Tag: christian novel

Writing My Next Novel – 10 Inspirations for the Long Journey

~ Colleen Scheid ~ 11 Comments

Writing a novel is like climbing a long hill with no guarantee of a good reception when you reach the top! That is, publishers aren’t usually waiting in line for it. So you want to enjoy the journey. It has to be its own reward. Writing my next novel has been a meaningful journey, with some fun along the way, and some beautiful views. If it sounds interesting to you, please hop on my mailing list to get news of its release. It may take a while. No one’s lining up to publish it. Yet. (sign-up below this post.)

1. A Hopeful Later-in-Life Romance

I wanted to write a book about two people in mid-life finding love despite the inevitable relationship baggage that comes with the extra years. I wanted to demonstrate that while wounds from the past stay with us, there’s a healing process that opens doors to a different future. Lauren, the main character, is pretty resistant to this process at first. She thinks recovery is something other people need.

2. A Romance that Doesn’t Idolize Romance?

I was interested in the question, “Can you write a story that fits the romance genre without idolizing the relationship?” After all, the relationship is the focus of the book. But I know from experience that making a relationship the focus of your life ends in disappointment. I wanted to show that by making God our first love, we’re not less, but more able to love each other.

3. Relationships Need Community

Like my last novel, “Someone They Can Trust”, this story is set in Pleasant Hill, with scenes at Pleasant Hill Community Church. The difference that the church and the recovering community makes in the lives of this couple and their families is huge. I love books where that’s happening!

4. A Neighborhood to Love

Pleasant Hill is a fictional name for where I live, a Cincinnati neighborhood with beautiful architecture and green space, but stressed by poverty, crime and struggling schools. Lauren has stayed in her neighborhood and committed for years to work as a counselor in its public elementary school, but the decades up close with troubled children in a broken system is taking its toll on her. I wanted to write a story that showed Christians working together to deal with tough issues, and care for one another in the process.

5. God of the City

Many Christian novels have rural or suburban settings. I wanted a story showing how God is working in the city churches. The situations in “After All the Lost Years” are grounded in real experiences – urban kids terrified of bugs on their first camping trip, people planting gardens in neglected spaces between buildings, youth leaders dealing with kids who are self-harming . There’s never a lack of drama in an urban setting.

6. Put on Your Own Mask First

I wanted to revisit the themes of my first novel, “Drug Free Actors” – how helping others instead of attending to your own mental and spiritual health just doesn’t work too well. Lauren has to come to terms with this before she can grow closer to Jay.

7. The View from the Other Side

It’s a challenge for me to navigate the male mind, but I wanted to give my empathy a shot with the character of Jay, telling the story from his point of view as well as Lauren’s. Jay, a recovering alcoholic with good looks and a good heart, has the complex task of balancing his longing for a relationship with Lauren with obligations to the troubled family he already has and the business he’s trying to rebuild. He doesn’t always get it right, but he’s trying hard.

8. Recovery Work Works

Jay’s character demonstrates how three years of hard recovery work – attending meetings, trusting a sponsor, working through the twelve steps – is transforming the way he lives. I love people with a few years of sobriety and twelve step work behind them. They have an honesty, humility and wisdom that’s refreshing.

9. Taking on Mental Illness

The crippling effects of mental illness on families is another theme close to my heart. In this story, Jay’s ex-wife, Char, has bipolar disorder as well as a personality disorder, and his daughter struggles with depression and self-harm. Since around one in five Americans experience mental illness, it makes sense to address it in family stories.

10. Gardens Everywhere

Finally, I was inspired to weave my love of gardening and conservation practices into this story. Making our urban spaces beautiful and sustainable is something more and more of us are working on, and Jay’s sixteen year old daughter, Sophie, is about as zealous about it as she can be!

When a Book Just Shows Up in Your Head

~ Colleen Scheid ~ 1 Comment

Tenth Reason I Wrote, Someone They Can Trust

“Someone They Can Trust”, my new novel, is available on Amazon. To receive news about what I’m writing, please subscribe to the author email at the bottom of this post.

I tend to look back and have some insight into why I chose to write a book. In the drafting phase, though, I’m far less aware, less conscious. People, situations and issues just show up in my imagination.

