Google allowed me to create audiobooks with an AI narrator for free of my titles available on the Google Play store, so I decided to give it a try. Right now, Necessary Proof , Unshakeable Pursuit , Weddings and Wasabi , The Spinster’s Christmas , and my devotional Who I Want to Be are all available as AI-narrated audiobooks. From now until March 11, 2023, Necessary Proof digitally-narrated audiobook is free! Pick up you free copy and let me know how the audiobook sounds. If you hear anything weird, feel free to email me and let me know the exact time where you heard it, and I’ll try to have Google correct it.

The weather here in California has been really nice lately, although it does get a bit hot in the early afternoon. I recently started exercising again, now that my IBS is doing a little better, and I’ve been enjoying running outside in the early morning when it’s still cool. I’m listening to an audiobook, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running: A Memoir by Haruki Murakami. The author is a very famous writer in Japan who has won tons of awards, although to be honest I haven’t read his fiction since the more literary style of his books aren’t to my taste. But I bought the audiobook since it was about two subjects I wanted to hear, writing and running. The author apparently has been running for decades, and has run numerous marathons and even an ultra-marathon. His training methods aren’t as scientific as what I followed when I trained for the Honolulu Marathon, but his discipline is no joke. I liked the way he compared and contrasted his writing with his running. One thing t...

For today's Slow Down Saturday, I wanted to share this verse with you. I'm not always consistent with my daily Bible readings, which is really bad for me. It was like this especially when I was was sick during most of March and part of April with IBS issues. I hadn't read the Bible in a while, and I started to feel sluggish and stagnant inside, as if something was stuck. It felt like something in my spirit was wrong. When I finally started feeling better, I got back into my daily Bible readings. When I read my Bible and started spending time in prayer again, I instantly--and I mean instantly--felt refreshed and renewed. It was a reminder that God is with me. I was reminded to seek the Lord's will and His guidance. I remembered that following His purpose for me makes me feel like I'm on the right path after wandering lost for a while. Take a moment today to stop and read a passage in your Bible, and spend a few minutes in prayer. Be reminded that God is there an...

I got kind of stressed out by the stuff I have to do for my book launch (the 2nd book in my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series ), which is coming up on February 17th. I have a To Do list with everything that needs to be done, but I get paranoid that I’ve forgotten something, and it makes me anxious. I try to slow down my workload on weekends, especially Sundays, but I was reminded on Thursday that sometimes I need to slow down midweek because I’m only piling on stuff that adds to my stress levels. The cluttered and scattered state of my head was making it hard for me to get work done. So I simplified my book launch process and adjusted my launch calendar for the 3rd book in my series, which will release in May. Just by eliminating things on my To Do list, and consolidating and adjusting due dates so I can get more done in advance, made me feel tons better. So today for Slow Down Saturday, is there something you can simplify or eliminate to make your life easier? Never underestimate th...

Last year right after Thanksgiving, I had a couple weeks of pretty bad burnout. I had been working hard since July to improve my writing productivity, and I had been doing well, but I hadn’t been taking enough time out for myself to recharge, and I certainly hadn’t been spending much time alone with God. So I spent two weeks mentally drained. Since then, I’ve been trying to remember to make it a priority to spend time reading my Bible everyday. It's hard, sometimes, because I just want to keep busy and get done everything on my To Do list, but when I sit down and meditate on a Bible verse, I've been feeling God speak to me and convict me. What are some of your favorite Bible verses? Was there a particular passage or verse you happened to read today? Share it with me below!

I've been doing the devotional Thessalonians: A 5-Day Reading Plan by NewSpring Church on the YouVersion Bible app , and today's devotional (day 5) and Bible reading was really good for me. Lately I've been disappointed with my work output, my number of hours worked per day and my words written per day. I think I'm comparing myself to other writers who are so much more focused and disciplined than I am, and have insane word count outputs, and are making six figures a year. I'm also trying to achieve the same number of hours worked as when I was a biologist, but biology work was much less mentally strenuous than writing has been. So I've been struggling to improve my focus and my discipline, but I get lazy very easily. God has given me this gift of working from home, so I should take advantage of it, right? But just yesterday I really didn't want to work, and since I'm home all day there's no one to notice if I slack off. The devotional made ...

