Alas, it did not happen. I was blindsided by the dreaded process known as formatting, which sapped all my creative energy, as well as my desire to look at a computer screen for any longer than necessary.

So, if you’re interested in hearing my thoughts on Underworld journeys, stay tuned for another week.

Since I’m severely lacking creativity today, I decided to give a BTVP update.

If you’re new to Lady of the Larke, BTVP is short for Beyond the Vanishing Point, a medieval fantasy book series that I have written and am currently in the process of self-publishing.

I’ve held off on giving updates, because nothing is set in stone yet. I can’t give an official release date because there are still a couple variables, and I don’t want to do a title reveal until I can also show the cover—and considering I don’t exactly have a cover yet, that’s going to be a little bit.

But! Don’t let that make you think it’s going to be some long wait until my debut novel is out in the world. I’m currently in the process of formatting, and I’m working with an extremely talented cover artist. And after that’s done, I really don’t have much more to do before publication. My hope—hope—is for this book to release into the world sometime at the end of this summer.

I’m going to be honest with you. It’s frightening to be actively working on publishing. BTVP has been so near and dear to my heart for pretty much my entire adult life. Writing is an escape of sorts for me, and so BTVP became an instrument to process growing up, friendships, having a calling in life, and walls I didn’t even know I was putting up. Not to mention situations that kept popping up in my life that were strangely similar to the ones I was writing. I learned things about myself that I never knew. I thought through things I was observing in the world around me, trying to understand them. I poured my heart and soul into my characters and let them lead the story onward.

Now to put all that into the hands of—well, anyone? That’s terrifying.

But the even bigger fear is the nagging thought that says, “Maybe you’re not ready.”

As I was formatting, I broke down crying at one point because I was afraid my writing wasn’t “good enough.” I decided on self-publishing after receiving three rejections from publishers. I know, I know, that’s not a lot compared to many extremely popular authors. And that’s where the voice in the back of my head comes in.

“You’re not being patient enough,” it whispers. “It still needs work. It wasn’t good enough for those publishers, so why are you putting it out now, when you’ll probably regret it later?”

That’s when I grit my teeth and remind myself of a few things. The first rejection letter I got was actually amazing. It was unlike any of the other ones, because it was full of feedback. They saw potential, but said it still needed work, and told me specifically what to work on.

And you know what? I took their advice. I rewrote portions of the book. I finished the entire series. I shortened the book. But in the end, the reason I decided not to try again with them in the future was because what my vision was didn’t seem to fit what they were looking for.

The next two were pretty straightforward: “This isn’t what we’re looking for right now.” “We haven’t had success with anything in a medieval time period.”

That, in the end, is why I decided to self-publish. Not out of laziness, or not wanting to take a publisher’s advice. Because I was writing something unique that doesn’t fit in a box. That makes it very hard for a business to market and sell.

Plus, the age I was writing for was kind of all over the place. It started out writing for my 14-year-old self who couldn’t find enough clean YA fantasy books to read. But as I got older and matured, so did my writing. While I didn’t write anything inappropriate that a 14-year-old shouldn’t read, the tone grew heavier. Struggles got more real. Hope became harder to see. I began incorporating concepts into the lore (largely inspired by C.S. Lewis) that I definitely didn’t grasp at 14.

I’ve talked a bit about how I’ve wrestled to find a balance between showing darkness and not getting lost in it. The later books in the series—written in my early 20s as opposed to my late teens—got darker. Namely, portions of the fourth book and the prequel(s)1.

I don’t want that to turn younger teens away from reading it, but the reality is that I’m not writing for just them anymore. My hope is that it will be interesting for all ages, and that as my younger audience grows up and rereads, they’ll catch things they didn’t the first time.

But all that is hard to market, too. What do you mean, it’s YA but appropriate for Middle Grade readers…and oh yeah, adults have read it and enjoyed it too?

My vision for BTVP is not simple, by any stretch, and it certainly doesn’t fit in a box. The real reason I decided to self-publish was so I could retain control over that.

To wrap this up, as I’m sure many of you have caught on, I’m rereading The Lord of the Rings right now. I finished The Two Towers about an hour ago, and I was struck by the moment when Sam has to make the heartwrenching decision to leave Frodo, who he believes to be dead, take the Ring, and go on to Mordor himself.

I think that’s one of the biggest moments in Sam’s character development, but what stood out to me this time was how Sam, throughout the whole thing, is never certain that he made the right decision. As he goes onward to Mordor, he’s still debating in his mind what he should have done. He even tries to go back, but by the time he gets to the spot he left Frodo, the Orcs have already taken him. Sam is still convinced that he made the wrong decision, that he should have stayed by his master’s side and died protecting him.

