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Good Wednesday Morning. This Month we are having our Shine in 09 1question interview series. You are welcome to participate. You can email me, DM me on Twitter, Facebook me, send me an Utterli response or leave your comment here, in the forum or link back your response from a blog post.
The question for the month is:
In this New Year what goals have you set and how do you plan to accomplish them?
Today Jennine Arena, Owner at Mark Anderson Productions, LLC, a Minneapolis-St. Paul Area, Minnesota communications firm that specializes in: media relations, media training, events communication and video project management responds...
I plan on getting more involved with Linked In and answering questions like this. Especially if there is an opportunity where it will be posted elsewhere, as a public relations avenue. My company will continue sending out its monthly e-newsletter that is a quick tip and showcases one of our latest projects. Another goal for 2009, for myself personally, is to write about my experience with my father's fight with lung cancer, and how we made the most of the last few months of his life. Where will it be published? I don't know if it ever will, but I want to have the opportunity to write it, not only for myself, but to give others hope and ideas while going through such a difficult situation.
On tonight's Media Candy we're talking with Ron Hudson of Immediate Influence about being of service this year. How will you shine in 09? www.blogtalkradio.com/deegospel
Our bro host tonight is Ron Hudson Author, blogger, radio talk show host, CM.NLP and Strategic Influence and Persuasion Trainer Listen-in to his BlogTalkRadio show Immediate Influence that airs on Monday nights at 6:30pm PST, 8:30pm CST, 9:30pm EST: www.immediateinfluence.com
Show Format
1.Intro
2. Top Topics(Hot Topics) Below to look through. The list is tentative. You know how we do.
Commercial/Drop
3. Special Guest: Author/Playwright Tiffany Warren is the author of a new Christian novel TheBishop's Daughter (January 09, Hachette Book Group.) Tiffany L Warren is also the bestselling author of "What a Sista Should Do", "Farther than I Meant to Go, and "Longer than I Meant to Stay". Tiffany also writes young adult fiction under the pen name Nikki Carter. Her first young adult novel "Step to This" will be released in March, 2009. She is also the founder of the Faith in Fiction Retreat, which is slated for July 2009 in Orlando, FL. She will in Atlanta this weekend.
4. Obama Inauguration and The Economy. The inaugural committee for President-elect Barack Obama just announced there will be a "Neighborhood Inaugural Ball" at the Washington Convention Center on January 20. Tickets will be available for free or at an affordable price, according to USA Today. Obama's inauguration committee claims it is the first official inaugural ball of its kind featuring interactive components like webcasting and text messaging, to link neighborhoods across the country with the new president.Is it fair to ask him not to celebrate with a ball? Sourcelink: http://www.essence.com/news_entertainment/news/articles/budgetballprezelectinviteseveryonetohistoricevent/
WASHINGTON – Roland Burris tried to take President-elect Barack Obama's Illinois Senate seat Tuesday but failed in a scripted piece of political theater staged just before the opening of the 111th Congress. "Mr. Burris is not in possession of the necessary credentials from the state of Illinois," declared Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
Burris, 71, earlier confirmed that Secretary of the Senate Nancy Erickson had informed him in a private meeting that his credentials lacked a required signature and his state's seal.
He said he had been advised that "I would not be accepted, and I will not be seated, and I will not be permitted on the floor." He spoke to a crowd of reporters who had followed him across the street for a news conference in a cold and steady rain outside the Capitol. Sourcelink: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090106/ap_on_go_co/senate_burri s
Happy New Year! This year CFB is taking off toward the same direction, but in a bigger and bolder fashion. Today we kick off of New Year's 1 Question Interview Series(You are welcome to participate at your blogs and the forum and on Twitter.) If you use Twitter please put in #1?book as your hashtag.
Now onto the question...
What Must-Haves Do you Need when your on an Out of Town Book Event?
Author and Editor Marilynne Griffith response via Twitter:
Must haves for out-of-town events? 1. Reliable escort or transport. 2. Media-radio, tv, etc 3. Prior promo 4. Godly sistahs!
A pastoral about race and religion. My top pick. I am huge fan of Marilynne Robinson' Housekeeping and Gilead. Now a bigger fan of her dyptch Gilead and now Home. I see these two novels as standalone/standbesides, because Robinson stitches a common thread between the two novels. "Why is racism prevalent in American Christian life." Both Home and Gilead are set in 1956, the era of the Civil Rights Movement. In Home we see the characters observing and noting the changes in America, but not in a way that progressive Christian would like for many to believe(black church burnings, city-planning, lynchings, fear mongering.) Race is an issue, even among the Children of God. It's still an issue, and I applaud Robinson for extending the conversation.