I’ve been studying the book of Acts lately, using Search the Scriptures: A Three-Year Daily Devotional Guide to the Whole Bible for my daily quiet time. I like Search the Scriptures because each day’s passage is usually pretty short and manageable, and there are only 2-3 questions to answer, so it doesn’t take a huge amount of time. The questions and sometimes the additional reference verses are usually targeted really well for study and application, so I get a lot out of it. I’m almost at the end of Acts, and Paul has finally gotten to Rome. He’d been talking about it before he even went to Jerusalem for the last time, and God had even appeared in a vision and spoken to him to tell him that he would testify about Christ in Rome. Search the Scriptures also gave some good reference verses from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and for the first time I was able to match the letter to the time Paul wrote it. What was curious was that Paul originally intended simply to stop in Rome on hi...

I’ve been reading more marketing books lately. The self-publishing market has changed so much in the few years since I first started self-publishing, and I haven’t released anything in several years because of those bad bouts of writer’s block ,so I wanted a refresher course on ebook marketing. I’m not very good at marketing AT ALL, and quite frankly I don’t like it very much, but I know I have to do at least some marketing for my books. But I started feeling overwhelmed and stressed about the thought of all the advance marketing I will need to start doing. God was watching out for me, because I had previously arranged to call an author friend of mine, MaryLu Tyndall , in order to ask some advice about target audience. So we talked, and she heard all my fears and stressing about marketing, and she basically talked me down from the rafters. She reminded me that God is in control of my marketing and book sales, and I should pray and do only the marketing I feel God telling me to do...

Just a reminder, the prices of Who I Want to Be ebook and print book go up again next week Wednesday! For a limited time, my Matthew devotional book,  Who I Want to Be , is only $0.99 for the ebook and $3.94 for the print book, which is the minimum marketplace price! Buy  Who I Want To Be  in  Kindle ,  iBooks , and  Kobo  ebook formats, and buy print books on  Amazon . If you already bought the ebook, the ebook versions now have my pastor's foreword, so be sure to update your copies from wherever you bought them. The print version already has the foreword. This sale is in celebration of the Japanese language version of the devotional, titled  本当の私に , which just released. I am very excited to have my devotional translated into Japanese and available to Japanese women who may be interested in Jesus Christ. If you know anyone who might be interested in this devotional book in Japanese, please do point them to the  Japanese section o...

The Luke Devotionals: As part of my Bible study in the book of Luke, I started writing devotionals for each passage, and decided to post them here. I also will have the devotionals translated into Japanese, so if you know of any Japanese-speaking women who are curious about Christ, please do point them here! English is at the bottom. *** ルカ３章１節〜１４節 ８年生から９年生に進級するときの夏休み、わたしの心はとても悲しかったのです。わたしは、とても恥ずかしがりやで人とうまく話すこともできずに、クラスのなかで友達もいなくて孤独でした。そのようなことから、わたしはだんだん人を避けて一人になり、その孤独感から逃避するために小説を読むようになりました。本だけがわたしの友達だとよく思っていました。 大学で心理学を専攻したあと、今となるとわたしは鬱病だったと思います。一週間に何回か自殺を考えるようになっていました。家族が精神科医にいくようになったのですが、その中で弟がADHD　（注意力不足活動過多症）だったので、わたしが精神科医と話す時間はあまりありませんでした。わたしは一人の少女の短編小説を書きました。その少女は自分の存在は無意味であり、すべては無駄であり、自殺を考えている少女でした。 神様の恵みにより、そのころ教会に行くようになりました。唯一、自殺願望を阻止していたのは、毎週教会の牧師が罪の悔い改め、キリストにある喜びの説教でした。わたしは、個人的にその罪の悔い改め、キリストにある喜びを経験していたわけではないのですが、頭では、そのことを理解していました。 何が原因だったか覚えていませんが、ある晩、クライマックスが来たのです。わたしは、泣き崩れ、神様に自殺しないように助けを求めて祈ったのです。その時、何があったのかわかりませんが、わたしは罪を悔い改めて、「良いクリスチャン」になることを決心しました。 わ...

I’ve had a good start to the new year so far, but haven’t sat down to think about my goals until now. I love setting New Year’s resolutions. Some people think that’s weird and I know all about the low probability of keeping resolutions, but I still like to make them. It makes me feel positive about myself and the upcoming year, and for me, that just feels good. So I came up with some goals/resolutions for the new year that I hope to keep. 1) Three novels in 2020 Since I write full-time, this isn’t an unrealistic goal for me. Last year, I was still suffering from several bouts of writer’s block. Some was because of personal issues, but because I got nothing done during that time, it then made me doubt what I should be writing. I ended up flipping between several different projects as I tried to figure out what I wanted to work on, and the indecision itself also triggered writer’s block when I tried to write any particular project, because I wasn’t certain if that project was wha...

