In the style of a daily planner, “The Prayer Map for Women” offers a pleasant, easy-to-use guide for establishing or venturing further into a deeper prayer life. The first thing that I noticed about this prayer map was its conveniently compact size; it is lightweight and will fit in most women’s purses or bags for easy carrying. Also, because it is spiral-bound, writing in it is very handy, without having to hold the pages open; this is one of the first features I look at when considering any kind of notebook or journal. The pages themselves are whimsical and appealing without being ostentatious or detracting from its purpose, with magenta and teal illustrations.

Two pages are allotted for each entry, divided into small, concise sections. Each page begins with “Dear Heavenly Father” and contains the following sections: Thank You For; I Am Worried About; People I Am Praying For Today; Here’s What’s Happening in My Life; I Need; and Other Things on My Heart That I Need to Share With You, God. The second page ends with “Amen. Thank You, Father, for hearing my prayers.” There is also a different Bible verse at the end of each entry, which grounds the writer in Scripture and encourages further reading of the Word. For women who are looking to jump-start, revive, or simply go deeper in their prayer life, this quaint little journal is the perfect guide!

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Barbour Publishing and was under no obligation to post a review.

A short book of which half is photocopies of O'Connor's journal. As a writer myself, and a person of deep faith in a Divine Being (whatever one wishes to call that Divinity), I was fascinated by her struggle to keep faith in God & herself, and by her constant pleas to God to grant her ambitions to be more than a mediocre writer (possibly because they echo my own prayers)

However, cynically, I wondered who tore out the missing pages - was it the publishers themselves(to keep the journal focused on he writing prayers) and were they really missing when the journal was found? I'm not a fan of living celebreties biographies and advice books - but O'Connor is no longer living, and her talent has stood the test of time. Thus, this journal could have been a great inspiration to unpublished authors. It is fascinating seeing her insecurities & ambition laid bare. I did, however, expect a prayer journal to cover other aspects of her life, and that was missing from this very short book. I did, however, like the photocopies of the actual journal and seeing her actual handwriting.

Welcome to Songdove Books Newsletter: September 2014

October 1st, and I royally missed sending out the September newsletter!  Will you forgive me?  September was a strange month for both me and Songdove Books.  On the day job front, work was the slowest it's been in months!

My latest book, "A Year in Prayer With Jesus" launched on the September Long Weekend.  It's available in a wide range of online locations in both paperback and various ebook formats.

As of this newsletter, no one has signed up on the calendar to publicly begin Day One in a bid to cover the various prayer points in this book every single day for an entire year.

Pumpkin Pie From the Ground Up! (Well, Almost!)

An ebook was also launched in September that shares my own recipe from picking out a pumpkin to breaking it down and turning into pie filling that everyone who's ever sat around my table at holiday meals has raved about.  It is a departure from what I usually write, but it was a fun project and can be offered as a paperback booklet if requested.  This book is entitled, "Pumpkin Pie from the Ground Up! (Well, Almost!)" and yes, the humour in that title continues throughout the book.

One Thought Leads to Another. . . and Another. . .

Towards the end of the month, an idea came to me about tweeting, "A Year in Prayer With Jesus".  As it turns out, most of the book is quite tweetable with very little tweaking to make most prayer prompts fit into 140 characters.  Songdove Books is also on Pinterest, so the thought progressed into making each prayer prompt into it's own image based on the book cover's background image.  The result actually turned out quite well, which led to a third thought!  Amazing how one thought leads to another eh?  My goal now is to create 7 prayer cards for every day of the book's year and make them available for purchase.  Unfortunately, most places I could go to have prices that to me, are prohibitively high if I wish to resell them to you.  

