Timothy wrote to me with the following questions:
When did you know that you are/were a writer?
I guess I knew that I wanted to be a writer when I was about 27 or 28. I’ve always been an avid reader and one day, during my lunch break, I’d forgotten to bring a book with me to read. So, I took out my pen and paper and started writing a book. I’ve been writing ever since.
What made you choose Christian Fiction?
When I first started writing, back in 1994, I wasn’t aware of the Christian fiction genre. Actually, the genre wasn’t very prominent back then. I still consider Christian fiction and Christian romance novels to be a fairly “new” genre, meaning, I haven’t really started seeing them until the past fifteen years. When I was growing up, Christian fiction did not exist and I read a lot of secular fiction.
Regarding your question – when I first started writing, I sent my writings to an editor whom I’d paid to edit my work. One of the comments she made was: Is this a Christian romance? I was not familiar with that term at the time. To help with my writing career, I joined Romance Writers of America and I joined the RWA chapter entitled Faith, Hope, And Love (RWA’s Christian Inspirational Chapter). Being a part of Faith, Hope, and Love opened the door for me regarding Christian fiction. I became familiar with the genre and I started reading those novels. I’d been mentioning God, faith and church in my books before I even knew about the Christian market. So, by my “discovering” this genre, it just made me aware that this is the type of fiction that I needed to be writing.