Guest & Author Pam Hillman, Claiming Mariah

By Pam Hillman

The men in my family are sticklers about the dates on canned goods. If the date is expired on a can of vegetables, they won’t eat them. Expired ketchup? Fuh-get-about-it! Mayonaise? You’ve GOT to be kidding?

But don’t expect them to actually open the oldest bottle first. Oh no! That would take way too much time and thought. No, they grab the newest one…unless I hide it. Just sayin’

Big ticket items like cars and homes kinda have a shelf life. I mean it’s not stamped on your house, “will expire in 40 years”, but eventually these material things will become run-down, decay, wear out. Even stone castles don’t last forever.

You would think that our very lives have a shelf life. I mean we’re born, we grow, learn, advance in age, then end up as senior citizens, and pass on from this life. But do we really have a shelf life? Can anybody put a stamp on us that says, “you’re done”?

No, not really. God is the only one who can put a time stamp on us, and even then, we’re not “done for”. As long as we put our trust in God, we’ll never, EVER be done for. We’ll spend the rest of eternity in Heaven with Him. Wow! Christians have a shelf life that extends into eternity and beyond. Now that a shelf life to get excited about, isn’t it?

While you savor that tidbit, let’s focus on books for a moment. Print books can have a long, healthy shelf life if properly taken care of, but they do age after time. The pages become brittle, the binding loose, spines stiff. So, yeah, sad to say, but books have a shelf life.

Ebooks have burst on the scene in the last few years, so it will be interesting to see what kind of shelf life they have. They won’t face the same decaying forces of humidity, or dry air, or neglect that cause print books to decay, but they might encounter changes in software and hardware that might make them obsolete over time. Looking at it from this side of the fence, it looks like ebooks will have a long and productive shelf life.

My current novel, Claiming Mariah, is an ebook from Tyndale House. I definitely want it to have a long shelf life, as an ebook and as a print book someday. My debut novel, Stealing Jake, released in July, 2011, and it’s still clocking along nicely eighteen months later. With a click of a button, fans can download either book instantly.

And that kind of shelf life makes me smile.

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Pam Hillman was born and raised on a dairy farm in Mississippiand spent her teenage years perched on the seat of a tractor raking hay. In those days, her daddy couldn’t afford two cab tractors with air conditioning and a radio, so Pam drove the Allis Chalmers 110. Even when her daddy asked her if she wanted to bale hay, she told him she didn’t mind raking. Raking hay doesn’t take much thought so Pam spent her time working on her tan and making up stories in her head. Now, that’s the kind of life every girl should dream of! Claiming Mariah is her second novel.