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Lee Warren writes contemplative essay and devotional books, as well as inspirational Christmas novellas.
His essays remind you to slow down and enjoy the present moment because we’re only here for a little while. Readers say his essays are vulnerable, open, honest, engaging, insightful and thought-provoking. His devotional books provide practical, story-driven devotional material you can use every morning to get your private worship started right. Readers call his devotional books encouraging, inspiring and thoughtful. His inspirational Christmas novellas will remind you of Christmases past when your grandmother pulled piping hot cookies of the oven and everyone gathered around the living room to open gifts and maybe sing a few carols. They'll also remind you that God sometimes chooses to step into the here and now by sending heavenly beings to encourage and challenge us. When Lee isn’t writing essays, devotional material, or Christmas novellas, he is a freelance journalist who has written hundreds of articles for various newspapers and magazines. He’s also a fan of NASCAR, baseball, tennis, books, movies and coffee shops. |
Just the Facts
- Lee has written 17 books (6 traditionally-published and 11 indie-published)
- He has written hundreds of articles for various newspapers, magazines and websites; he currently writes for "The Pathway" newspaper in Missouri, "Living Light News" in Canada, and ChristianExaminer.com
- He won the "Best Entry in Articles" award at the 2004 Florida Christian Writers Conference
- His book, Common Grounds: Contemplations, Confessions, and (Unexpected) Connections from the Coffee Shop, has reached the "Top 500 Free in Kindle Store" and been ranked in the Top 35 for non-fiction books at Wattpad (where it is currently a featured selection)
- He "won" NaNoWriMo in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, writing four novellas; the first two of which has been released
- He is a contract editor for E-Moon Publishing and Bold Vision Books
- He has edited dozens of books that are currently in print
- He is on staff with The Christian Communicator manuscript critique service
- He is a certified CLASSeminars trainer
- He has taught at the Florida Christian Writers Conference, the Glorieta Christians Writers Conference, the CLASSeminars Christian Writers Conference, the Heart of America Christian Writers Conference, the Write-to-Publish Christian Writers Conference and the Wordsowers Christian Writers Conference (as well as serving on the leadership committee for an extended period; he's currently on the advisory committee)
- He has been writing professionally since 2000
The Rest of the Story
I have always been a writer. I just didn't know it.
My parents divorced when I was eight, which meant I spent Saturdays with my dad. He often had to work (he was a commercial painter) half a day on Saturdays, so we hung out in his paint shop before going to lunch or to the park. While I was in his office, I banged away on a manual typewriter he had on his desk – copying album liner notes, or anything else I could get my hands on, to get me started.
My imagination took it from there.
During my teen years, I wrote poems and then songs to express my angst over love being so elusive.
In high school, I took an English class with a teacher named Mr. Martin. He encouraged us to "just write." That was his mantra. As I did, he saw something in my writing and encouraged me to continue – even after completing his class.
A year or two after graduating, he sent me a letter with the same sentiments. It gave me the push I needed to continue.
By the time I hit my early twenties, I had written enough songs to fill an "album" – which really just meant I hit record on my tape recorder and sang ten songs while attempting to play along on my white electric Ibanez with the most jacked up pickups you've ever heard. This was the 1980s, after all.
The lyrics were pretty dark, given that I was coming from a place of confusion and frustration (love, or lack thereof, was still the focus), but that meant they were also honest. Having that sort of release saved me.
I became a Christian in my mid-twenties and stopped writing for a while. The churches I attended initially seemed to place a higher emphasis on being inside their four walls several times each week than engaging in the arts out in the community. That was my interpretation, at least. I could be wrong.
Either way, I stopped writing until I got my spiritual legs under me. I jumped online earlier (1994) than most people I knew and landed a singles column that was sent out via email every week by "Christianity Today." That whet my appetite even further to take my writing to the next level.
In my early thirties, I heard about a writers conference in Kansas City, and it piqued my interest, so I attended. I took a fiction-writing track that was taught by novelist Nancy Moser and it spoke to me on so many levels. The whole conference did, really. Finally, I was among people who thought and processed like I did.
I met an editor there from "Decision" magazine (Billy Graham's official publication) and pitched an article idea to him. He liked it, but it needed to be tweaked. We sent it back and forth (via snail mail) for two years until it was finally fit for publication in April 2000.
