Every Christmas season, a certain piece of music seems to follow me everywhere—from radio jingles to shopping mall speakers. But it wasn’t until a snowy evening in 2012 that Handel’s Messiah truly captured my heart. That December, I decided to take my wife on a date to see the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s performance. I had always liked classical music, but nothing prepared me for what I would experience that evening.
When airport baggage conveyors brought mine and Andrea’s matching black suitcases into a terminal, it was hard to distinguish them from other generic bags rolling alongside them. They were branded as Jeep, but they weren’t extraordinary, and toward the end of their usefulness, I picked them out by their rips, broken wheels, and other scars.
They were part of our marriage from the beginning. My parents bought them from Sam’s Club as their wedding gift to us, and our first trip with them was our downtown Chicago honeymoon. The original plan was a honeymoon in the Yucatan Peninsula, but spring 2009 was the height of the “Swine Flu” epidemic, and with all the flight and hotel accommodation cancellations, we settled for the far less tropical Windy City in May.
In March, my youngest brother, Adam, died in a car accident on his way home from work. I could never describe the feelings in a few words posted on the internet, nor would I want to.
The first draft of The Lord of Luserna was two days from completion when everything happened. Instead of writing a few pages for a novel, I wrote an obituary.
Almost twenty-one years ago, Caitlin Mirela entered our lives. Now, that may sound odd to those of you who know her, because her twenty-first birthday was over seven months prior to me writing this post. But there are a few of us out there who remember November 1 just as easily as her March birthday.
First, let me step back a few years. In about 1997, my parents chose to begin the foreign adoption journey. I was ten or eleven-years-old when the adoption agency interviewed my parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Some months afterwards, a social worker interviewed our whole family to see if we were fit to adopt a little girl. Early on, my parents chose to seek adoption for one infant girl from Romania; they’d already picked her name too—Jaci. After we were approved, we just had to wait for a specific referral from the agency.
Where I live in Pennsylvania, the old adage of “a pizza shop on every corner” almost applies. Many of the national chains are here (Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Little Caesars, Papa John’s), but local shops flourish even more. Those local shops all serve New York style, and you should expect to hear Italian spoken while they toss the dough.
My family loves pizza, to the point of eating it nearly every Friday—in the twelve years Andrea and I have lived in this part of the country, we’ve built plenty of memories around these places too. For a while, I’ve wanted to compile some of the thoughts and memories we’ve had: nothing profound, but all things I’ve observed and pondered.
The last few pages in Heretics of Piedmont, after the story and epilogue, are acknowledgments. I am very thankful for those who supported me through my first writing journey. You can read those pages for yourself, so I’ll refrain from reiterating them here. I want to give special attention to my wife, Andrea.
A few years ago, I remember her asking me a question: “What’s one of your dreams you’d like to see come true.”
Every Christmas season, a certain piece of music seems to follow me everywhere—from radio jingles to shopping mall speakers. But it wasn’t until a snowy evening in 2012 that Handel’s Messiah truly captured my heart. That December, I decided to take my wife on a date to see the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s performance. I had always liked classical music, but nothing prepared me for what I would experience that evening.
Daily commutes don’t need to be boring. For the past 14 years (except for a hiatus in 2020), my drive to work has been about 30 minutes. I learned early on to listen to something and have since consumed over 2 months of audiobooks (thanks Audible!). But of course I’m driving, so I have to be aware of my surroundings too.
One feature that captivates me nearly every day is a wide, slow moving river that once represented the border of the colonial frontier. The Susquehanna was the first major obstacle to westward expansion, and it was the route I travel on now that generally follows the same highway on which generations of early pioneers trudged. US 30 crosses the river on the Wright’s Ferry bridge, and just downriver this is the older Veterans Memorial Bridge (currently closed for a few years of retrofitting). On my side of the river (York County) sits Wrightsville borough, and on the Lancaster County side is Columbia, which was once a candidate to be capital until Washington D. C. won out.
When airport baggage conveyors brought mine and Andrea’s matching black suitcases into a terminal, it was hard to distinguish them from other generic bags rolling alongside them. They were branded as Jeep, but they weren’t extraordinary, and toward the end of their usefulness, I picked them out by their rips, broken wheels, and other scars.
