Seagull Sex & Romance Writing

Living as close to the water as we do it is impossible to get through spring without realizing that seagulls like sex. The males beat wings of love over the females crying in coarse ecstasy while the females add their own chortles of joy.

God invented sex. It’s biblical. Song of Solomon is a marriage manual for sex. “A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me that lies all night between my breasts…Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away, be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountains of Bether…Your lips, O my spouse, drip as the honeycomb; honey and milk are under your tongue…Let my beloved come to his garden and eat its pleasant fruits.”

Since my favorite genre as a writer is mystery-romance-suspense, I’m thankful God created sex. It’s a gift He gave humans to glue their marriages together and keep them intact through difficult circumstances. God’s perfect plan for marriage is presented in the Bible: a man and woman leave their parents, become one flesh, and stick together until death parts them. Marriage doesn’t always follow the guidelines – but God’s plan always works best. Sex helps.

God’s gifts should be revered and valued, not re-gifted or treated as cheap bubble machine ornaments to be given away, tossed or trampled. Sex matters. God intends it to be a gift that a husband and wife open after the marriage ceremony. That’s why my Christian mystery-romance-suspense books are fun, entertaining, clean, safe reads.

My sexiest and most enticing hero in the Texas Miz Mike series thus far is likely Native American Indian Chief Alan Bitterroot. Readers will discover passion, love, and amazing adventure and suspense in “Bridge to Xanadu.” They will also discover two Christian characters facing the ultimate temptation to open the sex gift – with our without marriage. Do they?

Sex is good. It’s not “dirty” or “shameful.” Christians are like seagulls. They enjoy sex. Good thing – because it keeps romance writers working!

From finding a dead body in the dumpster at the sheriff’s office to being straddled by a knife-welding rapist and serial killer, Texas Miz Mike is back in her most gripping and humorous mystery-romance-suspense ever, “Bridge to Xanadu.”

Oh – and did I mention that “Bridge to Xanadu” puts Mike on a collision course with her newest hero and tests them both to see how they will handle the temptation to open the sex gift early?

http://www.amazon.com/Bridge-Xanadu-Miz-Mike-Book-ebook/dp/B00WFC67V2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1429593376&sr=1-1&keywords=bridge+to+xanadu+stephanie+parker+mckean

qid=1429593376&sr=1-1&keywords=bridge+to+xanadu+stephanie+parker+mckean

God and Passwords

Why should I, a mere human, expect to understand the Great and Mighty God, Creator of the universe…when there are mere human existence questions which mystify me?

For example, living in Scotland. When friends invite us over for “tea,” I am greatly perplexed. Do they mean we should come to eat dinner with them? Or do they mean we should come over and have a cup of tea? It can mean either one. So I invariably have to ask. Sometimes asking is embarrassing because kind-hearted friends think I’m inviting myself to dinner and will quickly respond, “Oh, yes. Stay and have a meal with us.”

Panties. This might sound like a strange thing to be perplexed about but it’s something that has flummoxed me since childhood. Are panties worn under a nightgown or pajamas, or does one just wear the night attire next to the skin? It’s something my mother never told me. On the rare occasions when I slept away from home – like attending a summer camp – it was a question I couldn’t ask the other girls. My pride wouldn’t let me admit that I didn’t know the answer. The problem with being too proud to ask a question is that sometimes you go through life never knowing the answer.

Computer passwords. This throws me every time. When I visit a website and it asks for a password, I stare at it stupidly. How dare it ask for my password! I don’t give out my password to strange sites. Or…is it asking me to make up a password for that website? Sometimes I look at the website and declare, “If you’re trying to get business you should drop the password thing, because really – looking at what you’re trying to sell – it isn’t worth making up a new password and trying to remember it. Then I go away…still not knowing which password it meant.

So if I am too thick-headed to know the life answer to these three simple everyday problems, why would I expect to understand Mighty God, Creator and Miracle-Worker?

Some of our friends and family members are going through severe trials at the moment. They are lovely, kind, wonderful people who love God. Why are they suffering?

I don’t know.

