Final Winning Submission

 Hi all! Here's the final winning submission. Enjoy!

 

HI YA SISTER!, submitted by K.H., USA I am 70 years old and that greeting was made 55 years ago. The year was 1964 and my family, consisting of 8 siblings along with my Mother and Father, had just found a house to occupy in Lake Elsinore, CA. We had just moved to California from Michigan and had completed a one-month adventure living in tents at Lake Elsinore State Park. We left Michigan, with a good number of cars, trucks and assorted personalities, looking forward to starting a new life in the Golden State. 

Truth be told, I’d say we resembled the “Grapes of Wrath” more than anything else. My Father had no job waiting, little money to feed his family, and no definite place to live. But my Mother had a dream. She had always wanted to move to California, the land of sunshine and opportunity, for her children. I had been “raised around” the Truth. What does that mean? Throughout the years, my Mother would invite the different sisters, that sporadically appeared at our doorstep, to have a study with her and anyone else in the house that was interested. My Mother studied with many sisters throughout my childhood, and was eventually baptized in 1970. We were a family that moved often. Even as a young child, I stopped being surprised at the knock on the door two weeks after we moved into a new home. Those Witnesses always seemed to find us. It seemed like we were being stalked, but in a good way. 

 I studied with an elderly anointed sister when I was eight years old. Later on, during my teenage years, I continued to respond to my Mother’s invitation. She would yell into thin air “Jehovah’s Witnesses are going to be in the living room on Wednesday at 3:00. Anyone who is interested, show up.” I usually showed up. My Mother didn’t drive, so there really wasn’t a way for us to get to a meeting. But the Witnesses were ALWAYS there throughout my childhood. My Mother died in 1996 shortly after my unbelieving Father came into the Truth. Seven of her nine children have dedicated their lives to Jehovah. 

I was 14 years old and a freshman at Elsinore High School, on that beautiful Fall day in 1964. I bounced off the bus and walked down the dusty road to our home by the lake. I saw an older lady standing at the door talking to my Mother. I walked past them into the house, looked at the lady and said “Hi Ya Sister!” “Hello, she replied.” A few minutes later my Mother came into the house and asked me how I knew that lady was a Jehovah’s Witness. “Gee Mom, they’re all over the state of Michigan. I figure they must have a few of them in California!” In a huff I walked away. Little did I know, that through a series of starts and finishes, six years later, those “few” Witnesses would help lead me to baptism in 1970. So, for over 50 years now, I have loved saying “Hi Ya Sister!”

 

Thank you again to all who submitted stories and experiences. I enjoyed reading each and every one of them, and I plan on doing more of these contests in the future!

In other news, an exciting project that I've been teasing for a while now is nearly ready for a big announcement, so stay tuned right here for that!

Another "Bloom of Youth" Contest Winner

Hi all! As promised, here's the second winning entry for the "Bloom of Youth" writing contest. Enjoy!

I was serving in London Bethel as a driver for a couple of years. One day I was driving the Bethel van sitting at traffic lights when the Bethel phone rang and I foolishly answered it. Just at the same time that another brother was driving the other way towards me. He reported me talking on the phone which is illegal (even though I wasn’t actually driving the engine was on).

The result was I was asked to leave Bethel and removed from all privileges in the congregation. This experience taught me many lessons and I feel did me a lot of good.

I am now serving as an elder in Mill Hill congregation near the old Bethel. If anybody makes a silly mistake and loses privileges I now feel I can encourage them to have the correct attitude and learn from it, then become stronger.

Submitted by D.P., United Kingdom

"Bloom of Youth" audio book finally here!

Great news! After months of waiting for news back from Amazon's Audible service, The Bloom of Youth is now available in their store! If you've already got a subscription to Audible, be sure to give it a listen. If you'd like to hear an extended sample, check out the first chapter here on my YouTube channel.

Also, I apologize for the long wait in sharing the winning submissions I received for the bloom of youth writing contest. I'm still waiting to hear back from one of the applicants (so if you submitted a story and didn't hear back yet be sure to check your email!). In the meantime, I've decided to share one of the stories today. (I'll share another one next week) Enjoy, and thanks again to all of you who participated!

My Bloom of Youth Story, submitted by M.S.

I was raised around the Truth my whole life. My mother has been faithful to Jehovah for a long time. Unfortunately my father was disfellowshipped when I was 13, so he has been away from Jehovah for 24 years.

Growing up as a teen I had influences from both my parents as well as young ones in the congregation leading double lives at school. I thought I could just lead a double life myself. And I did, or thought I did successfully up until I was 18. One of my classmates had lost her grandmother in death, so I started witnessing to her about the resurrection hope.

She looked at me and said, “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

"Yes, of course," was my reply.

She said, “If that was really true, why are you with us?”

