I finished my eighth book this week.

Okay, so two of them don’t “count.” I trashed my first story and am rewriting it from scratch. And the second is an historical… Out of my usual realm and entirely in need of a rewrite. But even then, I feel like I’ve accomplished something major in the two and a half years I’ve been writing.

This story took a path so different from all my others. Normally, when a story seizes control of my mind, I plug away until it’s on paper. Start to finish for most of my books is somewhere from six to nine months. (I believe I made an analogy in earlier posts of “giving birth” to stories.) Faith of the Heart took a different tack.

I started the story in my mind during Christmas Eve mass in 2006. I get ideas at the oddest times. I wrote the prologue on the way to visit my in-laws on Christmas Day. But then I got sidetracked. Seems like that was a common pattern with this story — as is the pattern with our faith in general. Perhaps the title was prophetic. I finished All the Right Reasons and Turning Thirty-Twelve. Those stories were older, and in my extraordinarily orderly (some call it obsessive-compulsive) mind, I like to finish stories in the order they’re created. So Faith waited patiently, coming out a scene at a time, jotted down in my typical green pen on the backs of racing forms or scrap paper. One of the best scenes was written as I waited to catch the plane to Dallas for RWA nationals last summer.

Then the Amazon series was born. My Critters encouraged me to finish The Reluctant Amazon for the Golden Heart contest. Faith was again put on the back burner. I finished the first Amazon book then started the second. Add a fantastic new on-line critique partner and total edits of the Murphy’s Law trilogy, and my poor Faith ended up ignored. Until I decided to send it in to two contests. And it finaled in both, and then it won the Winter Rose.

The story finally got its due, and it currently sits in the hands of my favorite beta reader. (Thanks, Kylie!) My mother — always one of the first people to read my work — thinks it is one of my best. God love her, she always makes me feel good about my writing. But the odyssey ends for this story, and I’m very pleased with the results.

What’s next? The Amazon series. And rewriting the first book. And one of the characters from All the Right Reasons keeps whispering in my ear.

Life is good right now.