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I hope you enjoyed Tiff’s story. Beauty from Ashes is actually a major revamp of the very first novel I ever completed but never published. I began it one night when my son Silas was about nine months old and in the hospital after a birth event similar to baby Natalie’s.
I usually take this space to thank everyone who helped me get my book published, but this time I want to start by thanking God for saving my son, who we were told would be no more than a vegetable if he survived at all. (Spoiler alert: Silas is now a healthy, happy, and intelligent almost ten-year-old boy who astounds me with his humor, positive outlook, photographic memory, musical genius, and so much more.) You can read Silas’s full story in my memoir, A Boy Named Silas. I feel like this acknowledgement section would not be complete if I didn’t thank God for bringing all the doctors, therapists, and specialists into our son’s life who helped him on his miraculous road to recovery.
Grandma Lucy first appears in my novel Turbulence, one of the books in my Kennedy Stern Christian suspense series. It’s been a neat challenge and change of pace for me to write Christian women’s fiction after focusing for so long on suspense. I have to admit what when I first started writing novels, this is far closer to what I envisioned for myself.
God, you’ve carried me through so many things in my life and in the writing of this book. Thank you for not answering my prayers years ago when I wanted to publish that first NICU novel I wrote, but thank you also for allowing Tiff, Jake, and Natalie’s story to finally come out in Beauty from Ashes.
My husband is my biggest encouragement. Amy and Elizabeth are life-saving editors (or if not life-saving, at least they save me a lot of embarrassment). A big thank you to Cathy as well for her good eye and for my friends (real and virtual) who prayed for me while I worked on this story.
I’m grateful for the chance to work with Victoria Cooper for the first time on the cover for Beauty from Ashes, and I think she did a great job. It’s the first time a cover has literally taken my breath away. Thanks also to my OB nurse friend Tara for answering a few medical questions.
If you’re interested in more novels, the Orchard Grove Christian women’s fiction books show God at work in the lives of everyday couples going through common (or not so common) struggles. My hope is to offer encouragement to readers who sometimes need a reminder that God is a God who is loving and powerful enough to “bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion — to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair” (Isaiah 61:1-3). You can read book 2, Before the Dawn, today, or see the sample below.
Whatever joys or trials you face today, may God’s comfort and love be close to your heart, and may your joy be full in him.