Wow! It was like my world started crumbling. I couldn’t fool my schoolmates. I couldn’t fool Jehovah. And I needed to make a change... I decided that I needed to be either all for Jehovah or all for the world, I couldn’t do both anymore.

Fortunately I made the right decision. I have been serving Jehovah now for many years. I’ve been pioneering since 2004. (Been to Pioneer School 3 times, 2 of those times with my husband.) And I have been able to serve where the need was great up until August of this year. Now my husband and I are living with my mom in US and hopefully she will be joining us in the pioneer work soon! Serving Jehovah is the best life ever and I really wish I figured that out sooner!

Tiny Update

 Talk about out of the frying pan into the fire! My wife and I just fled one country due to a pandemic, only to find ourselves surrounded by local wildfires, smoke-filled skies, and raining ash. I woke up this morning at 9:00, thinking it was much earlier, only to discover a view of the sky similar to the one in the picture below.

As if this year weren't already crazy enough, now we have apocalyptic views right outside our window. At this point, nothing would surprise me! It's good to know we're so close to the end; it's hard to imagine things getting any more wild than they already are.

In book-related news, I'm still waiting on the approval of The Bloom of Youth Audible audio book. As I've said previously, it's impossible to tell how long Audible will take in giving me the green light, so we'll have to keep waiting and seeing. As for the sequel of The Bloom of Youth, The Bloom of Youth 2: Time and Unforeseen, I'm still working on it but it's progressing steadily and should still be done in time for a fall '20 release.

In the meantime, I'd like to talk a little about this upcoming book, but I think I'll save it for a podcast episode!

Hope you're all staying safe and healthy out there!

Bloom of Youth Audio Book finished

Hey! Good news for those of you who enjoyed listening to the first chapter of the audio book for The Bloom of Youth! The entire book is recorded, edited, and submitted for the Audible review process. What I've found about this process, however, is that the time needed for approval varies wildly. My first audio book, FLEE, took nearly five months to go through the process. The second, The Unrighteous, took less than two weeks!

So really, it's anyone's guess how long this third audio book will take, but rest assured, I'll be letting you all know here once it's available.

Recording this audio book was quite the experience, as I did it while relocating across the globe. Due to the pandemic and sudden visa changes, my wife and I were forced to leave our previous home of eleven years and return to the United States. This means that approximately half of the book was recorded in my old office, a room in our high rise apartment, late at night when the traffic outside wasn't loud enough to show up in the audio. The second half was recorded in the home we are staying at now, which belongs to family. Living with more people and being in a new environment meant a lot of trial and error with recording times and locations, trying to find that sweet spot that would match the audio from the previous half of the book. Eventually, I managed, and I hope the transition from one recording locale to the next isn't too noticeable!

In other news, I haven't touched The Bloom of Youth 2 much in the last couple of months, but now that I'm settling in here and I've got much more time on my hands than before, I'll start chipping away at the remainder of the project. I still plan to release it this fall, so stay tuned...

Can you believe it's 2020?

I certainly can't! I never pictured us experiencing this date on this side of the system, but here we are.

I wanted to update you all on how things have been going lately, since I know it's been a bit quiet over the last few months since the release of STAND. As has become my custom, I've taken a little breather after the completion of the last novel to recoup. In addition, life has been a bit of whirlwind since August (when the book was released), with conventions and other events keeping me busy.

In the midst of all this, I was working on the audiobook for FLEE, which I completed and released as promised for free on YouTube. I later went back and re-recorded many of the older chapters and planned to put everything up on Audible so that the audiobook version could be purchased alongside the Kindle and paperback versions on Amazon, but this turned into a bigger headache than I imagined.

The software I used to record and edit has not worked well with Audible's audio proofing process, with numerous issues and errors keeping me from publishing every time I try to submit the files. In addition, Amazon's customer support has been less than ideal, with many of my inquiries going unanswered and customer reps changing constantly, requiring me to re-explain the issues in detail. All of this, you can imagine, has slowed down the process and frankly killed a lot of my motivation to pursue this particular project. I'm not giving up just yet, but I've turned my attention to other things for the time being.

Going forward with the books, I've had about five different projects on the back burner for the last year or so. On occasion I'll go back over these ideas and write a bit here and there, perhaps fleshing out a scene or two or trying to piece together a rough synopsis to give me a launching point. These books span quite a range of genres, from a historical fiction set in 15th century England centered around a small ragtag team of Bible smugglers to a sci-fi interplanetary-colonization series set several millennia into the New World. All fun ideas, yes, but so far nothing has really jumped out at me.

That is, until I sat down about a month ago and started work on a brand new project, something completely unrelated to the ideas I'd had stewing in the back of my mind for so long. This story is much more grounded in our present reality, and is, in fact, a sequel. And just so I don't encourage any false hopes out there, I'll go ahead and tell you that it's the second part to Will Larson's story from The Bloom of Youth.

