Tag Archives: Christian Fantasy

It’s Official

During our meeting at the skydiving place last Thursday, my editor said she would take some of my questions to her boss and let me know what his answers were. Today she was back at work and true to her word, sent me those answers.

The first is that Bethany House has indeed approved the story idea for The Other Side of the Sky!  So it’s official and I can now begin working on it in earnest. Not that I wasn’t before, really, just that it’s nice to stop wondering if any day I’m going to get a “Thanks but no thanks” and have to drop it all to come up with another idea. Not that I wondered overmuch, mind you.

I’ve been reading a lot about Jerusalem over the last few days. Why was the Temple destroyed, what happened after that, why is the area called Palestine, what is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre about, etc. Today I went looking for maps. Not that I’m writing about Jerusalem — I’m not —  but I find that reading about historical things gives me lots of ideas.

The other day I was trying to go through my five pages of notes on the prologue and kept getting cross-eyed so I decided I’d go through and just write down all the questions the notes I had were generating. I put each question on a small business sized card and ended up with 39 cards. Many of the questions were of the “Should it be A or B?” nature. No wonder I was getting overwhelmed.  If I’m trying to follow some kind of simple narrative and with every step have several options… it doesn’t take much before you can’t even hold it all in your head anymore.

Sort of like this.  I’m going to write a story about a girl and three bears. Or should it be a boy?  And maybe only two bears. Or maybe they should be raccoons. Or deer. If they were deer how would that change the story? What if they were owls?  Okay, so she goes into the woods… or do I want it to be a moor? Do bears live in moors? I’d better go look that up. Okay. No, bears don’t live in moors. What about deer? Oh, but I want them to be eating porridge and I don’t think deer eat porridge. Maybe they could be eating salad.

Let’s go back to the bears for now. So she gets to their house and knocks on the door. Would the bears leave their door unlocked? Well, why not? They’re bears. So she knocks and goes in and finds … what? A sofa? A TV? A pile of pine needles? I wish I knew what this story was going to be about…

See? Like that. So now I have a whole stack of cards about stuff that happened in the story maybe 1000 years before the actual events of the story (or should it be 500 years? Or 100 years?) so that I can figure out why things are the way they are in the present story time. Politics, government, people groups, and the actual physical location…

My hope is that once I get these things more or less determined, then maybe I can not only start writing but keep it up for a time. 

Seriously, I do hope that. LOL.  Oh, and there was one “comment” from BHP and that was their hope that I would try to tell my story in the fewest words possible in the interest of attracting a potentially broader readership. Apparently there are many readers who are scared off by long-looking books. I, on the other hand, pass up on books that are too short. Seriously. I don’t like short books. They’re just too…

…short.

I am such a dinosaur. 🙂

Day of Mourning

Recently my publisher, Bethany House, sent me notification of the sad news that because The Shadow Within (Book 2 of the Legends of the Guardian King series) and Return of the Guardian King (Book 4 of the series) have not been selling sufficiently they have decided not to keep them on their list of active publications. That’s a bunch of words to say they’ve been declared out of print and BHP will be producing no more copies of them. I’ve asked to have the rights revert to me.  

So if any of you are still waiting to get the Legends Series, or specifically the final book in that series, I suggest you act now before they vanish forever, like What-a-Burger’s A-1 Thick and Hearty burger. (Though I seriously doubt the A-1 is really going to vanish forever.) ((I’ve clearly seen that ad WAAAAY too many times…)  The books are still available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online sites as of today, and I would guess you can still order through local stores, though the strange setups independent booksellers have with distributors makes that literally a guess.  

Books 1 and 3 (The Light of Eidon and Shadow Over Kiriath) apparently continue to sell well enough that they’ve decided to keep publishing them.  

I knew this day would come and suspected it would be sooner rather than later, particularly given our current economy. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Shall we accept good from Him and not adversity as well? He knows what He’s doing and I don’t, and whether the books are in print or not is no obstacle to Him getting them into the hands of those for whom they are written. Maybe they don’t even matter any more and have served whatever purpose He had for them.  

If I step back I still have to marvel that the entire series actually made it to print at all, since there was considerable doubt the initial books would sell well enough to justify putting out the rest. And seeing as Eidon came out in 2003, Shadow Within in 2004… that’s about five years of shelf life in a very transitory and unforgiving industry. Have to be happy about that.  

Plus this last fall, a German publisher contracted to publish all four of the GK books. So it’ll still be out there, even if I won’t be able to read any of the books. 🙂  

In any case, I still have another book to write, which, believe it or not, starting last week I’ve finally the time to get back to. Or maybe I should say, I have another proposal to prepare, since at this point, that’s all I’ve got the go-ahead to do.  

   

 RIP

Graveyard photo by Qole Pejorian

CLJ print review of RotGK

Back in July, Christian Library Journal reviewer Donna Bowling emailed to inform me that the Journal is back in hard-copy publication and that her review of Return of the Guardian King is on pages 8 and 9 of the June 2009 edition with RotGK’s cover serving as the cover illustration for the same edition. Cool!

For excerpts from this review, click here to read my post on Writing from the Edge back in 2007

A New Review of an Old Book, Plus a Link

Today in the course of working on my website, I had to go to Amazon to get page links for all my books and was delighted to discover there was, of all things, a new review on The Light of Eidon page. It was really cool.

Generally I don’t like to single any particular review out, because I love all my reviews (well, except for the negative ones that say I can’t write and reading my books is more boring than watching paint dry) and I deeply appreciate the fact that anyone would take time out to write one. This one, however, was so unexpected in the first place — after all, it’s Enclave that’s releasing not Eidon— it was a pleasant surprise in my day. Not only because it was very kind to the series, but it brought up an element near and dear to my heart that few others have noted to this degree — and that’s the fact my characters grow. Since that is the point of the whole Guardian King series, to take a man from spiritual death, through salvation and on to spiritual maturity, it’s gratifying when someone notices and comments on it. I also appreciated the observation that when you focus on character growth, the characters are probably going to start out flawed and perhaps not terribly likable. But that’s probably one of my favorite stories: the transformation of wimp to hero..

Posted June 26
By  Berean Hunger – See all my reviews

It’s not often that I find a work of Christian fiction that genuinely challenges me in my walk with God, but The Legends of the Guardian-King series did just that.

I have never before read a series that so clearly and captivatingly captured the Biblical concept of walking in light versus walking in darkness. Hancock has wrapped deep truth in a fascinating and complex story. Following these characters through their mistakes, triumphs, and both good and bad choices really made me think of the power of what I choose to believe and whether I appropriate truth or not.

“Light of Eidon,” I will admit, doesn’t start off as captivating as “Arena” did, but keep reading. One of my favorite things about Hancock’s writings is that her characters GROW, and this requires starting off not being as likable as we might want. I love this because it mirrors real life and I actually learn, rather than just watching a perfect person go though life.

Karen Hancock has renewed my faith that God can challenge His church through fiction. Her grasp of Biblical truth is evident, as is her dependence on God to help her communicate truth.

~~~~~
So thank you very much, Berean Hunger. And thank you to everyone else who’s ever posted a review of my books. I really do appreciate each one of them.

Originally this was to be the extent of my posting today, since I spent the bulk of my time working on the formatting of a My Bookspage, which is almost but not quite ready for “publication.” But then Mary Hugill posted another knock-out post on her blog tonight about some of her own spiritual growth issues which were realized through her experiences in homeschooling. It was such a great post I had to link to it:  A New Direction in My Life.  If you’re interested in homeschooling, spiritual growth or bible doctrine, please hop over and give it a read.  You won’t be sorry!