They were part of our marriage from the beginning. My parents bought them from Sam’s Club as their wedding gift to us, and our first trip with them was our downtown Chicago honeymoon. The original plan was a honeymoon in the Yucatan Peninsula, but spring 2009 was the height of the “Swine Flu” epidemic, and with all the flight and hotel accommodation cancellations, we settled for the far less tropical Windy City in May.
My family has about a fifteen minute drive to church. It’s a scenic drive that includes farm fields contoured to the rolling hillsides, thick woodlands, and a small town. Often as my family loads into our car, the bells of a nearby church sound out through the southern Pennsylvania countryside. It’s not our church, but I still enjoy hearing those bells—the ancient call for the community to worship their Creator, Lord, and Savior.
I’m not sure about everyone else, but for me it’s easy to be pulled into investing in shiny new tools when learning a skill.
When I picked up running, I heard about all the gadgets: smart watches, GPS, pricey shoes, running shirts, running shorts, head bands, wrist bands, armbands for your phone, apps for your phone, app subscriptions, virtual running coaches, and many more. Where do you start?
I’ve found writing to be the same. There are computer programs to write your first draft and others for editing; there are spelling/grammar checkers and analyzers that give you metrics for the whole manuscript (overused words, redundancies, glue words, etc.). But don’t forget about the research, plotting, and planning stages, each having their own array of tools you can choose from.
I admit it—I’ve cried during a movie. And it’s hard to say that. I grew up proud of being unemotional; in fact, I would say I’m still pretty restrained. Yet, a few years back as a 30-year-old man, I actually shed a few tears while watching a film. No, it’s worse than that: it was during a documentary—and not the kind you would first imagine.
My wife, Andrea, and I were watching BBC’s Planet Earth II. Yeah, you read that right: Planet Earth. It was towards the end of the first episode, Islands. It wasn’t about cuddly dogs or majestic eagles; it was penguins. Let me explain.
In December 1958, (a few months before Mt. Zion Baptist Church of Brogue, Pennsylvania was founded), Leonard Read published a short essay in a magazine called The Freeman that made this assertion: no single person on the face of the earth knows how to make a pencil. He wrote the essay, I Pencil, to illustrate the futility of a planned economy and the power of a free market. Though this is not about economics, I see an interesting parallel with a letter written almost 2,000 years before I, Pencil.
Modern society, perhaps more than ever, drives us to consume. We consume products then dispose of them when they become outdated. We absorb all that our phones, computers, Alexa’s, and streaming service demands. Though some of us may spend less time consuming than others, we still devour food, media, and words daily.
And what of our relationship with God? We can sit under preaching three times per week. We read and prayerfully consider the Bible, which of course is all good. But I argue that just as we consume, we also ought to create.
Daily commutes don’t need to be boring. For the past 14 years (except for a hiatus in 2020), my drive to work has been about 30 minutes. I learned early on to listen to something and have since consumed over 2 months of audiobooks (thanks Audible!). But of course I’m driving, so I have to be aware of my surroundings too.
One feature that captivates me nearly every day is a wide, slow moving river that once represented the border of the colonial frontier. The Susquehanna was the first major obstacle to westward expansion, and it was the route I travel on now that generally follows the same highway on which generations of early pioneers trudged. US 30 crosses the river on the Wright’s Ferry bridge, and just downriver this is the older Veterans Memorial Bridge (currently closed for a few years of retrofitting). On my side of the river (York County) sits Wrightsville borough, and on the Lancaster County side is Columbia, which was once a candidate to be capital until Washington D. C. won out.
1 John 5:7 is probably the most controversial inclusion in the King James translation of the Bible. Often referred to as the Johannine Comma (Latin: Comma Johanneum), entire books have been written about this one verse, either for or against its place in the Biblical text. It is arguably the most concise Trinitarian declaration in the New Testament:
For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
To start off 2024, I’m excited to announce Heretics of Piedmont: A Novel of the Waldensians as part of a unique giveaway!
The organizer of this giveaway, Jayna Baas, had such a creative idea to promote an amazing collection of books that literally spans centuries of faith.
As a side note, one of the books in this giveaway, Whose Waves These Are by Amanda Dykes, was one my wife and I read together. It was a favorite of ours in 2022, only to be topped by another Amanda Dykes novel: Set the Stars Alight.
