Long Overdue Newsletter: December 2020

"You can't go back and change the beginning,

but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

- C.S. Lewis

Announcements

"Sound Words for Strange Times"

Written By: Pastor David Todd Whittley

Published by Long Overdue Books

David Whittley is the lead pastor at the Corinthian Temple Church of God in Christ located in the West Garfield neighborhood of Chicago. His congregation and the local community was hit hard in 2020 and weren't able to come together, in-person, for Sunday worship. Each week, Pastor Whittley delivered a virtual sermon with words of encouragement from the Bible to serve as a source of healing and inspiration.

We are proud to publish this collection of Pastor Whittley's sermons delivered during the COVID-19 Pandemic. You can download the PDF below or by clicking on the images above. To support Pastor Whittley and his church's work, please visit their main website here.

If you write every day and read great authors, your writing will naturally improve. You don't have to go out and read 20 books on creative writing before you can get started.

That being said, it's good to have 2 or 3 of these books on your shelf, ones you can turn to from time to time and learn from helpful teachers/authors. Here's a look at our recommendations to get you started for 2021.

Download our "Perpetually 2020" Calendar

We were planning to write a "2020: Year in Review" post, but a few paragraphs in we decided, "Alright, let's just move on to 2021."

And that's when an idea hit: How about a "Perpetually 2020" calendar. Starts normal for January and February then once you hit March, every day is a Monday for the rest of the year. Each month has, at most, three events on the calendar - most of which end up being cancelled. You can download the PDF, take to a local FedEx Kinkos/printing store and create a last-minute Christmas gag gift.

What to Expect from the

Long Overdue Newsletter in 2021

Have you ever had to buy orange juice for a group? There's a sizzle moment when you're looking at the options and have to decide between "No Pulp" and "Heavy Pulp." Either way, you're going to disappoint someone. So, in a last ditch effort, you pick "Some Pulp" to try and make everyone happy.

But it ends up being equally disappointing. Neither the "No Pulp" or "Heavy Pulp" fans are excited about the choice.

With that shaky orange juice analogy in mind, we've been doing a "Some Pulp" approach with our newsletters in 2020. Half content for authors, half content for people interested in recording family stories. Moving forward, the Long Overdue newsletter will be 100% focused on writing advice, publishing tips, and sharing from authors we are either publishing or actively supporting. The newsletter will aim to be a "social network for creating books." In other words, we're going "Heavy Pulp" for our author audience.

Which means, if you are interested more in telling and recording family stories but not so much in writing books, this might not be the most relevant newsletter anymore. However, we've built a new website for Family Stories, a Facebook page, and I think we'll eventually have a newsletter 100% dedicated to this topic sometime in 2021. If you're more interested in the Family Stories component, please email library@longoverduestories.com and we'll add you to that list rather than this newsletter.

This time last year, we had the goal that no matter what, we'd publish a newsletter every single month. At the time, had no idea the "no matter what" would turn into the monster that was 2020.

But having a few hours set aside each month to work on this newsletter was always a great escape and we can't thank you enough for the support you've given Long Overdue all yearlong. We hope our newsletter provided a nice little distraction and we can't wait to share more of the journey with you in 2021!

Keeping up with Long Overdue

"So uh, the vaccine isn't going to disrupt this nice little work from home thing we've got going on... is it?"

- Crash the Dog, Chief Marketing Officer

The best place to keep up with all things Long Overdue is via our monthly newsletter.

Second best place: Our website - Long Overdue Books. The one-sentence summary: Long Overdue Books is the social network for creating books. It's a place for authors, editors, artists, and book designers to come together and move ideas from rough draft to published work.

Our next newsletter will be Tuesday, January 12th. As always, we'd love to hear from you in between.

You can reach Cal the Librarian at - library@longoverduestories.com

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