We are in the middle of a storm that feels like the eye of a hurricane – except hurricane eyes are supposed to be calm and our storm isn’t even calm in the middle. Why?

I don’t know.

What I do know is this secret to the universe that unlocks every blessing of God and makes it available to us if we just exercise enough faith to believe and accept it: God is in Control. “ALL things work together to good for those who love the Lord.” Romans 8:28.

God may be a mystery. His way of working may indeed be mysterious. Yet He made it so simple that a child can understand it.

Trust. Just trust.

http://goo.gl/wmLNDy

Bye-Bye Baby

Spring is here! Folks are thinking about flowers and babies. Appeals arrive daily to save badger babies, elephant babies, endangered species, whales, dolphins…even trees.

The majority of people who rescue stray dogs and cats; scream for laws to free whales and circus animals; demand a stop to the slaughter of badgers and dolphins – are okay with killing unborn humans. Defenseless little boys and girls – especially girls and especially black. Abortion is murder. It stops a beating heart.

It is ironic that it is illegal to kill baby eagles, but it is legal to kill unborn children who are created in the image of God.

Some of the same people who run campaigns to save trees, go green to save the planet, and give personhood status to chimpanzees say that parents should get to decide whether their children live – right up to the time of birth.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution promises every person the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Unborn children are defenseless victims of a political system that listens to the green color of money rather than the agonized shrieks of the country’s most defenseless citizens who are ripped apart inside the womb and flushed down the toilet.

Unborn children are not a part of their mother’s bodies. They have their own DNA from conception. Life begins at conception. Unborn children have beating hearts at 21 days; fingerprints at nine weeks; can feel pain at 10 weeks; smile at 12 weeks; and are fully male or female at 16 weeks.

To make the “choice” of abortion palatable (babies are given no choice), different labels are applied. A baby is a “fetus.” Murder is “abortion.” Pregnancy is “terminated.” The Bible says that God forms a child in the womb and calls him or her into His purpose. Abortion has murdered generations of unique God-created individuals. Some might have found a cure for cancer, invented safe traffic-hopping cars, found the key to ending world poverty, or built a system of lasting world peace. We will never know. We do know that a dearth of children living to become productive, working adults is undermining tax and retirement programs.

The real horror is that abortion is murder. God will not hold a country guiltless for slaying innocent children. Labels don’t change facts; they play to emotions. If it’s not a baby, the woman is not pregnant. A woman’s right to choice ends at her body; the baby is NOT her body.

Smell flowers, enjoy spring. Pretend babies are trees and save them.

Read “Love’s Beating Heart” and let it sing into your spring.

goo.gl/9TQsK5

http://goo.gl/wmLNDy

Your Everlasting Love Card

Saturday is Valentines Day. Poor Charlie Brown is already sitting against his mailbox waiting for cards that never come.

A host of folks never get Valentines cards. I know. I used to be one. Fortunately for the card-less of this world, God has already written a Love Card for every single person, and it’s redeemable every day of the week and not just on special occasions.

Some U.S. stores carry huge Valentines cards. Big or small, no card could ever contain the world’s greatest love story. There have been great movies and television shows celebrating the power of love. They fall short of recording the world’s greatest love story. Authors write romances and sprinkle romance into books – but the language of love is never complete in these books no matter how peerless the writing.

The world’s greatest love story is found in only one Book, the Christian Bible. Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this; that a person lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends.” Then Jesus proved it by dying on the cross in our place and purchasing Heaven for us. Unequaled love that cannot be matched in any card, movie, television program, or book. The greatest love story the world has ever known.

God created us. He has always loved us. Before Jesus was born, Jeremiah 31:3 carried this promise from God: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; with loving kindness have I drawn you.”

God’s Love card is not new.

Probably one of the most famous verses in the Bible is John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

God’s Love Card is for everyone. No matter how many or few Valentine cards you get – even if they add up to zero – do not despair. You are so loved that Jesus stretched out His arms and died for you. And that much love would never fit into a card.

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Celebrate torn, worn pages!

May God bless y’all with joy, peace, love, success, and prosperity in 2015 and beyond.

