Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Heart of Hollyhill”
“Merry Christmas Eve to you. May your heart be filled with the magic of the season.” Have you ever had big plans of good times on Christmas Eve and then you get a cold – dozens of sneezes, a box of tissues, a red nose miserable cold – to spoil everything. In this Christmas scene from Summer of Joy, my …
“Help me to continue writing through those black moments of discouragement when I feel that nothing I write is good or worthwhile or will ever be read by anyone.” (an excerpt from A Writer’s Prayer by H. Joseph Chadwick) From the time I got hold of my first notebook and pen, I wanted to be a writer. All those lines …
Merry Christmas. What a great time of the year when cheer and goodwill fill the air! If you’re like me, memories of Christmases past bring smiles. I like thinking about the times I’ve celebrated Christmas with my characters too. In Love Comes Home, Kate and Jay celebrate a first Christmas together after World War II by buying a scraggly tree …
June 1965 Jocie Brooke here reporting from Hollyhill. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to do any extra reporting. Oh, I’ve still been helping Dad with stories in the paper. Nothing too exciting. This is Hollyhill, you know. About the most exciting story for months was old Mrs. Jennings turning 100. One hundred years. That means she was …
What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language. ~Jane Goodall I invited you all to ask me a question about me or my writing last week. And a couple of you took me up on it. Whenever I give a talk about my books, the part I always like …
Spring 1965. Jocie Brooke here, reporting from Hollyhill. As usual nothing much is happening around here. I don’t know how my dad finds enough stuff to put in the newspaper every week. He says that’s because I don’t know what people in small towns like to read in their paper. He says people like good news and nobody wants to …
An expert knows all the answers – if you ask the right questions. …Levi Strauss I don’t presume to know all the answers because I’m no expert at anything. That might be a fun question to ask yourself. What are you an expert at doing? Hmm, none of you asked me that question, but it is tickling my imagination. I’d …
This summer my first inspirational novel, Scent of Lilacs, has been a free e-book download. You can find it at most e-book sites like Amazon Kindle; Christianbook.com or Barnes & Noble. And if you’ve made that first visit to Hollyhill, you might want to go back for more visits. Those books, Orchard of Hope and Summer of Joy, are on …
Lilacs and More I love lilacs. When I was a kid, it was a rare yard in my area that didn’t have an old lilac bush. Nobody went out to garden shops back then to actually buy bushes. You went to somebody’s yard who had one and asked if you could get a start. Out would come the grubbing hoe …
CHECK OUT JOCIE’S NEW PLACE ON THE WEB Find Jocie’s Heart of Hollyhill reports every week at a new place. Click on Heart of Hollyhill under Blogs on my website homepage or go directly to Jocie’s posts with this Heart of Hollyhill blog. New place. Same Jocie. Still the Sixties.