Greetings!

Hello! I'm in Oklahoma, after spending most of my life in eastern Missouri. I was a volunteer youth director most of the 1990s, then somehow got out of church for a few years before the Lord got my attention following a stroke in 2008. One of my biggest desires is to write Christian fiction.

 

My problem is, I've spent 25 years bouncing around from genre to genre, both Christian & secular. In '91 I came very close to launching a YA detective series with Bethany House. Now I think I've found my sub-genre, men's Christian fiction -- which I didn't even know existed until a couple of years ago! (You usually have a hero & a love interest, but their romance is secondary to whatever action is going on around them.)

I'm working on a novel set in a small Mo. town in 1927, with the high school football coach as the hero. He gradually falls for a first-year English teacher. He is a widower who lost his faith after his wife died while he was away in WWI, but he is about as color(race)-blind as a man of that time & place could be. She leads him back to faith & he makes her re-evaluate her Confederate heritage-based racial ideas WHILE they run afoul of the Al Capone of St. Louis & his hit men!

 

It's a time period generally and a year specifically that have long fascinated me. 19th-Century America meets modern-day America. So much going on: first real modern media icon that summer in Lindbergh, sports now BIG, with Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Dempsey & Tunney HUGE icons themselves; Lincoln Highway opened in 1926, roads improving all the time, travel by car has become open to the average family; Silent movie industry at its ZENITH (with the first dialogue film coming out that fall, about to change everything!), women doing considerable writing/directing in Hollywood, brief period where a happy ending wasn't required to be the heroine getting married (Incidentally, one of the VERY FEW apparently legit salvation experiences in a non-Christian feature film that year in Sadie Thompson!); U.S. enjoying financial/credit boom, with radio becoming big, other gadgets ... just on the bring of the bubble bursting. Battles over traditional beliefs/behavior going on; etc.

 

By the way, I wasn't intentionally avoiding your other question. I haven't read a lot in this sub-genre. My first ones were by Paul Meier. I actually read the second one first, then found the first one. One was The Skeleton in God's Closet, where a noted archeologist harbored such hatred against Christianity that he went to tremendous lengths to plant a phony letter from Joseph of Arimathia to Nicodimus, confessing to being part of a plot to fake the Resurrection -- even using a scrap of papyrus from the right era to do it on, with appropriate ink, so that it would carbon testing would verify it. Some 25 years later he leads a dig in which it is unearthed. The hero, an archeologist/author who is in love with this guy's daughter, has to put the pieces together & prove it was faked before mass chaos erupts, world-wide. The other I read, The Constantine Codex, he has later married this gal (also a top researcher) & she finds what turns out to be the missing ending from Mark. Those two were enjoyable, even though his hero was Greek Orthodox. By the third one of his I started, his anti-evangelical viewpoint had become too pronounced to ignore & I put it down after a couple of chapters.
Another in the genre I read was Deepest Waters by Dan Walsh, about a newlywed couple heading back from California with a nice little cache of gold, when their ship sinks (based on the SS Central America), she is rescued & he is (wrongly) presumed dead. Always, a little romance, but when the 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through plot complication arises it's usually a grave physical danger, not a misunderstanding between the main characters, like in virtually all romances.

 

On the widow question: It just works well. No tiptoeing around divorce, etc. In this case, he had been saved as a teen & had been very active in church through college. I needed something earthshaking enough to have temporarily broken his faith. He was away on the battleship Texas when she miscarried & still there when she died during the flu pandemic -- helpless to anything but write letters.

 

Thanks! Good to be here.