When the plans we make crumble, when our dreams don’t come true, what are we to think about the goodness and faithfulness of God?
That’s the journey in store for Verity Wilde and Will Crockett in my upcoming release, A Scattering Of Light, but why did it take me so long to complete this book?
Let me tell you a story…
I began work on A Scattering of Light in 2021, the year my last historical novel Shiloh was published, but much like Verity’s shay ride to Yorktown (the moment in the book when you’ll meet her), the past few years proved bumpy for the Bentons.
In spring of 2022, after much thought and prayer, we decided to sell our Oregon home and move to Tennessee. We laid careful plans. All doors seemed open, the path before us clear. Then, days before we were to list our nearly paid-off home for sale, we learned its foundation had eroded to a point where no buyer could secure a loan to purchase our house.
Instead we faced six weeks of extensive repair that resulted in much of our yard being excavated and destroyed. With the ensuing cascade of landscape repair, gradual plumbing disasters, landscape re-excavation and re-repair, the financial loss set us back to where we were in 1994 when we bought the house. We weren’t going anywhere.
Some writers produce their best work under pressure…
Or else they find writing an escape from life’s difficulties. I’m not one of them. Amidst the ongoing interruptions, set-backs, and disappointments, I finally set aside a demanding historical novel and instead produced two children’s books, Bear Country and Larkspur, one already written, the other partly so. Though demanding in their way (my illustration skills were rusty to say the least), they were largely stress-free projects. By their conclusion we had concluded that, for reasons we may never know this side of Heaven, God meant us to stay in Oregon for now. So with the children’s books both released by the end of 2023…
I buckled down to finish researching and writing A Scattering of Light.
It came as no surprise to see the thematic aspects of the story mirroring my own experiences of the preceding years. When I realized that trusting God through trials and surrendering my desire to shape life according to my plans would be the spiritual themes Verity Wilde and Will Crockett also grappled with, I began to seek the Lord for how best to pour onto the pages all the encouragement, correction, and comfort I’d received from Him and from brothers and sisters in the faith who walked this path of surrender before me. 
Over the next blog posts I’ll share some of that wisdom with you, gleaned from two of my favorite sources. But it’s also true that I’ve found some of my most profound encouragement through stories. I bet you have as well. I hope and pray that A Scattering of Light will be such a reading experience for you.
A Scattering of Light releases April 13th. If you plan to purchase a copy, consider preordering. Preordering is a huge help toward a book’s success because it lets those pesky algorithms know more readers should hear about it. That’s one way word of a book gets spread.
I cannot wait to read your long awaited novel. I love your historic fiction.
Thank you for waiting for it, Patti!