I am therefore working on a system integration with my website that would let you buy each card one at a time at a price point that would bring a month-long sampling down a bit more than what I've been quoted to date.  The beauty of buying one at a time is that you don't have to buy ALL the prayer cards necessarily, but can pick and choose which cards you wish to purchase.  Prices go down with bulk purchases as well.  The service that lets me do this offers a wide range of options, but I've narrowed them down to greeting cards, flat cards (postcard size), image downloads and ecards (which are free to send to anyone you wish).  This service isn't live yet on my site because I'm currently not happy with the gallery presentation.  You're welcome to give me feedback after looking at this page here:  http://songdove.fa-ct.com/wordpress-mu/songdovemusings/a-year-in-prayer-with-jesus-daily-prayer-cards/ Clicking an image will open it up full-size and once everything on the page has loaded, the various buy choices will appear across the bottom of the image.  Presentation options include the basic gallery thumbnail presentation, or a tiled mosaic presentation so far.  Lightbox presentations or slideshow presentations don't work well with the buy choice links.  But so far, all gallery options have the thumbnails quite close together. . . If you as my mailing list are ok with that, then I'll go live with one of the two presentations that work.  But if you have critical thoughts as much as I do about it, then I'll have to keep looking for something that works a bit better before taking this concept live.

Wrap-up

So this month was all about pumpkins and prayer.  Considering the Canadian Thanksgiving is coming up in October shortly, that combination of thoughts is very timely.  If you've been wondering what to do for family devotions this year around the table, you may want to follow in one reviewer's footsteps and buy a copy of "A Year in Prayer With Jesus" to nicely fill that void.  If you're looking for a lighter pumpkin pie this year that might actually be healthy for someone in your household, you may wish to purchase the ebook, "PumpkIn Pie From the Ground Up! (Well, Almost!)".  

I don't know what October has to offer yet this year, but I do know the wetter weather is playing havoc with my health already.  Fall is a beautiful time of year with leaves changing colours and decorating sidewalks as they fall from the trees.  The temperatures get more livable as we leave the seering Okanagan heat behind.  Cooler temperatures sometimes bring more precipitation in this part of the world as well, which is the bit my body kicks up a fuss over.  Myself, I love the rain!  It is so incredibly peaceful and quieting.  I have yet to convince my lungs of the same thing however.  So pray for me as we enter this Fall season.  Pray for health, for domestic economic sustainability, and for God's continued leading as I move forward.

No book projects are on the horizon at this time, which means it's time to begin thinking about Fall, Christmas or Winter book tours to help get the word out about the books currently on the Songdove Books line-up.  An offline order sheet has been created now, which  you are welcome to download at this link here:   http://songdove.fa-ct.com/stuff/bookorderform.pdf    Feel free to share that with others who may not be comfortable ordering books online.

Past Newsletter:
http://songdove.fa-ct.com/wordpress-mu/songdovemusings/past-newsletters/

THREE MORE DAYS to take advantage of a 99cent book sale on "TribBooks", "Inktera" and "IndieReader" apps (available on Google Play and Apple #App Store).

They reduced the price of all three of my e-books to $.99 for 7 days, just 10 copies each are available for "Dressed for Eternity", "A Year in Prayer With Jesus", and "Practical Thoughts on Becoming an Author", while supplies last.

All three books are at this link here: https://www.inktera.com/store/search?q=Marilynn+Dawson Their TribBooks app is here: http://tribbooks.com/ and their Inktera app is here: https://www.inktera.com/store/free_apps

Saturday we began the book launch giveaway.  Sunday we ended the month-long 15% off celebration sale.  Monday we went to visit the blog of a writer of Christian children's books to engage in an interview about myself as an author, and this latest book.  TODAY we have a fun announcement and invitation!

Have you ever sat down with a group of people and all agreed to join a daily initiative where each of you took a different day?  It might have been taking turns sitting at the bedside of a sick friend.  It might have been taking turns watering a special plant a week before someone's big day.  Maybe it was for a fundraising relay and you each signed up for one hour on the clock.  Have you ever put your name on a 24-hour prayer calendar?  Did you ever sign up for a time slot on a 40-day prayer calendar?  Global Day of Prayer likes to encourage prayer groups to do that in the 40 days between Easter and Pentecost every year.  I've heard stories of prayer rooms that are open 24 hours a day in Israel, England, and other places as well.

