on this planet. Including the Iraqis.

How then can we ensure this right for the Iraqi people? Democracy, certainly. But not alone—or even first. Democracy in and of itself is simply a recipe for the powerful and the many to tyrannize over the weak and the few. Only within a framework of justice and law and guaranteed freedoms for all can democracy work in Iraq—or anywhere.Will such a framework be universally accepted by the local population?

Probably not. There were plenty of Nazis in Germany and Imperialists in Japan who resisted such reform after World War II. Tyrants hate giving up a stranglehold on other people’s lives. We gave them no choice. Two generations later, their descendents are hardly clamoring to return to the old regime.

Such a framework should not be a matter of choice or vote in Iraq either. Not that I believe the average Iraqi, given a choice without fear of reprisal, would not prefer to make their own decisions as to philosophy, faith, worship, political views—or actions as mundane as buying a satellite dish or personal preference of music, literature, dress—than to have those decisions imposed by the secret police of either a corrupt dictator or a totalitarian theocracy.

Whatever one’s personal views on this war, this nation has been given a historic opportunity for advancing freedom in a world only too lacking in that value. If in our eagerness to go home, we walk away, handing the keys of Baghdad to the faction that manages to scare up enough votes to satisfy cries for a ‘democratic’ solution, we will have won a battle, but lost a war.

No, democracy is not enough.

When Danger and Faith Collide in a Congolese Rainforest

As authors, we're told to "write what we know". Having lived now in six countries and traveled in more than thirty, including some of the planet’s more difficult corners, it is perhaps inevitable I write international intrigue set well outside "first world" comfort zones from Bolivia to Afghanistan. My latest Tyndale House release Congo Dawn takes place against the backdrop of the Democratic Republic of Congo's Ituri rainforest war zones.

A brief synopsis: If absolute power breeds absolute corruption, what happens when a multinational corporation with unlimited funds hires on a private military company with unbridled power? Especially in a war-torn Congolese rainforest where governmental accountability is only too cheaply for sale and the ultimate conflict mineral is up for grabs.

Why this particular setting?

Growing up in the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon, I was captivated by missionary biographies from its second-largest counterpart on the far side of the globe, the Congo. Africa's equatorial rainforest basin is actually one of this planet's most naturally wealthy regions with rubber, diamonds, gold, oil, uranium and numerous other mineral reserves. Unfortunately, as memorialized in the Joseph Conrad classic Heart of Darkness, human greed and brutality have kept its people among the planet's poorest from the days of Portuguese slave raiders and a Belgian colonial era characterized by forced labor and horrific working conditions to the vicious dictators and rebel fighting of its independence era. In recent years, all-out civil war has left more than five million dead. News headlines are a constant succession of atrocities, "boy soldiers" now a dictionary entry.

And yet, however dark the situation, the DRC has also been witness to the shining flame of God's love raised high by followers of Yesu, Jesus Christ. Among missionary biographies that impacted me personally was that of Dr. Helen Roseveare, who helped establish several mission hospitals and medical training centers in the Ituri rainforest where Congo Dawn takes place, herself held brutally captive by Simba rebels during the violence of the DRC's 1964 war of independence. The largest of those centers, Nyankunde, real-life counterpart of my fictional rainforest community Taraja [Hope], was in turned razed just a few years ago during the latest round of rebel massacres.

Today's fighting is greatly aggravated by the value and pursuit of conflict minerals in that zone. As always, it has been the mission pilots, medical personnel both expatriate and Congolese, and other followers of Yesu, Jesus Christ, who have been first back into the conflict zones well ahead of United Nations, embassy, local law enforcement or any other humanitarian and corporate interests. Their courage in shining bright the light of Yesu's love in one of the planet's darkest corners gave voice to this story.

As to Congo Dawn's actual suspense thread, I've had personal opportunity to witness what a multinational corporation is capable of in back alleys of the Third World when no one is watching (an experience in itself too unbelievable to write up as fiction). In Africa as elsewhere, both the protective and striking arm of such corporations has historically been hired foreign mercenaries. But today's private military corporations are vastly different, possessing more fire power than the average country. What struck me was the lack of any accountability to outside oversight beyond some paid-off local warlord.

