On Ideas

I remember the time the idea for Heavenly Lights came to me. That was in February of last year, just a month after I left my home in Michigan and moved to Texas for my film internship. Authors are always asked where they get their ideas for their stories, and, a lot of times, the answer is the same: From everything. For some time, I didn’t understand what this fully meant. There has got to be a specific event or something that sparked the idea. When the synopsis for Heavenly Lights came to mind, I began to understand exactly what they meant. For me, there was a spark, but the idea for the story itself came from many things that I had observed as I grew up. What inspired my idea for my story was the discovery of a sound wave that has been traveling through space for thousands of years. Scientists claimed that it very well could be the reverberation of the Big Bang. I, on the other hand, being a Christian, had another idea…

Science has shown that the universe itself is becoming larger and larger as time goes on. The Bible says that God’s Word does not return void. With that in mind, I came up with a thought: What if this sound wave was the voice of God speaking the universe into existence, continually creating?

With that in mind, I thought about the books that I read as a kid and as a teenager. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Ted Dekker’s Circle Series. I loved the idea of a story that had a blatant Christian message and parallels inside of a story that everyone could read and be entertained without feeling as if they are having the author’s beliefs pushed upon them. Both Lewis and Dekker did this extremely well, especially the latter. He transformed the story of creation, the fall of man, and the Great Romance between Elyon (God) and his bride (man itself). Reading these stories, I got to see what I had grown up learning about in a tangible sense that brought light to things that I may not have understood. Keeping all of this in mind, I set about creating the main idea of my novel.

Heavenly Lights is a novel for everybody, not just those who believe in God. If you are a believer, then you will definitely enjoy it. If you are not, then no worries! This story will be as exciting for you as it will be for anyone else who reads it.

The novel sits at 95,638 words at this very moment. I have not worked on it very much for a while, but plan on getting some serious writing done this weekend. The plan was to have it done by the end of spring, but that was when I didn’t know that it was going to be much longer than the 90,000 words I had originally anticipated. I have hopes that the first draft will be finished sometime in the summer. When exactly, I am not sure. I am hearing a few rumors about a large project being on the horizon. Whether or not that will affect my ability to work on Heavenly Lights as much as I want to remains to be seen. I will be keeping you guys updated on my progress. I know I have a few people waiting to read it when I am done, so I don’t want to keep them waiting too long. The first draft is extremely rough, so it is going to need to have a lot of time dedicated to making it the best it can be. While that happens, I have a few other novels in the works that I will also be working on. Those could be available before HL, but maybe not. In the meantime, I have a couple of short stories waiting to be typed up and edited. Those will be posted on here as soon as I accomplish those. I hope you enjoy them!