Oh, what a mess! If they can’t run the country, Democrats will settle for ruining it—and the nooze media, and our great institutions of higher education, will help them.
I wonder if they understand that Barack Obama is constitutionally barred from being president again. Do they realize there’s no lawful way to award the presidency to Hillary Clinton, even if they were to succeed in their jihad to “drive Trump from office”? Either they honestly—if I may use that word when speaking of such people—don’t know these things, or just don’t care.
With all these liberals purposely trying to destabilize the country, why have I been writing fantasy novels? And why am I so pleased that my latest book has just been published?
“The Throne” is the ninth book in my “Bell Mountain” series. My publisher describes these as “faithful fiction that reveals the Kingdom of God,” and readers say I do it without getting preachy. Give God the glory for that. He guides me as I write, and the books are a lot smarter than I am.
Why fantasy? Well, it’s a way of looking at life from a new perspective that’s not so easy to access via other types of fiction. It allows me to write for teens and even younger children without parting company from an adult audience. Readers of all ages have enjoyed these books, so why change?
In the fantasy world discovered in my books, the people of a great nation have, over the centuries, lost their sense of relationship to God. Their religion is a worldly political establishment, a set of rituals, carried on by force of habit more than anything else. But there are still characters who seek God—some of them not even knowing that He is what they seek; and the stories are about how God calls them to His service, and how they respond—in an age of war and revolution, bravery and treachery, miracles, prophecy, barbarian invasions, and acts of sacrificial heroism and darkest villainy.
It’s not so different from our real world, after all.
I’ve tried to make these fantasies stand out from those commonly found on our bookshelves today, taking for my models the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but always taking care not to imitate them: there’s more than enough of that elsewhere. The stories are infused with a Biblical worldview: even more than Lewis and Tolkien, the Bible is my inspiration. This I have tried to do without being preachy, for the excellent reason that most readers are turned off by preachiness, which makes the author feel good but does little for them. Most of our fiction is a God-free zone, which makes it trivial at best and unwholesome at worst.
So in these stories you won’t find any mighty wizards casting spells, although there are characters who pretend to have such power. Hopefully I have weeded out all the common fantasy clichés—bawdy tavern wenches, lusty warriors with muscles on top of their muscles, and all the rest of them. There is nothing allowed in my stories that the Bible doesn’t allow: all the laws of nature remain in force. Anything accomplished by the characters has to be done the old-fashioned way—by them, without benefit of magic. And by the power of God.
I write these novels because I have been called to write them, and the reader response has been all I could have hoped for. I don’t expect, as a result of my weekly political and social commentaries, ever to hear from anyone who says, “Hey, thanks, you’ve talked me out of being a liberal!” That doesn’t even happen in a fantasy world.
I write these books in faith: because, in the long run, faith, if we have anything at all, is what we have.