So what happens when a multinational corporation with unlimited funds hires on a private military company with unbridled power in a Congolese rainforest where the ultimate conflict mineral is up for grabs? Coming up with one very plausible possibility birthed Congo Dawn.

On a deeper spiritual level, Congo Dawn addresses the age-old question of how a world filled with such darkness, injustice and pain can possibly be the creation of a God of love. What value beyond our own comprehension might human suffering possibly hold that a loving Creator God permits so much of it to continue? At one of the story's high points, the main protagonist Robin asks a question with which I think every reader can identify:

“I would give my own life to stop the pain I’ve seen. To stop little girls and boys from being raped. Or just as bad, forced into armies where they’re turned into killers. To keep families from being torn apart by war. Children dying of preventable diseases for lack of a dollar’s worth of medicine. So am I more compassionate than the God who created all these people, created all this beauty? How can an all-powerful God who claims to love humanity look down on our planet and watch such unspeakable things happening, innocent people hurting and dying, bad guys winning over and over again, so much suffering, without it breaking His heart? Without reaching down and putting a stop to it?"

Robin's personal faith journey through the pages of Congo Dawn reflects my own spiritual wrestling with the above questions. The answer begins ultimately with recognizing as the protagonist does that I am not more compassionate than my Creator. Any love I can possibly feel or show is a dim reflection of our heavenly Father's love.

So if I begin with the recognition that God is truly love, that He loves us far more than we can love others, I must come to the same simple, yet profound realization to which Congo Dawn's main protagonist is ultimately drawn. The coexistence of a loving Creator with human suffering is no oxymoron, but a divine paradox those refined in the fires of adversity are best equipped to understand. The smallest flames of love and faith shine most brightly against the darkest night. Our heavenly Father really does know what He's doing, and His ultimate plans for our lives and all His creation will not be thwarted.

And in that realization is the basis for a faith that cannot be shaken however dark the night.

From an Ituri Rainforest: Change a Heart, Change a Nation

I wrote the below post on events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo three years ago (see link here or at bottom), shortly after a ministry colleague and I had traveled to Nairobi, then she continued on for a hair-raising trip into the Ituri region of the DRC, where we had local ministry partners. At that time I was buried deep in Afghanistan fictionally, resulting in my two most recent Tyndale House Publishers titles, Veiled Freedom and Freedom's Stand. Though Joseph Kony had already running around the region's rainforest with his murderous, drugged up boy soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army for some years, neither Kony nor the Ituri conflict made many news headlines. I had certainly no expectations then of writing a novel set in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But what I did know then was that:

1) The civil war in northeastern DRC, already responsible for more than five million dead in the last decade, and fueled by the boundless treasure of the zone's many conflict minerals, showed no hope humanly speaking for a peaceful resolution.

2) The only true hope of changing the situation in the DRC, the mess that is the Ituri conflict zone, or any other people and society was the same as it has always bee. Change that truly transforms society comes through changed hearts, not circumstances. And hearts change when they are restored to personal relationship with their Creator and heavenly Father through the transforming love of Jesus Christ.

I did write a novel set in the Ituri rainforest, Congo Dawn, scheduled for release February 1, 2013. Its tagline:

"If absolute power breeds absolute corruption, what happens when a multinational corporation with unlimited funds hires on a private military company with unbridled power? Especially in a Congolese rainforest where governmental accountability is only too cheaply for sale and the ultimate 'conflict mineral' is up for grabs."