My dad died unexpectedly that same month. He wanted to be a writer when he was young, so he understood my desire to become one as well, and he lived long enough to know I was pursuing that dream, and to read the "Decision" article.
As my siblings and I were going through his things after he died, I found the magazine with my article on one of his bookshelves. Apparently, he was proud of my accomplishment. That was another defining moment in my writing career – the affirmation I needed to continue.
That same month, I met the editor for "Sharing the VICTORY" magazine – the official publication of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, at the same writers conference in Kansas City. He asked me to begin writing feature articles on assignment. For the next two or three years, I interviewed several famous athletes for that publication and was beginning to find my groove as a sportswriter.
When the editor took a job with another publication, he commissioned me to write features of all sorts for his newspaper. I interviewed athletes, politicians, lobbyists, and people from all walks of life.
That led to my securing writing gigs with several other newspapers and websites, including Yahoo! Sports, the U.S. Olympic Committee website, SB Nation, "Discipleship Journal," "Christianity Today" and various others.
In 2003, I had an idea for a singles devotional book so I contacted an agent and he sold it to a Revell in just three weeks. They released that book, Single Servings: 90 Devotions to Feed Your Soul, in 2005.
Given my varied writing background, I really didn't want to create a brand around my status as a single person, and that probably stalled my momentum to some degree, but I continued to write articles for newspapers and magazines and I took a number of work-for-hire book contracts with traditional publishers.
After writing a few more books for traditional publishers, economics started to change in the publishing industry. Book publishers began taking fewer risks on lesser-known commodities, and, as newspapers began to die and people began going online for their news, they expected it to be free.
Once the online end user is unwilling to pay for a product, the producer of the content has to seek more ad revenue than normal and then the product becomes more about the number of clicks than it does the content itself. Hence, you see articles titled "15 Celebrities Who Have Aged Poorly," and "19 Tweets About Millennials That Will Make You LOL."
People are more inclined to click on those stories than they are willing to click on a feature about a behind-the-scenes volunteer at a soup kitchen in downtown Omaha who is making a difference, or a journeyman backup utility baseball player who is discipling a former Triple-A teammate on the phone every night.
Ten or fifteen years ago, we would have written their stories anyway because journalism is supposed to be about telling the truth and informing the citizenry. Entertainment came in a distant third. The shift to primarily ad-based revenue streams rather than subscription-based streams flipped this equation to put entertainment first.
Enter clickbait.
These economic changes made getting a traditional publishing deal more difficult and it made finding good-paying journalistic writing gigs more sparse.
When a periodical editor comes calling, I'm still covering events and writing features for them. But I'm trying to make myself less dependent on them.
In 2013, I started hearing about indie authors who were making a living by handling every aspect of the publishing process themselves. I stumbled across an indie-author podcast called The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn and it was highly influential in me jumping out of the traditional book publishing world and into indie publishing.
In 2015, I released my first four indie books, and I released three more in 2016. Indie publishing has given me the artistic freedom to create what I want to create while also making me even more aware of the importance of finding a market share on my own terms.
My parents divorced when I was eight, which meant I spent Saturdays with my dad. He often had to work (he was a commercial painter) half a day on Saturdays, so we hung out in his paint shop before going to lunch or to the park. While I was in his office, I banged away on a manual typewriter he had on his desk – copying album liner notes, or anything else I could get my hands on, to get me started.
My imagination took it from there.
During my teen years, I wrote poems and then songs to express my angst over love being so elusive.
In high school, I took an English class with a teacher named Mr. Martin. He encouraged us to "just write." That was his mantra. As I did, he saw something in my writing and encouraged me to continue – even after completing his class.
A year or two after graduating, he sent me a letter with the same sentiments. It gave me the push I needed to continue.
By the time I hit my early twenties, I had written enough songs to fill an "album" – which really just meant I hit record on my tape recorder and sang ten songs while attempting to play along on my white electric Ibanez with the most jacked up pickups you've ever heard. This was the 1980s, after all.
The lyrics were pretty dark, given that I was coming from a place of confusion and frustration (love, or lack thereof, was still the focus), but that meant they were also honest. Having that sort of release saved me.