But what Sam only briefly considers is that if that was the case, the Quest would have failed. The only reason Sauron didn’t get the Ring in that moment is because Sam had taken it and was actually wearing it when the Orcs came. Sam might have doubted his decision, but he stuck with it until there was no going back.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be fully comfortable with my decision to self-publish, and I certainly don’t know if it was the right one. But if I let the doubt and imposter syndrome freeze me, I’ll never take any steps towards publication. So I’m going to keep going, and trust the rest into God’s hands.

After all, He was the One who put it on my heart to write BTVP in the first place.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything very exciting to celebrate with. A while back, I posted a note asking if anyone would be interested in a Q&A, but only one person responded.

However, it was a very interesting question, so I thought I would dedicate a whole post to it. Basically, the question was, when I’m retelling old myths and legends, how do I handle the pagan elements in a way that’s glorifying to God?

I love that question because it goes to the heart of a lot of what I write. I’ve mentioned before that my motto is “redeeming the legends.” I love classic stories, such as Arthurian legend, or Greek mythology, but there is a lot that’s not honoring to God in there. I don’t think that means all the stories should just be thrown out, though. I’ve made it my mission to take the old tales and reshape them in a way that if I were picking it up off a bookshelf, I could read it with a clear conscience. For the Arthurian portion in my series Beyond the Vanishing Point, that meant working around the immoral behaviors of major characters. That was simple enough to take out; I just didn’t need to deal with certain stories.

But I have written other things inspired by ancient cultures (namely Greece and Babylon), and the elements I needed to “redeem” shifted a bit. How did I deal with the pagan worship and polytheism? This was an interesting issue, especially in regard to the Babylonian tales. Babylon is culture that is consistently represented as an enemy of God Himself throughout Scripture. How was I supposed to work with that?

The easy answer is that for the most part, I take out the pagan aspects and just focus on the story as I think it could have happened within a biblical worldview.

But I want to explain more in depth than that, because it illustrates the strategy of how I actually go about retelling myths very well.

I believe that most myths and legends have a seed of truth to them. I believe there was a real King Arthur. I think Atlantis could have been real. And there’s no question in my mind about whether dragons exist or not. Seriously, go read Job 41.

But I also know that the things that inspired the stories probably looked nothing like the way we tell them. To quote medieval scholar Dorsey Armstrong, “King Arthur probably wasn’t a king, and he definitely wasn’t named Arthur.” If Atlantis was a real place, it didn’t fall in judgment for its pride in attacking Athens, which was has no historical record of such a war and most likely didn’t exist yet. And dragons? What Job 41 describes is clearly a sea creature, not your traditional flying, gold-hoarding serpent.

So when I look at these stories, I like to work backwards. I take the story we have today, then the version of it I want to tell. I compare and contrast the two, filling in gaps until my version could, with enough oral retellings, become the traditional one.

It was my dad who first taught me to think like that. When I was early in the process of the first book in BTVP, he asked what I was planning to do with Lancelot and Guinevere’s adulterous relationship. I responded that I was doing nothing with it, and that Lancelot wasn’t even a character, because I didn’t want to go near that stuff. My dad (who is responsible for some of the best ideas in BTVP) gently informed me that you can’t have an Arthurian story without Lancelot, and that if I wanted to get around the adultery issue, I could still avoid it. He suggested a way to make it so that Lancelot and Guinevere never had any romantic interest, but it was misinterpreted that way, until over time, it turned into the classic romance we know now.

When he suggested that, I don’t think he knew that he was reshaping the way I viewed my entire series. I made that my whole mindset. Every time I came up with a new twist, I would say to myself, “Ok, for the sake of argument, in this fantasy version of Earth, let’s say this is the true story, what really happened to inspire all the legends. If that’s the case, how did we come to the myth we tell today?”

Of course, I didn’t go for the quite historically accurate “this is what really happened.” For one thing, I believe there are a lot of supernatural elements in the world that could have inspired some of these fantastical myths in the first place. Secondly, and more prominent in my mind, for a fantasy writer, complete historical accuracy is most of the time boring and not the kind of story I’m looking to tell.

So I explained what I did to get around the prominent adultery in Arthurian Legend, but what about the paganism in ancient mythology? That answer is twofold.

I have a general rule with myself that while I may address the religion briefly for the sake of cultural accuracy (even though it is fantasy, I do want any ancient cultures I represent to be shown with some historical basis), I won’t go into detail. For example, in my retelling of The Epic of Gilgamesh that I just finished revisions on, I do reference the fact that in Uruk, there are temples and priests to the gods, that astrology and magic is prominent among noblemen, and even refer to a couple of the Babylonian myths. But I don’t involve the gods as characters, or show people worshiping them, and my character who’s the main voice of truth clearly states that he doesn’t believe in them.

