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MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ When I was in the final stages of writing MARK! The Herald Angel — when the story was essentially done and I was reading it through for the last time before releasing it to the first readers — I asked myself a question that I think every writer should ask before they let a manuscript go: What do I want the person who finishes this book to feel? Not think. Not know. Feel. Because thinking and knowing are good and important, but the

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I want to talk about something that most authors know and very few say plainly, because it feels a little awkward to say it plainly. Amazon reviews are the single most important factor in whether a book reaches readers who don't already know the author. Not the writing quality. Not the cover design. Not the marketing budget or the social media presence or the press coverage or even the word-of-mouth recommendation — though all of

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I want to talk directly to the pastors and church leaders reading this, because this is a message that has a very specific and limited window of usefulness. The churches that have the most meaningful, most unified, most well-executed Advent seasons are the ones that made their key decisions in August. Not October. Not November. August. I know this because I've been in and around church ministry for decades, and the pattern is cons

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ A couple years ago, I handed something I'd spent years making to the first readers who weren't my family. I remember the specific feeling of that. The slight nausea. The particular vulnerability of having worked on something long enough and carefully enough that it had become genuinely personal — and then releasing it into the world where other people would have opinions about it. Looking back, I want to share what I've learned in

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ There is a pastoral challenge that almost nobody talks about directly, but that almost every pastor faces in December: The people in your congregation — the ones who have been coming to Christmas Eve services for thirty years, the ones who can recite Luke 2 from memory, the ones who have heard the nativity preached from every angle available to a human preacher — have developed a kind of protective familiarity with the story. They

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Let me make the case that you should read a Christmas book this summer. I know how that sounds. I am aware that the Christmas music doesn't start until at least November 1st and that the retail decorations, while arriving earlier every year, have not quite crept all the way back to July. I am not suggesting you put up a tree or start wrapping gifts or do anything that would alarm your neighbors. I am suggesting that July, specific

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I spent years in the world of animated children's content, and it taught me something that I find myself returning to constantly as I think about the future of MARK! The Herald Angel: the difference between content that families watch once and content that families return to every year for the rest of their lives. That difference is not production quality. It's not budget. It's not even the sophistication of the animation. It's wh

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I want to tell you about the Christmas I almost ruined by trying too hard. It was a few years into having four kids, which means it was the season when I was theoretically most experienced at Christmas parenting and practically most in danger of overcomplicating it. I had ideas. I had a list. I had ambitious plans for traditions and experiences and meaningful moments that would be remembered forever. By December 20th, I was exhaus

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Mark the Herald Angel does not want to go to Earth. He makes this abundantly clear on the bus ride home from the Eternal Herald, after his editor dismisses his story and hands him an itinerary with a single word on it: Earth. He mutters about it. He slumps in his seat. He crosses his little arms. He is, in every particular, a being who has been asked to do something he did not sign up for and does not want to do. He is, in other w

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I've been on both sides of this conversation — the ministry leader trying to build a meaningful Advent event, and the author being invited to be part of one. Both perspectives have taught me things that I think are worth sharing. The good news first: booking a Christian author for your church Advent event is more accessible than most ministry leaders assume. Most Christian authors in the independent and mid-list space are actively

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I know what you're thinking. It's June. The Christmas music isn't even in the stores yet. The last thing you want to do is think about December. And you're right — mostly. I'm not here to suggest you start shopping or decorating or planning your Christmas Eve menu. That would be absurd, and I have more respect for your summer than that. But here's something I've observed in years of ministry and family life: the families who have

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Before MARK! The Herald Angel, I spent years working in animated children's content. Specifically, I was part of the writing and development team for Auto-B-Good — a series that went on to win five Emmy Awards and find its way into the homes and hearts of families across the country. It was, in many ways, the best education in family storytelling I could have received. Not a formal education — though I respect those tremendously —

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Luke 2:19 is one of the shortest and most quietly devastating verses in the entire Christmas narrative. The shepherds have just left. They arrived frantic with wonder, spilling over with an account of angels and heavenly armies and a message about a baby who is the Savior of the world. They shared everything they'd seen and heard. And then they left, going back to their flocks and their night shifts and their ordinary lives, glori

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ One of the things that makes a character transformation believable — and I've thought about this a great deal in the course of writing MARK! The Herald Angel — is that the character being transformed must be entirely sincere about who they are before it happens. Not performatively resistant. Not waiting to be convinced. Not secretly hoping someone will come along and shake them out of their rut. Just genuinely, completely, absolut

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ There is a phenomenon that happens in churches when an entire congregation — across all ages, across all small groups, across the whole range of life stages and backgrounds that make up a healthy church community — reads the same book in the same week. I've seen it described different ways by different pastors. Some call it a sense of common language. Others call it a shared emotional temperature. One pastor I know described it as

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ There is a phrase at the center of MARK! The Herald Angel that I want to spend some time with today, because I think it carries more theological weight than it might initially appear to. That phrase is "fair dinkum." For the uninitiated: fair dinkum is Australian slang meaning genuine, true, authentic, the real deal. It functions as both adjective and emphatic exclamation. A fair dinkum story is a genuinely true story. A fair dink

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Every story lives or dies by the reality of its world. Not reality in the sense of factual accuracy — fiction is fiction, and the rules of fiction are different from the rules of journalism — but reality in the sense of internal consistency, specific detail, and the feeling that the world you're reading about existed before you arrived and will continue existing after you leave. The world of MARK! The Herald Angel is called Paradi

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Every year the calendar separates Easter and Christmas by about eight months, and in the cultural imagination they end up feeling like two entirely different holidays with two entirely different emotional registers. Christmas is warm and anticipatory and domestic — candles and carols and the smell of something baking. Easter is solemn and triumphant and outdoor — lilies and sunrise services and empty tombs. And yet. I've been thin

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Here is something I've observed across decades of ministry experience, working in and alongside churches of all sizes and denominations: The Advent sermon series that lands hardest every year is almost never the most theologically sophisticated one. It's the one where the congregation feels, from the very first Sunday, that they are all inside the same story together. Theological depth matters enormously. I'm not suggesting otherw

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I have been singing the same Christmas carol since I was old enough to stand in a church pew and hold a hymnal with both hands. I have sung it in children's programs and Christmas Eve candlelight services and shopping mall food courts when Muzak was still a cultural institution. I've sung it at the top of my lungs in the car and in the quiet of early December mornings and probably somewhere in between during at least three separat