I received an announcement about a writing contest going on at Regenerated Magazine. If you have teens in your house, here’s some incentive for a fantastic end-of-year assignment.

What I like most about this contest is that it’s sponsored BY teens and FOR teens. It’s encouraging for me to see Christian teens engaging their peers in such a thought-provoking assignment. And I love essay contests!

I hope you’ll help spread the word!

From the website:

Regenerated Magazine is holding an essay contest this summer for students ages 12-18. The topic is “How to live a regenerated life,” and the first place winner will receive an iPod Nano.

Regenerated Magazine is all about transformation, inspiring young Christians everyday to change our culture. Through the renewing of our minds with our biblical worldview, we’re challenging our peers to live for the glory of God.

How can you do this? How can you regenerate our culture in politics, in religion, in everyday life? How can you transform the world for Christ? Tell us! Write an essay about it—you might win an iPod® Nano!

Topic:

In Regenerate Our Culture’s mission statement, it says we are trying to “regenerat[e] our nation’s worldview away from the post-modernism holding it and back to the Christian worldview it was first built on. It can’t be denied that many in our nation have turned away from God in politics, religion, and their everyday lives. Our vision is to help bring about a positive change in these three important areas…”

What does this mean in real life? How can you live a regenerating life that will impact our culture for Christ?

Entrant Qualifications:

Students between the ages 12-18 as of May 1st, 2007. This contest is open to homeschoolers, public schoolers, and private schoolers.

Contest Dates:

All essays must be emailed to essaycontest [at] regenerateourculture [dot] com between April 1st, 2007 and June 1st, 2007 (closing on 10:00 pm EST).

Contest Rules and Guidelines:

* All work submitted must be entirely the work of the person submitting it. No outside assistance in, but not limited to, brainstorming, editing, proofreading, is allowed.

* The essay cannot exceed 900 words.

* All essays must be emailed to essaycontest [at] regenerateourculture [dot] com and the header must have the entrant’s name as the subject line, and the essay must be BOTH in the text of the email and attached in Microsoft Word format. The essay must be double spaced in size 12 Times New Roman font. The essay must have the entrant’s name and birth date as the title.

* All essays must be submitted by 10:00 pm (EST) June 1st, no later.

* The essay must not have been previously published anywhere. This includes on the internet (on a blog or other site).

* Regenerate Our Culture staff and board members may not enter. Regenerate Our Culture writers may not enter unless Regenerated Magazine has only published one (1) of their articles.

Judging/Judges:

Essays will be judged on the following:

* Biblical worldview (we’re not nitpicking the theology—just the essential doctrines of God, sin, man, salvation, etc.)

* Organization/Clarity/Logic

* Content/Writing Style

* How well the thesis is supported (how convincing the argument is)

* Grammar

Judges will be picked by ROC and their names will be disclosed when the contest winners are announced. They have been chosen for their excellence in writing, clear understanding of a biblical worldview, experience, and other qualifications. Judges’ identities will be revealed after the contest is closed.

I was recently contacted by this book publisher, asking if I’d be interested in reviewing one of their new children’s book series. While I browsed around their site, I found some great information for writers.

If you’ve ever considered writing a nonfiction book, you’ve probably heard by now that you don’t write the book first. You write a book proposal, which you submit to an agent or publisher. There are several different books that teach you how to do this, but this publisher’s site includes a very concise list of what’s required:

“In order to consider your nonfiction book for potential publication, we will need to see a proposal that includes the following items:

* A brief synopsis in 1-2 paragraphs
* Author bio or resume specifying credentials and publication credits, if any
* A complete table of contents, plus estimated length of manuscript in words and pages
* Two to three sample chapters (not the first)
* A description of the target audience
* One page/paragraph on your book’s unique advantages
* A list of competing or comparable titles and how your book differs”

You can read the rest of the guidelines here.

It is SO incredibly hard getting a good agent or publisher to notice your work. Your submission will most likely be piled high in a stack of other people’s manuscripts. How will you get anyone to notice you?