The other element of this is the more interesting one: the alternate explanations. When taking an old story that involves paganism, I don’t want to totally ignore the role that the gods often play. And so, I find other things to fill that role.

You’d be amazed at how many holes Immortals can fill.

A god of war, like Ares? An Immortal gifted with near invincibility and extreme strength could easily inspire that. Especially with the idea that Mortals didn’t know how to interpret what they were seeing, so they made up an explanation. You see examples of that even in the Bible, when the people of Lystra tried to worship Paul and Barnabas after they healed a lame man in Acts 14.

What about demigods, like the kings of Atlantis who were descended from Poseidon, or Hercules, or Achilles? All it takes is rumors to spread about one Immortal for there to suddenly be whole lineages of people who are a little more than human.

This extends to other fantastical philosophies, as well, even Christian ones I think are a little…out there. In medieval cosmology/astrology, it was commonly believed that angels guided the movements of the stars and planets, serving as guardians of different parts of the universe. It was also believed that the planets themselves influenced people. But what if there were instead Immortals singing the songs of the stars so Earth could hear the music of the spheres, thus influencing the hearts of humanity? Believe it or not, that’s actually what’s happening in “Songs of Sun and Stars,” my short story in Firefly Tales.

I think you’re getting the idea. For most things that are a little too pagan, or even not part of a false religion, but just simply weird, or a bit too fantastical, I can sub in Immortals, and it takes care of itself nicely.

I know, I know, saying something is too fantastical and using my own fantasy race of people instead. It sounds pointless, but once I start publishing BTVP and you read it for yourself, I think you’ll understand. I see it as a kind of mild fantasy, where all the weird, hard to swallow things are explained by either spiritual forces that the Bible tells us exist, or my own original Immortals, and I limit the fantasy to those two elements (at least on Earth…in other worlds, you do get things like Fae and werewolves and traditional flying dragons).

That’s probably a longer answer than the reader who submitted the question was asking for, but I wanted to expound, because it gives you an idea of what to expect from my fiction. Which, while I can’t say a ton at this moment, is still very much in the plan to be published by the end of this year.

I don’t remember exactly how Andrew Peterson defined sehnsucht. I think it was something along the lines of “inconsolable longing.” But I do remember how The Gray Havens, my favorite band, described it, using C.S. Lewis’s words: “a desire more desirable than any satisfaction.”

This definition is a paraphrase of a quote from Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised By Joy. In this book, he describes his conversion to Christianity in terms of experiences with Joy, or sehnsucht, a longing for something that the world couldn’t satisfy. In the end, Lewis found that satisfaction in Jesus Christ.

Though I’ve been saved since I was a kid, I have also felt a longing for something more than what this life has to offer. Maybe you have, too. It’s an ache, knowing that something isn’t right, but that something better is coming. The ache is an experience of its own. I always think of it like how the Apostle Paul writes that “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." (Romans 8:22) Except the groaning is a strangely pleasant thing.

The ache of Joy was a companion to me during years of loneliness and anxiety as a teenager. Even if I was hurting in this world, there was a promise of one yet to come. It was hope mixed in with the pain. I cried over books that highlighted that theme, and I sought out music that would make me feel the sehnsucht. Not because of the feeling itself, but because I wanted—needed—to be reminded of the world to come. In Lewis’s words,

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

This desire imprinted itself upon my heart, offering me whispers of comfort and tastes of Joy. And, as a result, it started making its way into my writing.

Very early on when I started writing, I knew I wanted to try to capture the same feeling that all my favorite books invoked in me. I wanted to offer my readers the hope of heaven that my favorite authors had reminded me of.

Fast forward to 2022, and sehnsucht really began to take ahold of my writing. I was in college, trying to balance school, writing classes, and a new novel. Little did I know how all those things would come together and shape themselves into BTVP, the series I’m working on publishing.

As I’ve said before, I’ve taken many of Jonathan Rogers’ Writing With classes through The Habit, his online writer’s community. Unsurprisingly, my favorite of those classes are always the annual ones he does on The Chronicles of Narnia. Two years ago, I attended my first Habit Writers’ Retreat, and I had a chance to sit down with Jonathan Rogers and chat. One question he asked me was what class had been my favorite so far, and I was ready to answer.

“Writing On The Dawn Treader,” I said, with no doubt in my mind. “It brought me back to the reason I write.”

He looked surprised at that, and asked what he’d said that meant so much to me. It had been a couple years since the class at that point, so I couldn’t remember exactly, but I told him that it was because of the sehnsucht. During that class, he pointed out how the entire last chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is rooted in sehnsucht, the desire for something more than this world. In the quest to Aslan’s Country, Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, and Reepicheep are following that desire to its end: Aslan Himself, in His own country, and there they are told that He can be found by another name in their own world.

