Kingdom Writers: A Podcast for Christian Writers of All Genres

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

Have a thought on this episode? Share your comments on YouTube here.

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

A partnership that made up a large share of Shelley and CJ's income ended when the company behind it went out of business. It was a shock to them. It was not a shock to God.

This is the testimony side of that story. Looking back, Shelley can trace how God had been building the replacement income a full 18 months before they knew they would need it, including through a stretch when they had actually tried to sell Christian Book Academy and every door stayed shut.

She ties it to Zacchaeus and the tree. That tree took years to grow, and it was already standing there on the day he needed to climb it.

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

Is this idea from God, or is it just me? What if I spend two years on the wrong thing? Asking looks like faithfulness, and it feels like waiting on the Lord. But if you have been asking the same question for three years and there are still no words on the page, something else is going on.

CJ and Shelley give a practical way to hear God's voice for your book without second-guessing every idea. One shift in how you think about it, and four things that actually look like something on a Tuesday morning.

Clarity in scripture usually comes while people are moving. Abraham left before he knew the address. The Jordan did not stop until the priests had their feet in it.

They walk through the weekly business meeting with God, what goes in the notebook and in what order, why capturing an idea and judging it are two different jobs, and a test you can actually repeat: scripture first, wise counsel, peace that is more than excitement, and fruit that survives a few months.

And the last one, which is where a lot of overthinking lives. You may already have your answer. The next thing you need may not be more information, but obedience to the last clear thing he showed you.

Have a thought on this episode? Share your comments on YouTube here.

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

Distraction is not a character flaw. It is the water all of us are swimming in now, and working against it takes an actual plan.

Shelley gives you three. Name the one thing that distracts you most and set a single boundary around it. Ask God each morning which of your big rocks goes into the jar first. Then protect one block of focused work with everything else turned off.

She also talks openly about the burnout she hit in 2017 and the years she spent retraining her brain afterward. If 15 minutes is all you have, that counts. The point was never the length of the block. It is that nothing else gets in.

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

You have been working on this book for years. Not sitting around doing nothing, actually working, and you are still standing in the same place. That is the part almost nobody talks about.

CJ and Shelley walk through five Christian writing mistakes that keep Kingdom Writers stuck for years. What makes them costly is that every one of them feels like progress while you are doing it.

Rewriting chapter one until it has been rewritten more times than the rest of the book has been written. Waiting for a big block of time that your season never actually delivers. Buying one more course, because preparation is safe and a first draft is exposure.

Then the one that hides best: writing with nobody waiting for your next chapter. And the last one, waiting to feel qualified, as though a publishing contract were God's validation of your calling rather than a business decision made by a company.

Anthony Trollope wrote 47 novels in 15-minute blocks while working full time as a post office inspector. None of these five mean you have failed. They mean you have been working without a way through.

Have a thought on this episode? Share your comments on YouTube here.

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

You do not have to do all of it at once. That is the whole episode, and it may be the sentence you needed today.

Shelley noticed an author she follows quietly release a leader's guide six months after her book launch, and it reframed something. Endorsements, a lead magnet, a study guide, a relaunch. None of that has to be finished before you publish, and an independently published book can always be edited later.

So write yourself a permission slip. Do the most important thing now, let the rest come in layers, and trust God with the outcome.

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

How many years have you been carrying this book? Four? Twelve? Twenty-five? Somewhere along the way you may have started reading the delay as the answer, and decided it was too late to write your Christian book.

It isn't. CJ and Shelley walk through five reasons the years behind you are not a verdict on the book in front of you.

Delay is not a verdict. Joseph got the dream and then got the prison. Moses was 80 when the assignment came. Time passing tells you that time passed, and nothing more than that.

There are three different versions of "too late," and they need three different answers: I'm too old, the moment passed, and I wasted the time. Naming which one you are carrying is what lets you set it down.

Shelley also shares her mom's story. She started a book, walked through a multiple myeloma diagnosis, and the book she finished years later held a story she could not have written before.

And the restart is smaller than you think. Not a new outline. Open the file, read the last page you wrote, and write one paragraph forward.

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

We put so much weight on the big doors. The launch, the numbers, the speaking invitation. Meanwhile God keeps opening small ones and we walk right past them.

Shelley shares two stories from inside Christian Book Academy. Megan mentioned her book at her dentist's office, and the assistant there turned out to know teachers and librarians. Pam handed a book to a neighbor, and one single page in it carried that neighbor through a hard time.

She and CJ call these divine appointments. She prays over you at the end that you would start noticing the small ones.

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

A pastor in South Africa wrote a little book in the 1800s. Over a hundred years later it landed on our shelf in Colorado Springs, and it wrecked us. Andrew Murray never knew our names. His words traveled anyway.

If you have been wondering whether the book on your heart will ever reach anyone, this one is for you. CJ walks through Matthew 8 and the Roman officer who told Jesus He did not need to come to the house, that He could say the word from where He stood. The word traveled. The healing happened somewhere the speaker never went.

Your words can do the same thing. They can reach readers you will never meet, in places you will never go, long after you have forgotten you wrote that chapter.

🎟️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

How do you know God is actually calling you to write this book? Not "would it be nice." Not "people keep telling me I should." How do you know it is Him?

Most of us are waiting for something unmistakable, and while we wait, we walk right past the ways He has been confirming it for years.

In this episode CJ and Shelley walk through five signs you can actually look at. The idea that will not leave you. The material you have already been collecting without calling it that. The story that lines up with the message. The people who keep saying the same thing without ever having met each other. And the fifth one, the sign almost nobody counts, which is usually the clearest confirmation of all.

No seminary degree required. No platform required.

Have a thought on this episode? Share your comments on YouTube here.