This is what the Lord says—
    your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God,
    who teaches you what is good for you
    and leads you along the paths you should follow. – Isaiah 48:17

Today is a gray, cloudy, quiet, breezy, cooler Saturday morning with a hint of the promise of fall in the air. The ground is saturated from a long night of rain, and there’s a blanket of fresh pine straw covering pretty much everything.

It’s the sort of day that calls for another pot of coffee, that invites deeper study, that leads to contemplative writing, and that lends itself to reading. And that is what I’m going to do. Rebekah will be working on Sunday’s sermon for WFPC (don’t miss it if you’re in town), and I’m going to be – hopefully – caught up in my novel.

War, broken relationships, love, and hope:

Producing a novel is a new thing for me. I may have made my name in non-fiction, but everything I have written – my devotional writing, the majority of my books, this blog, and even my newspaper work – has all been driven by story.

So I have this really good WW2 story, and I’m giving it the context of a novel because it’s simply not something that should be raced through in a thousand words, or even a couple of chapters. It’s a big story that I believe is worth the investment of the research, the character development, the background, the time, the imagination, and a big-picture setting that provides such a colorful backdrop for the struggles, the challenges, the love, the comedy, and the triumphs that play out over the narrative.

Okay, that last paragraph sounds like I’m trying to sell the book. But it’s not nearly done yet, so I’m more likely still selling the idea to myself!

Mining for treasure:

One of the huge challenges of being a writer is the ratio of seen to unseen in terms of published work. Reading a book is a lot like purchasing an item at a gift shop without considering the labor, the industry, the mines, the mills, the foundries, the transportation, the factories, the manufacture, the distribution, the investment, the countless hours, the sweat, the salaries, and so much more.

Today, I think, is going to be a mining day. But I enjoy the digging; I enjoy the process; I enjoy the exploration; I enjoy uncovering nuggets. Sometime in the future – hopefully sooner than later – there will be a new book on the shelf. And when it is, I hope you will be interested enough to spend a little time reading it for yourself.

Until then, you can click this link – Derek Maul’s Amazon Author Page – to see what else I’ve written over the past few years. I’d be honored if you did.

– DEREK