It doesn’t take much to figure out what that other name is.

I had read this and listened to the Focus On The Family audio drama a hundred times. But something made it stand out like it never had before. I realized that the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader had always been a bittersweet thing for me. It made me feel something strange, even as a kid, something both beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time. I hadn’t known what that was when I was younger, but now I understood: it had been sehnsucht, all the time.

Right then, I told myself, “This is why I write. To give a reader this. I want to take them to the Utter East.”

“Take them to the Utter East” became my new motto. Whatever I wrote, I wanted to give people hope and show them beyond the veil. Then, they could take that light with them when they returned from the story, much like Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace return home knowing they can find Aslan there, too.

Shortly after that class, I received a postcard in the mail from a good friend. On the front, it featured a picture from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie: the exact scene with Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace stepping into the wave to leave the Utter East and return home. And while I’m still of the opinion that Caspian also being in that picture ruined the scene, I was able to ignore it for once, just because of the sheer timing.

Right after I’d made my writing motto “Take them to the Utter East,” my friend sent me a literal picture to remind me of that? How could that be coincidence? I hung the postcard on the cork board above my desk, promising myself I would never get rid of it, and I would look at it whenever I needed a reminder of why I was even trying to be a writer.

That card is postmarked February, 2022, and I still have it, to this day.

But let’s back up a month to January of 2022. Another writer friend and I had just exchanged writing prompts, and I got the first inklings of the story that would become my series.

I had no idea what historical fantasy was, and so after a brief Google search, I figured out that one definition was fantasy set in a historical time period, and I paired that with the prompt “You’ll go down with your ship.” That gave me a vague storyline about a sailor, accompanied by an Immortal, trying to get to a mysterious island shrouded in moonlight before something very bad happened.

What was this island? Why did they have to get there? What did the fog hide?

Those questions circled around my mind endlessly, and I just couldn’t come up with an answer. That is, until halfway through my college semester. I’ll never forget that day.

I was in Psalms class, which was, quite honestly, my least favorite class. I struggled to pay attention most of the time, and I did a lot of doodling in the corners of my notebook. Very often, my mind would drift to the story I was trying to craft and the elusive details I couldn’t lay hold of—like the question of what was on that mysterious island.

But this day was different. The pastor stopped, and he said something that, little did I know, would shape the next four years of my life.

“There are two Hebrew words that get translated ‘everlasting,’” he said. “One of them literally means ‘to the vanishing point,’ and the other means ‘beyond the vanishing point.’ Imagine looking at the horizon and coming to a place where you can’t see any farther. God and eternity go beyond that point.”

I sat bolt upright in my chair, jotting down those definitions as quickly as I could. I’m pretty sure I circled “beyond the vanishing point.” Then I thought to myself, “I don’t know what a vanishing point is, but that’s what’s on that island.”

I don’t think I heard another word of that class. My mind was far away, creating the beginnings of what would become the central place to my entire series. Not only did the infamous Vanishing Point enter my book that day, but I also decided on a title for the book: Beyond the Vanishing Point. I wanted that longing, that beautiful ache, for something beyond what we can see on Earth, to permeate every word of my story.

Months passed, and the book drastically changed. Poor William, the main character you may remember me talking about in the past, got pushed aside for the Immortal Shipwright who was supposed to be a side character, and their 1800s adventure was exchanged for an Arthurian one. But in all the plot changes, one fundamental thing remained the same: the Vanishing Point, a place of evil, and the hope that there was something beyond it. The book grew, until it was two, and then a trilogy, and then four books, and then four plus a prequel. That title, Beyond the Vanishing Point, became the name of the entire series.

That, dear readers, is what BTVP stands for. Beyond the Vanishing Point.

The changes to BTVP happened so gradually, and inspiration struck so sporadically that I didn’t even realize the timing of it all. How Writing on the Dawn Treader, the class that brought me face to face with sehnsucht, was right in the middle of the process.

As my Immortals in the story would say, I don’t think that was an accident.

Today, BTVP is in the editing stages. The first book is in the process of self-publication. The prequel, the last of the books I’ve written, is currently undergoing revisions. Those notebooks from both Psalms class and Writing on the Dawn Treader sit somewhere in a bin, untouched for years. The postcard depicting the Utter East is in a binder along with other pictures, quotes, and letters that I intended to look at whenever I needed inspiration.

I don’t look through that binder often enough. I don’t see the picture of the Pevensies at the Utter East every time I write like I once intended. I don’t even think about the phrase “beyond the vanishing point” often anymore, because it’s become so familiar. But those things never lost their impact. They’re engrained in my mind, permeating the words I write.

