Endless Summer Of Writing by Bob Jones

School’s out for the summer! Endless days of ice cream, popsicles, pools, playing in the park and… O wait, that was my post intro from 50 years ago.

For most of us, summer may not mean two empty calendar months like it does for students, but it does signify the start of a new season for learners.

You can look at this summer as a blank slate of possibility when it comes to writing.

This summer can be your time of experimentation. These next two months can be a creative playground to find new inspiration, dedicate time for your work in progress or start a new project.

Here's a suggested summer writing to-do list (courtesy of Jessica Lawlor at “The Write Life”):

1. Write in a new space. There’s nothing like removing yourself from your normal writing space to give you fresh perspective and new inspiration.

2. Plan an at-home writing retreat. Set aside a full afternoon with no distractions to write at home.

3. Participate in a summer reading challenge. The best way to become a better writer is to be a 

voracious reader.

4. Join a writing group or find a writing partner.

5. Clean up old files to find new inspiration. Sometimes, taking space from an old idea is just what we need to come back to it refreshed and inspired to start anew.

6. Start a blog. Blogging helps you build a personal brand, and can lead to valuable connections and new opportunities. It also helps you improve your own writing skills.

7. Find new blogs to read. Browse the list of 100 Best Websites for Writers

8. Refine your personal brand. Dedicate a little bit of time to further developing your unique personal brand as a writer through social media.

9. Pitch a guest post. Make a list of blogs where you’d love to see your work, research their submission guidelines and craft a pitch to send their way.

10. Plan ahead. Use summer as a time to plan for the future.

Summer may not hold the same meaning as it did when you were a kid, but you can still use these next few months to take your writing to the next level.

Let your summer of creativity begin!

Robert (Bob) W. Jones is a recovering perfectionist, who collects Coca-Cola memorabilia and drinks Iced Tea. His office walls are adorned with his sons’ framed football jerseys, and his library shelves, with soul food. He writes to inspire people to be real, grow an authentic faith in Jesus, enjoy healthy relationships and discover their life purpose.

Twitter: @bobjones49ers
Blog: http://blog.northpointechurch.ca

A Second Edition, by Bryan Norford

Editing an earlier work is a harrowing and humbling project. Daily, it serves up amazement at the odd flash of brilliance, but embarrassment at verbose and turgid prose. Ann and I have been editing our first book authored together six years ago, Happy Together: Daily Insight for Families from Scripture. The book. written in a daily devotional format, reviews examples of marriage, family, and relationships from Genesis to Revelation.

Why edit? It’s a mammoth task with over 350 pages of text. But feedback over the years has led us to condense the material to a page-a-day format; reduce the daily readings from 300 or 350 words to about 250, but still retain the basic message of each one. As you can imagine, a useful exercise to sharpen and produce concise writing.

In addition, we have added a text from each day’s reading, and a responsive prayer. Each page is reformatted to camera ready and paragraphs reduced to newspaper style for easier reading. Now to add the front and back ends, build indexes listing Scriptures used and subjects reviewed, check references for accuracy and consider cover redesign.

It has also given us the opportunity to incorporate ideas from reading and conferences we’ve taken in the interim. As always, our purpose is to produce a worthwhile legacy for our family and others; if it sells, that’s an added bonus!

Looking back is a reminder of the frailty of our work. I’m sure you get the feeling a work is never finished; there’s always some improvement we could make. Editing is an opportunity to catch up on some of those improvements, but accept the fact is still comes up short and we depend on Him to complete it in the hearts and minds of our readers.

Here is a sample page.