The Great Adventure

It seems like I am always switching gears.

A little over a week ago, we had commencement, and I left teaching behind to focus on my writing career over the summer. Sometimes that takes a while to switch gears, but this time around, it doesn’t seem as hard. Maybe that’s because I have been spending so much time doing marketing for my independently published books.

But that’s where my next need to switch gears comes in. Since January I have self-published four books. One is an update of my classic end-time Christian story, If Tomorrow Comes. One is a collection of short stories entitled The Stranger and Other Stories that I am making available free of charge. One is a steampunk western entitled Tom Horn vs. the Warlords of Krupp. And the fourth is an apocalyptic story about a virus that prevents people from waking up entitled The Kiss of Night.

All of these are great books, and I am proud of them. But I have not spent as much time on any of them as I have what is coming.

The Champion is a three-part Christian suspense book series that answers the questions: Were the Old Testament gods real or not? And if they were, where did they go? This project is my baby. I have been working on it for five years and I am eager for it to succeed.

Right now, I am in the process of editing the first book, which introduces the main character 30-year-old Harris Borden, who sees himself a failure as a pastor. He asks for something significant to do, and his prayer is answered. He is called to confront the Universal Corporation, which is a front for demonic activity. He is thrown from a rooftop, shot at, chased into a collapsing building, wrongly imprisoned, stabbed, and well, you get the idea. While many Christian novels are looked at as too benign, this is far from it. And that’s just the first book.

So I find myself weeks away from launching The Champion, and am feeling a mixture of excitement and fear. There’s lots to do before launch. And I want to make sure that I present it in a way that will give it a fair shake.

In a lot of ways, everything I’ve done in independent publishing up to this point has been to teach me how to launch this. I’m eager to get people’s response to it.