I had not re-read that blog post until today, as I am preparing for the marketing of Congo Dawn. But as I do so, I realize how much of the below post's theme threads through the pages of the book. And how apropos it is to this current season in my own birth nation. Once again we are facing an election season, hoping and dreaming to bring about change in our society through making change in our elected officials. But whether the Congo or North America, true change must begin from within. Change a heart, change a nation.
  READ ORIGINAL POST: From the Eye of the Storm: Change a Heart, Change a Nation

Investigative Techniques 2.0: Piecing the Puzzle

It was a particularly steamy Miami evening. I'd been invited to a farewell party for a neighbor, a Special Forces sergeant stationed in Miami with the United States Armed Services Southern Command (SouthCom), now reassigned to the ongoing conflict in Iraq. With three international intrigue novels set in Southern Command's Latin America theater of operations, I'd developed a reasonable fan club among SouthCom personnel. Which in turn had spawned advance copy readers and technical advisers all the way up to an intelligence-branch brigadier general still useful in my current research.

The sergeant's wife was the only other female present in this bastion of testosterone, muscled frames, flowing liquor and loud-cracking jokes. When a tall newcomer entered with stride and body language exuding command presence, I didn't need to be told this wasn't just another of the guys. My host waved me over. "Captain So-and-so, this is Jeanette Windle, the author you've been hearing about."

My host then turned to me. "Jeanette, I'd like to introduce my commanding officer. He just got in from two weeks TDY (temporary duty) down south."

Craning my head far back to permit my five foot, one inch frame to look comfortably into a shrewdly penetrating gaze, I commented without the slightest forethought, "So how did you find Saravena?"

You'd have thought I'd been caught red-handed with the original Declaration of Independence. All conversation (and drinking) halted as the commanding officer exploded, a G-rated, sanitized summary of his tirade as follows: "Who let that author woman in here? How could she possibly know where I spent the last two weeks in the eastern guerrilla zones of Colombia? When I find out who's been talking out of turn, heads will roll!"

My host simply grinned. "I told you she knows more about what we're doing down there than we do."

Not the kind of reassurance one likes to hear from the military intelligence assigned to keep one's birth country safe. Since my SouthCom contacts were as tight-lipped a bunch as they were trained to be, I had not picked up any usable intel from them. So how could I know the classified location of a Special Forces temporary duty operation? In actuality, it was simple enough, as I explained to the commanding officer (an explanation he grudgingly accepted, though like Queen Victoria, he was not amused!). Here's how it all came together:

The US military has long had fingers in Latin America's counternarcotics war. But with the post 9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, Congress had recently expanded SouthCom's mission to include training Colombian troops in counterterrorism techniques against leftist guerrillas infesting their jungles. Miami TV news coverage had made mention that the expanded operation would be delayed until Colombia could supply an adequately fortified operating base to house American Special Operations troops.

The exact location of said op was classified. However, American intel restrictions couldn't keep local photojournalists in the eastern guerrilla zones of Colombia from capturing on film the newly reinforced walls and sandbag barricades of a small military base outside the jungle town of Saravena, its reconstruction rumored to be paid for by the Americans.

Then came a casual mention in the Miami Herald that SouthCom troops could heading to Colombia within the month, pending approval of the new facility by US Special Forces command. Again no details. However, just a few days later, the front page of eastern Colombia's regional newspaper boasted a large photo of an American military jet disgorging a dozen US soldiers in camouflage fatigues onto the single airstrip of Saravena's tiny airport. The caption underneath proclaimed, "Southern Command officers arrive from Miami to inspect the future home of their soldiers."

SO when a SouthCom Special Forces captain walks in the door a few days later from 'two weeks TDY down south', where else but Saravena, Colombia, is he likely to have been spending his time?

You (like that Special Forces captain) may be asking just why I'd coincidentally been checking out local Spanish newspapers from a Colombian guerrilla stronghold? That is even simpler. I'd spent my adolescence in Saravena, and I just happened to keep a Google alert for any news from the zone.

Which all goes to show that investigation is basically a matter of:
 1) Putting puzzle pieces together.

2) More importantly, being in the right place and time to uncover those particular puzzle pieces.

I've mentioned in previous postings my upbringing as daughter of American missionaries among the jungles, rivers, Andes mountain trails of the Colombian Amazon. If the guerrillas were back then just unorganized, roving bandits, it was an adventurous environment for an expatriate family, far more so for my parents than for their five offspring, to whom it was simply home. As a child, I really did believe "Yanqui, Go Jom" [Yankee Go Home], scrawled on the whitewash of our perimeter wall, was a normal decoration of any expatriate home. I was barely a teenager the first time I was accused of being a CIA agent; my smart-alecky reply that I was still too young to be recruited.

