Celebrate with me by entering my giveaway!

One lucky winner will receive:

• Brand New KINDLE with Wi-Fi
• Brand New KINDLE with Wi-Fi to Giveaway to a Friend!
• Forever Hilltop by Judy K Baer for you and a one for a friend

Enter today by clicking one of the icons below. But hurry, the giveaway ends on May 22nd. Winner will be announced 5/24/12 on my Blog.

 

Don’t miss a moment of the fun. Tell your friends via FACEBOOK or TWITTER and increase your chances of winning. Hope to see you on the 21st!

###

Judy Baer is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach with a Master of Arts in Human Development which focused on writing, coaching, faith and spirituality. She is the author of 75+ published books, primarily novels.

Judy, how long have you been coaching, and what made you decide to become a writing and creativity coach?

I began coaching in the year 2000 and have certifications from three different coaching schools and have attended a fourth. I began as a personal life coach but found it was often writers who showed up as my clients. When I began my master’s, I wanted to combine my love of writing with my love of coaching. My final paper involved developing a new model of coaching for fiction writers who were struggling with character development. This was also a time when I developed a way to use coaching skills to vision and develop non-fiction books. Although  I didn’t initially intend to coach writers in particular, it was a very natural client group to relate to. After as many books as I’ve written, I doubt there’s an experience, hang-up, excuse or block that I haven’t suffered myself. As one of my clients tells me, “You never let me get away with anything.”

What are some examples of problems you’ve helped writers resolve at different stages of their careers?

We start wherever a client wants. Sometimes it’s writer’s block, sometimes new writers simply don’t know how to begin. I have non-fiction writers come to me with an idea they’ve had but they’re not sure how to work it into a marketable book. That’s when the visioning process is very helpful. Oftentimes the book a writer thinks she or he wants to write is very different from the book that they actually produce. We refine and define ideas together.

Where one starts isn’t always where one ends up. One gentleman came to me to write his book, decided to truly become an expert on the topic and is now getting his PHD and using his original idea as the jumping off point for his thesis. If an audience member wants to learn more on a subject, they can purchase a book for a more in depth look at the speaker’s ideas. That’s fun because, although the client might not be a professional writer, they are very well educated in the area they want to write about.

I’ve coached people through writer’s block, organizing their offices, confidence issues and just about anything that stands in the way of becoming the writer they dream of being. I’m not an editor but I work with the client’s ideas, emotions, roadblocks, etc. That’s a pretty general answer but coaching is a very agile, flexible thing and we hone in on issues whatever they might be. People can resolve their own issues, certainly, but what I know about coaching is that you can resolve them much faster with a coach walking along side you. Read the rest here.

We all need peers from whom we can learn and grow.  We need to be part of a tribe of people who hold similar interests and speak the same language.  This isn’t true just for writers.  We all need those kind of people in our lives.

And now I have to play catch-up for all those things that didn’t get done while I was away…

Judy Burgi!

Thanks to everyone who shared their summer with me … loved that peek into your lives!

What are you looking forward to this summer? Leave a comment and tell me what you love most about summer and I’ll enter you in a drawing to win a copy of Blessings from Acorn Hill (It’s a 2 in 1 volume and contains both Slices of Life and The Way We Were!)

Good luck and enjoy the lazy summer sun!

Many of the ideas I come up with for my books start with snatches of information I pick up while reading the daily paper, listening to television or reading those magazines.  It’s not the main story line that necessarily benefits from these snippets of facts I get from reading.  I may read an article on greyhound rescue and decide that an adopted race dog is the perfect pet for one of my characters.  Or I might read a fashion magazine and decide that one of my characters should have a particular style of dress.  It keeps me and my books from becoming routine.

When I speak to groups, I often say that a writer is like a dry sponge that moves through the world soaking up information and then, when they sit down to write, squeezes that juicy mix onto the page.  People used to ask me if my books were written about myself.

I’ve had nearly 80 published books in my career so it’s easy to assure them that I have not lived every one of the lives of my characters.  I haven’t experienced being anorexic or practicing as an attorney.  I haven’t been a trainer at a gym, a hockey player or worked at NASA.  Neither have I been a 42 year old newbie male pastor in a rural parish (as my hero is in An Unlikely Blessing and Surprising Grace which will be released in February, 2012.)

But life is simply more fun if you keep soaking it up!

Books are that way for a lot of people.  Some people get lost in romances or historicals, westerns, biographies or any of the many genres and single titles out there.  Reading allows me to go to Scotland, England or New York without leaving the house.  In fact, I think I’ll go to India right now where there has been a string of mysterious occurrences that are endangering travelers and see if I can figure it out…