The craft, the grind, and the calling. Posts about writing, publishing, and life as an author.
The Writing Life
I want to tell you where the Black Water series is going. Not everything. Some of it has to stay in the manuscript until you read it. But enough so you understand that what I built in the first book was a foundation and what comes next is the structure that goes on top of...
The Writing Life
In December of 2018 I pushed a publish button and thought the hard part was over. I had written the book. I had formatted it. I had a cover. I had a title that felt right. I had done the thing that most people who say they want to write a book never actually do...
The Writing Life
Michael Crichton does not fit the pattern. Every other author I have mentioned in this series writes in the Christian supernatural lane. Peretti. LaHaye and Jenkins. Dekker. They share a worldview, a set of spiritual assumptions, a belief in the reality of what most of the literary world treats as metaphor at best. Crichton is...
The Writing Life
A sermon requires you to already be in the room. You have to show up. You have to be open to receiving what is being delivered. You have to have enough relationship with the source that you will sit still long enough to hear it. For a lot of people — especially people who have...
The Writing Life
I want you to put the book down and sit with it for a minute. Not because you are confused. Because something landed and you need a moment before you move on to the next thing. I want there to be a residue. A weight. Something the story left in you that was not there...
The Writing Life
I know exactly who I wrote Black Water for. It is the person who is talented in ways that nobody around them has noticed. Who has gifts that are sitting unused because the noise of everything that went wrong is louder than the signal of everything they were built to do. Who has been told...
The Writing Life
I end chapters on edges. Not every chapter. But most of them. A question that is not answered. A decision that has been made but whose consequences have not arrived yet. A door that just opened into a room the reader has not seen. Something that makes putting the book down feel like leaving in...
The Writing Life
The single most important decision a series writer makes is not plot. It is architecture. The plot is what happens. The architecture is the world the plot happens inside. And if the architecture is not built to hold weight — if the rules are not consistent, if the internal logic collapses under pressure, if the...
The Writing Life
Every protagonist I have written carries both. Craig Anderson in SEER. Alan Charms in Black Water. Significant gifts. Significant wounds. The two living together in the same person and the wounds making it difficult to access the gifts. That is not a formula I chose consciously. It is a pattern that keeps emerging because I...
The Writing Life
Richard Kinson shows up in SEER as Craig Anderson’s mentor. He is older. Established. He sees something in Craig that Craig cannot see in himself. He does not push. He illuminates. He holds up a mirror and lets Craig come to his own conclusions about what he is looking at. He is the presence in...