Hey everyone! I’m here at Realm Makers in St Louis, but I wanted to drop in really quick and share how happy I am that so many of you (both here and at home) have been interacting with my blog birthday all week! By the way, if you don’t know what Realm Makers is, it’s an annual conference for Christian authors of fantasy and science fiction. This is my fifth year here, and I love it! The place is full of wonderful, encouraging, nerdy authors like myself, and it’s just the highlight of my year to be here with “my people” 🙂  

My first conference was in 2019, where I met my friends Josh and Sarah Chadd, who “adopted” me when I knew no one and was feeling very unsure of myself. Their friendship has been invaluable, and I love them so much! Josh writes Christian zombie apocalypse fiction (which was not a genre I was interested in until I read his books!) and Sarah runs an Etsy shop where she specializes in leather goods. Josh is also an AMAZING writing coach and mentor, and my book would not be what it is now without him. I highly recommend him and his mad skillz to anyone seeking someone to stand alongside them in their writing journey. 

I can’t believe I’ve had this blog for a whole year! I came up with the idea last year about a month before Realm Makers, and several times almost discarded it, but my very supportive friends, Troy and Stacy Hooker, were invaluable in encouraging me to stick with it and worked alongside me to build an amazing website. Troy is an extremely talented author of several books and Stacy owns an Etsy shop where, among other things, she makes the CUTEST little knitted gnomes! Together they run Descendant Publishing where they work to produce amazing stories that promote a love for reading, enhanced literacy skills, and positive moral values.  

I look back over the last year and am thrilled at how far my little blog idea about exploring God in movies has come. Now, twelve months later, I’ve turned out twenty blog posts, guested on eight episodes of the Men at the Movies podcast with my friend Paul McDonald, started a thriving and super fun Forged in Film Facebook group, hosted several movie nights at the my local church, and, oh yeah, finished writing a book!  

It’s been an incredible year. I still honestly don’t know how often the blog gets read or even visited, but I decided a while back that that wasn’t the important thing. I felt like God gave me the idea for this blog, but when He did, He never made any promises that it would be big or successful. All He told me was to write down what He showed me and share my thoughts on it. So that’s what I do. And the way I figure, if even one person reads my words and has to go back and watch a movie again because they never realized how much God showed up in it, then, well, my work here is done. Because once their eyes are opened, they start seeing Him EVERYWHERE. And then they start sharing what they see with others, and so on from there…and before you know it, the world is different.  

Thanks for a great first year, everyone! What shall we watch next?