A Mission Impossible, A New Genre, and A Dragon

After a few months of having this page and doing nothing, I decided it was time to give y'all a few updates on what's happening in my writing world and what y'all can be looking forward to this year!

Things have been kind of hectic as I've taken on several projects at once, breaking my personal rule of no multitasking. While it can be slightly overwhelming, it's been pretty fun. However, I'm still reining in my desire to put all my plot ideas into action at once. I'm sticking to only writing one new book at a time. But that hasn't stopped me from rewriting and editing several at once. 🙃

God has really blessed me over this time, and one of the biggest blessings was providing a wonderful editor for me at the exact time my normal editor was unable to take on a new project! (now I have them both working on separate manuscripts at once... I have a feeling I might suddenly have a ton of books ready to publish.) The crazy thing about this new editor, is that there should have been no possible way that we would meet. Not only had we never heard of one another, but she lives in a whole different country and doesn't edit as a job, so there would have been no way to find her online. God worked out our meeting in a wonderful way, and I am so thankful for that.

Winter of 2024 through to this year, I started writing a new genre. I have played around with Historical Fiction for some time, and I've done several HisFic short stories, but never a novel. My first try was a novelette, and the best response I got was "It reads like a history paper with some fictional names thrown in."

Not really the response an author wants. Especially when people have always commented on how real my characters feel. I was definitely doing something wrong, but what? That's what I couldn't figure out. It wasn't until last year that I sat down and sorted through the ways I write HisFic vs. any other genre. That was when I discovered the problem.

I have always been very passionate about history, and I really can't stand it when historical fiction gets it wrong. Sadly, I can no longer enjoy middle age HisFic without feeling so frustrated I want to throw the book across the room. A big problem with them is the majority are about these kids (often girls) who save the day in the most amazing and very impossible ways. And of course they never tell the adults what's going on, and they are always the heroes instead of ending up dead by chapter 3, which is what would have really happened. (Middle grade and the younger end of YA fiction often has that problem) And then of course when you get into older YA and adult historical fiction there is often a lot of inappropriate things or cussing. And, to top it all off, a very rare selection of these books actually seem to value the history they are writing about. I find more and more authors using HisFic as a shortcut to skip over the world building steps, but not sticking to the true events of history, or what the people of that day and age would do. I just read one that was about a 12-year-old girl in France, and she runs into an S.O.E., and he is wounded, so he passes off his mission to her because he can't complete it. And he gives her his training manual, all his explosives and super dangerous weapons that you have to be highly trained to use... and guess who is the hero of the day? 🙄

After having bought and studied all the S.O.E. training manuals that have been declassified, and reading all their classroom courses, you can guess that one didn't go over well for me. I'm surprised I finished the book. The only reason I did is because I was hoping the kid would get herself killed messing around with the equipment. Sadly not. It was a little too much realism to ask for.

First off, I'd like to just clear any doubt by saying that S.O.E. NEVER took their training manuals into enemy territory! This guys memorized the needed information and trained and tested for years on it. Secondly, they were so strong, well trained, and ready to push through anything, that by the end of the war England was actually scared of the killer spies they had created and disbanded them immediately. Never in a million years would an S.O.E. hand over his mission to a 12-year-old girl.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. I find a majority of books in this genre have a mini "historical" and a big "fiction" when it comes down to it. There are only a few historical fiction books I have actually bought and added to my collection, even though HisFic is my favorite genre. Often times, the accurate HisFic books have been written by men and women who had relatives in the time period, strong ties to what happened there, or are historians.

We have a big need for clean, true to history, historical fiction. Good stories without the foul language. Good stories without cheesy or inappropriate romance and love scenes. Good stories that stick to the truth of the historical period they are set in. Good stories that honor the God who wrote the history they talk about!

So I set about to rectify that problem... and ended up giving a historical info dump with a tiny bit of story woven it. 😬 Okay for an essay, not great for a book.

Well, last winter, I had this story set in a historical time period that I felt just really needed to be told. It was about an important time in history, but some very little known things about that time. I had nothing else that I was ready to take on just yet, so I decided to give it a go. I wrote it, and the response was amazing! Instead of trying so much to represent the events, I worked on making each character a representative of a group of people in that time. It worked! I've been told it's one of the best thing I've ever written, people loved the characters, and, best of all, people kept writing in about the historical events and asking if I'd made them up for suspense, because surely they couldn't be true.

While this sheds a sad light on how much we value and learn about history these days, it did really excite me, because it accomplished exactly what I wanted to do. People need to remember history, and I'm very pleased that I was able to shed light on even a few things that many people didn't know about. “Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.” ―Edmund Burke.

God really inspired me in many ways through the writing of this book, (which may or may not be part of a series. 🤫) There were times I was pretty positive I'd never pull it off, but I kept praying and He kept on giving me the next thing. It was really an amazing experience, and all glory to Him for it's completion!

All that to say, keep an eye out for a new book coming soon, and expect many more in the historical fiction genre, because I am really happy with how this is going, and the Lord has continued to inspire me with several other plot ideas!

Yes, I had a wild, probably impossible, idea. But I've prayed and God has provided everything I need to pull this off.

