The Year of Goals

Did I set any goals this year? I don't think I did. As a matter of fact, I think I just allowed myself to be carried along by the tidal wave that was 2015. I would have been too busy to accomplish any goals anyway. Actually, I did set one: to read 25 books for my Goodreads Reading Challenge. As of today, I still need to finish two more to make the goal. I'm trying to get that done today as I cook, clean, and prepare for guests tonight.

With this year behind me, I do plan to make 2016 a year of goals. Actually, I had dreams of setting goals last night, so I think God may be telling me something. My prayer is that 2016 will be the year of positive change in my creative and professional life. I recognize the need, and now I need to act and move in that direction. Along with finishing a new novel, continuing to edit for Pelican, and possibly starting up my own business, I really want to make my spiritual life a priority as well. My prayer time and Bible reading have really gone by the wayside since September, so those must move to the top of my list.

What goals (if any) have you set for yourself this year?

Giveaway of CAPTIVES

Enter the giveaway on Goodreads for a free paperback copy of  Captives. The winner will be randomly selected on January 31st.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Captives

by Megan Whitson Lee

Giveaway ends January 31, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I can't believe it's almost 2016 ... but it's coming ready or not.

I won't be blogging next week since we're traveling to South Carolina, hanging out with family, etc. So I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and holiday season.

See ya'll next year!


Anyone going anywhere or doing anything fun for the holidays?




"Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.<sup>"


~Zechariah 9:9</sup>

Meet the Characters of CAPTIVES

Three very different people--all of them on a journey where their lives intersect...

Blaise Timothy is a world-renowned cellist who has made her living traveling all over the United States and Europe, but her success in her professional life is in direct contrast to the failure in her love life. Moving from man to man, she is easily sucked into romantic relationships that are toxic and ill-fated. When her sister, Amy, goes missing, Blaise puts her life on hold to search for her younger sister. In the process, she learns more than she ever wanted to know about human trafficking as well as the darkness of her own heart.

Andrew Victor lives across the street from where Amy’s body is found and witnesses her covered body being carried out of the ravine. By profession he is an artist, but at thirty-one he has returned home from New York City without any money or direction. Andrew must live with his parents as he struggles to gain control over his life and an ever-increasing and dangerous addiction to pornography.

Asha Edgewater and her husband live in Washington, DC and work as missionaries. As a girl in Nepal, Asha was sold into sexual slavery—a bondage she didn’t escape until she was well into her twenties. Haunted by her past, Asha attempts to help others who have fallen victim to the enslavement of prostitution, and she feels a particular connection to Amy Timothy—the young girl whose life is snuffed out too soon. But for the grace of God that fate could have been hers…

Who are some of your favorite characters in literature?

Guest Spot Today for CAPTIVES!

I'm very excited to be a guest today on the site of my blog buddy, Stephanie Faris! Stephanie writes middle-grade and children's fiction. She is also a freelance writer with thousands of articles to her credit.


She's featuring Captives on her blog today, so stop over to her site to check it out. While you're there, check out Stephanie's wonderful books, Piper Morgan Goes to the Circus, 25 Roses, and 30 Days of No Gossip.


Have a wonderful and blessed weekend!


Link to Stephanie's Site is HERE.


By the way, Captives is now available for order in paperback as well as Kindle format!

An Excerpt from CAPTIVES

Okay, folks! Here’s a short excerpt from the opening of Captives…

 

A

my’s coffin had been closed for over an hour, but Douglas Timothy still couldn’t get the image of his daughter’s dead body out of his mind. The girl in that box looked nothing like the Amy he had known—the Amy he had loved and raised. Instead, the girl in the coffin was an emaciated skeleton with sunken-in cheeks and eyes, pierced and tattooed beyond recognition. It had been difficult for them to dress and make her up in a fashion that hid signs of the life she had been leading before her death.

When they identified the body, Anne, his wife, had even gone so far as to say, “That’s not Amy. That can’t be Amy. It doesn’t look anything like her!” In his own desire to believe that Amy might still be alive, Douglas had been swayed momentarily. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe she was still out there and they just needed to keep looking. But he knew it wouldn’t do them any good to deny the truth. It might not have looked like Amy, but there was good reason for that.

Amy had been seventeen when they last saw her, a junior in high school preparing for college. Although hospitalized briefly when she was sixteen for an eating disorder, she had always appeared to be a strong-minded girl who filled her life with all sorts of activities. Amy was a member of the school’s swim team, drama club, and her church’s youth group. She was, by most accounts, a typical seventeen-year-old. The girl on the slab in the morgue was twenty, a prostitute shot full of drugs, a victim of sex trafficking.

A Glimpse into Captives

So what is Captives about?

Captives is a novel that explores the consequences of a society demanding, distributing, and enslaving through sexual exploitation, but offers a message of hope, recovery, and redemption through God’s saving grace.

Here's the summary:

When seventeen-year-old Amy Timothy disappears from a rural Virginia truck stop, world-renowned cellist Blaise Timothy puts her life on hold to join the search for her sister. While conducting her own investigation into Amy’s disappearance, Blaise seeks solace in addictive and destructive relationships.

Three years later, the search for Amy becomes a homicide investigation and catches the attention of national media and sex trafficking activists. Less than a mile from where Amy’s body is recovered, Andrew Victor attempts to manage a failing career in art, an addiction to pornography, and a family secret that links him to the murder investigation. In Washington, DC, Asha Edgewater knows first-hand the horrors of sex slavery and lends support to the Timothy family even as she comes to terms with her own past. As all three lives intersect in their search for redemption and healing, they find it is only possible through God’s saving grace.

Captives is available on Amazon Kindle and will release in paperback by next week.


Have a blessed weekend!

Captives Released!

It's out! Well, at least it's out on Kindle. The paperback version should be available by next week.


For the next few days, I plan to post on Captives, its characters, and its inception. I will also have a few posts on the very real problem of sex trafficking.


This novel has a long history that starts in 2006 with a paragraph I wrote as a brainstorming exercise. I’d wanted to write about human trafficking for some time, but the right story never surfaced. At the time, a good friend of mine was the sexual trafficking liaison at the Salvation Army, and she had supplied me with tons of good material, case studies, and statistics. It was grim reading, but I realized then that this was something important that people needed to know about (and a lot of people really didn’t know about it).


I started with Blaise’s narration telling the background of her sister’s disappearance via trafficking; I later added Asha’s story to show the international side; once I realized that pornography and prostitution were linked, Andrew’s narrative came into play.

The novel originally came out in 2009 and was titled All that is Right and Holy. That year it won second place in the Christian Choice Book Awards through Xulon Press.

In 2015, a lot has changed in both the spectrum and spread of trafficking, especially within the United States. With that in mind, I decided to update the novel and re-release it under a different title. My husband designed the new cover. I love it! What do you think?

When did you first become aware of human trafficking?