I also was able to attend several really interesting sessions, like one on story beats in movies taught by Steve Taylor, one on voice-over acting by Katie Leigh, and two different sessions on AI, and the benefits as well as disadvantages of using in it writing (for the record, I use AI for things like helping keep track of my notes and occasionally prompting, but never for writing-that’s all mine and the Holy Spirit’s). One thing that really stuck with me from one of those sessions was that AI is not truly intelligent. It is not capable of original or creative thought, and everything it knows it’s learned from resources, people, users, etc. And a lot of the time, those things are inaccurate. Another thing that got me was that the more one uses AI for writing, art, or any creative expression, the more you risk losing your own specific, individual, personal voice. The example that was given was, say you hang around with a group of people who all use the word “totally” a lot. Eventually, you are totally going to start using the word totally. It’s the same with AI. The more you hang around it and talk to it and use it for projects, the more you are going to start to sound like it…which is to say, incredibly generic. And why would you want to do that when God gave you your own unique voice to unleash on the world?? It gave me a lot to think about.

The other exciting thing about this year was I had two mentoring appointments, a paid critique, and two pitch appointments. Yes, I was pitching a book at Realm Makers this year! It’s been a long time since I pitched a book, the last time was in 2021 when I pitched to my friends Troy and Stacy Hooker of Descendant Publishing, the year I first met them. See, I’ve been working on a very special, very secret book project the past four months called Travels with Jesse. The whole thing was jumpstarted when I participated in the beta testing for my friend Paul MacDonald’s Unlock Your Story platform. (You can read more about that in last month’s Firefly blog)

Anyway, the results I got from my submission to Unlock Your Story were incredible, accurate, and really made me look at myself in a different way. And in doing so, God was able to come in and highlight things in me, misconceptions and straight up lies from the enemy that had been very damaging to my identity for like, decades.
Everything God’s been doing in my life this past spring, breaking of lies, restoring truth, and just plain reminding me of who I am, is what led to me deciding to capture it all in a story.
Travels with Jesse is about Jesse and his younger sister Sarah, and they grow up together in their father’s house. They are separated when Jesse is ten and Sarah is six, when Jesse goes with their father to train as a Watchman Protector, and Sarah is sent to live with an aunt. While they are apart, eleven years pass in which Sarah is subjected to bullying, conditional acceptance, and other events that damage the way she sees herself. So when Jesse finally returns after completing his training, she has not only forgotten him, she has forgotten herself. Jesse must fight through obstacles and agents of the enemy to break off the lies and remind Sarah of what is true before she loses herself forever.