Mission: Re-write, edit, format, design covers for, print, and publish 2 books BEFORE December of THIS YEAR so that I can release them as a Christmas special... (and also for a personal reason of my own which I won't disclose because it's a surprise. 😉)

I'm part of a writer's guild, and so I threw this out there and called an M.I. The response was amazing! By the next day I had a wonderful team, and they have fully taken this on! I've been breaking out two chapters a day (minus Sunday) and they have been reading, editing, and giving me feedback on them every day! It's been amazing, and just what this set of books needed as I have rewritten them more times then I can count. I finally pushed the draft aside. (Draft 10 maybe??) and rewrote the whole first book from scratch. I only have a few more chapters, and I started it June 3rd!

Book two will be a little harder as I kicked it's original MC out completely, slid the Ally into the MC position, and created a whole new Ally. We'll see what happens. But, if I could write the whole first book in just over a month, and have it wonderfully edited in that time too, I think that I've got a chance with the second!

So, keep an eye out for a few more updates on that and a Christmas special this year!! Books always make the best Christmas presents. (Said the very unbiased author. 😁)

I can't thank my M.I. team enough for the work they have been putting into this, and I am so excited to see if we can pull it off. God has really given me the inspiration I needed and provided me with the perfect group of people to help me see this through!

Yep, most people would say it's impossible. But hey, what's a Mission Impossible if it's not impossible?

"Well, this is not mission difficult, it's mission impossible. "Difficult" should be a walk in the park for you."
–Mission: Impossible II

Yes, I promised a dragon. Sadly, there is one. He is behaving himself while I write this post, but who knows what he'll do the minute I'm not looking. Smaug (a.k.a. my laptop) has been doing his best to make sure I never get anything written, let alone published. He messed around with my cover design, he stuck his naughty claws in my editing and scrambled it all up, and– his most dastardly act– he ate an entire half of the novel I was writing! (which amounted to about 200+ pages, and several major character arcs) I'm not ashamed to admit I cried a good deal over that.

Smaug has continued to eat things, tear them up, and make a mess. I know I've been pretty frustrated lately, and when he chomped down seven years of research for lunch... well I'd just about had it.

I think that God is using this as a lesson in patience. And honestly... it's pushing me hard. There are days when I feel like lashing out and letting others have an earful, or just being harsh or snappy, because of how frustrated I am. (There are days that I have done that.) But that is sin, and it is a sin that needs to be gotten rid of in my life.

I love the comparison that God makes when he talks about us being refined. (as a history geek, I know all about metal smiths and refining things. Medieval history) The only way to purify gold or silver ore and give it any value, was to put it over fire so that all the dross was burned away. (dross is the mineral waste)

A hymn that I love, How Firm A Foundation, has a few verses about this.

“When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.”

“When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.”

We often think of deep waters and fiery trials being something huge like the death of a loved one, great loss, catastrophes, etc. And while this is certainly true, I think it would do us all good to step back and see that the little trials, and even the medium sized ones that seem to only be a big deal for us, are part of this refining process. But if we stiffen our necks and harden our hearts, then this will only continue to make us miserable and there will be no fruit of His Spirit at work within us. We must humble ourselves and open our eyes to see and learn the lesson God is teaching us.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think that just because I'm going through a difficulty that I'm being punished. Yes, it's true God uses trials to punish people. (Just take a look at the Old Testament) But just because a bad thing happen, doesn't mean it's a direct consequence for a way I sinned. BUT, I do believe that God uses every trial to reveal sin, teach us something, and refine us so that we will be more like Him. James 1:2-4 says: "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." (emphasis added)

I don't think God is punishing me with my dragon of a laptop. But I DO think that He has used it to reveal sin in my life. And now that I can see it, I need to ask Him to help me overcome the impatience and the urge to take my frustration out on others. He has said that if we ask, He will give. If we lack wisdom, ask it of Him and He will provide it.

I want to end with a short story I once read that completely stunned me.

There was once a group of women studying the book of Malachi in the Old Testament. As they were studying chapter three, they came across verse three, which says: “He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.” This verse puzzled the women, and they wondered what this statement meant about the character and nature of God. One of the women offered to find out about the process of refining silver and get back to the group at their next Bible study.

That week this woman called up a silversmith and made an appointment to watch him at work. She didn’t mention anything about the reason for her interest beyond her curiosity about the process of refining silver. As she watched the silversmith, he held a piece of silver over the fire and let it heat up. He explained that in refining silver, one needed to hold it in the middle of the fire where the flames were hottest so it would burn away all the impurities.

The woman thought about God holding us in such a hot place– then she thought again about the verse, that He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver. She asked the silversmith if it was true that he had to sit there in front of the fire the whole time the silver was being refined.

The man answered “Yes”, and explained that he not only had to sit there holding the silver, but he had to keep his eyes on the silver the entire time it was in the fire. If the silver was left even a moment too long in the flames, it would be damaged.

The woman was silent for a moment. Then she asked the silversmith, “How do you know when the silver is fully refined?”

He smiled at her and answered, “Oh, that’s easy. When I see my image in it.”

I pray that whatever trials you might be facing today, whether big, small, or somewhere in-between, you will be able to take a step back and look at it as a refining fire which God is using to make you more like Him.

God Bless! And Happy early 4th of July!!!

A New Genre

A Mission Impossible

And A Dragon