Wake of Echoes

Stealing Liberty on Amazon STEALING LIBERTY  comes out today and I am SO excited! I hope you buy it, read it, love it, review it and tell all your friends so they can buy it, read it, love it and tell all their friends too. But even if you don't, I want to tell you the story of how it was almost never published. Last year, after my literary agent, Cyle Young of Hartline Literary, had contacted all the big name publishers, inviting them to offer us a contract for Stealing Liberty , he heard back from very few. That's not at all unusual. But the ones who did respond declined to publish it. They liked the concept and the writing , they indicated, but the story was "too Christian." "Too Christian?" I asked. "Really?" Cyle was baffled too. Two things confused us most: First: a couple of these publishers have a long history of publishing  Christian  fiction.  Second:  STEALING LIBERTY  isn't even really a Christian ...

“Music expresses that which cannot be said, and on which it is impossible to be silent. ” – Victor Hugo We all find ways of coping with the challenges of Spectrum life.  I run, I write.  I pray a lot.  Music is also pretty high on my list. When the love I feel for my children  – the joy, the fears, the admiration, the protectiveness – builds up inside me to the point that it is inexpressible with mere words, I turn to music.  Maybe it’s a sad song that mirrors my fears, or a rousing anthem that spurs me toward my next goal.  Maybe it's one of those angry songs that rails at the inequities in life.  But if a song grabs my heart, it's because it has expressed something that mere words cannot. These are those songs – it’s my Au-some Autism Playlist.  While they don’t all, word for word, match every emotion I have felt during the past six years since we were diagnosed, they do represent a nice spectrum of feelings that, to me, represe...