An excerpt...
Listen: Audio Excerpt
An excerpt...
The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never failed to acknowledge, especially when it stood over against particular sorrow. Even more frequently after their mother died he spoke of the house as if it were an old wife, beautiful for every comfort it had offered, every grace, through all the long years. It was a beauty that would not be apparent to every eye. It was too tall for the neighborhood, with a flat face and a flattened roof and peaked brows over the windows. "Italianate," her father said, but that was a guess, or a rationalization. In any case, it managed to look both austere and pretentious despite the porch her father had had built on the front of it to accommodate the local taste for socializing in the hot summer evenings, and which had become overgrown by an immense bramble of trumpet vines. It was a good house, her father said, meaning that it had a gracious heart however awkward its appearance. And now the gardens and the shrubbery were disheveled, as he must have known, though he rarely ventured beyond the porch.
Not that they had been especially presentable even while the house was in its prime. Hide-and-seek had seen to that, and croquet and badminton and baseball. "Such times you had!" her father said, as if the present slight desolation were confetti and candy wrappers left after the passing of some glorious parade. And there was the oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung its imponderable branches out over the road and across the yard, branches whose girths were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa. There had once been four swings suspended from those branches, announcing to the world the fruitfulness of their household. The oak tree flourished still, and of course there had been and there were the apple and cherry and apricot trees, the lilacs and trumpet vines and the day lilies. A few of her mother’s irises managed to bloom. At Easter she and her sisters could still bring in armfuls of flowers, and their father’s eyes would glitter with tears and he would say, "Ah yes, yes," as if they had brought some memento, these flowers only a pleasant reminder of flowers.
Why should this staunch and upright house seem to her so abandoned? So heartbroken? The eye of the beholder, she thought. Still, seven of her father’s children came home as often as they could manage to, and telephoned, and sent notes and gifts and crates of grapefruit. Their own children, from the time they could grasp a crayon and scrawl, were taught to remember Grandpa, then Great-grandpa. Parishioners and their children and grandchildren looked in on her father with a faithfulness that would have taxed his strength if the new minister had not hinted at the problem. And there was Ames, her father’s alter ego, in whom he had confided so long and so utterly that he was a second father to them all, not least in the fact of knowing more about them than was entirely consistent with their comfort. Sometimes they made their father promise not to tell anyone, by which he knew they meant Reverend Ames, since he was far too discreet to repeat any confidence, except in the confessional of Ames’s stark bachelor kitchen, where, they suspected, such considerations were forgotten. And what was their father not to tell? How they informed on Jack, telling him what Jack had said, what Jack had done or seemed inclined to do.
"I have to know," their father said. "For his sake." So they told on their poor scoundrel brother, who knew it, and was irritated and darkly amused, and who kept them informed or misinformed and inspired urgent suspicions among them which they felt they had to pass on, whatever their misgivings, to spare their father having to deal with the sheriff again. They were not the kind of children to carry tales. They observed a strict code against it among themselves, in fact, and they made an exception of Jack only because they were afraid to do otherwise. "Will they put him in jail?" they asked one another miserably when the mayor’s son found his hunting rifle in their barn. If they had only known, they could have returned it and spared their father surprise and humiliation. At least with a little warning he could have composed himself, persuaded himself to feel something less provocative than pure alarm.
But no, they did not put him in jail. Jack, standing beside his father, made yet another apology and agreed to sweep the steps of the city hall every morning for a week. And he did leave the house early every morning. Leaves and maple wings accumulated at city hall until the week was over and the mayor swept them up. No. His father would always intercede for him. The fact that his father was his father usually made intercession unnecessary. And that boy could apologize as fluently as any of the rest of the Boughtons could say the Apostles’ Creed.
A decade of betrayals, minor and major, was made worse by awareness on every side that they were all constantly alert to transgression and its near occasion, and made worse still by the fact that Jack never repaid them in kind, though this may only have been because their own mischief was too minor to interest him. To say they shared a bad conscience about Jack to this day would be to overstate the matter a little. No doubt he had his own reasons for staying away all these years, refusing all contact with them. Assuming, please God, he was alive.