For one thing, make sure you submit EXACTLY what the publisher requests. If they don’t take unagented work, then don’t submit without an agent. If you have any opportunity to meet an editor or agent personally through a writer’s conference, then do it.

I keep reading over and over again that a book proposal must be sent to the right editor at the right publishing house at the right time. It’s a game; yes. You have to know when and how to make your move. BUT! Your odds of success are greatly improved when you know the rules of the game.

Just thinking about all this makes me want to eat a big piece of dark chocolate. *sigh.*

Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday, and I know this day brings mixed emotions for many people. If your mother has passed on, then the day may bring sadness, mixed with fond memories of your childhood and special times you spent with her.

If your mother is still alive, yet you’re not able to see her in person, your joy is only complete when you can make a phone call or contact her in some way. The phone lines on Mother’s Day are busier than any other time of the year!

I’m looking forward to this Mother’s Day. I’ll be spending it with my parents, my husband’s parents, and my own family. Our church has a parent-child dedication service on Mother’s Day, and we’re having our younger two children dedicated. It will be a unique experience having all the grandparents with us to witness.

Also, our seven-year-old daughter will be coming forward this Sunday to announce her decision to accept Christ and to follow through with believer’s baptism. We had the joy of meeting with our pastor a couple of days ago — just me, my husband, and our middle daughter. She’ll be baptized on the last Sunday of this month. I’m planning on bringing tissues with me to church of course!

As Tasra Dawson mentioned yesterday (don’t you just love her?), motherhood is filled with so many days of mundane tasks — cleaning up spills, running out the door 10 minutes late, heating up last night’s leftovers in the microwave … again. Yet there are moments that sparkle with so much joy you know every second is worth it.

Yesterday I posted at Writer Interrupted a little about my mom and how my mother/daughter gift book came into being. Here’s what I wrote:

Nine years ago, my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was a scary time, as she underwent surgery and chemotherapy. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, but I didn’t know how.

So I started writing out thoughts in my journal. I called it “Tribute to Mom.” God miraculously healed my mom that year, although the cancer returned a few years later. Once again, I prayed, “Lord, how can I show Mom how much I love her?” I’d never given her the tribute because it was still just scribblings in my journal.

Then I went to a Christian writers’ conference, and a door to a publisher opened. I was invited to write a tribute book from a daughter to her mom. I wept as I went back through my long-ago journal and rewrote out my sentiments to meet the needs of the publisher.

These thoughts became a book, From a Daughter’s Heart to Her Mom: 50 Reflections on Living Well, published last spring by Thomas Nelson. Once again, the Lord spared my mom’s life, and I was able to give her my journal scribblings, polished by an editor, in book form.

My mom’s love for me came full circle when I was able to write that book celebrating the love of a mother and her daughter. As I worked on the manuscript, my mother-in-law graciously loaned me dozens of old books filled with poems, quotes, and art that helped inspire me to meet the deadline. To add to the emotional whirlwind, I was in my last trimester of pregnancy (a daughter), so I was completely surrounded by the love of mothers and daughters.

Whatever your plans are for this Mother’s Day, I pray that God blesses you with a love that only comes from Him.

Well, I’ve gotten behind on all things bloggy, so I missed reading about Shannon’s Works-for-Me-Wednesday Birthday Edition, which was … um … last Wednesday. But since she still has her Mr. Linky up, I’ll send my tip in late.

With five children, we host a LOT of birthday parties around here. I really love entertaining kids, yet I’m not a Martha Stewart, and we don’t have a big budget for these things. What I enjoy most is getting to know the mothers of my kids’ friends. And a birthday party is an easy excuse to get people together.

The best kind of party for me is a laid-back affair where the kids run around and play outside and the parents sit around talking. I’ve discovered the easiest time to host a birthday party — for our family, at least — is on a weekday.

