People often ask me what led me to start writing. My answer is I ran away from it.
Here’s how it happened.
During the years I served as a missionary in Russia, I took several trips to Ukraine. There I met up with a team from my home church, and I helped them in their children’s camp as an extra interpreter.
Working with us were members of an amazing family who had endured horrific persecution for their faith throughout the years Ukraine belonged to the Soviet Union. Their stories of God’s mercy while they endured fierce pressure touched us all.
After I returned to the states, one of the women who’d been to Ukraine cornered me, saying “You have to write a book about that family.”
My response? “I’m not a writer.”
She didn’t let that stop her. “You know the people, the language and the culture. You can write the book so an American audience can relate to it.”
I thanked her and refused. Little did I know that over the next few months, God would push me into agreeing. Eight years later, Beyond the Rapids was published.
And I was stunned by how it inspired and encouraged many believers coping with their own struggles.
While I enjoyed the writing process, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to write any more books. Until Beyond the Rapids won a Readers’ Favorite award.
Then I started thinking about writing fiction. About creating the kind of stories I loved to read.
I sought guidance from the masters, like CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, and ruminated on what made me love their books so much.
The answer was that they celebrated Christian values in the writing. They wrote of honor, and love, and doing right.
So, I set out to learn the craft of writing fiction. And I crafted a story that honors Christian values, even though it isn’t overtly Christian. This past December, I was thrilled to publish Flight of the Spark, the first book in the Outlawed Myth series.
In the novel, duty, desire and destiny collide. Fifteen-year-old Iskra lives in a society that is recovering from a brutal civil war. In order to avoid such suffering in the future, they’ve traded all their freedom for safety.
But what they’d done is learned to fear the world and everything in it.
When Iskra betrays a friend out of fear, the friend is taken, never to be seen again. Iskra’s guilt forces her to do the unthinkable: seek out the Riskers for answers. Iskra’s quest quickly entangles her fate with a cryptic prophecy and a young Risker named Xico, who ensnares her heart and is willing to put it all on the line to win her.
With every risk Iskra takes, the closer she gets to true freedom. But every choice carries a consequence. The choices she makes set events she never imagined into motion, and the price of her freedom could very well be her life and the life of the man she loves.
And ultimately, she has to face her own fears, the ones bind and control her.
Evelyn Puerto reads just about anything and writes in multiple genres. When she married, she inherited three stepdaughters, a pair of step-grandsons, and a psychotic cat. Currently, she writes from northeastern Wisconsin, but soon will be heading south for shorter winters.
Website: https://www.evelynpuerto.com/
Twitter: @evelyn_puerto
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Author.Evelyn.Puerto/
Find Flight of the Spark on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081S9B17B/
Find Beyond the Rapids on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1414116055/
Check out my young adult fantasy fiction novels HERE for something optimistic and fun.
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