Did I ever expect four years of my life to be taken up by that simple phrase that captured my imagination and seemed to encapsulate all my hope? Never. But I don’t regret a moment of it, and I’m so glad that God is beyond the vanishing point of time and can shape even our imaginations exactly how we need, to do the work He’s given us to do.

The postcard my friend sent me, situated underneath Alan Lee’s illustration of Tevildo, Lord of Cats, from Tolkien’s story Beren and Luthien (which was supposed to be an encouragement for editing, knowing that Sauron was originally a giant cat).

There’s nothing quite like said friend calling you out by saying, “I think you deal with grief and troubles just like your main character. You bury yourself in your work to keep busy.”

There also nothing quite like the extra call-out that comes from the aforementioned main character being the most evil villain you’ve ever written.

I talked a bit before about how I strive to write “honest” characters. And by “honest,” I don’t mean truthful (though I take some pride in the fact that my favorite villain I’ve written never actually tells a lie). I mean realistic, true to human nature and the experience of what it is living in our broken world.

And to do that, it usually means I have to use my own experiences and personality to guide me.

I don’t intentionally write characters based on myself, I really don’t. At least, not often. There have been one or two exceptions when I’ve made personas for the purpose of processing stuff going on in my life. Captain Lark, the original character I got the “Larke” part of my pen name from, was one of these. But for the most part, it just happens naturally.

And what less should we expect? There’s a popular quote misattributed to C.S. Lewis that goes, “We read to know we’re not alone.” In reality, the quote comes from the movie Shadowlands, which is based on Lewis’s later life, but it’s still very relatable and relevant to any reader.

How many times have you read a book where you saw a character going through something you thought only you experienced? I’ve had this happen many times, the most notable examples being Janner from The Wingfeather Saga and Jace from The Ilyon Chronicles. Both those characters taught me that the struggles that had me so downhearted were nothing that other people hadn’t gone through before.

If the author thought to write that, it must mean that the author understood what it was like.

Now, I don’t think that’s always the case anymore. I’ve definitely written situations I’ve never experienced myself, and supposedly have written them well (sometimes it comes about that similar situations happen to me shortly after I write them, which is simultaneously creepy, encouraging, and annoying at the same time). But I think it’s true to say that most characters have a piece of the author in them.

Because really, we can’t create from nothing. God is the only One who can speak into the void and bring something into existence. As mere sub-creators, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s words, rather than creators, we can only recycle the things that already exist into different, unique combinations. One of the most classic pieces of writing advice is to write what you know, and really, no matter how fantastical or imaginative the setting, we can’t help but write what we know, because we have nothing else to work with.

And thus, I’ve found it impossible to write completely original characters. Most of them have some influence of existing characters. As I said before, The Shipwright was partly inspire by Jace. The Princess reminds me in some ways of Elizabeth Bennet. The Knight is an existing character, one of the ones taken directly from the Arthurian Legend. And The Hunter…well, since he doesn’t come into the first book and his real development is later on, I’ll leave him a mystery for now.

But even more than that, they all have a piece of me in them. The Shipwright’s journey is based on my recurring battles with anxiety. The Princess behaves a lot like me when I'm competitive. The Knight is my perfectionist side. The Hunter is well, mostly just me, in rather disturbing ways at times.

I used to get annoyed by it. I couldn’t seem to write a character that was separate from me. But in the end, I embraced it, because for one thing, it’s therapeutic to have characters in place to help me process what’s going on and how situations could end (that’s the explanation I’ve given to my uncanny ability to predict things about to happen in my life: extreme pattern recognition and understanding of how one scenario will naturally lead to another). I honestly don’t know how I would process life without my writing. In some instances, I’ve gotten anxiety spikes when I haven’t been writing for a while.

Sometimes I realize how much I’m putting of myself into a character. More often, I don’t, and it takes people who know me well to point it out. Another example of this is that when I was first getting to know one of my very dear friends, I was telling her about The Shipwright, and she pretty much told me that she knew exactly what kind of person I was, just based on him.

This can be a blessing and a curse. As someone who’s gone through lonely periods where all I wanted was to be known and accepted, but also reclusive times when my biggest fear was to be known and rejected, it’s a hard line to walk. But as a writer sharing my work, knowing the inevitable fact that people who know and love me are going to read my stories, it’s unavoidable. I’m going to be called out every once in a while.

And so, I’ve just accepted the fact, and I want to use it to help people. The Bible teaches the idea that God allows us to go through trials so that we can encourage others who will go through them later. And maybe writing about my experiences with life is the way to do that.

Like I talked about before, The Shipwright is the one character where I’ve tried to be the most honest about what it really means to struggle. And as I started this post with, a character that my closest friends see a lot of me in is, unfortunately, my villain.