When my oldest children were toddlers, I usually liked a weekday party from 11 to 1. Since all of my close friends at the time were fellow SAHMs, it was pretty much like a play group, except I provided PB&J sandwiches and cake. The moms talked, the kids played. Then everybody went home and took naps. Easy.

As my kids have gotten older, we’ve opted for the 4 to 5:30 pm time slot, preferably on a Friday. That way, some of the moms who work can still attend if they can get off early. Moms with school-age kids can pick up their kids at school, swing by Wal-Mart and stuff something into a gift bag (don’t you do that?), then come over.

The reason why I like weekday parties is that there’s so much more hype and expense involved with big weekend bashes. This also leads to more stress for me — because I feel like people expect more on the weekend. Plus, I’m interrupting their Saturday afternoon plans.

Some years, I haven’t felt like hosting at my house, so we’ve had them at parks with a playground. Most of the parks have a covered pavilion, in case of rain.

For my son who has a July birthday, we’ve done a few evening cookouts, when the sun has gone down a bit. I guess our favorite one so far was a pirate party, where my husband led the kids down to the creek to search for “hidden treasure.” (We hid a cooler full of party favors and let them “follow the map” to find it.)

Yesterday, we worked on making invitations for my daughter’s 7th birthday. She asked if she could invite her whole first grade class over, including her teacher. OK. She only has 13 in her class, so I can handle this. We were going to do a tea party, but since the boys are coming too, we’ll just do a “backyard fun” party. Swingset, sandbox, frisbees, nerf footballs … maybe I’ll invest in some bubbles. And that’s it.

I really love birthday parties. Some parents have the budgets to go all out and invite entertainment and do the whole nine yards, but we keep things simple. I also prefer to invite the whole family; that way I get to know the siblings, and I can see who has kids the same age as mine. (Older siblings are great help for organizing games!)

There is really only a small window of time when your kids will want to do these kinds of parties. I remember growing up, that as I got older, I wanted to invite only a couple of friends and maybe go out to eat instead of having a party.

When we homeschooled, we often squeezed in a lunchtime birthday party, then the moms could go back home and finish the schoolday. Now I try to work around traditional school hours.

My kids get so excited about making the invitations and stuffing goody bags (though at times, we’ve just handed out bubbles or balls for party favors). This summer, we’re hoping it will work out to host a rocket-themed party, and we’ll let the kids make rockets and shoot them off in our backyard.

I’ve also learned it’s best to go ahead and buy thank-you notes along with the invitations — and get them done AS SOON AS POSSIBLE after the party. I confess, some years are just crazier than others, and we haven’t always gotten thank-you notes written, but we do try.

This works for us!

Mary DeMuth tagged me for a blog meme, 8 Random Facts About Me. Hey, you’ll have to go check out her list and see the cover of her mom’s devotional book in KOREAN! Mary, I hope your dream will come true of leading praise & worship someday — you should do it!

Here’s how you play:

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

OK, here goes:

1. My favorite snack is this Atkins’ Protein Bar. It tastes like a chocolate candy bar — yet it’s got enough protein to prevent that sugar high-low thing that makes me crash.

2. We have six chickens right now. I could seriously spend all day watching our chickens peck around the backyard. They’re so much fun to watch! Our two-year-old daughter calls them “chich-ens.” And she runs around trying to “catch the chich-ens.” She caught one yesterday and sat down and petted it for about half an hour. Poor chicken!

3. I want to go to Venice someday. I have several paintings of Venice on the walls of my house. I love looking at the canals and boats — I dream of gliding along in a gondola someday with my husband.

4. I’m reading Caddie Woodlawn out loud to my daughters right now, another Newbery winner that I missed reading growing up. It’s by Carol Ryrie Brink, who wrote about her grandmother’s childhood growing up in late 19th-century Wisconsin, told from a first-person point of view. It’s great!

5. I went to the same high school as the actress, Julia Roberts, who was two grades ahead of me. We did NOT have a drama program at our high school — but she was good at making political speeches for school elections.

