The craft, the grind, and the calling. Posts about writing, publishing, and life as an author.
The Writing Life
I do not want to preach at my reader. I want to tell them a story that does the preaching for me. There is a significant difference between those two things and the difference is everything when it comes to whether a reader finishes the book or puts it down halfway through. Frank Peretti understood...
The Writing Life
The genre does not get the respect it deserves. Christian supernatural fiction lives in a strange position in the literary world. Too spiritual for the secular market. Too fantastical for the readers who want straight theology. Not edgy enough for the horror crowd. Not literary enough for the prestige fiction crowd. It exists in a...
The Writing Life
Camille is not easy to explain without giving too much away. She exists in the spiritual world of Black Water as an entity with real power and real presence. She is not a background character. She is not a device. She is a force in the story with her own will and her own relationship...
The Writing Life
Let me tell you about Alan Charms. He is the lead character of Black Water and the person I will be spending a significant portion of my creative life with. He is not a simple man. He was not designed to be. Alan carries trauma. Real, specific, unresolved trauma that has shaped every decision he...
The Writing Life
Borrowing from writers you admire is not theft. It is how craft develops. Every writer builds on what came before. Peretti built on C.S. Lewis and Walter Wangerin and the tradition of Christian fantastic literature that preceded him. Dekker built on Peretti. I built on all three. That is not a confession of weakness. It...
The Writing Life
Ted Dekker gave me three things I use every time I sit down to write. The first is the double world. Two realities running simultaneously. One modern and grounded. One ancient and elemental. A character caught between them whose experience in one affects what happens in the other. I talked about this earlier in this...
The Writing Life
Frank Peretti gave me a specific gift that I have never put down. He showed me how to make the invisible world feel physical. In This Present Darkness the spiritual realm is not abstract. It is not a theological concept floating somewhere above the story. It is a place with texture and weight and consequence....
The Writing Life
SEER was the book I had to write before I could write Black Water. Not because the stories are connected. They are not. Different characters. Different world. Different everything on the surface. But underneath they are connected by the writer who made them. SEER was where I learned what I did not know. Black Water...
The Writing Life
SEER did not land the way I hoped. The reviews were not kind. Not in the way that means people were cruel — most readers are not cruel, they are just honest in the way that only anonymity allows. The feedback was that the story had problems. Structural problems. Things that a more experienced writer...
The Writing Life
I self published SEER in December of 2018. No agent. No traditional publisher. No industry connections pulling strings or opening doors. Just a manuscript I had written, a cover I had designed or commissioned, and a button on a self publishing platform that said publish. I pushed it. The decision to self publish came from...