It Was His Story
Before I ever begin any actual writing, I always operate in dream stage. With each one of my books, that has been my process. I’ll allow the characters to exist only in my mind, in my heart. I’ll use the notes on my phone to jot down any key pieces that need to be remembered, and then the rest gets fleshed out in a creative space of time and imagination.
After I had finished my first book, my goal-oriented personality wrote a new expectation on the board: create a trilogy. I knew I could write a good story and had the resources to publish something new, but writing three books that all connected to each other was a whole new ball game for me. Still, it could be fun and at that point I was sort of hooked on writing, which made this the perfect opportunity to test my creative abilities.
While in dream mode for the first book in the series, I began to envision a wounded warrior. Someone who wasn’t an obvious hero, could really be the villain of the story, and yet had some defining qualities that tugged on the reader’s heart strings. I saw him as someone you couldn’t write off, because there was more lurking behind the surface. His character took shape in the setting of the medieval world, somewhere in Eastern Europe, where he was abandoned at a young age. Then, even after he was taken in and given a family, he struggled to find a place where he belonged. He was a man who had to fight to find his way back home.
And that’s when I realized…it was his story. My younger brother’s. Through my main character, Lucian, I was telling his story. You see, when I was in middle school my parents became foster parents. Every year we had new kids in our home, most of them left, but some didn’t. Elijah was one of the ones to stay. In my mind, he and Jacob were ours from the beginning. Of course, it wasn’t until a year and a half later that it become official.
The gap in our ages gave me plenty of insight into the hard life he had had and was still having. I guess that’s one thing they don’t tell you…adoption isn’t a perfect solution. It doesn’t immediately fix nor fill all of the voids in a child’s heart…adoption changes us all. It certainly changed me. Watching my brother grow up, I recognized his resilience and his bravery. That’s where the title, “An Unexpected Redemption” came from, because my greatest hope for him was that he would see himself in the way I saw him. That he would see beyond what was, to what could be. A redemption of the lost things, the broken places, the woundedness.
That silly, fearless, eight year old boy had captured my heart in a moment, and I grew to love him dearly. So, when I finally sat down to write it all out, I knew I wanted my readers to feel the same way about Lucian. I wanted it to be clear that no one is beyond redemption, and that love is the greatest gift we can give in this world.
He’s graduated now, and honestly still facing some hurdles on the bumpy road of life, but I know that with the hand of the Lord, and his heart of a warrior, he is going to get through. Lucian’s tale may have finished when I published the last book of the trilogy this year, but Elijah’s story is still being written. He is so much more than a character from a book; he’s a young man who has greatness in him. He truly is an overcomer, and I am so proud to be his big sister!
