Dear Reader,
I have been asked many times how much of this story really happened. I frequently hear comments and questions like, “This feels too real to be a novel,” or “Did this or that actually happen?” So here’s a brief synopsis of the story behind the story.
The character of Wade Parker is imbued with the true feeling and emotion of my early youth, and the relationship between Wade and Luke is loosely based on my recollections of my relationship with my brother Paul. We did suffer the death of our younger brother, John; our family did fall apart; we did have a dog named Mac; and Billy Goat Hill, Eagle Rock, Three Ponds, and Cavendish Caverns all were real places.
Drawing from the pathos and drama of my personal history, I constructed a fictional world set within and without the boundaries of my real-life childhood experience. This methodology is not unusual. Some of the best novels ever written have been biographically inspired. What is important, and what I would like most to share with you, is how God worked a miracle in my life and continues to work miracles through the writing and publication of this book.
I wrote the first passages of Billy Goat Hill in the summer of 1992. Though writing has always provided an artistic release, breathing life into the character of Wade Parker began a kind of catharsis I had not previously experienced as a writer. I am a novelist, one who imagines a story and then tells it, but this time something compelled me to dig inward and dare to reveal a good deal of truth about my own life. I did not yet know God as my Creator or Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, nor was I aware of the existence of the Holy Spirit. I now know how omnipresent the mysterious Holy Triune is.
As the manuscript progressed, my soul whirled and stirred with a passion of Spirit that was so freeing it amazed me. Wade Parker emerged with a powerful purpose, challenging me, often goading me to acknowledge what was missing in my own life…the ability to forgive. In many ways this is a very personal book as my heart is laid bare through the voice of Wade Parker. Forgiveness, which is the essence of Christ, has become elemental to my faith, and it is my fervent hope that my readers be impacted by this essential message.
I self-published the original version, titled The King of Billy Goat Hill, under the pen name Mark Stanleigh, in 1996. The secular version was something of a success, but more important, the release of the book began part two of an incredible journey. For sixteen months I traveled the country doing personal appearances, meeting people, and thinking, thinking, thinking. Wade Parker took me on a sojourn into the wilderness culminating with a spiritual epiphany that changed my life forever. At the age of forty-eight, I came to understand that God was real and He had a plan for my life.
I soon found myself in God’s boot camp learning about His will and His Word, and not, to my surprise and disappointment, doing much writing. For the next five years, He saw fit to engage me in many things, but not writing. Then, when He knew I was ready, and when I least expected it, he worked another incredible miracle. He arranged for me to meet and become friends with David Van Diest, who is now my agent.
By then I had adjusted to the idea that God’s plan for me apparently did not include writing, so it took a while for me and David, two new friends getting to know each other, to come around to the subject. Eventually we did, and the long version of what ultimately transpired will be saved for forums other than this short letter. A summary of the amazing events that led to the publication of this book reads as follows: A novel written by a secular writer is published in 1996. Writing the book is a life-changing experience that leads the writer toward God. Nine years later, five years after the writer has given his heart to the Lord (and has done very little writing in between), and without pursuing it, he is offered a contract to rewrite and publish a novel about forgiveness, the writing of which led the writer to know the Lord in the first place.
I share this with you, dear reader, because I’d like you to be in on God’s miracle. You see, only God could make this happen. I can’t tell you how rare it is for a previously published secular novel to be rewritten and published by a Christian book publisher. (Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love is the only one that comes to mind, which I highly recommend, by the way.)
I praise God that you have had the opportunity to read this book and welcome your comments and questions.
Blessings,
Mark Stanleigh Morris