The Writing Life

I have been writing stories for over 30 years. I began when my children were small and my husband, Dan, and I worked as missionaries in British Columbia, Canada. I had a dream one night about a mystery and a young girl who solved it. And so I wrote “The Mystery of the Missing Message”, a teen novel that portrayed a young girl who gets involved in a case of a kidnapped baby and falls into danger when she tries to solve it. Based around the idea of a Christian Nancy Drew, I went on to write four more teen novels featuring Jodi Fischer and her friend, MaryAnn Laine, and had them published by Moody Press from 1985-1987. I thought my dream had come true and that I would be the next famous author and household name.

But it didn’t happen. After Moody discontinued the series, I continued writing but had little success in getting published. I wrote two teen novels, featuring a girl dectective by the name of Teri Michaels, an 8-12 mystery novel that took place on a sheep ranch in eastern Montana (also a mystery), and a historical novel about the bibicial character of Ruth.

Were these my “practice” novels? I do not know. They are still sitting in my closet, waiting to be edited and published.

One day I strolled the Christian book store Fiction aisle and noticed that almost all the published titles were historical fiction. Ah, I thought. I’ll write a historical fiction. The only problem was that my great love and passion is the medieval era, and I placed my book (Sirocco, The Wind from the East) in that time period, using a real-life person from history, Pricne Arthur of Brittany, as the springboard. I wrote and studied and edited like a fury, confident that at last one of my novels would see print because I had written what everyone was writing: historical fiction. Alas. I discovered several years later that most Christian publishers will not publish anything older than the Civil War and especially veer away from the days of the Crusades. My long quest to find a publisher finally ended with Xulon, a POD publisher in Florida. I am currently writing the sequel to Sirocco: Mistral, the Wind from the North.

Writing is the easy part, right? Finding a publisher is the hard part. I’ve been told that if you write well, your work will be noticed and you WILL be published. Do you agree or disagree? What does it take to be published? Why couldn’t I find a “traditional” publisher?

Please write to me and let me know your ideas, thoughts, comments and suggestions. Share your problems with the writing life. Maybe together we can find an answer.

Ginger (Virginia)