Today virtually every place I lived as a child remains under guerrilla control. Saravena, a small homesteading town in Colombia's eastern plains, was in my teen years a Wild West stereotype of cantinas, unpaved streets, cowboys galloping into town shooting pistols into the air for weekend drinking sprees, and one tiny thatched evangelical church where my father preached. It was in fact the blueprint for the fictional town in The DMZ, my second adult novel set in the Colombian guerrilla zones.

The discover of oil in the region brought in electricity and pavement, followed by bombs and guerrilla attacks that left much of the town in rubble. But I could still recognize in news photos the vegetation-shaded airstrip where my siblings and I would jog. And the dusty playing field and rusted hoops at the tiny military base on the outskirts of town where as teens we squared off at volleyball and basketball with conscripts little older. Are local youth still allowed through those massive new gates and security barriers to play sports with American Special Ops? Somehow I doubt it.

Since Saravena, I've currently lived in six countries and traveled for ministry in more than thirty on five continents. I raised my own expatriate family in Bolivia, one of the world’s top-five most corrupt countries, where I had the dubious pleasure of a front-row seat to the development of one of the planet's first narco-states, which birthed my first adult novel, CrossFire..

If not a typical North American lifestyle—and certainly not always comfortable—it is a lifestyle with which other members of ICFW can identify. I'm sure those members would agree that there is no better training for an investigative writer. I learned to be wary, observant, always looking over my shoulder and asking who, what, when, why. where, and how. Why is that man across the street looking at me? What is he reaching for in the small of his back? How I can get out of this alley without being backed into a no-exit corner?

How many contradictions did that Customs Officer just make? Why is he patting that over-sized pocket on his padded vest? What size of bribe am I supposed to be slipping in there? When did those two armed guards move in on either side of the exit?

Why did that pickup and white Toyota Corolla just pull up on the shoulder of the road? Who is getting out of the pickup and walking toward the Corolla? Why is he reaching into the trunk to pull out that briefcase instead of speaking to the driver? Where are they speeding off to in opposite directions? How can I discreetly duck out of sight before they notice I’m walking by?

In short, sheer nosy curiosity is not only a survival instinct, but the underlying base of any effective investigative technique.

Now, how to go about applying the above to ferreting out your own puzzle pieces and putting them together? In writing for a different blog, I actually gave some practical tips on just that. If you're interested, here is the post: http://internationalchristianfictionwriters.blogspot.com/2010/03/investigative-techniques-from-trenches.html

Ten Years Ago Today

Ten years ago, on the morning of 9/11/01, I was sitting in my home office in Miami, scribbling out the closing scene of my then latest work-in-project, The DMZ, set against the Islamic involvement in Colombia's guerrilla zones where I grew up, when my husband called from our ministry headquarters in Miami to tell me to turn on the news.

"I can't; I'm finishing my last scene," I told him.

"Turn on the news," he insisted.

As I did and watched our world change forever, a phrase I'd written in the mouth of a main protagonist, encapsulating the theme of the book, suddenly took on new meaning.: "Those who are not willing to bleed and die for what they hold dear will always be held hostage by those who are."

The story behind The DMZ originated simply because I'd written my first suspense novel, CrossFire, set in the counternarcotics war in Bolivia where I'd spent 16 years, and my publishers wanted another. I'd grown up what are now the guerrilla zones of Colombia, so it was an obvious setting. As I began to research, I was stunned to uncover the completely unpublicized involvement of Islamic militant groups in Colombia's guerrilla conflict.

Then I came across a Colombian news item that never made our media of Iran trying to push through a “humanitarian aid project” to build a meat-packing plant, complete with airport, in a small jungle town smack in the middle of the guerrilla demilitarized zone, or DMZ--and incidentally 300 kilometers from the closest cattle ranching area. That set me to questioning just what Iran was doing there, which birthed The DMZ.