It’s already nearly a week into the New Year. How did that happen so quickly? It reminds me of a book I started writing when I was fourteen. I can’t remember the plot, only that it involved a young woman falling off a horse, being knocked unconscious (which I undoubtedly spelled wrong) and falling in love with her rescuer, “Father Time.”

One thing I do remember about the book is that I knew absolutely nothing about writing a book! My idea was to make every sentence in the book as beautiful as I could. Even though I was born in Texas, I mainly grew up in Georgia in an area of red clay, rolling grassy green hills, and pine trees. I must have used every adjective in the Thesaurus in an attempt to make red clay, rolling grassy green hills, and pine trees sound lovely enough to catch and hold my readers’ attention. I still have that worn Thesaurus sitting on my desk. The cover is gone; it’s now in three parts and a few spare pages. All the pages are yellow-brown with ragged-looking, torn edges. I must have been born to be a writer because that Thesaurus is the only surviving relic I have of my childhood.

Life has moved on from Georgia and from sheltering places green and growing. Some of my life has been spent in barren deserts. Some has been spent in hardship, heartache, sorrow, and unbearable pain. I sometimes feel as torn and worn as my Thesaurus friend, but I’ve learned to wear the broken with pride. God has used brokenness to change me.

Very few sentences of my life have glowed with the resplendent magnificence of the sentences I so laboriously penned for the unfinished book. Paragraphs and entire pages have been ripped out and soiled. Some pages suffered loss as they tumbled down the corridor of time. Others were hastily gathered and clumsily glued back together. Of this I am confident; God kept intact all the sentences He needed to write my life into one that reflects His glory.

My writing has also progressed. Verbs and action replace strings of adverbs and adjectives. Christian mystery-romance-suspense has proven my niche and zany Texan Miz Mike, in Bridge to Nowhere and Bridge Beyond Betrayal, is fun to work with – because she hijacks the stories and transforms them into what she wants!

If you look at your life in 2015 – and it looks like my Thesaurus – rejoice! God is in control and He will glue your life back together in a way that gives you the most joy and Him the most glory.

Celebrate worn, torn pages!

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Where is “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men”?

With Christmas nearly here, some look at the evil pervading the world and ask, “If Jesus is real, where is peace? Where is goodwill to men?”

We’ve given it away. Oh, not just those of us alive today – it started a long time ago. But when we don’t hold our ground and stand up for Jesus, we let the peace and goodness that we should be guarding slip away.

The Bible says, “In the beginning God created…He made man in His own image…male and female created He them.” We’ve let “intellectuals” sell us the theory of evolution and the big bang. We’ve given away our unique human creation status and gone down to romp with the apes and frogs. If we’re animals – why behave at a higher level – like humans?

We’ve allowed “intellectuals” to make us doubt that God is real. If there is no God, there is no absolute right or wrong. Everyone is free to embrace what they consider to be in their own best interests regardless of whether it is “legal” or harmful to others.

We’ve allowed schools and nations to celebrate “Santa” on Jesus’ Birthday. We’ve allowed them to celebrate eggs and bunnies on Easter instead of the Son of God Who died for the sins of the world and rose again to prove that He holds the keys to life and death and can secure eternity for us.

We murder unborn children and make it legal by changing labels: the children God created in the womb who are gifts from Him are called “fetuses.” Murdering them is called “abortion” or “terminating the pregnancy.”

The Bible teaches that a man and woman marry and become one flesh for life. We’ve replaced that with – if you get tired of each other, get a divorce. The Bible warns against sex outside of marriage. We glory in it…and suffer the diseases and heartbreaks that come with it.

God told us to live the Bible and teach it to our children diligently so they will live it too. Instead, we’ve rolled it out on a cutting board like a paper dressmaking pattern and cut it into comfortable shapes and sizes to wear for our individual lifestyles.

God gave us the gift of freedom of choice. We’ve abused that gift by deliberately choosing wrong and by calling evil good and good evil.

Someday, Jesus will return. Every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess that He is Lord. Then there will be peace on earth. Lions will eat straw. Wolves and lambs will lay down together in peace. Children will play with venomous snakes and not be bitten. Peace and goodwill will reign and rule.

