Thinking back to my first novel Hope of Glory, I remember the prayer I said to the Lord and His very clear response: "I want you to write a Christian novel about horse racing." Succinct. Plain. His voice. The result of that was a saga, 700+ pages which took 8 and 1/2 years to write, produced by a start-up vanity press with little experience. The book is of course too long, amateurish, with some good writing, some not so great, and, yes, it would be much shorter, better written, and more professionally done if I wrote it today. But, I'm not ashamed of it because, if it does nothing else it captures the backstretch life of many racetrackers who make their way to the track one way or another. Through relatives, relationships, or seeking a life around horses as I did, all kinds of people show up working on the backside (barn area) to make horse racing tick.
A key component in the novel is the worldly side of relationships established between the different layers of people who work in horse racing. When creating characters, my desire has always been to make them come alive, to seem real, like you either know them or know someone like them. That part of my writing appears in all of my novels.
I will admit to the fact that in some parts of Hope of Glory the story can definitely get what unbelievers refer to as "preachy". Because of the minutia of details in the novel (yes, many of which could've and should've been eliminated), the "Christian" parts of the story are never vague.
The point I want to make here on this "Wednesday Wanderings" post is this: I write real. Occasionally, that unfortunately offends some Christian readers. This results in a particular audience for my work that might not be the mainstream Christian reader who favors stories with that "Clean Fiction" label which, for me, is an oxymoron in Christian Fiction. Anyway, I certainly don't consider my work "unclean", but it takes a hard look at the world to contrast it to "the way, the truth, and the life" that is Jesus Christ.
Raw Romantic Redemptive . . . I write love stories with a passion.
Father, thank you for the words, the inspiration, the characters, the stories. Thank you is never enough. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.