January 2005

News, updates, & pronouncements from Pat Ballard, the Queen of Rubenesque Romances

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. 
Eleanor Roosevelt

Something to think about....

Negative thoughts are the speed bumps of life.
Pat Ballard

Forgive me for being pompous and quoting myself this time, but this has been on my mind a lot lately. And forgive me if I've "borrowed" someone else's quote, but if this has been said before, I'll gracefully give credit where credit is due.

As I talked with a friend the other day, I said, "When we go back in our past and pull out old hurts and dwell on them, we're slowing down our progress into the future." As I spoke this, it really hit home to me as being kind of profound. I don't think it was as profound to my friend as it was to me, and it may not be as profound to you as it was to me, but I've thought about it a lot in the days since.

Joe, my husband, has a line in one of his songs that says, "If I stay in the past, the future leaves me behind." Think about how true this is.

What I hope for everyone in this New Year of 2005 is that we can let go of the negative thoughts that weigh us down, that slow down our journey into the future. Stop dwelling on our negatives and dwell on our positives.

Have one of your New Year's resolutions be that you'll try to go an entire day without thinking a negative thought about yourself.

If you don't make it through the first day, try again the second day. Keep on until you've made it through an entire day without saying or even thinking something negative about yourself. Once you've made it through that day, try for a week.

Soon, you'll have broken the habit and be on your way to feeling like the beautiful person that you are.
 

 A Word From Pat

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!

I fixed dinner (food) for our little family on Tuesday, before Joe and I left for East Texas on Thursday. This meal was very informal. Finger foods served on paper plates! Chicken wings and turkey wraps, cheese cubes and cocktail sausages with Ritz crackers, olives and pickles, Rotel cheese dip and chips, party mix, slaw, macaroni salad, and jello salad. We had Christmas cookies and iced mini muffins for desert.

I said, "Here it is. Eat when you want to, for as long as you want to, as often as you want to." I think everyone enjoyed it. 

Then, Thursday morning, Joe and I left Nashville on a sheet of ice. We usually travel west on I-65 through Memphis, Little Rock, etc., but they'd had so much ice, sleet and snow that we decided to go south to Birmingham, then west on I-20. It was a hundred miles out of our way, but well worth it. We still had bad roads for about 60 miles, even going south. We stopped for the night in Vicksburg, Mississippi and spent the night in a motel on the banks of the Mississippi River. We could see the river from our room.

We got to Joe's hometown, Frankston, TX, around 2 p.m. on Friday and had a good four-day visit with friends and family.

But it's good to be back home now, and I'm looking forward to getting started on my New Year.

I hope everyone has a wonderful, healthy and happy 2005!

                                                 Love,

                                                                    Pat

Visit Pat's Place at www.patballard.com │ Write me at patballard@bellsouth.net

Books — Existing and Upcoming

Abigail's Revenge, my fifth novel, is now finished! It's a Romantic Suspense, and is different than any other novel I've written. It's also a good bit longer.

Abigail Avery was framed for the murder of her father and sent to prison when she was only eighteen years old. A bunch of crooked "good ole boys" from her hometown of Leaky Springs, Mississippi want her land and house. Abigail doesn't have any idea why they would want her property. But they were willing to kill for it and send her to prison, hoping to get her out of the way long enough to convince her to sell or to acquire it in some other manner. But now, ten years later, Abigail's out of prison and heading back to Leaky Springs to get revenge on the people, especially the judge, who stole ten years of her life.

And now that I'm finished with Abigail's Revenge, I'm going to finish my first nonfiction book, The 10 Commandments of Self-Love, a motivational book on accepting ourselves as we are instead of obsessing over trying to look like some unrealistic actress or image we see in an magazine.

Meanwhile, my new book Dangerous Curves Ahead—a compilation of 10 short stories—is available through my new publisher, Pearlsong Press (www.pearlsong.com). After its May 2004 publication, Dangerous Curves Ahead received a glowing review from Cindi Appel on the Fearless Books review website. Appel wrote:

Ballard doesn’t pull punches. She shows her heroines exhibiting ample will and tenacity to tell off those who would shame them into becoming something they aren’t just to blend in with society's narrow-minded notions of beauty.

To read the entire review, go to www.pearlsong.com/dangerouscurvesahead.htm. You can also read an excerpt from Dangerous Curves Ahead's title story, Dangerous Curves, by clicking on the title link in this sentence.

Pearlsong Press has also re-released my existing books, Wanted: One Groom, Nobody’s Perfect, His Brother’s Child and A Worthy Heir.

The Pearlsong Press edition of Nobody's Perfect was called "a charming, witty love story with a twist" in the July 2004 Small Press Bookwatch section of Midwest Book Review. Read the whole review at www.pearlsong.com/nobodysperfect.htm, or an excerpt at
www.pearlsong.com/nobodys_excerpt.htm.