I became a Christian in my mid-twenties and stopped writing for a while. The churches I attended initially seemed to place a higher emphasis on being inside their four walls several times each week than engaging in the arts out in the community. That was my interpretation, at least. I could be wrong.
Either way, I stopped writing until I got my spiritual legs under me. I jumped online earlier (1994) than most people I knew and landed a singles column that was sent out via email every week by "Christianity Today." That whet my appetite even further to take my writing to the next level.
In my early thirties, I heard about a writers conference in Kansas City, and it piqued my interest, so I attended. I took a fiction-writing track that was taught by novelist Nancy Moser and it spoke to me on so many levels. The whole conference did, really. Finally, I was among people who thought and processed like I did.
I met an editor there from "Decision" magazine (Billy Graham's official publication) and pitched an article idea to him. He liked it, but it needed to be tweaked. We sent it back and forth (via snail mail) for two years until it was finally fit for publication in April 2000.
My dad died unexpectedly that same month. He wanted to be a writer when he was young, so he understood my desire to become one as well, and he lived long enough to know I was pursuing that dream, and to read the "Decision" article.
As my siblings and I were going through his things after he died, I found the magazine with my article on one of his bookshelves. Apparently, he was proud of my accomplishment. That was another defining moment in my writing career – the affirmation I needed to continue.
That same month, I met the editor for "Sharing the VICTORY" magazine – the official publication of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, at the same writers conference in Kansas City. He asked me to begin writing feature articles on assignment. For the next two or three years, I interviewed several famous athletes for that publication and was beginning to find my groove as a sportswriter.
When the editor took a job with another publication, he commissioned me to write features of all sorts for his newspaper. I interviewed athletes, politicians, lobbyists, and people from all walks of life.
That led to my securing writing gigs with several other newspapers and websites, including Yahoo! Sports, the U.S. Olympic Committee website, SB Nation, "Discipleship Journal," "Christianity Today" and various others.
In 2003, I had an idea for a singles devotional book so I contacted an agent and he sold it to a Revell in just three weeks. They released that book, Single Servings: 90 Devotions to Feed Your Soul, in 2005.
Given my varied writing background, I really didn't want to create a brand around my status as a single person, and that probably stalled my momentum to some degree, but I continued to write articles for newspapers and magazines and I took a number of work-for-hire book contracts with traditional publishers.
After writing a few more books for traditional publishers, economics started to change in the publishing industry. Book publishers began taking fewer risks on lesser-known commodities, and, as newspapers began to die and people began going online for their news, they expected it to be free.
Once the online end user is unwilling to pay for a product, the producer of the content has to seek more ad revenue than normal and then the product becomes more about the number of clicks than it does the content itself. Hence, you see articles titled "15 Celebrities Who Have Aged Poorly," and "19 Tweets About Millennials That Will Make You LOL."
People are more inclined to click on those stories than they are willing to click on a feature about a behind-the-scenes volunteer at a soup kitchen in downtown Omaha who is making a difference, or a journeyman backup utility baseball player who is discipling a former Triple-A teammate on the phone every night.
Ten or fifteen years ago, we would have written their stories anyway because journalism is supposed to be about telling the truth and informing the citizenry. Entertainment came in a distant third. The shift to primarily ad-based revenue streams rather than subscription-based streams flipped this equation to put entertainment first.
Enter clickbait.
These economic changes made getting a traditional publishing deal more difficult and it made finding good-paying journalistic writing gigs more sparse.
When a periodical editor comes calling, I'm still covering events and writing features for them. But I'm trying to make myself less dependent on them.
In 2013, I started hearing about indie authors who were making a living by handling every aspect of the publishing process themselves. I stumbled across an indie-author podcast called The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn and it was highly influential in me jumping out of the traditional book publishing world and into indie publishing.
In 2015, I released my first four indie books, and I released three more in 2016. Indie publishing has given me the artistic freedom to create what I want to create while also making me even more aware of the importance of finding a market share on my own terms.
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Your weekly email has become my Saturday morning paper. Look forward to it. -Sheriena McEvers
I enjoy reading your emails. They are always insightful and make me stop and think. I welcome that brief pause in my life. -Kathye Kochanowski