Until then, we need to put peace on earth and goodwill to men into practice in our daily lives and not blame Jesus if we don’t see it in the rest of the world. Someday, we will.

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Signs, Purple Penguins & Sex

Humans attempt to make their own laws and ignore God’s laws.

Some human-made laws make sense and make life better for everyone: don’t let aggressive dogs run free; don’t clutter the landscape with junk; don’t smoke in public places and expose others to the health risk of second-hand smoke; don’t drink and drive.

However, these laws are already covered by God in the Bible. We have dominion over animals and are instructed to treat them with kindness. We are to be good stewards of God’s creation. We are not to do anything that defiles or destroys our bodies, which are God’s temples. Not smoking or drinking alcohol, for example, would eliminate an enormous number of health, social and safety issues.

Rocks thrown up by the sea in front of a “No Dumping” sign reminded me of the futility of ignoring God’s laws and attempting to impose our own. No joke…a school has decided to call students purple penguins instead of girls and boys. The Bible says that in the beginning, God created humans as male and female. Yet this school will call students purple penguins to be “gender inclusive.” If there is any need to refer to a student’s gender, he or she will be called “the G word,” or “the B word”…or perhaps pizza or hotdog.

Insane. Attempting to supplant God. Just as the “No Dumping” sign is powerless to stop the sea from hurtling rocks along the shore, so are humans powerless to change male and female by re-labeling. God made us male and female. He made penguins – also male and female.

Imagine romance writers like me in a world of purple penguins. We would never sell a book. Gender-inclusive, gender-neutral purple penguins would never read a Christian mystery-romance-suspense like Bridge to Nowhere and Bridge Beyond Betrayal. They would be shocked by cowboy Marty’s male appeal and Miz Mike’s female attraction to it. The same for other books written by other authors. Those poor pitiful purple penguins would miss out on some good books!

Thank Jesus that He is still in control – no matter how many signs we put up and how many labels we change.

Celebrate, all you authors and writers! Calling boys and girls purple penguins won’t stop these future readers from growing up and wading into the thrill of books that showcase characters who are unashamedly male and female…and sexy.

God made sex. Like everything else God created – sex is good!

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

The good in Goodbye

One Meredith Wilson song in the 1962 film “The Music Man,” starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones, is “Sincere.” Singing it, The Buffalo Bills lament, “where is the sin in sincere, what is good in goodbye?”

Goodbyes can be good.

This is the time of year in Fortrose-Rosemarkie, Scotland, when adult seagulls say goodbye to their young. Hearing the frantic, anxious calls of the abandoned youngsters rips my heart. The baby seagulls don’t understand why parents that have so lovingly cared for them suddenly leave and ignore their agonized cries. Big, fluffy, grey baby gulls walk along the edge of the water and sit on rooftops calling their absent parents. But this time, no matter how gut-wrenching the cries – the parents don’t respond.

I wonder if it is as hard on the parents to ignore the hurt cries of their young as it is on me. If so, they ignore the sharp, biting heart pains and distance themselves – using the wisdom God instilled in them – so the babies will be forced to exercise the feeding and flying skills that the parents have so diligently taught them. If they continued to care for their babies, the babies would continue to live on handouts and never learn self-sufficiency. A winged example of the popular cliché “tough love.”

All parents experience the hurt and learn the benefits of goodbyes when their children are still young. Goodbyes are a part of sending children to school to learn, sending them to visit grandparents and friends, sending them to summer camps…sending them away to universities, jobs, and distant locations. Without the goodbyes, children would never grow into their full potential and learn God’s will for their lives. Goodbyes can be good – but they still hurt.

The longest, hardest goodbye is when someone we love “dies.” It’s been nearly a year since my wonderful, talented son, USMC Major Luke Parker, “died” to this world. Perhaps my deep inner hurt and emptiness magnifies the anguished cries of the baby seagulls and makes me hypersensitive.

