The Story Behind the Story

     My mouth dropped open as fifteen-year-old Ariana giggled.

     "What did you say?" I asked, laughing myself.

     "Everyone born in the nineteen-hundreds is old."

     "Well," I chuckled back.  "Everyone born after 2000 is a baby."  She and the other students laughed good-naturedly.

     I am working with wonderful young people this summer, doing Bible clubs all over Sioux City, Iowa.  Ariana's statement brought to light just how young they all are.  All of the students were born between 2002 and 2004.  Wow!  I was in my twenties when they were born, driving, working, voting--a full-fledged member of society.  And I was their age in another century. 

    It's hard to believe I'm coming up on two decades out of high school.  several weeks ago marked eighteen years since the Class of 2000 walked across the stage to receive their diplomas, flipping their tassels on the way down.  Graduating in 2000 sounded so modern and space age at the time, especially since the fall of my senior year was still 1999.  Going into a year that was simply a two followed by three zeros was like going into uncharted waters.  Actually, most experts still consider 2000 to be the 20th century, not the 21st.  Now, 2000 sounds like a long time ago...which it is, really. It doesn't always seem like it, but it is.  

     So...what have I been up to since 2000?  Glad you asked!  I've done many things, such as mission trips, college, ministry, teaching, marriage.  It's been an adventure, and still is.  

     One thing I had been doing long before 2000, and continue to do, is writing.  I have had a passion for it as long as I can remember.  

     This weekend, a series I have written debuts on Amazon Kindle, the Riverside County Chronicles.  This series has been in the works since 2000, and there is an interesting story behind it.

     Inklings of this series had been in my heart since around 1992, when I envisioned a series about friends at a church, having adventures together.  Back in 1992, I was ten, and my idea of adventures involved mysteries, kidnapping, and secret rooms hidden in old houses.  I came up with some pretty convoluted plots and had a lot of fun.  A few of the characters I came up with at the time were the basis for the current characters.  Still, it was pretty rough stuff back in '92.  

     The story really started taking shape the summer of 2000.  Four days after my high school graduation, I left for a mission trip to Africa.  I have talked extensively about that in other posts.  Some very wonderful things happened on that trip, especially the many, many children who came to Christ.  I also enjoyed spending time in London on layovers.  I loved our interpreter in Zambia, and we are still friends today.  I met people I would never have otherwise met.  These were blessings.  There were also some refiners fires.  Very difficult experiences.  One of them was that I had a teammate (who was also my roommate all summer) who was impossible.  You can read about that whole experience in other posts, or in my book "Why I still Believe" (also available on Amazon Kindle).  But, that summer, I had a lot inside me.  A lot I needed to get out.  A lot I longed for.  I was in a foreign country with an abusive maniac.  There was no one to talk to, because she manipulated the whole trip, and everyone over there was on her side.  It wasn't worth if for me to even speak most of the time, unless I was teaching.  So, the only way to avoid losing my mind completely was to write.  I filled notebook after notebook.  I wrote journal entries about what was doing on daily, but I also had those old stories from 1992 come back to me.  

     I wanted to get to know these characters.  During this intense time of silence for me, these fictional characters were like real people to me.  They were my friends.  The only ones I had for almost ten thousand miles.  I really felt like I got to know them.  Story after story about them flowed into my heart and out my pen.  I even wrote down details about them that would never make it into the books, but just for my own reference, so I felt like I was working with real-live people.  I named the church King of Kings Baptist Church, and based it off of Corona Heights Baptist Church, the congregation I grew up in.  I wrote up a church directory, complete with everyone's address, phone number, and birthday.  I had a mental picture of exactly what everyone looked like, almost as if I could see them in front of me.  I wrote out their testimonies, how they came to faith.  

     These friends from King of Kings Baptist Church helped me battle culture shock, homesickness, and bitterness toward my roommate.  I could always retreat into my writing to be free from all of it.  I believe the very best of me went into this writing.  What's more, I don't think I could have come up with any of it under any other circumstances.  The heat had been turned up under me, and beauty came forth.  

     Although much more cohesive than my 1992 drafts, these stories from Africa weren't completely publishable.  In fact, I think their purpose was to introduce me to these friends.  Make them real to me.  When I arrived home and started taking classes at community college and working at a preschool, I would work on more stories about these friends.  These stories, from the fall of 2000, are incorporated into the series now.  They've been edited and revised here and there over the years.  

     Originally, there was one book.  But every now and then, new ideas would come to me.  I found I missed my friends.  I wondered how they were doing.  Something funny would happen in my life that would seem to fit perfectly into one of the stories.  I not only added to the original book, but wrote two more.  I had a trilogy.  And for several years, I sat on it, doing nothing else with it.  

     A little over two years ago, Walter and I were having dinner at a Sizzler.  Walter had gone to the restroom, and I was idly sitting, listening to the conversation of the family across the walkway from us.  

     "Did you know that if Star Wars hadn't made the prequels and now the sequels, my generation wouldn't be into it?" A thirteen-year-old boy was asking his parents.

     "Best idea, making those extra movies.  If the trilogy was good, having two additional trilogies is great." The father agreed.

     Hearing this struck a chord in me.  What if I wrote three prequels and three sequels?  I loved the challenge.  It wasn't hard.  These friends were practically begging to tell their stories.  

     As Walter and I got ready to move, I wrote a basic outline of my prequels.  I typed them up shortly after arriving in South Dakota.  They came from a deep part of my heart.  I even had dreams during this time that contributed.  I believe it was God's guidance in creativity.  

     So now I had six book.  What would the sequels be like?  I had great ideas from real life, and I plugged away writing.  Finally, as of a month ago, I have nine books.  They blend a little more specifically than the Star Wars movies, so they aren't really set up as three prequels, three "original" and three sequels.  They're just nine books that go together.  

     The whole series is deeply Christian, with biblical truths intermingled with humor, love, and plot twists.  Almost all aspects have some basis in real-life experience.  I set it in my home area of Riverside County, California.  I never specifically say what city the stories take place in, but I refer to many cities in the county.  In my heart, they live in Corona.  I grew up in Riverside (until age 7) and Corona (from 7 to adulthood, when I moved back to Riverside).  They're almost like one city, as they are right next to each other. If you live in one, you likely do a lot of errands in the other.  I consider both Riverside and Corona my hometown (too bad Facebook only lets me put one hometown!).  I came up with the title Riverside County Chronicles in 2010.  Until that point, I had referred to them as the Good Old Days Trilogy (It was only a trilogy at the time).  I was never happy with that title, and liked the current one much better.

      At the bottom, I have put some of the cover art used on the books.  If you are interested in looking them up on Amazon (each is only 99 cents), click on the following link--if it doesn't work, copy and paste it onto a web browser (my other two books, Why I Still Believe and The Last Resort are also at this site):   https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Janelle+Stoermer