Everybody feels sorry for themselves once in a while. It’s hard not to. It’s a great coping mechanism for whatever hard thing we are having to deal with. But at some point we have to put down the crutch and walk. Here’s an essay I’m working on for the new version of To Own a Dragon. The book might be called Rogue Elephants, or it might be called Father Fiction. We are still deciding. But the essay is a different [...]

I’ll be off the grid until Thursday, but we will be hiding manuscripts all week, starting Monday, August 17th. (My publisher will be tweeting locations through my twitter account) Actually, there’s a good chance one will be hidden before then, too. So make sure to sign up on the Facebook Fanpage and follow me on Twitter. My phone number will be with the book when you find it, but I won’t be able to call [...]

I confess I love watching this guys web show. His name is Josh Shipp, and he’s an advice columnist for the digital age. His advice is for teens, and yet I find I learn something every time I watch one of his videos. If you’re a youth group leader, he’s completely clean, in fact, he often speaks to church groups. That between appearing on MTV and so forth. And when you get to know his personal story, you will [...]

A long time ago I put a message in a bottle and threw it into the ocean. Not unlike that Police song, I woke up and there were a hundred-thousand bottles washed upon my shore. That message was Blue Like Jazz, and I honestly didn’t expect anybody to actually read it. Since then, those of us who think the way we do haven’t had much of a chance to get together. I think that is one of the things I’m [...]

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a truly positive review of a book from Publisher’s Weekly. They can be a bit snobby about books. And even their review of Million Miles is fairly safe. But I’ll take “funny as hell.” Here is their review. It will print in next week’s issue:

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Own Life Donald Miller. Thomas Nelson, $19.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-7852-1306-2

I get great questions via twitter nearly every day, and I’d love to be able to answer all of them. But that’s hard to do in 140 characters, and even harder walking through an airport or bagging dog poo at the park. So every so often I’ll just fire off an answer on the blog. Here’s the first, and it’s especially applicable today, since I’m writing:

Twestion: christopherbmac@donmilleris How smooth is the transition from writing one [...]

Recently I purchased a new garbage disposal for my kitchen sink as the old one sounded like I’d dropped a watch in it. I got a referral from a friend for a good plumber, a man who happened to be a Christian, and I called him for an estimate. I called around and his price seemed fair so I made an appointment. The plumber, I will call him Judas, came over with the new disposal and installed it in [...]

In Nashville they’ve built a giant replica of the Parthenon, the temple in Greece that was built for Athena. I don’t know why they built a replica of the Parthenon in Nashville. I suppose there is a placard that explains it but I don’t like to get that close. It sits in a field just off downtown, just off the country-music recording studios and boot stores, and when I’m driving through town I swear I hear Carmina [...]

There’s this trick in screenwriting/storytelling called “Saving the Cat” in which you have your protagonist do something good, say on page fifteen or so of your screenplay, that way when the movie ends, and your character beats back the bad guys, the audience will be glad for him, and feel contentment about the story they just experienced. It’s true in life too.

It was troubling today, then, to see Alberto Contador bashing his teammate Lance Armstrong in a press [...]

Anne Jackson, over at Flowerdust.net sat both Mike Hyatt (CEO, Thomas Nelson Publishers) and I down to talk through what Mike and I will be sharing at the upcoming Story conference in Chicago. You can find this video on her blog, but I thought it was interesting enough to feature here as well. The event will come in just about the middle of the Million Miles tour, but I will be sharing most of the same [...]