In just a few weeks on September 12, Worldview Warriors Publishing will be releasing our first fiction novel. This will be a reprinting of my novel Call to Arms. With this upcoming release, I am writing two blog posts about this book. This one will give you some of the history of how this book came about. To give the entirety of details here would require several blog posts, but I want to give the highlights.
Call to Arms is a fiction novel that deals with the main theme of spiritual warfare and showcases the reality of it. While the story is made up, there is a lot of truth echoed in this story. I used six actual events that either I experienced personally or I personally knew those involved as key plot points, so I certainly understand the notion of “the truth is stranger than fiction.” The main goal in writing this book is to help train the believer for the reality of spiritual warfare. I will not profess to be an expert on spiritual warfare, but I will proclaim to be a veteran of the war. So here is the story behind Call to Arms.
I began writing this book in April 2007. I had just begun exploring fiction writing, and I had written two novels primarily for practice (no, those are not getting published any time soon). I felt an impression to do this book and to do it immediately. I wanted to wait for more practice before writing it, but there was a sense of urgency with it. So, I started with something, and in six weeks I had 250 pages written. But the whole manuscript was trash in my opinion. The story was okay, but I had a lot of stuff that was definitely less than impressive. So, I took the entire manuscript, took the key characters and key plot points I liked, and re-wrote the whole thing. This version was MUCH better.
It would need a few more drafts and some reworking of some of the plot structure, and I thought I might have something. So, I sent it to a Christian manuscript critique group where professionals would take a few sample chapters and give a thorough critique to see if it is publishable. At first, they said I wasn’t quite ready and to take a creative writing course and/or attend a writer’s conference. I did both. A couple of drafts later, I resubmitted to the same group, and they said it was ready. After a little more feedback, I did need to make a dramatic change to the character and setting structure. It wasn’t as much work as I feared, and it was completely worth it. After seven drafts, I was ready.
As a result of this group’s feedback, they sent my info out to 100 different publishers, mostly of the self-publishing and “pay to publish” types. Several reached out to me but called for a $2000-3000 budget in order to print several hundred books, marketing, etc. I was in college, I was still taking student loans, and I had no real platform either. I wasn’t a speaker or anything, so there was no way I could afford that. But one did reach me, and they only charged enough to do the cover and do the printing. Thus, my first published book Battle Cry: Adventures in the Kingdom of Heaven was born in April 2011. However, this publisher did not do the type of cover I was hoping for, and they did not do a final edit that I thought they would do. People noticed the “Charlie-isms” where I sometimes make the same mistakes or phrase things certain ways.
The next year, I got an opportunity I was not expecting. I got to go to the Colorado Christian Writers Conference, one of the biggest, most well-known, and respected conferences in the nation. I had been wanting to go to for several years, and I ended up going for 6 of the next 7 years and even served as faculty for 4 of those years. It was HUGE, not just numbers wise, but productivity wise. I met a lot of people, got a lot of feedback, got a lot of help in my writing, and better than all that, I met a publisher. This one loved my work, and I wanted something different than what I had, again not knowing much of anything about the industry. They took my manuscript, and I changed publishers. This time, we did a much more thorough editing job, did some minor revisions to clean up the story even more, and they gave me an AWESEOME cover for it. In 2014, this version was released, and Battle Cry became Call to Arms.
Between both publishers, I sold about 500 copies of this book. For the record, that is about the national average, including the mega-sellers and the no-sale books. The responses for Call to Arms were phenomenal. People loved the writing, but they especially loved the story. I set up this book to be a “dual story” novel. I have two stories that run side-by-side: one takes place in the modern day of the mid-2000s. The other takes place in a fantasy setting that reminds readers of Chronicles of Narnia and Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness. The way the two stories work together has garnered the greatest complements. The next highest category of praise is how well I wrote the sword fights. Being a competitive fencer myself, I had the knowledge to do the sword fights right so the reader is hooked. I not only got endorsements from creation speaker Charles Jackson (check out his Facebook ministry page here) but I also got an big endorsement from Christian fiction blogger Peter Younghusband out of Australia.
But then a problem occurred. I had a trilogy planned. The other two books were written, but when Book 2 was ready to send (Book 3 had a draft done, but wasn’t polished yet), the publisher closed down. It would be several years before I’d hear from them, and trying to reach out garnered no responses. I knew it but the publisher went down and Call to Arms went out of print. By this time, I was fully a part of Worldview Warriors, and we had started our publishing wing. I still know very little about how to go about looking for a publisher, but I didn’t want to ask to see if they would republish it. I would not need ask, however, because Jason DeZurik came to me about it!
I did some more revisions as since its release, I had grown so much doctrinally and in maturity that some things I had written were like, “Yeah, could be better.” But I didn’t make any major changes to the plot. I did change a few scenes while keeping the same plot but made it more plausible. I also decided that I would not complete the trilogy. The plan was for Book 1 to describe the battle between Satan and his minions, Book 2 would describe the battle against the flesh (while also doing the former), and Book 3 would describe the battle against the world’s system. But when I sought to work these two, I lost all interest in doing them. A big part of that is the big plot reveal in Call to Arms. Any sequel I did would have this plot reveal already there and it would never carry the power of the first. So, with this new release Call to Arms will remain a stand-alone novel.
So, in a few weeks, Call to Arms will be re-released for its third edition. It will be my fourth book with Worldview Warriors Publishing. I have two more non-fiction books that are already underway, but I am not done with writing fiction either. I have a big one that has been cooking for a while, and I have some smaller ones that will be fun to do also. When I get to them depends on how much writing time and brain function I have in my off-work hours. Next week, I’ll take a more serious look at spiritual warfare and more of what drove the writing of Call to Arms.
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