Guest Post: Author Sirena N. Robinson

I’m so excited to have my friend and fellow author, Sirena Robinson, guest posting for me today. If you haven’t had the chance to read her books, check out the links at the bottom. I’m guest posting over at her blog today as well, so you can read that here.

Faith and Writing

by Sirena N. Robinson

Today I am thrilled to be taking over here on Amy’s page. I’ve known Amy for almost two years now, and she’s one of my biggest supporters with my writing. She’s one of my beta readers, so she’s involved in almost every aspect of my books, from finding all my grammar errors to brainstorming plot ideas. So when she asked me about doing a takeover as part of my publicity celebrating the launch of my recent releases, I jumped all over it. She’s taking over at my blog today for those of you interested in her thoughts on writing lgbtq fiction. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

When I asked Amy if she had any ideas about what I should write on, she suggested discussing both how I came up with the series and how my personal faith interacts with the philosophy and religious undertones in the novels. The Chosen Chronicles focuses, rather heavily at times, on Christianity.

I’ll start with the easier of the two. In college, I took a creative writing class and was prompted to write a short story about a way to prevent the Apocalypse. What would eventually become Devil’s Dilemma was born. I kept writing and what had started as a short story ended up a 100,000 word novel. Shortly after finishing it, however, our house burned down and I lost the book. It took me more than two years to re-write it. During the re-write, I introduced new characters, added some plot twists, and changed the ending to allow for more books because I knew I didn’t want to stop at just one. It felt like there was more story left to be told.

At first, I thought there would be four. I had planned for four. Then, I decided I needed something to link the books together, so I decided to write a common prologue, one that would connect them. That’s where the prologues with Amaya and Gabriel come in, so of course she needed her own story. That brought me to five. Then, when I decided how the fourth book was going to end, it seemed right to have some common threads with the last ones, so I expanded it to seven, which is where it is currently. If you were to group them, Devil’s Dilemma can be read as a stand-alone. There’s no cliff-hanger and it’s relatively self-contained. The next three are meant to be one story, and the last three are another, for seven in the series.

Now for the tougher question. To be clear, I am a Christian. I have a relationship with God that I value above all else, and I have a closely held set of beliefs that I have come to after much thought, discussion, and prayer. Those beliefs do not always coincide with what I write, and for some people, that can be hard to understand.

In my novels, my fictional representation of God is very cold and hands-off. That makes for good fiction because it gives characters hoops to jump through. My version of Angels can have sex, interact with people, and have children. Those things are far from Biblical, but they work for the plot I’ve created. I have characterized Satan in the later books in the series, turning him into a villain and using him to drive the plot of the sixth and seventh book.

Unlike a lot of authors of sensitive subject matter, I write under my own name. No penname here. That means that everyone in my family knows it’s mine when they pick up a book. There’s no doubt it’s their niece or daughter or granddaughter who just wrote a five-page sex scene or introduced the Devil as a character. I wish I could tell all of you that it hasn’t caused problems, but that would be a lie. There are some people in my life that can’t separate what I write from who I am. One aunt won’t speak to me anymore. She claims I’m a hypocrite and that I cannot be a Christian and write a book with violence, foul language, and pre-marital sex.

Devil’s Dilemma

Devil’s Despair