I’m extremely happy that my books are now available in both print and eBook format. Please visit Pearlsong Press and check out all the options that are available.
 

Ask your local  library to stock my books, allowing many others to enjoy them
while spreading the size acceptance message.
 

Weighty Matters

                                             We the Educators

This is the third of several stories I will share with you in this series of "We the Educators," regarding our responsibility to speak up and say something to people who insist on promoting the "fat is bad" mentality.

One of the things I do, on a very regular basis, to help educate the world about weighty issues is to write letters. I write letters to editors of newspapers, magazines, TV stations, and radio stations, to major TV producers, and even to TV evangelists. I bought an offensive Hallmark card a couple of years ago, then called Hallmark and got the company president's name and sent him the card, explaining how offensive it was to plus-size women. He wrote back and apologized to me and assured me that the card would be taken off the stands. The next time I looked for the card it was gone, so I think he did what he promised.

My point is, these are such simple things that all of us can do to make our collective voice heard. I read an article that said when the media hears from one person, they consider it to be the voice of several thousand people.

Below are a couple of examples of letters that I write. Sometimes I write nice letters. Sometimes my letters aren't so nice. If the offender is someone I think has a closed mind on the subject, then I try to make them very angry. If they're angry, it'll be harder for them to forget what I've said.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a letter to The Tennessean newspaper that was published as the lead letter — a three star letter. You can read it at: http://tennessean.com/opinion/letters/archives/04/12/62790924.shtml?Element_ID=62790924

Earlier this week my attention was brought to a very nasty article by a person who is fairly well known in the media. Here's the letter that I sent to her. 

Dear Debbie,

Your article, 2004: Fat Chicks, Good; Big Guys, Bad, has been recently brought to my attention, so I went to your website and read it.

For someone with all your credentials, who, according to your Bio, wants the world to recognize how intelligent you are, you certainly aren’t afraid to expose your absolute  ignorance regarding the obesity issues.

I’d like to ask why you thought it necessary to virtually attack fat women to make a point about men on steroids. The two subjects aren’t remotely related.  

When you assume that all obese people are that way because, as you wrote, “Yet, instead of outrage over the calorically-gifted segment of the populous (sic) and their addiction to muffins and Krispy Kremes…” you’re assuming that every fat person on the face to the globe is that way because we’re “addicted” to food and can’t stop feeding our mouths. In doing this, you prove without the shadow of a doubt that you’re writing from pure prejudiced hatred and not from knowledge.

What is your problem? Are you afraid that you’re going to get fat? Do you have to announce your hatred for fat people loudly, in hopes that it will frighten away your own fat gene?

The sad part about this is that you could have written a wonderful article about steroids without leading into it with your putrid diatribe of fat bashing. For all the good you’ve supposedly done, why would you use your ability and reputation to do so much harm? How many women and young girls will start down the long, lonely road of eating disorders because of your words?

Or do you even care about that? Are you even aware that it is estimated that in the U.S. alone, 150,000 women will die from eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia, this year?  Are you aware that dieting is thought to "set up" the starve-binge pattern that leads to the development of eating disorders? Are you aware, or do you care, that one in five American women is suffering from a severe form of an eating disorder, and eight out of 10 have some of the symptoms of these illnesses; that one out of 200 American girls aged 12-18 suffers from anorexia nervosa; and that one out of four American college women is bulimic?

And would you like to guess at the reason these statistics exist? One of the main reasons we have such horrible stats in our nation of plenty is because of the kind of hatred I just read in your article.

You’re a journalist. Get some real facts before you do another hatred article.


Don't be afraid to let your voice be heard regarding anything you feel strongly about.
 

Calendar Of Events

Be sure to check  my website on Jan. 8 for the first of two recorded radio interviews. The first one will be available on  Jan. 8, and the second one will be available the following week.

And check out the photos from the Nov. 6 Mississippi Authors Festival that are now online at The Queen's Proclamation blog and The Pearlsong Letter blog. (Click on the Mississippi Authors Festival Link under the "Photo Albums" heading in the lefthand column of either blog to view the photos.)
 

Book Contest

Register to win a free copy of the Pat Ballard book of your choice at Top 100 Women Sites: http://www.top100womensites.com/contest.htm.
 

Read previous issues of The Queen's Proclamation at http://www.pearlsong.com/newsletterarchives.htm.

 Subscribe Me! Remove Me!

Did someone forward this newsletter to you, and you'd like to sign up to receive future issues yourself? Use the form below to subscribe.

Already a subscriber, but want to remove your email address from the Queen's mailing list? You can also use the form below to unsubscribe — just fill it in, select "Remove" from the drop-down menu, and click "Go!"

The Queen's Proclamation is published by Pearlsong Press, Inc.

P.O. Box 58065 │ Nashville, TN  37205  │ www.pearlsong.com

©2005 Pearlsong Press