(I’m still not quite sure how to feel about that information. Just because I get obsessive over research, like an occasional mind game, and hate being the center of attention but am also somehow a natural leader doesn’t mean I had to make him so much like me. )

But let’s talk about one I haven’t introduced you to yet. The Knight. I’ll outright name him, since he’s from the original legends: Sir Galahad. The perfect, pure Grail Knight, according to Sir Thomas Malory’s rendition of the legend.

When I decided to include Sir Galahad in BTVP, I was faced with a question: how do you portray a character who’s supposedly perfect?

The answer was very simple: he’s not perfect, but all the pressure to be so turns him into a perfectionist.

As a perfectionist myself, this was something fairly natural to write. And though I struggled with Galahad’s arc over the entire series more than any other character’s, I’m fairly confident that I managed to portray a more realistic, or honest, as I prefer to say, depiction of the Knight in Shining Armor trope.

The knight in shining armor is often the most boring character, at least in modern fiction. His place has been taken by the brooding, emo, morally gray anti-hero that I’ve talked about before. Who knows, maybe soon I’ll devote a whole post to heroes and how to revive them. When I looked at the somewhat ridiculous depiction of Galahad in most of the Grail stories, I asked myself, “How can I make sense of this, but still pay homage to the original character?”

I don’t remember outright making a plan. It just kind of happened as I was writing. Galahad started feeling the pressure of all the expectation on him as the “perfect Grail Knight,” and he realized how he couldn’t live up to that. And so it drove him to comparison…and anxiety.

Oh how well I knew that feeling.

I’m not doing all of this to get pity. It’s not a cry for attention. The last thing I want is for people to think my life has been miserable. In reality, it’s been by far the opposite. I just often choose to focus on the harder parts, because that’s where I see the potential to encourage someone.

So why am I saying it now? To advertise for my books? Well, I’m horrible at marketing, so I will admit, I am searching for my target audience.

But more than that, I’m saying it to tell you the reason I write in the first place: to encourage. To exhort. So many of the Apostle Paul’s epistles include the command to build up the body of Christ, to encourage them, to laugh with those who laugh and mourn with those who mourn (Romans 12:15, to name one example). God has given me a wealth of experiences to draw on, whether it’s having a sister with disabilities, saying goodbye to friends, anxiety, loneliness, or hearing God’s call to move hundreds of miles from the town I’d lived in my entire life.

As I pour out everything into my beloved characters, bearing my own heart and soul, it’s not about me. It’s about honesty, because when I show you the ugly, hard parts of what the world has to throw at us, then maybe it can give you some courage to face it.

As C.S. Lewis said, “Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”

I don’t write for children, but I think teens and young adults need the same reminders sometimes.

I hope my characters who struggle against themselves are an encouragement that God is greater than our hearts (1 John 3:20).

I hope my characters who face physical enemies are reminders that as believers, we’re in a spiritual battle every day (Ephesians 6:12).

I hope that even my villain can be used to teach us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44).

Even if you never read any of my books when I publish them, then I hope even just this post is an encouragement to you. If you’re going through anything I talked about here, then please know that you are not alone, and God can understand your suffering, better than I ever could. After all, I’m just a finite human. Turn to Him in your troubles, and He will be faithful to see you through.

P.S. I’m excited to announce that my good friend Madigan (yes, she’s the one who could tell what kind of person I was based on my characters) just started up her own blog! She’s a talented writer and artist, and the author of “Zoey the Human” in Firefly Tales. Even if you have no idea who she is, I can promise you that she’s an awesome human, and you definitely need to check out her blog.

P.P.S. I’m also excited to announce that another writer friend, Nellie Martin, has also launched her Substack! She’s is also a Firefly Tales author (her story is “The Little Shipwright”), and I had the honor of being one of the first to meet her when she first joined The Habit, Student Edition.

I can’t wait to see what both Maddie and Nellie have to share, and I’m linking each of their first posts below.

Madigan G.

Hello my name is Maddie and I don’t know what I’m doing

I don’t really know what a blog is or why I’m doing one. Okay, well, that’s partially a lie, I do sort of have a reason for this…

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4 months ago · 19 likes · 5 comments · Madigan G.

love is blooming through the cracks. //

// an introduction and a beginning ♥

You only need to spend a little while around me to know one thing: I love theatre…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · Nellie Martin

Let’s use music as an example. There’s very little of CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) that I actually like. Not only is the style not my favorite, but I think it’s often poorly written. That’s not its worst crime in my eyes, though. The worst part is that it’s shallow. It doesn’t have many real experiences in it1.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to sing and hear songs about how God is good and how He has everything under control, and we absolutely should focus on the hope that He’s working all things together. But sometimes I think Christianity falls into the trap of focusing so much on the end that it makes it sound like the experiences in the moment don’t mean anything.

