I was stuck away from my desktop with none of my portable tasks with me yesterday, so I went back through my older files in storage and pulled out a book that hasn’t been on the market in about 14 years: Waiting on the Thunder. This is one I wrote in 1993 (apparently a VERY busy year for me, even with 2 toddlers and a brand new Contracting Officer’s warrant, but I guess I had plenty of engineers and lieutenant colonels to kill off in my novels so I could de-stress myself). I wrote it before the Christian romantic suspense genre took off, and it was specifically targeted as a Christian Southern Gothic murder mystery/suspense, even though I didn’t really realize back then that I was writing Southern Gothic. I later put it out as an indie ebook.
It got great reviews but the bad ones tended to be not for the story or the writing but for the Christian aspect. It was not at all preachy but about a woman who’d lost her faith because of how un-Christian she was treated by people who claimed to love her. Non-Christians loved the suspense but complained about the Christian aspects, even though they were very much part of the main character’s personality. Christians loved the suspense but complained that how dare I make the female protagonist Christian because–gasp, gasp, clutch pearls–there was (whisper) premarital sex (clutch, clutch, gasp) in it and therefore the book shouldn’t be marketed as Christian because the two are mutually exclusive. One woman in particular sought me out to scream at me that I was just trying to make a buck by referencing Christianity in it.
People are funny.
I didn’t write any more Christian-themed novels after that. Ever. Instead, I now write demons as metaphors for facing trauma, angels as metaphors for that inner power and goodness, witches as metaphors for all outcasts in the world in spite of their inner magic and uniqueness. Priesthoods, churches, covens, and even healing circles are metaphors for political organizations and community dynamics.
I started reading back through the last edition and decided to run it through EditGPT and another editor to see if there were any changes. (There were a ton of em-dashes, hahahahahahaha, and those were the ones my editor left in.) I’ve noticed in the last year or two that many of the grammar rules I learned as an English major have changed somewhat. I saw a lot of that here, too, how in 25 years, many of the hyphenated words are now one word, plus more commas are used in places they weren’t before and commas are left out of other places I was taught were mandatory. I added some commas, but I rarely remove them, and the Oxford comma is canon for me. Interesting, considering this book was fully edited, but life rolls on. What I didn’t do was update the technology or attitudes to make it reflect today. It’s a capsule in time.
This is #21 of my 25in25 experiment. I think. Technically, it’s not NEW intellectual property and I didn’t expand it, but after it being unavailable for so long, I’m gonna count it.
A Southern witch returns home. Secrets won’t stay buried. A chance to confront and heal—or face the consequences.
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