Before SEER there was In the Blood.

Same book. Different name. Same story of a young man named Craig Anderson whose dreams were coming to pass in real life and who did not know what to do about it. Same mentor in Richard Kinson helping him understand that what he thought were just dreams were actually something God had placed in him. Same journey from confusion to confidence as Craig began to accept that he was a prophet and that his gift was not something to run from.

I changed the name before I published it because In the Blood felt like it belonged to a different kind of story. Something darker and more thriller-adjacent. The book I had written was supernatural but it was also deeply about identity and calling and a young man learning to trust what God put in him. SEER fit that better. It named what Craig Anderson was becoming.

The name change was the easy part.

The writing was the hard part. Because I was figuring everything out as I went. I had read enough to know what a good story felt like but I had never built one myself from the ground up. There is a significant gap between those two things that only closes through the doing. I was in that gap for the entire writing of that book — learning what I did not know by discovering the things that were not working and trying to fix them.

Every first book is like that. Not because the writer is not capable. Because you cannot learn what building a story requires until you are actually building one.

I was building one. Slowly. Imperfectly. And it was worth every difficult page.

Stephon Rudd