They’re kind of irresistible – beckoning me like an open door to a walled garden.

The other nine reasons I wrote Someone They Can Trust are all good reasons, but I don’t think many novelists just crank out books for logical reasons.

There are many logical reasons not to write a novel – they take a super long time, they’re hard to get published and even with healthy sales, you wouldn’t want to calculate your hourly pay. Probably about as much as someone who knit a scarf getting ten bucks for it at a craft show.  

We pretty much do it for love – we knitters and novelists and artists of all kinds. Many of us feel like that’s what we were made to do and that’s the gift we can give people.

To have someone enjoy it – that’s compensation too.

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When the Setting Writes the Novel

~ Colleen Scheid ~ 7 Comments

Fifth of 10 Reasons I Wrote, “Someone They Can Trust”

I have a love-hate relationship with my neighborhood, which is also the setting for my new novel. We moved here to be near downtown, be near our church, and be present in an urban neighborhood that was struggling. We figured that at the very least, we could help by paying city taxes and keeping up a pretty old house.

That was 26 years ago, and the place is pretty much embedded in my heart, for better and worse. College Hill is a mix of beauty and despair, with crumbling public housing right next to fairytale old mansions. I love its huge trees, surrounding woods, elegant architecture and the outstanding kindness of many of its residents. I hate the poverty, the garbage on the streets, the emptiness in the eyes of young people hanging out on corners.

The novel I just finished, “Someone They Can Trust” is set in this neighborhood, with characters attending a church there that is grappling with the brokenness of the community. Belonging to a church a lot like the one in the novel has shaped most of my adult life. There I’ve learned everything from staging plays to running a tutoring program, to trimming hedges..

I’ve been enriched by the goodness of hundreds of people, hundreds of events, thousands of worship services. I’ve been tired out to a point of flatness by the problems of poverty, racism, violence and faithlessness in our community.

All those years of the best and the worst of this place have shaped the story arc of this novel. The fictional events take place in a real church, real houses nearby, a real coffee shop and a beautiful bed and breakfast down the road. Spring Grove Cemetary is as much as a gorgeous retreat property for the main characters as it has been for me.

“Someone They Can Trust” is a book about God showing up and healing people in a challenging neighborhood, because that’s what I’ve experienced here. It’s good to know that God does wonderful things even in tough places. That’s why I wrote this book.

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God Heals People, Really

~ Colleen Scheid ~ 4 Comments

Second of 10 Reasons I Wrote “Someone You Can Trust”:

“Someone You Can Trust”, my new novel, releases on Amazon on May 23. For more information, subscribe to the author email at the bottom of this post.

A psychologist in my writer’s group read some passages in my latest novel and said, “This is the first book I’ve ever read that has a passage incorporating prayer for inner healing.”

There aren’t too many novels that incorporate healing prayer of any kind, at least not that I’ve found. Leif Enger’s  “Peace Like a River” is one luminous exception, and years ago I read a novel by Agnes Sanford, a well-known leader of the Anglican charismatic movement in the mid 20th century, but it was a pretty bad fiction (her non-fiction books are wonderful).

So here goes me giving it a shot in “Someone You Can Trust”, now available for Preorder.

Through prayers, I have seen God straighten out a bent spine, reverse a spina bifida diagnosis, melt away a brain tumor, and salvage someone’s fading sight. I have experienced prayer for mental and emotional issues that substantially reduced my symptoms of depression and anxiety, and gave me courage to realign myself in messed up relationships. I’m convinced that God wants to heal us.

So in the course of this novel, two of the three protagonists, Maya and Janice, experience substantial healing in sessions with a therapist who also prays (therapists who pray in sessions are rare, but there are a few out there.) Maya, who spent time with missionaries in rural China, also prays for people’s physical healing, a normative practice among the Christians she knew there. My training as a reporter makes me scrupulous about writing true scenes – even in fiction, I only write it if I’ve seen it happen or heard of it firsthand from a credible source.

Many people assume that illness is caused by God, or that God is indifferent to it. My experiences have turned such theology upside down. That’s why I wrote this book.

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