By November of 2023, I had my writing mapped out for the year 2024. First would be completing the sixth book in my Heaven Intended Civil War series and then writing the sequel to my time travel novel Anything But Groovy. You know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men, right? Those books were pushed to the back burner after a conversation with my friend, Jane Lang, who is the mayor of Neenah, Wisconsin, a city just south of where I live.
On December 7, 2023, Jane asked me to meet her at Oak Hill Cemetery in Neenah. The chapel on the cemetery grounds had been refurbished to its 1800s glory through the generosity of a local family. She thought the chapel would make the ideal cover for one of my Civil War books.
After taking pictures inside and out, Jane and I walked through the snow back to our vehicles. Before we could even open our doors, we looked at each other, and almost at the same time said, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a Hallmark Christmas movie-style book set in Neenah?”
We went off to Globe Coffee and, being the sweet Christmas movie aficionados that we are, we expounded on that idea. Jane talked about all the fun Christmas and holiday events that go on in Neenah every year. After about five minutes, I looked at her and said, “That’s the outline to a Christmas book right there.”
Once January of 2024 rolled around, I was at my desk outlining this book, originally titled A Very Winnebago Falls Christmas. The first couple weeks of January I got a start on writing the book. On January 29, 2024, I flew to Columbus, Ohio, for the beginning of a three-week visit to help out our middle daughter and her husband who had a 2-year-old daughter and newborn son. Generally, I don’t travel with my laptop, but I brought it for this trip because I wanted to keep working on the book.
Over the course of three weeks, I chipped away at the manuscript every day. The vast majority of writing was done between 9 p.m. and midnight when the house was quiet with everyone asleep but me. The first draft was completed two days after I arrived back home.
With a goal of having this book published for the 2024 Christmas season, John and I started researching the process of self-publishing. However, after a brief conversation with a fellow writer from Catholic Teen Books when we were at a writers’ get-together in Niagara Falls, New York, I reached out to a mutual acquaintance of ours, literary agent Joe Durepos. I was hoping Joe could share some thoughts of where to pitch two other complete manuscripts I had and could give John and me some insight on our idea of self-publishing the Christmas book.
It turns out that Joe is a super-fan of Hallmark Christmas movies. To the point that he subscribes to the Hallmark Channel annually in November and December and has a spreadsheet to track the movies he watches. Joe asked me why I hadn’t pitched the Christmas book to an agent. The answer: I’d only ever pitched one book to an agent and it had been turned down. By chance, that agent was Joe. (No worries, Royal & Ancient did find a home!)
Joe asked to see the first 50 pages of the manuscript. Then, maybe 48 hours later, asked to see the entire manuscript. After reading that, he offered me a contract to represent me through his literary agency. The contract was signed July 17, 2024, with the caveat that if Joe didn’t find a suitable publishing house for the book by October 1, 2024, then the contract would be voided and John and I would self-publish the book.
Over the next two months, Joe pitched the book (rechristened at his suggestion to A Very Chapel Falls Christmas) to some of the biggest secular and Christian publishers on the planet. There was strong interest in this project, but, for various reasons, none of them offered me a contract. Two months went by when another avenue appeared. Joe, who had been Matthew Kelly’s agent for his first two books, had a conversation with him in mid-September. (For those of you unfamiliar with Matthew Kelly, he’s the founder of Dynamic Catholic and Viident Publishing. They have 200-plus writers in their fold with a total of more than 100 million books published.) Unbeknownst to Joe, Matthew was in the process of starting a new imprint under Viident Publishing called Feminine Genius, which would feature women’s fiction.
Matthew asked to see the manuscript and within a few days he extended a verbal contract to me to publish A Very Chapel Falls Christmas for the 2024 Christmas season. That gave us about 10 weeks to go from a manuscript that had been copy edited and revised once, to a complete book that went through numerous more rounds of copy editing and revising. This project gave my copy editor Ava, a recent graduate of Miami University, a run for her money, but she and her design team did an outstanding job of getting this ready to go to print in record time.
John and I had the opportunity to meet with Matthew and his team at Dynamic Catholic in Northern Kentucky on November 21, 2024. I’d met Matthew once years ago when I interviewed him for an article in the Compass newspaper. He was just as kind and genuine as I remembered. He explained that they’d “crashed” the book through for a soft launch in 2024, but had plans for a bigger launch for the 2025 holiday season.
Quite generously, Matthew offered to give a case of 40 books to each of the businesses named in the book (while the city is called Chapel Falls, its modeled after Neenah and we used the real names of Neenah businesses in the manuscript) to help launch the book. The businesses could do what they wanted with the books, whether it was share them with their employees or clients, sell them at the list price and keep the proceeds, or sell them at the list price and donate the proceeds to charity. More than half of the businesses chose to donate the proceeds of their sales. Local non-profits from animal shelters to those focusing on children and the underprivileged received donations of thousands of dollars to start off the new year.
Through Neenah’s chamber of commerce (Future Neenah), I was given the opportunity to sign and sell books at various Neenah Christmas events that happened downtown in December of 2024, plus they arranged for Jane Lang and me to be interviewed about this project by a local television network. Between all those efforts, upwards of a thousand books were distributed or sold in the area in just over two weeks’ time. The book hit as high as #20 on Amazon in December in Contemporary Christian Romance.
As 2025 kicks off, I’m continuing to market A Very Chapel Falls Christmas and am accepting interview invitations, and setting up speaking engagements and book-signing events throughout the year. I’m looking to present to more book clubs, women’s conferences, libraries, middle schools, high schools, etc. If you know of any venues where I could be interviewed, speak or sign books, let me know. I cherish the opportunity to talk about my mission, “to write wholesome, unforgettable stories that align with my faith and values to touch the hearts of countless people worldwide.”
Who knows what 2025 will hold for this sweet Christmas story. New York Times best-seller? Ranked #1 in all its genres on Amazon? Available for sale at major big box stores? Green-lit for the next Hallmark or Great American Family movie? We’re looking forward to following whatever path God leads us on.