I first heard the song “Transformed” in the early 1950s and liked it so well that the words and music stuck with me. A dozen or so years later in the 1960s, the main characters of this story were born in my head during a stay at a Michigan lake. In the 1970s in South America I wrote multiple pages of back story.
In the early 1980s, I acquired my first computer. Little by little, I transcribed the pages of back story to the computer and began drafting more of the story.
I drafted it in all kinds of places. In the back seat of a car on a cross-country trip, I “wrote” some important elements in my head and scribbled a few notes to remind me when I got home. Many evenings while driving a stretch of Interstate to and from a teaching job, I would compose in my head, then transcribe to the computer when I got home.
In the 1990s, I puttered with it some more, adding another key character and making first attempts at a sequel. At some point, I considered the story complete. A handful of family and friends read it and said they liked it, but a publisher I approached was not interested.
In the mid-2000s, I decided that if I were ever to do anything with it, I needed to get serious about some training. In 2005 I attended my first Christian writers’ conference and got my first lessons in fiction in a class by the renowned Christian writer Angela Hunt.
I learned several startling things. I spent the next decade learning how to incorporate those style elements into a number of rewrites of the story. I hope you enjoy it. If you have feedback, you can write me at esthergrossts@gmail.com.
I drafted it in all kinds of places. In the back seat of a car on a cross-country trip, I “wrote” some important elements in my head and scribbled a few notes to remind me when I got home. Many evenings while driving a stretch of Interstate to and from a teaching job, I would compose in my head, then transcribe to the computer when I got home.
In the 1990s, I puttered with it some more, adding another key character and making first attempts at a sequel. At some point, I considered the story complete. A handful of family and friends read it and said they liked it, but a publisher I approached was not interested.
In the mid-2000s, I decided that if I were ever to do anything with it, I needed to get serious about some training. In 2005 I attended my first Christian writers’ conference and got my first lessons in fiction in a class by the renowned Christian writer Angela Hunt.
I learned several startling things. I spent the next decade learning how to incorporate those style elements into a number of rewrites of the story. I hope you enjoy it. If you have feedback, you can write me at esthergrossts@gmail.com.
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