Pertinent Questions With Impertinent Answers

"Is everything a joke to you?""Uh, only the funny things."The Avengers

The following are the questions which Bree (of Tea and Bree) sent in for the party and the benefit of you all.  They were very good questions, but I never promised an absence of drollery. 

1. What inspired you to write The Shadow Things?I was partially inspired by the little novel Sun Horse, Moon Horse, a heart-wrenching and beautiful story, but also by an annoyance with people who, having become Christians, are prickly and discontented with their lot.  We all know that story.  Many of us live that story.  So what does it look like to have a person contented and growing in righteousness despite all circumstances attempting to invoke the opposite?  What do fortitude and patience, faith and peace look like?  In The Shadow Things I attempted to sketch a picture of those virtues in the lives of a few otherwise insignificant people whose “footsteps yet remaining do testify that they were indeed holy men who, fighting so valiantly, trod the world under their feet.”
2. What was the first feeling you felt when you found out The Shadow Things was accepted, and going to be published?I was so floored that for a time I refused everythin3. How much time daily do you spend writing?I don’t write every day (though a day doesn’t pass when I’m not thinking about one or several of my novels) but when I do I spend four hours, twenty-two minutes, and five seconds writing…
4. How long did it take you to write The Shadow Things?                                 I tend to say it took around two years.  It is not a big book (it surprises me how quickly people tear through it), but then it was my first serious novel; though I had learned how to write before that, I had yet to learn on The Shadow Things how to scrub off a novel and make it thoroughly presentable, and of course that takes a little time.  I’m told I was made to rewrite quite a bit of it at one point, and the person who claims to have told me to do so keeps apologizing to me for it, but I don’t actually remember any of that happening so I suppose I have forgiven her…
5. Could you be persuaded to share a snippet of one of your first written works of literature, unedited? Let me think…  No.


ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!