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| Dr. Richard Mabry |
What are your hopes and dreams for your writing career? Is
your goal to receive contracts offering substantial advances? Maybe you
envision shelves at the local book store filled with your novels. Today, Dr. Richard Mabry shares what he’s learned about
prosperity while on his personal journey.
~ Dawn
A
Funny Thing Happened On
The Way To Fame And Fortune
I didn’t set out to be an author. From childhood, my career
goals were airline pilot, then professional baseball player, and finally
physician. As I matured, I realized the first one was a fantasy, the second one
highly unlikely (although I did play a bit of semi-pro baseball), while the
third was what God had in mind for me. I didn’t realize God also planned for me
to write, but events after the death of my first wife made that path
clear to me.
In none of these did I have an ultimate goal of fame and
fortune—well, maybe the baseball thing, but nothing since then. But when I got
my first writing contract, the dreams began. At my first writer’s conference, I
was awestruck by the published writers there. These were people whose names
were household words—maybe not in my household, but I was just getting started,
so I could be excused for not knowing all of them. But surely they were
celebrities in their hometowns. Most certainly they had to stop and give
autographs in the grocery store or dry cleaners. And undoubtedly they lived in
the lap of luxury. After all, they were
published authors!
Heart
Failure is my sixth published novel, and I’ve long
since decided that fame and fortune may find some authors, but not me. True a
row of books with my name on the cover are spread across the shelf over my
writing desk, but with each book release there are no cheering crowds outside
my window, no marching bands in the street. A few folks at church might ask,
“When’s your next book coming out?” but otherwise it’s pretty quiet around
here. And fortune? Afraid not.
Although I haven’t become rich and famous, my words have
been read by many more people than the population of the town where I grew up.
If I’ve succeeded in my mission, when those readers turn the last page of my
novel they find they’ve been left with a message—not a hard-sell of
Christianity, because that’s just not my style, but rather a message that no
matter how far we drift from God, we can always turn back to Him. I’ve been
allowed to use the printed page as my pulpit. And that’s rich and famous enough
for me.
~Richard
L. Mabry, MD
Tweetables:
A funny thing happened on the way to fame and fortune. Click to tweet.
No matter how far we
drift from God, we can always turn back to Him. Click to tweet.
Dr. Richard Mabry shares
what he learned while on his personal journey to publication. Click to tweet.
When
her fiancé’s dangerous secrets turn her world upside-down, a beautiful doctor
must choose between her own safety and the man she loves—and thought she knew.
Dr. Carrie Markham’s heart was broken by the death of her
husband two years ago. Now, just as her medical practice is taking off, her fresh
engagement to paralegal Adam Davidson seems almost too good to be true . . .
until a drive-by shooting leaves Carrie on the floor of his car with glass
falling around her.
When he confesses that Adam isn’t his real name and that he
fled the witness protection program, Carrie is left with an impossible choice:
should she abandon the fiancé she isn’t sure she really knows, or accept his
claim of innocence and help him fight back against this faceless menace?
Dr. Richard Mabry is a
retired physician, past Vice-President of the American Christian Fiction
Writers, and the author of six published novels of medical suspense. His books
have been finalists in competitions including ACFW’s Carol Award and Romantic
Times’ Inspirational Book of the Year, and his novel, Lethal Remedy, won a 2012 Selah Award. Richard’s medical thriller, Stress Test (Thomas Nelson), garnered
rave reviews from Library Journal and
Publisher’s Weekly. His latest novel
is Heart Failure.
Richard’s website is http://rmabry.com.
He blogs regularly at http://rmabry.blogspot.com
. He can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
