When I first published Classroom Management for Catechists, I made the decision that fiction would be just-for-fun, something I do to relax, because I learned that publishing was stressful and a ton of work.

Fast forward a decade and some, my life is radically different. My efforts to pursue some other occupation keep falling flat, and I end up back at: Why not work on some of those novel drafts?

Which means mostly I should be editing (right now) the top work-in-progress, but I find I want to talk about the whole thing. So I created this Fiction section for everything related to that.

How to subscribe, or not:

As best I understand it, when you go into your subscription settings and decide what e-mails you want to read:

• One Soul at a Time’s home page should give you the whole shebang.

• Evangelization & Discipleship will be, going forward, where I stick posts related to the original topic of this newsletter.

• How’s it Going, Jen? is personal updates, general chit-chat, and chronic-illness talk.

• Fiction is conversation about writing fiction, resources I’ve liked, stories I’ve enjoyed.

This is my first time working with the “sections” feature, so thanks for patience as we work this out.

As always here at One Soul at a Time, all content is free to read, but the combox is a thank-you perk for sponsors. I can’t commit to responding to all reader e-mails, but subscribers at any level can send prayer requests or other comments by replying directly to the newsletter in your e-mail inbox. I do pray for all reader intentions even if you don’t receive an individual reply.

Will this be Catholic fiction?

Define your terms. I tend to write Catholic characters, though not exclusively, because that is the world I live in. My top three manuscripts at the moment are:

• Catholic Bible-belt parish setting, mostly-Catholic cast

• Different Catholic Bible-belt parish setting, mostly-Catholic cast

• Bible-belt setting, mixed Catholic & Evangelical cast.

Tone and genre vary a fair bit in those three works. With respect to their faith, characters run the gamut of normal practicing Christians and normal non-Christians. So it’s neither the stereotyped, straw-man tropes that tend to show up in the secular publishing world, nor some kind of fairy land of perfectly-perfectly saintly believers.

None of my work is conversion-plot, and none of it is apologetics-in-disguise. I think up weird stories and write them down. Religion looms significantly in the lives of many of my characters and tends to have major plot-effects, but the central story question lies elsewhere.

Is it clean fiction?

I write grown-up books for grown-up people.

• I’ve somehow miraculously managed to keep the cussing out of the manuscript that is closest to publication. Don’t know whether that will hold generally, the characters in this one novel are just better behaved than usual — and the tone’s a lot lighter, that helps. But I might scrub it out of other manuscripts, or not, depending.

• I don’t do explicit sex scenes, at all, just no.

• Violence is mostly off-screen, but murder, rape, infidelity, and any number of other adult topics are on the menu, either centrally or tangentially.

But, you know, if you need a wholesome, feel-good romantic comedy about torture and bigamy, I’m here for you.

Who’s publishing all this?

Nobody, if I don’t get my act together. Realistically it’ll probably be self-published, because although I think there’s a respectable audience out there who’d be interested in savoring this piece of the literary pie, I’m not aware of any publishers actually serving that market.

Ready to be corrected.