All the Promises
My novel All the Promises (originally titled Silver Bells) is free for Kindle today via BookBub, and I thought you might enjoy hearing a bit about how it came to be. Grab your free ebook HERE, then grab a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy this story behind the story.
This was such a fun book to write, especially since it was set in the 1970s—the years when I was falling in love with my husband, Ken. While my story is completely fictional, many aspects of the novel were inspired by my own life (and Ken’s). My talented husband also designed the beautiful cover for the Out of Their Element collection, which became the current cover for All the Promises.
This book has been published under a couple of titles and with several cover designs—one version for Christmas and one without the focus on Christmas so the book can sell and be enjoyed year-round.Like Michelle Penn (my heroine in All the Promises), I grew up the daughter of a Kansas farmer. The oldest of five children, I had the happiest childhood imaginable. Much of that joy came from the fact that I had a mother who read to me—especially after I developed asthma and was unable to play outside during much of the year because the wheat and hay our farm produced were the two things that triggered my asthma attacks. But my mom opened up the whole world to me when she taught me the joy of a wonderful story! I knew the summer I read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books that someday I wanted to write a book.
Like my heroine Michelle from All the Promises, I attended Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. In fact, my dad and all my siblings attended or graduated from K-State. And like Michelle, I really wasn’t too torn up when I dropped out of college to marry my husband, because the real dream of my life was to have babies—lots and lots of babies.
As Michelle did, I worked as a typesetter and proofreader for several small-town newspapers. I started my first newspaper job back when page layout was done with an X-Acto knife and a waxer, and just before computers revolutionized the process of getting a weekly newspaper put to bed. What fun it was to write the scenes in the newspaper office!
The “newfangled microwave” incident in All the Promises was inspired by the fact that my husband’s family owned one of the first microwave ovens in their county. They won the oven as a prize in their small town’s Holiday Lane drawing. This amazing contraption that could boil water in a matter of seconds, and pop popcorn in under two minutes, was quite the attraction! Ken’s friends would often follow him home from school to watch his demonstrations of exploding marshmallows or melted plastic (and some other fiascos I’m not sure his mother knows about to this day, so to protect the innocent I’ll save those stories for another day.)
As I wrote the novel, it was sometimes sobering to explore how much we’ve changed as a society in less than fifty years. Technology has revolutionized every aspect of our lives—some for the good, but others in truly frightening ways. Still, one thing I realized as I wrote the novel is that families have remained the backbone of our culture, and the place where God grows us into the people He wants us to be. My parents have been such an inspiration to me, and my dad is still a place I go for wisdom and advice about life. I was also blessed to have all my grandparents in my life well into my forties. What a wonderful blessing and source of wisdom and faith they were in my life. And an example to me now that nine (soon to be ten!) precious little ones call me “Mimi.”
Many readers have commented that they enjoyed turning back the calendar a few decades to a simpler time before technology got such a grip on our world. Yet, as much as we’d sometimes like to harken back to simpler times, thankfully, our God is ever unchanging, ever-dependable and steady, and His goodness and care for us is as certain and strong in this twenty-first century as it ever was in the past. It was such fun writing a story set in a recent past that many of my readers remember fondly. But most of all, I hope the story serves as a reminder that Jesus Christ is the same…yesterday and today and forever.
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