Trying to Make Up My Mind – Which is Better? by Jo Ann Brown

Usually I’m very sure of my opinions, but I’m been debating an issue with myself for the last couple of weeks.
What is better: beginnings or endings?
I love beginnings. It’s fun to step off into an adventure in both real life and when reading. Emerging into a place (or a time) I’ve never been before is always a thrill. It doesn’t matter if I’m walking through ruins of a supply depot in northern England left by the Romans over a millennia and a half ago

or taking a virtual reality ride on a banshee in the Avatar section of Disney World for the first time. The chance to experience something new is exciting, the anticipation exquisite. Anything and everything is possible in that moment before everything begins.
But I love endings, too. The feeling I get when I’ve spent a wonderful day with my family or enjoyed a great visit with friends or seen a great movie or finished a book by a favorite author that ended up being even better than I’d imagined. Or such a book by a new-to-me author!
This time of year is all about endings and beginnings. Last month, I finished work on the fourth—and final—book in my Amish Spinster Club series. Immediately after it was done, I started work on the first book in a new Amish series set in lush valleys of the Green Mountains of Vermont. It’s been tough to say good-bye to the Amish Spinster Club characters I’ve spent over a year with as I watched them make homes and lives and find love in northern New York, and now I’m having to get acquainted with a new “cast” in a new location.
Starting a new book is like standing in that long line, inching forward a person at a time, for a ride.

There’s the breathless possibility of something amazing that’s about to begin. I’m not sure where it’ll end up other than my hero and heroine must have their happy ever after ending. Will this be the book that “writes itself” or the one where I have to labor over every word? What surprises are waiting for me in spite of outlining the book in a synopsis? No matter how much time I spend with characters before I put fingers to keyboard, they always hold back something about themselves or their story that they won’t reveal until I’m in the midst of writing the book. Looking forward to those discoveries is part of the excitement that fires me up at the beginning of a project. I love it!
However, I admit that I also love being able to type the words “The End” when I reach the last page of a manuscript. Not that I’m actually done with the manuscript because it’s time then for a red pen and revising. I go through a LOT of red ink during this part of the process. However, I really enjoy revising because I can look at my characters with a different eye than when I’m going through their story with them the first time. No matter how much work awaits, there’s the satisfaction that weeks of work have led to something being completed...and that’s a wonderful feeling!
So now you can see my quandary. What is better: beginnings or endings? Post your opinions...and I’m going to guess nobody is going to say middles, though now that I think about it, being in the middle of something can be great fun, too, can’t it?

Where do you get those ideas for your books? by Jo Ann Brown

When people find out I’m a writer, and I’m celebrating the 30th anniversary of my first book this year and I’ve published over 100 books with a variety of pseudonyms since that initial book, the first question they ask is: “Where do you get your ideas?” Maybe they’ve seen the small bank I saw this spring in a bookstore window in England and thought that I just keep them in a box on my desk.

I hope the question about where I find my ideas isn’t quickly followed (not even giving me a chance to answer) with “I’ve got a great idea for a book, but I don’t have the time to write it. Do you want it? You write the book, and we’ll split the profits.” I’ve learned to smile sincerely and say that I’m grateful for their offer, but I’ve already got more ideas than I’ll have time to write. The response is either a knowing nod or disbelief.
And you know what? Both responses are correct.
I’ve always got ideas for future books whirling about in my head. Most writers do. The amazing thing is the future ideas always feel much more enticing than the current one in the work-in-progress, especially if I’m in the midst of the middle muddles section of the writing process. That part when all those story threads that looked so straightforward when I began the project now seem like a ball of yarn that’s been on the losing end of a kitten’s attention. Many of those ideas will eventually find their way into another book, but some just drift away and are best forgotten. Some writers keep an idea notebook, but I don’t. If an idea doesn’t have the power to stay and grow – it can’t remain just an idea; it has to become a more in-depth concept—then it never was, in my opinion, more than a whim. You know how I define a whim? Just something that seems like fun in passing, but doesn’t have enough depth to become anything real.
But, every once in a while, an idea comes to me as a gift from someone else. Usually it’s from a family member (especially my husband who’s my first reader and catches all the words I leave in or leave out in my rush to tell the story). My children grew up listening to a discussion of plot points around the supper table as my part of “How was your day today?” sharing that we did each night.
The second book of my Amish Spinster Club series is one of those books where the central idea for the book (and the title) was given to me during a dinner discussion with my husband. We still do the “How was your day today?” sharing even though the kids are grown and out on their own. I was excited about the heroine I had planned for the book—an Amish nanny in an Englisch home—

but I was still pondering the rest of the details. We actually were talking about the most recent releases from Love Inspired, and I mentioned how two were Amish romances and three were western settings and the last was a small town setting in the Midwest. With a laugh, my husband told me I should try to combine them all into one book. The Midwest book wouldn’t work because the series is set in northern New York. Therefore, he said my next book should be called The Amish Cowboy. He laughed, thinking it was a joke...but I thought, “Hmm....”
I’m sure every writer (or artist of any type) understands what that “Hmm....” means. It’s the sound of the wheels of the brain kicking into motion. Ideas soon were ricocheting through my head, and the story for book which eventually became The Amish Christmas Cowboy quickly gelled in my head.
It’s not the first time my family has given me ideas for books, and I hope it won’t be the last, because no matter how many ideas I have on my own...good ideas for books are always welcome here. I guess I need to look for a small box that says that. Hmm....

