Fiction with a Mission

by Kathi Macias

 

I am often asked how and when I knew I wanted to be a writer. My answer? I can’t remember ever wanting to be anything else. I have loved the written word for as long as I can remember. My mom says I started reading long before I started school, and I never looked back. When I ran out of things to read, I simply started writing my own stories.

 

When I became a Christian at the age of 26, my first thought was that I would immediately start writing Christian books. Thankfully God didn’t allow me to do that until I’d matured a bit.

 

Nearly 10 years later I got an entry-level job at Gospel Light Publishing, where I began to learn about the Christian publishing industry, which simply intensified my passion and desire to write.

 

A few years later, Regal Books (a part of Gospel Light) graciously gave me the opportunity to make that dream a reality. My first book, a women’s devotional, titled A Moment A Day, was released in 1988 and became a bestseller for Regal.

 

Since that time I’ve published a total of 30 books, but none that I’ve been more excited about than my current “Extreme Devotion” fiction series from New Hope^® Publishers.

 

Wait a minute! New Hope doesn’t publish fiction . . . do they? They do now! And it’s all about a shared passion and God’s timing.

 

I was already publishing nonfiction with New Hope when I mentioned to Andrea Mullins my dream of writing a four-book fiction series based on the true lives of believers around the world who suffer for their faith. Andrea’s eyes lit up, and she wanted to know more. I soon discovered that it had long been Andrea’s dream for New Hope to publish “fiction with a mission,” based on just such stories as I was proposing. And she wanted it to be a four-book series.

 

And so the “Extreme Devotion” series was born. The first two books, No Greater Love and More than Conquerors, released April 5, 2010.

 

No Greater Love is set just outside Pretoria, South Africa, in 1989 during the violence and upheaval prior to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the downfall of Apartheid.

 

More than Conquerors takes place in the border town of Tijuana, Mexico, and also in the Mayan village of San Juan Chamula in Chiapas State, where “evangelicos” are unwelcome and often persecuted.

 

Though neither book is a light, fluffy, or easy read, both have been described as “riveting page-turners” that will challenge your heart and your faith at an entirely new level.

 

These first two books in the series will be followed by Red Ink, set in China and scheduled for an October 2010 release, and People of the Book, which takes place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and will release in April 2011.

 

All four books of this series are rooted in the principle of first allegiance to God and a first-love relationship that compels us to ultimate service. How grateful I am that the Lord birthed that passion in me and enabled me to express it in writing—and that He brought alongside Andrea Mullins and all the other precious believers at New Hope Publishers to partner with me in that endeavor.