In real life, the U.S. embassy managed to derail that Iranian project, which permitted me to use it for my fiction plot. But I'd always wondered what Iran's Plan B was. Interestingly, that Plan B has actually materialized very closely to my plot line within the last year on the Venezuelan side of that same jungle zone in an alliance between Iran and Hugo Chavez, another startling example of seeing my fiction in the headlines.

A brief synopsis of the story:

When the US loses three major military assets in Colombia within weeks, attention turns to the demilitarized zone, a Switzerland-sized piece of territory handed over to the guerrillas in the vain hope it would make them start talking peace. The death of three American environmentalist activists in the same area bring a UN inspection/media team to the scene, including environmental journalist Julie Baker. For Julie it is at once a career opportunity of a lifetime and a revisiting of old hurts and terrors as she returns to the place of her birth—and her parents’ deaths at the guerrilla hands.

As Julie’s probing unleashes a terrorist plot that spans from the rainforests of Colombia to the Middle East and the very heartland of America, she must confront resurging issues from her own past. Does God have a right to demand our total sacrifice? Does He have the right to demand our sacrifice of those we love? "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds . . . If anyone comes to me and does not hate (count as of lesser importance) his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple (John 12:24; Luke 14:26). Are these just words or a philosophy of life God seriously expects us to apply beyond our comfortable suburban neighborhoods?

But when I was writing that morning of September 11, 2001, I was not thinking of a broader application, rather of the country where I'd grown up as a missionary kid and loved dearly, 40 million people being held hostage by less than 20,000 leftist guerrillas. A poll taken in Colombia at the time of my writing revealed that the top Colombian choice on how to handle the guerrillas was to have the Americans come in and defeat the guerrillas for them.

I never dreamed how relevant the phrase I'd written that became theme of the book would become on a world-wide scale by the time The DMZ actually went to print: "Those who are not willing to bleed and die for what they hold dear will always be held hostage by those who are".
Ten years later, those words still hold true. As we remember on this day, may we hold our lives in an open hand and be known for what and whom we are willing to lay down our lives.

"Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13)."

"But God demonstrates His love for us in this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8)."

"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers (1 John 3:16)."

Freedom's Stand Nominated for Golden Scroll Novel of the Year

Advanced Writers and Speakers Association (AWSA) announces the finalists for the 2011 Golden Scroll Book of the Year Awards. Finalists will be honored at the AWSA Golden Scrolls Awards Banquet, Sunday, July 10th, from 1 to 3 pm at the Omni at CNN Center in Atlanta.

The 2011 Golden Scroll book awards Novel of the Year finalists are Kathi Macias for Red Ink, Golden Keys Parson for A Prisoner of Versailles, and Jeanette Windle for Freedom's Stand.

The Nonfiction Book of the Year finalists are Nancie Carmichael for Surviving One Bad Year, Jane E. Schooler, Betsy Keefer Smalley and Timothy J. Callahan for Wounded Children: Healing Homes, and Margot Starbuck for The Girl in the Orange Dress.

Other awards to be presented at the Golden Scrolls Award Banquet are the Publisher, Editor, Fiction Editor, and AWSA Member of the Year, The Beyond Me Award as well as the prestigious 2011 Golden Scroll Lifetime Achievement Award.

Bestselling author and international speaker Patsy Clairmont will be the keynote speaker with Linda Gilden as emcee. Authors Carol Kent and Pam Farrel will present awards. Recording artist Gwen E. Smith will perform a parody written by Martha Bolton dedicated to editors and publishers. A dessert reception immediately follows the banquet.
At 4, our guests are invited to hear author and Hollywood screenwriting consultant Linda Seger who will discuss turning Christian books into movies.

The Golden Scroll Awards banquet and reception are open to the public. Tickets are $45. For more information or to register for the banquet, go to www.ScrollAwards.com.
AWSA, an outreach of Right to the Heart Ministries, consists of over 300 top ICRS women authors who both publish and speak nationally. See www.AWSA.com.

For more info please contact Linda Evans Shepherd at LSwrites@aol.com or 303-772-2035.