Getting a Very Special Christmas Present by Jo Ann Brown

When you were a kid after Christmas, did you get together with friends to share what was received as gifts? We’d ooh and aah over everyone else’s gifts, as excited as if they were our own. In a way they were, because we knew in the year to come, we’d be playing with our friends’ toys, too. Because we lived in northern New York where the snow could stay until deep into April, gifts like bicycles and skates offered us delayed pleasure. That was okay because while we waited to ride them outside (some of my friends had cellars big enough to ride inside), we put our sleds and ice skates to good use.
Over the years, my two younger sisters and I had a tradition of going through our toys in October and picking out some of the better, but seldom played with toys to donate the town clerk who would see they got to children who would love them, We sewed new clothes for the dolls or even whole wardrobes, so the dolls were even better than new. Stuffed toys were spiffed up with fresh ribbons and maybe even an outfit or two of their own. We knit scarves for everything from Barbie to teddy bears in vivid shades of whatever yarn we’d collected from my mother’s friends.
It was the way my parents taught us about sharing with those kids who might not otherwise have gotten a nice toy for Christmas and knowing that the giving brought as much joy as the getting.
Years passed, and I continued the tradition with my young children. They picked out the toys to donate, and I fixed the toys up so they looked like new. In addition, I began knitting personalized Christmas stockings for everyone in the family, our immediate family, parents, in-laws, nieces and nephews.

My older daughter was five and my son was two when my husband I decided that our family wasn’t complete. Our son had been born in Korea and came to us when he was 11 months old, but this time we applied for an older child, knowing there was a narrow window between our children’s ages and how agencies didn’t like to disrupt the family order for the oldest child already in the family. We filled out the paperwork and waited and waited for the good news. As we’d specifically asked for a girl, I knit our future daughter a stocking with her name on it. We were all set for her.
Sure enough we got our best-ever early Christmas present the Monday after Thanksgiving when our social worker called with news on a little girl who’d been matched to us. She was 18 months old. In her photo, she looked too serious for such a young child, but we discovered she was already in our hearts and we couldn’t get her home.
We put everything on warp speed in hopes of getting her home in time for Christmas, but it didn’t happen. It seems as if no baby, even our Savior, has come when it’s convenient. We hung her stocking and said, “She’ll be here to open her gifts with us next Christmas.” She did, in fact, come home the day after Valentine’s Day after all the hoops were jumped through.
Now fast forward to 2001 and our younger daughter was participating in the college program at Disney World.

That year, we knew she wouldn’t be home for Christmas, because her session ended on January 8. We didn’t want to lose another Christmas with her. Going to Florida wasn’t possible, so what to do? Her sister, her brother, my husband and I discussed it, and we decided to postpone the Christmas gift portion of the holiday until she came home. I was proud of my kids to be willing to put off the fun of exchanging the gifts they’d picked out for each other, and I believe they’d learned about what was truly important in gift-giving from that old tradition of sharing with others.
We set up the tree, hung the stockings and made the cookies as we always did. My husband read “A Visit from St. Nick” on Christmas Eve as he always did, but that year he read it over the phone so our youngest and her five homesick roommates (and apparently a suite full of other kids longing to be home) could hear. We enjoyed the events at church and with extended family and neighbors, but the gifts waited under the tree unwrapped. Our kids couldn’t participate in the “what did you get?” conversations...Not yet!
On January 9, our daughter arrived home. The first thing we did after she got in the house was share the gifts we’d gotten for each other. It was all the sweeter for waiting, and we laughed and laughed about being the last people in neighborhood to open gifts. But the best gift again was having the whole family together again.
Being together as a family is a theme throughout my Amish Hearts series. The final book in the series, An Amish Arrangement, is coming out today (January 1 as an ebook).

The heroine, Mercy, knows all about the different ways of building families because she’s both an adoptee and an adoptive parent. She and the hero, Jeremiah Stoltzfus, must learn, too, that sometimes things happen on their own schedule and all we can do is have faith that God will make everything come out for the best in the end.
Have a merry Christmas with the ones you love and enjoy the special traditions you’ve built through the years!