In a similar fashion, it would be fun to sign up 365 people or prayer groups, each beginning Day One of "A Year in Prayer With Jesus" on a different day on the calendar.  The way this book is laid out, you can begin Day One literally any day of the calendar year, so no one has to be concerned with missing part of the year if they don't start on a given date.

One of the prayer points in this book, "Thy Kingdom Come", features prayer prompts for a wide range of missions organizations across various denominations.  It also features nations in or near the 10-40 window, and encourages prayer for various people groups and language groups.  As the author of this book, this particular prayer point was the most difficult to put together.  Every missions organization mentioned had to go through a vetting process to be sure they were teaching Salvation, placing emphasis on the Word of God, and allowing the Holy Spirit to lead and guide them.  Language groups and people groups had to be "living" so that I wasn't asking you to pray for groups that had in some manner disappeared off the map.  While these vetting processes helped to narrow down the various lists, I still had far too many entries for the mere 365 days to be covered in a year.  After prayer and puzzling, I finally reduced these lists to those that hopefully represent the widest swaths of humanity on the planet.  Needless to say, this particular prayer prompt feels like a mere drop in the bucket of all the people groups and language groups a person or prayer group could be praying for.  The "Your Thoughts" entry will come in handy for many of you who know of or work with groups not mentioned in the 365 day period.  If you purchase the paperback copy, you can write those in with a pen or pencil.  If you buy an ebook version, you may wish to purchase a matching notebook from my cafepress.com store (http://www.cafepress.com/songdovebooks), so that you have somewhere to write down additional prayer prompts as they come to you.

But imagine. . . You begin Day One on September 3rd.  Your friend begins Day One on September 4th.  Your buddy's prayer group begins Day One on September 5th, and so on.  Each of you would come to the above prayer prompt one day after the other, effectively lifting up those mentioned there every single day for an entire year!

This is exciting to me because I do have a heart for missions!  I know how deeply missionaries appreciate those back home praying for them!  I know how impacting those prayers are on daily life on the missionfield.  I also know how difficult it is to get people praying for these missionaries on a regular basis.  I used to run an online prayer group and we divided up the globe into the same regions as created in the Left Behind Series by Tim Lehaye and Jerry Jenkins.  I still have graphics of those regions on my computer from those days managing this online prayer group.  We had prayer warriors from South Africa, Britain, Australia, Germany, the USA, Canada, Singapore, etcetera.  Whenever possible, each person put their name down to pray on a given day for a given region of the world.  This prayer group went on for several years and we'd meet to pray together once a month online in group chat.

So needless to say, I can't help being excited about the prospect of encouraging people to join with each other across cities, regions and nations to lift up missionaries, nations, people groups and language groups in prayer every single day for an entire year!

Participation requires a copy of this book in some format, whether paperback, PDF, epub or mobi.  Tomorrow, September 3rd, four people will receive free copies of "A Year in Prayer With Jesus" in digital format.  Once you have your own copy, you are then encouraged to visit the entry form on my website at:  http://songdove.fa-ct.com/wordpress-mu/songdovemusings/join-with-others-in-covering-the-world-in-prayer-for-an-entire-year/  Fill in the entire form including where you obtained your copy of the book, as well as what date you began Day One.  If you include a link in the form, be sure to fill out the box asking how you want your calendar entry to appear.  Failure to fill out that final box will result in your full name being shared on the date you choose.  Your entry will be placed on the calendar manually, and your email address entered into my monthly Songdove Books Presents: Newsletter.  You're free to unsubscribe from that newsletter at any time.

I am seriously looking forward to adding names to the calendar on my website!  Are you game?  Check this link for current places where you can get your copy and join the fun!  https://www.facebook.com/notes/marilynn-dawson-author/book-launch-for-a-year-in-prayer-with-jesus-august-30th-sept-5th/700524600040431