I wish someone would talk about what it’s like to have a family member with a disability. I wish believers were more comfortable admitting when they’re not okay. Just because we know everything will turn out well in the end doesn’t mean we can’t acknowledge that pain exists in the moment.

This desire for honesty doesn’t just apply to music. It’s part of what makes a well-written story—in particular, well-written characters. And today, I’m going to talk about an example of a fictional character that started out well in that regard, but faltered towards the end. Then, I’m going to introduce you to one of my own characters I wanted to do better than that with.

Meet Jace

When I was 15, I became obsessed with a book series called The Ilyon Chronicles by Jaye L. Knight. It was about persecuted believers in a fantasy world similar to Rome and their adventures. They try to rescue those being imprisoned and killed for their faith, keep the surrounding nations free from tyranny, and restore the rightful ruler to the throne. But my favorite part, as it often is, was the characters. Kyrin, the FMC (female main character), was actually fairly relatable at first. My friend who recommended the series actually said that Kyrin reminded her of me. I took it as a compliment and expected to find her growing more relatable as the story went on.

But that’s not what happened. Another character stole the spotlight, at least for me: Jace, the MMC (male main character).

Jace was unique to anything I’d read before, though now that I’m more familiar with the fantasty/romantasy genre, I realize that he fits a popular trope and I just hadn’t read anything with I before. He was a half-breed, part human, part Ryrik, the most hated race in Ilyon. As a result, he was hated and seen as a monster.

Because of this, Jace believed he was unloveable and not worth anything. This sent him into a deep depression…and that’s where I want to pause.

I’ve struggled with anxiety since I was 11 years old. It started one night when I had a bad night’s sleep, and suddenly, there was an ever-present fear of not being able to sleep. One night, I was absolutely fine; the next, my life was changed.

Especially in my early teen years, it was bad. I let fear put barriers between my family and me. Many nights, I couldn’t sleep, and I’d wake up in the morning literally having to force myself to eat. I was so ashamed that I couldn’t stop worrying, and I convinced myself that I must be the only person struggling like this. That made me afraid to open up to anyone about it, even my parents. How could I expect anyone to understand, if I’m the only one dealing with this?

I was too young (and not online enough) to know what the term “mental health” meant. I was convinced that if I could only manage to stop worrying, then God would fix everything. I grew frustrated because I was doing everything “right:” I was reading my Bible, praying, repenting of my sins before God…so why wasn’t it working? Why didn’t the nightmare end?

It was in probably the darkest time of my life that I started reading The Ilyon Chronicles. And there I saw something that surprised me: I saw a character who couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Thought he was alone and let that put barriers between him and the people who cared most. And just when he thought he’d achieved peace, it would all come back, worse than ever.

Jace made me realize for the first time that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t the only person to struggle with my own mind. Because if someone had written that, it must mean that someone else knew what it was like.

Finally, I had found a character who felt real, and an author who showed inner turmoil for what it is. Though I couldn’t relate to Jace’s circumstances, I could relate to his struggles, and it made me feel seen…a little less alone. By the time he had his “breakthrough moment” in the third book, I realized that I was making the same mistake he was: I was trying to fight all my battles on my own. It broke me, and I finally surrendered.

Nothing happened at first. But slowly, I was tearing down the walls I’d built, letting people in and trusting God with how situations would turn out. One day, when I was 17, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d lain awake at night because of anxiety. I thought it was over. After all, that’s what had happened to Jace. He’d had his encounter with the Jesus character of that world, and though he said he sometimes still struggled, you as the reader never got to see it.

But I learned that’s not how real life works. For some people, I’m sure, the Lord can miraculously take away depression or anxiety. But not for me. The first time the anxiety came back, it was a shock. I thought I was over this!

What I learned was that the Lord was using my past experiences to change how I dealt with it now. I could look back and remember how God had guided me through last time, and I trusted that He would do that again. I realized that anxiety will likely be a lifelong struggle, but I don’t need to let it enslave me like it once did.

Let me be clear: I’m not at all saying that what God did wasn’t significant. It was nothing short of a miracle. I’m not saying that moment held no power when anxiety came back. All I mean is that I was mistaken in its meaning. I thought it meant I was cured, forever. Instead, it held a very different value, one of giving me experience to strengthen me in the next battle. It was growing me as a person so that next time I faced the obstacle, I could do it more maturely.

And in the end, that’s where I felt that Jace fell short. I’ve seen a lot of Christian writers have their struggling characters have a mountaintop experience, and then never once think of the hardships that brought them there, much less go through them again. Jace’s character arc encouraged my teenage self very much, but I think he would’ve encouraged my adult self more if we’d seen doubts coming back to haunt him…except this time, he would know how to handle them and not let them master him.