6. I have trouble motivating myself to exercise, so I’m keeping track of how many miles I walk/jog on the treadmill. I’ve figured out it’s 268 miles to reach one of my favorite beaches (Tybee Island), so I subtract from that number every time I treadmill. My goal was to walk to Tybee by the end of May — then I’d fit into my old bathing suit — HA! It’s looking like I might get there by September, when pool season will be over and I can once again hide in my sweatpants.

7. I just finished reading Tracey Bateman’s novel, Catch a Rising Star, book one in her Drama Queens series. It was funny! If you like to watch soap operas, you’ll love this one.

8. I spent a summer driving a delivery truck in Lake Tahoe, California. I worked in a copy shop and had to deliever flyers and marketing materials to Caesar’s Tahoe. Lake Tahoe has got to be one of the most beautiful places on earth.

That’s my eight. Now I’m supposed to tag eight of you. Hmmm … if you’re interested in this meme, consider yourself tagged — and let us know you’ve blogged it!

I wrote yesterday about discovering Beth Vogt’s article in the new issue of Spirit-Led Writer. Well, that led me to do some nosing around her website, Mommy Come Lately, which is full of wonderful help for mothers who are having children later in life.

Beth writes, “More and more women are embracing motherhood in their mid-thirties and forties. Most Mommies-come-lately agree: A late start at motherhood—or for some women, a restart—enhances your ability to succeed as a mom.”

On her website, there are links to recent news articles as well as a rich library of resources — both online and print — that are of interest to women bearing children later in life.

I learned the term AMA, which means Advanced Maternal Age. Any woman over age 35 bears increased risks during pregnancy, explained more here.

There’s also a photo album full of inspiring pictures of families where the mother gave birth later in age.

Beth’s book topic strikes close to home for me. Our party turned out to be a lot of fun last weekend, and we had several young families over at our house. At one point, I was sitting on my back porch talking to two friends my age, in our late 30s. Both women were considering whether or not to have another baby.

I felt like, from that conversation, perhaps a new life will someday come into the world — because I do hope they’ll try for another baby. We also had a couple, mid-30ish, who are considering adoption — and this is also a topic covered on Beth’s website and in her book, Baby Changes Everything: Embracing and Preparing for Motherhood After 35.

Beth also writes a blog, Mommy Musings.

Since my last child was born when I was 36, I guess I’m part of this Mommy-Come-Lately movement as well. No matter what age you are — or whether you have a child biologically or through adoption — there is no greater gift than being called to raise a new human being in the image of God. Nothing compares to the joys!

If you want to be published, one of the best things you can do to move toward your goals is to attend a writers’ conference.

But for most of us, budget and time constraints prevent our being able to attend as often as we’d like. So, what’s the next best thing to going? Reading conference reports from those who attended! YEA!

This month’s Spirit-Led Writer includes two conference reports that kept me hanging on every word.

In her article, Writing for the Soul: The Sweet Agony, Beth Vogt reports on what it was like to attend her fourth Writing for the Soul conference in Colorado. Beth will have her first book published by Revell this August, entitled Baby Changes Everything: Embracing and Preparing for Motherhood after 35.

Beth wrote:

The list of this year’s conference speakers read like a Who’s Who of Christian writers: Liz Curtis Higgs, Dr. Tim LaHaye, Dr. Dennis Hensley, and James Scott Bell, just to name a few. Editors representing Discipleship Journal, Focus on the Family, MOPS International, as well as Tyndale House Publishers, Guideposts, and Bethany House and others were available for appointments.

She included notes and quotes from attending the different workshops. What an inspiration for those of us armchair traveling attendees!

And Linda Boe wrote a fantastic first-timer’s account of her trip to the Mount Hermon Christian Writer’s Conference in northern California. She was graciously given a scholarship by Cecil Murphey, which allowed her to attend. As a mother of three and grandmother of six, Linda relished every minute of this conference — and her enthusiasm is contagious.

I love reading articles like these! They remind me of all the wonderful reasons to attend Christian writers’ conferences; mainly, the people you meet will encourage you to keep on writing for God’s glory.