When we left Will in the last story, we'd seen him grown partway to manhood. He'd learned, through a tumultuous adolescent year, to make the truth his own and take a stand for what he believed in. At the time, I was happy leaving the story at that, until I started thinking more about my own adolescence and all the other things I learned and experienced during those difficult years.

Since I'm only a fraction of the way into writing the first draft, I don't have a title or a cover to share here just yet, I just wanted to let you all know what's in store. Hope you're all having a lovely (and not too cold) January 1st.

Still can't believe we're in 2020!

On a roll...?

It's been a productive last couple of weeks. I've set clear writing targets for the last book in the FLEE series, STAND, and have really been motivated to progress with the story. As I mentioned in the last podcast, it's proving a real challenge to connect and conclude the story lines and character arcs introduced in previous books while moving the general plot of the series forward. But we're getting there, and it feels really good!

I've also been chipping away the the newest podcast episode when I have some spare time ("chipping away" meaning working on the illustrations for the video). My drawing skills aren't great and my digital drawing skills are even worse, but perhaps with time and practice the quality will improve some. In the meantime, I hope you can enjoy the illustrations, messy though they are.

This latest podcast episode, number 14, answers some of the questions I've gotten regarding the latest book, The Bloom of Youth, and in particular, whether or not Will's experiences parallel my own as a teen. Enjoy!

"The Bloom of Youth" Now on Amazon!

Hi all! It's always exciting to share news of a new book's release, and today I'm happy to announce that The Bloom of Youth is now available on Amazon! As always, I've released both Kindle and paperback versions. (If you don't own a Kindle, I recommend downloading the Kindle app, available for both Android and iOS devices, which will allow you to purchase and read the book digitally.)

You can grab a copy by clicking the picture below. (The two versions currently appear on Amazon as separate entries, but this should be fixed within a day or so.)

If you'd rather read in bite-sized weekly installments, check out The Bloom of Youth blogspot here. As usual, new chapters will be released each Monday morning.

Hope you enjoy reading as much as I did writing!

Thank you for your patience!

Hi there! It's been a while since my last update (nearly two months, yikes!), so I wanted to pop in here and say a few words about what I've been up to this summer, as well as offer [some very meager] news regarding my current writing projects.

First off, I allowed myself a bit of a break this summer. I had the opportunity to travel with my wife to Japan, where we enjoyed a 10-day vacation. We got some much needed rest (and lots of great food) after what's been a rather stressful few months in our current situation here in Asia. (Side note: I was a few days late on one of the updates for the "STAY" novel on the blog due to enjoying my vacation so much that I totally forgot to publish a new chapter...)

As for the third installment in the FLEE series, I think it's safe to say that it's likely not going to be getting a release this year. (Hopefully early 2019, but please don't hold me to that!)

Part of the reason for its delay is just being too busy with other things to have the time or energy to focus on it. Being the final installment in a trilogy is also part of the issue; there's quite a bit of pressure to make this last novel a worthy and satisfying conclusion to FLEE and STAY. Aside from all that, there's just still so much story to tell. Simply put, it's daunting, and I want to make sure I get it just right!

In the meantime, of course, I've got The Bloom of Youth about to be released (I'm shooting for the end of August), which is a wacky little book written in a totally different voice than my others. But I'm hoping that it'll be a needed change of pace after the heavier books that I've been publishing these last few years.

Anyhow, that's what's been going on in my life this summer. How is yours?

And now for something completely different...

Writing about the great tribulation and the last days–while undeniably exciting–can be a pretty exhausting task, especially when it's practically all the writing you've done in the last couple of years. I realized this over a year ago, shortly after starting the first book in the FLEE series. I knew that I needed a break. So, for a change of pace, I began a side writing project around that same time. It was something more for myself than any kind of reading audience, but it wasn't long before I found myself falling in love with the story and characters.

You see, the goal of this project was simple–tell an honest story about life from the perspective of your average, adolescent Witness boy. It wasn't set during Armageddon or the great tribulation or paradise, but in our modern day. Instead of some epic, cinematic struggle, the main character would just be a normal kid trying to survive his teenage years: navigating the horrors of high school, attempting to not stand out too much, struggling to not be awkward around girls in the hall, and trying to figure out who he was and what he wanted to do. If Critical Times was a Summer blockbuster and the FLEE books were a thriller miniseries, this book was one of those quirky indie flicks.

Since this novel is so different (and quite strange, frankly), there is of course some risk releasing it within the EK Jonathan family (in fact, I did consider releasing it under a different pen name, but after weighing all the pros and cons I decided against it). In any case, it's almost done, and should be ready for a wide release this summer, and who knows, you might just enjoy it!

Here's a sneak peek at the cover:

Stay tuned!