And so, as I often do when I’m dissatisfied with something in a book, movie, or show, I thought, “Well, I’ll just write it myself.”

Meet The Shipwright

One of my favorite characters in BTVP is one I’m simply going to call “The Shipwright” for now. I’d be lying if I said Jace didn’t have a huge influence on him. After all, it was Jace that made me like that type of character in the first place.

I was still blissfully unaware of the existence of BookTok or Bookstagram or the associated tropes, but still I managed to fall into a popular one and ended up with a dark, brooding, emo but somehow likable MMC on my hands. I guess that makes me living proof that the tropes are sometimes there for a reason, since I didn’t know they existed, and thus wasn’t trying to copy anything, but still ended up using them.

But the reality of how The Shipwright’s character developed wasn’t by trying to make him fit some trope or trying to copy one of my favorite fantasy characters. It was a result of one of the most lonely summers of my life.

I mentioned before that in the summer of 2022, I worked at a day camp in Pennsylvania. Overall, it was a pretty bad experience. Not because of the job, but because it was my first time away from home. I missed the friends I’d made only six months before when I started college, and I’d never been away from my family for so long. Why had I ever thought it was a good idea to leave them?

I didn’t know what to do with all the new feelings, so I poured them into my writing. And boy, was my poetry journal from that year moody. Sometimes I still look back at it and wonder what in the world was wrong with me.

While that summer was difficult, I wouldn’t trade it for anything, because that was when I did my most foundational work on BTVP. It wouldn’t be what it is now without the time I had to pour into it. One of the most important things I did that summer was character development of two of my three main characters: The Shipwright and The Princess.

I had pretty good motive ideas for The Princess. She was an existing character I’d made for a role play story in The Habit, Student Edition, so she was fairly developed already. But The Shipwright gave me more trouble. What would his arc look like?

It was by listening to a song that I had the idea for a character who was right where they were supposed to be, but hated it. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that was the situation I was in. It was too late by the time I figured it out; The Shipwright already had the arc of being given a charge he didn’t want, but still having to complete it. Almost unknowingly, I poured all my frustrations with my situation into him, and by the time I got home, I was astonished with how much like me (at least me internally) he had become.

I had yet to learn how much characters take on personality traits of their authors. This was my first experience with it in BTVP, though it continued as I developed every significant character in the series.

In the end, I embraced it and wrote, in an overly dramatized sense, what I had experienced that summer. I made it a significant character trait that The Shipwright struggled against his calling. And while it wasn’t really depression or anxiety, given how much he gets stuck in his own head, it certainly was a mental struggle—especially when the guilt angle kicked in.

Compared to other series (like The Ilyon Chronicles, for example), I had the “mountaintop experience” come very early in The Shipwright’s arc. In fact, it’s in the first book. But I was determined not to let that make him fade into the background. The second book was rough to write, because I was struggling to figure out each character’s role in the overarching story of the series, rather than just the plot of the first book. But as the books went on, I realized I had the perfect opportunity to do what I wished I’d seen in Jace and other similar characters: someone who goes through some internal struggle, has their moment of breaking free, but then continues to wrestle with it. The Shipwright is my most flawed protagonist, and even after being delivered from one specific situation, the flaws are still there, and I wanted to show him working to overcome them, and doing it more successfully because of past victories.

Oh, how I wish it worked in real life like it does in the stories. I wish my encounter with God had banished my fear forever. If only someone who once doubted God would never have questions again. Wouldn’t it be great if depression was a one-time experience?

And for some people, I’m sure they are. Maybe you’re someone who went through a dark time and came out without ever experiencing it again. If you are, praise the Lord!

But that’s not my story, and I know there are others out there like me. So that’s who The Shipwright is for: those who are constantly frustrated by battles in your own mind, and maybe thought you were past them, only for them to come back, sometimes worse than before.

It’s the honesty I wish we’d see in more of Christian literature: the reality that because God answered your prayers once, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to trust Him to do it again down the road. I’ve learned that God is faithful, no matter how flawed I am and how much I want to retreat to my old fears. And when they come back to haunt me, I’ve learned through the experience of winning past battles that fear doesn’t have to win with time.

If you’re interested in seeing topics like this dealt with, then stick around! Even though it’s only the beginning of January, I’m already counting down the days until I can give more concrete updates about BTVP.

It’s going to be a fun year.

I would like to add just one more note: a shoutout to my amazing friends over at The Habit, Student Edition. Collectively, in a weeklong challenge to write as many words as they could, they managed to write more than 1,000,000 words! I couldn’t be more proud of them.