And one more thing:
If you’re seeking paying markets for your work, a great place to do some research is to read through the conference website and see what the faculty are looking for. For example, there is a detailed list on the Writing for the Soul website.

A tip from one of these sites might make your query letter stand out — it shows the editor you’re serious when you send them exactly what they’re looking for. Plus, you KNOW this information is current if the conference took place recently.

Have you ever had questions about copyright law?

I found a great chart on this website that shows public domain copyright law. In the U.S., anything published before 1923 is considered public domain. As bloggers, we need to be aware of copyright law and not publish anything that we need permission to publish.

For example, I’ve noticed some bloggers publishing whole poems or devotionals written by other people after 1923. We can’t be doing this — even if we link to it.

We can quote a few lines, if we’re doing it for review purposes, but we can’t just snag someone’s great poem and post it on our site without permission. The author should be compensated (paid) if the work is under copyright — and anything written after 1978 is under copyright automatically.

As writers, this is a risk we take when posting online — anyone can steal your work as well. If you’d like to write a book someday, be careful what you post online. Some publishers don’t want to buy work that’s already been seen online, even if you only have a small blog readership. What if your work has already been cut and pasted on a bunch of other sites? This could lead to legal problems down the road for your publisher — if someone else claims your work as their own.

Book contracts are getting so complicated these days — and many publishers now want to buy electronic rights to your work. Yet how can you offer them electronic rights if your work has already been published online?

I’ve learned a lot of this from more experienced writers in my writing group — and some of them have had to play the meanie when they’ve found other sites cut and pasting their work without permission.

Just be careful. If you’ve got a great story, think about how you’d feel seeing that story show up on another site under someone else’s name. It might be better to save it and send it to a print publication first … where you’ll always have proof that it belongs to you. (For help with writing markets, check out Sally Stuart’s Christian Writers’ Market Guide).

This chart, When U.S. Works Pass Into the Public Domain, was prepared by Lolly Gasaway of the University of North Carolina. If you’re a serious writer, it’s definitely worth your time to educate yourself on copyright law.

If anyone knows a link to a site about Canadian copyright law or other countries, I’d love to learn more about this.

We’re cooking for a crowd this weekend, and I’ve decided to go with a super-easy dish that always seems to turn out okay.

A friend and I are each making two of these casseroles, then I’ve asked everyone else to bring either a side dish, drink, or dessert. We’re hoping this will be a budget-friendly, easy party for everyone.

I’m PRAYING it doesn’t rain — because we’ll have a ton of energetic kids running around!

Here’s the recipe — in case you’re also looking for a simple crowd-pleaser. (I like dishes you can make ahead — since the day of the party I’m usually running around cleaning!)

6 chicken breasts
1 dozen tortillas
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 tall can evaporated milk
1/2 cup butter
1 medium onion
1 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated
1 tall can mild chili peppers (optional)
Paprika

Cook chicken until tender; cool and tear apart. Saute onion in butter, adding soups, milk, onions, and chilies. Drop tortillas in chicken stock, 2 at a time and soak 2 minutes. Line bottom of greased 9×13 casserole dish, using 6 tortillas. Put layer of chicken and another layer of tortillas and the rest of chicken.

Pour soup mixture over top of all. Lift tortillas lightly to allow mixture to dribble through. Sprinkle with grated cheese, then paprika. Bake at 325 for 45 minutes. (I usually keep covered for 30, then uncovered for 15.) Serves 8.

This goes well with salad, black beans, and bread.

I saw this link from Sallie and couldn’t believe it. I’ve never seen anything like this.

Honestly, I don’t like it at all. There are so many people in the world who would love to read a book — and seeing people cut up books as “art” bothers me.

Plus — what do you DO with these weird papery creations? They’ll just gather dust. I know what FlyLady would say!

What do you think? I’m curious — do these people cut up books as a hobby, or is this a job? Who has time to do things like this? I’d rather read a book than cut one up as art — but that’s just me.