Power’s Back On

by Cynthia Ruchti

Summer storms sometimes mean power outages. A recent storm left our neighborhood without power for five days. The electric company crews were busy around the clock trying to remove fallen trees and repair line damage.

Our neighborhood hummed with the sound of back-up generators—for the blessed houses who had one. The generators worked hard to keep frozen food from spoiling and provide light and a way to recharge phones…which we needed to report outages.

Has your writing life experienced a power outage? Is even your backup generator running on fumes? Did that last rejection or uncomfortable critique threaten to pull the plug on your career?

Or maybe you’ve felt disconnected from the writing community. You’re alone in your pursuit. Or it feels like it. The lights are on in everyone else’s writing corner but yours.

That’s part of the reason ACFW works hard during the year to keep providing connections and resources for you—many more than the average writer can ever exhaust.

But—and this is important—it’s also why the virtual education and virtual relationships of ACFW’s online community needs its face-to-face component of the annual conference. It’s a place to recharge batteries, to get reconnected, to retool and revise writing goals and career paths, to plug-in to what the industry is looking for and what readers hunger to read.

Have you hesitated to register for the ACFW conference because you think nothing’s happening with your writing? That’s an important reason to attend!

Have you reached a comfortable rhythm in your writing, but your enthusiasm is waning, fading? That’s another important reason to attend the annual conference!

Has the past year been full of one bit of wonderful writing news after another and you’re looking for someone to celebrate with you? How about hundreds of novelists? It’s a great reason to attend the conference!

Do feel spiritually disconnected? That’s repair-able. The worship and inspiration of the ACFW conference is reason alone to get plugged back in and experience that surge of energy as you—and your writing—come back to life.

Perhaps this blog has described someone you know for whom the 2019 ACFW conference might restore the power for their writing career. Can you and a handful of writing friends band together to offer that writer the conference as a gift? What a powerful act of generosity.