An E-magazine dedicated to writing about faith and flying in a complex world

Contents:
1. Ezine subscription info.
2. Wingspread reading and signing event
3. New  article: Valentines Alligator Hunt
4. Writer’s Corner
5. Favorite quotes and books

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Subscribe  to this Wingspread  E-magazine (free), sent direct to your email inbox, about twice a month. Click here http://jimhurd.com to subscribe. You will receive a free article for subscribing. Please share this URL with interested friends, “like” it on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, etc.

Wingspread: Of Faith and Flying: Reading and signing event:
Wednesday, Feb. 25^th 6-8 p.m. Dunn Bros. Coffee Shop, Northdale & Foley Blvds., Coon Rapids, MN. All are welcome!

Wingspread is a memoir about how childhood faith led to mission bush-piloting in South America.
Buy it here:  jimhurd.com  (or at Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, etc.)  See pics related to Wingspread: http://www.pinterest.com/hurd1149/wingspread-of-faith-and-flying/

New article: Valentines Alligator Hunt
It’s Valentines Day in the States, and tonight Barbara and I have ventured deep into the Venezuelan rainforest. Will this be the night we get engaged? …

Read more here:  https://jimhurd.com/2015/02/09/valentines-alligator-hunt/
(*Request: Please leave a comment on the website after reading this article. Thanks.)

 

Writer’s Corner:  

Some ideas to help you revise your own stories:

• Think about one single person as a target audience. How would she/he read your story?
• Is your story cohesive? That is, is it about one thing? Does each paragraph point to the one single topic? If it’s about two things, write two stories.
• Can you add dialogue to your story? Readers like dialogue.
• Make certain every word does its work. If it doesn’t, cut it. You should easily be able to cut your story by 10%. A good rule is, the fewer words you use, the greater impact they will have.

Wondering how to clean up your writing? Read my “How to revise an article” at:  https://jimhurd.com/category/writing/

Writer’s Word of the week:  nominalization

Generally, nominalizations end in: -ion, -ness, -ance, -ence, -ness. These suffixes turn a word into a noun, a “dead” noun. A good rule: Go through your story and turn these words into powerful verbs. Example: “The assembly line used automation.” Change this to: “The factory owners automated the assembly line.”

 

Favorite quotes:

♠   A story is the shortest distance between a person and the truth.

Fr. De Mello

♠   Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

♠   The Good News of the gospel, therefore, is not that God came to take our suffering away, but that God wanted to become part of it.
Henri Nouwen

♠   He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

♠   Thank you for sending me a copy of your book – I’ll waste no time reading it.

Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

 

My all-time favorite books on writing:

William Zissner, On Writing Well.

Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

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