My cousin Irene inspired my career goal to be a nurse. Like her. Although I preferred words over numbers or science projects, becoming a writer had never crossed my mind. Until I hit the age of thirty.
Soon after I graduated from high school, I met Bob Hodgson. My parents, and others, gasped when I set my career goals and university application aside. Bob and I married that same year–1972. In 1975 and 1977, I gave birth to daughters.
Bob eventually became a Sheriff’s deputy, and in 1983 the four of us attended a retreat for Law Enforcement families at the Forest Home Conference Center in California. There, I had my first encounter with a real writer! While Carol the writer’s interviewed Bob and I for a magazine article, the thought of being a writer enthralled me.
I picked up a copy of The Christian Writer’s Handbook by Margaret Anderson and subscribed to The Christian Writer (now available as the Christian Communicator). Bob encouraged me, reminding me of my prolific letter-writing habit and the positive responses I received from their recipients.
Still, I didn’t have a Bachelor of Arts degree in English or Journalism. Nor did I have any extraordinary life experiences in my history. What did I have to draw from?
Doubt and fear plagued me and I gave in to them, launching what I call my Jonah Journey.
In the fall of l984, I enrolled in a nursing program, headed in the opposite direction of my Nineveh. Before the end of the first year of anatomy and physiology, chemistry, and college algebra, the stress of going my own way landed me in a hospital bed. As I lay in a hospital bed watching a nurse switch out a bag of fluids for my I.V., I realized a nursing career wasn’t the path for me.
I went to my college counselor and discussed switching my major to music. After all, I liked playing the piano and I had taught piano lessons. Easy to see I was more qualified to teach music, than I was equipped to be a writer.
It didn’t take more than a brief discussion with the dean of music for me to realize that a music career wasn’t right for me either.
Writing. That’s where my thoughts seemed to settle.
The end of 1986, during a walk with my Dad, I shared my pesky little interest in writing. Like Bob, Dad didn’t seem to think being a writer was so strange an idea.
The next summer I responded to an ad for a correspondence course (picture an online course today) offered by Christian Writers’ Fellowship International. After reviewing the writing sample, my instructor recommended that I enroll in the unit on writing daily devotionals. I did.
In November 1987, my first acceptance letter and non-acceptance letter arrived in the same envelope from The Secret Place, a quarterly daily devotional. I moved on to correspondence course units in various genres including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; all the while taking writing courses at the local community college and attending at least two writers’ conferences each year since the Spring of l988.
I entered the ambiguous world of publishing nearly three decades ago, and soon had aspirations of writing nonfiction books for women. Instead, I wrote devotionals, short stories, poems, profiles, personal experience stories, how-to articles, and book reviews for fifty different periodicals, plus a weekly newspaper column.
In 1990, while my dad and I walked a dirt road toward a creek, we discovered a deserted and dilapidated cabin not much bigger than my dining room. My imagination immediately planted seeds from which the premise for a novel sprouted. Next, I took countless novel-writing courses to learn the craft of writing fiction.
Women’s fiction wasn’t my first book published in 1998. God had other plans. When an idea for a children’s story tickled my imagination, I wrote it, studied writing for children, had the story critiqued by a published author, and then showed the book to an editor at a writers’ conference. Nineteen years later, my writing credits include 32 published children’s books.
Still, my heart remembered the dream to write and publish novels for women.
In 2008, I sent the first twenty pages of that endeavor to ACFW (American Christian Fiction Writers) as an entry in their Genesis contest for unpublished novelists. Later that year, at the annual ACFW conference, my writing sample was awarded First Place for Historical Fiction.
March 31, 2009 my agent called. She’d shown the proposal for my historical novel set in Jerome, a historical copper mining camp in Arizona, to several editors, and had heard back from one who was interested in publishing me.
In an out-of-the-ordinary situation, the editor asked if I’d be willing to adapt my story premise and move it to Cripple Creek, Colorado. Still set in the late 1890’s. Still taking place in a mining camp, but gold instead of copper. I said “Yes!”
When the editor suggested a series that included four sisters coming west, she nor my agent knew I was one of four sisters. I leaped at the chance to write that story, incorporating a few of the characters and plot points from the Jerome novel. Dr. Morgan Cutshaw, Lewis P. Whibley, and a devastating fire all found their way into Two Brides Too Many, Book One of four in The Sinclair Sisters of Cripple Creek Series.
As they say, the rest is history. I now have 11 novels and novellas published with WaterBrook Multnomah, Barbour Publishing, and Guideposts Books.
Fast forward to 2017. I’ve returned to my publishing roots and first publishing daydream—to write nonfiction books for women. I’ve written 10 devotionals to be published in Every Day with Jesus with Guideposts Books in 2018. And, yes, I’m currently writing my first nonfiction book for women.
I’m over-the-top thankful that God persists in pursuing us with His plans and for His purposes.
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