I’m feeling a bit thoughtful this Christmas season, and wanted to share some things that have struck me recently, and other things I’ve been remembering. This will be a more sober post than other Christmas devotionals, but I wanted to speak to anyone who might have felt as I did before I knew Christ. The image above was made by my friend Pammer James on the YouVersion Bible app , and I especially liked it for Christmas because it brings that particular verse in the gospel of John into focus during this season. In Jesus is life, a light shining in the darkness. As a teenager, I had a bad bout of depression. Everything around me was pain and sadness and darkness. But the moment I surrendered my life to Jesus, I felt peace for the first time in a long time, and I was not so lonely and filled with pain. Life was still hard, but the darkness was not as dark anymore, because I had Jesus lighting the way through a difficult time. This season can be hard because everything is bright...

I’ve had a horrible past week, and I blogged about it at ChristiansRead blog . But amazingly, some really great things came out of it: I have just come out of possibly the worst 10 days of my life. I had some pretty bad menstrual cramping for a couple days, but one of the generic acetaminophen tablets I took for the pain ended up giving me horrible food poisoning symptoms (I have a feeling it was some type of impurity or chemical contamination in the tablet). So after dry heaving almost hourly for 24 hours, I was in terrible shape. Click here to read more

I’ve over at the ChristiansRead blog with something “close to my heart,” so to speak. :) "I’ve been discipling a young woman at church who used to be in my youth group, so I’ve seen her grow up, to an extent. She’s very busy with graduate school right now, but there’s a young man she’s met with whom she’s gotten closer. It’s always hard for me to give advice or encouragement to young women when it comes to their love lives. Everyone’s experience with romantic relationships is different depending on each person’s personality, family background, and life experience." Click here to read more

The kids at church just got back from a youth retreat called Winter Vision, and one thing they got out of the retreat was the concept of how each of us is a teacup. The red plastic cups used for parties is disposable. Coffee mugs are a little better than those plastic cups, but they seem to breed in my cabinet like rabbits, and also they’re “common,” they’re not anything special. Teacups, on the other hand, like the fancy ones in your mom’s china cabinet which you’re not supposed to touch, are precious and protected. We are each teacups—precious and protected by God. I thought it was a great way to think of ourselves. But I want to go one step further. Yes, teacups are precious and protected, but they also should be used. If they’re just on display, they’re of no use to anyone. Instead, people are using their common coffee mugs rather than the beautiful teacups. And yes, I do think it tastes better if it’s drunk from a fancy teacup. For my birthday, my mom had shipped to me t...

One of my Daily Guideposts devotionals,  Helping Others Find Jesus , is posted on the Guideposts website! I hope you enjoy it!

Captain's Log, Stardate 01.18.2011 I got the whole concept of a “word” for the year from Marilynn Griffith. I haven’t always had a word for the year—I didn’t last year—but this year, I’ve been feeling like God wants me to focus on the word “blessing.” But not receiving blessings—rather, being a blessing. I’ve been reading this word a lot lately in my Bible and in conversations with people and in my devotional books. I want to be a blessing to people this year. I’m not sure how, but I’m going to look for ways and I’ll be open to what God wants me to do for Him. How about you? Any “word” for your year?

Captain's Log, Stardate 02.27.2009 I was at Faithchick talking about how The Relationship Principles of Jesus by Tom Holladay has been helping me to reset my priorities. Click here to read my Faithchick post.

Captain's Log, Stardate 11.21.2008 As Thanksgiving approaches, let’s be thankful. God made us to give thanks. Top five things I’m thankful for: 1. Captain Caffeine, because he let me pursue my dream of writing, he talks me down from the rafters, and, when needed, he gives me a good kick in the rear to get my work done. 2. My critique partners. God put them each in my life through divine appointments, and the best part is, we met when we were all still unpublished. We’ve grown with each other and support each other, and, when needed, they give me a good kick in the rear to get my work done. 3. My prayer partners. Some of these are my critique partners, some are my church family who love me and are proud of me. I wouldn’t be anything without prayer cover. 4. My parents for never discouraging me from writing when I was young, never telling me horror stories about how most writers never get published, never telling me that my aspirations weren’t valid. 5. My dog, because even though sh...

Captain's Log, Supplemental My article on spiritual gifts is up on TheHighCalling.org! Teaching is not my spiritual gift. That explanation works with my Sunday School teacher—but not with my boss. Read the rest here: Think Outside the Gift Box