Everyone who has ever said goodbye to a loved one who departed from this world, however, has an advantage over those confused, lonely baby gulls. If we are Christians, we know that the separation is temporary. We will join our loved ones again in Heaven with Jesus lighting the way. What an awesome comfort! Death is not an end, it’s the doorway into eternity and the beginning of living a life without pain and loss.

As for the gulls…they are forced to use the life skills they have been taught. They will pass them on to their youngsters. But will they ever see their parents again? I hope so. I really hope so.

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Shell Decorating

A pub in our area is welcoming students back to university with shell decorating contests and cocktails.

Contest categories include best fingernails, most glitter, most unique tattoos, wildest hair, and most body art – all of which will be left behind when we die. Our bodies are mere shells to hold the part of us that really matters while we’re alive. When we die – the us that is really us – escapes into eternity. Shells are buried. What a sad waste of expense and energy is reflected in decorating shells that will return to dust when we die.

The Bible advises in 1 Peter 3:3, “Do not let your adornment be merely outward…rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God.”

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make the best of the bodies that God gave us by taking care of them. It honors God when Christians set themselves apart from the rest of the world by separating our appearances from non-believers. But the Bible tells us in 1 Timothy 6:7, “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” With that in mind, does it make sense to spend time and money decorating shells?

Shell decorating contests are vain, useless, empty events. As for the cocktails? Alcohol poisons the shells that we spend so much money decorating.

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Rocks, Roses & Sea Breezes

It was hard when I first arrived in Scotland from Texas, USA. Even though it was “summer,” it was 25 degrees cooler and I went from wearing shorts and sleeveless shirts to wrapping up in three layers of clothes, a coat and a wooly hat.

Cars drove on the wrong side of the road. There were roundabouts – paved circles with no stop signs or traffic lights. Cars spin in and out of roundabouts without stopping and drivers use right turn signals – even though vehicles turn left entering a roundabout. Many roads are poorly marked or not marked at all. Signs are in both Gaelic and English, with the Gaelic on top. Since the lettering is small, it’s nearly impossible to read it.

Meals are called “tea,” so when you are invited over for tea, you don’t know if you’re joining friends for a cup of hot tea (which I don’t drink anyway), or a meal. Cookies are called biscuits and biscuits are scones. Toilet paper is “loo roll” and dish soap is “washing up liquid.” Sidewalks are called pavement. While waiting for a bus, the driver shouted at me, “Get on the pavement.” I was confused because I was standing on the pavement.

Favorite is spelled favourite, color is colour, program is programme, and long lines are called queues. Oh – and dog owners don’t like to have their dogs called “pups” unless they are actually puppies.

Church services are strictly timed to finish within an hour. Songs are usually accompanied by slow, ponderous organ music. Following human traditions is more important than following the leading of the Holy Spirit.

There are virtually no convenience stores and long trips are miserable because of the lack of public restrooms. Once, out of sheer desperation, I hunkered down in the back of a store that hadn’t opened yet, squatting between wire racks. Existing restrooms usually have thick-walled stalls from the floor to the ceiling with such painted-over metal hardware that I never lock the door because when I do – I either cut my fingers or am afraid I won’t be able to unlock it again.

When you order Italian food like lasagna in the U.S., you get hot bread, a salad, the main course, and refills of iced tea or soft drinks. In Scotland…you get lasagna. No refills on drinks.

Words like schedule, proven, resume and laboratory are pronounced differently. Words like garage and aluminum are pronounced so differently that I didn’t know what they were at first.

God brought me to Scotland. He’s helped me bloom. I still say “y’all,” and haven’t said “aye” yet, but I actually invited someone to have “tea” with us – meaning a meal! The hardness and trials have translated into blessings. We live where everything that is green blooms, and everything is green because of the surplus of rain. In any direction one looks, there is no blight, no ugliness. The people are warm, friendly, generous and independent. They remind me of Texas folks.

And my second Miz Mike mystery-romance-suspense is about to be released by Sunpenny Publishing Group, here in the UK. God has transformed hardness and confusion into rose petals and sea breezes.

It is possible to bloom amid rocks and hardness. Trust God to turn the hard circumstances in your life into garden spots.

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0