I recently read a blog post by Pastor Tom Brennan titled, “How to Write a Book.” I’ve read two of his books and have been impressed by both the content and quality, so I knew his insight here would be valuable. A point he made in the post that caught my attention was this:
Only write a book if you have read at least twenty-five books on similar subjects.
I agreed, but then I wondered if I had read that amount for my two (almost three) fiction books. I realize nonfiction study is different from researching a novel, but still I think it’s a good standard to hold myself to. Had I done that though?
Folk stories and songs shape culture. What would the United States be without Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone, England without Robin Hood, Scotland without William Wallace, or France without Joan of Arc? They embody the national spirit and provide legends passed down from parents to children through the generations.
During my ongoing study of the Waldensians, it’s easy to get bogged down in historical dates, names, and places, but miss the intricacies of daily life. They were (and are) a people with a name and even their own language. Yes, they have a written history dispersed across a few dozen books, pamphlets, and tracts. But the Waldensians also have songs, legends, myths, and poems—the kinds of culture parents teach their children and that have survived intact through centuries of oppression.
Every so often in history, it seems everything happened at once. A recent example future historians may evaluate is the rapid downfall of colonial empires from the end of World War II until the 1960’s. Further back was the period of national revolutions beginning with the American Revolutionary War and ending with the Napoleonic Wars.
Build Up
The most interesting to me, however, is the “explosion” of Bibles in the early modern period. Before the sixteenth century, the Bible—both Old and New Testaments—were inaccessible to most people. The Latin Vulgate was the most extant version, but few except for the Roman Catholic clergy could read it. Translations existed in English, French, German, etc., but they were not published or distributed to commoners, and thus are mostly lost to history. Everything changed, though, with a series of events starting in 1452.
No … but I imagine that answer lacks sufficient explanation.
This article is my opinion based on my education and recent research, yet it’s far from scholarly. I do, however, want to explain my conclusion as one who has thoroughly enjoyed studying about the Waldensians: a historic, dissenting branch of Christianity predating the Protestant Reformation by at least 400 years. They are also the subject of my novel, Heretics of Piedmont, the first part in a series I have titled Witnesses of the Light.
With a story set in the fifteenth century featuring oppressed Christians, it is impossible to avoid talking about the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, they were the ones doing the oppressing. In a sense, it would be easy for me to paint the Catholic Church as pure evil—the persecutors of God’s people, the Mary-worshipers, the harlot of Babylon.
But Heretics of Piedmont would be very edgy, boring, and frankly, a bad novel if I went down that road. I certainly wouldn’t want to read a book like that. Representing the Roman Church with a straw man might seem like the way to travel, but I would be doing my readers a great disservice. I could have used scare quotes around the word church when speaking about Catholics, leaned into conspiracy theories about Jesuits (even though they didn’t exist yet), and resorted to a cheap caricature of what the medieval Catholic Church was.
To start off 2024, I’m excited to announce Heretics of Piedmont: A Novel of the Waldensians as part of a unique giveaway!
The organizer of this giveaway, Jayna Baas, had such a creative idea to promote an amazing collection of books that literally spans centuries of faith.
As a side note, one of the books in this giveaway, Whose Waves These Are by Amanda Dykes, was one my wife and I read together. It was a favorite of ours in 2022, only to be topped by another Amanda Dykes novel: Set the Stars Alight.
I recently read a blog post by Pastor Tom Brennan titled, “How to Write a Book.” I’ve read two of his books and have been impressed by both the content and quality, so I knew his insight here would be valuable. A point he made in the post that caught my attention was this:
Only write a book if you have read at least twenty-five books on similar subjects.
I agreed, but then I wondered if I had read that amount for my two (almost three) fiction books. I realize nonfiction study is different from researching a novel, but still I think it’s a good standard to hold myself to. Had I done that though?
I’m not sure about everyone else, but for me it’s easy to be pulled into investing in shiny new tools when learning a skill.
When I picked up running, I heard about all the gadgets: smart watches, GPS, pricey shoes, running shirts, running shorts, head bands, wrist bands, armbands for your phone, apps for your phone, app subscriptions, virtual running coaches, and many more. Where do you start?
I’ve found writing to be the same. There are computer programs to write your first draft and others for editing; there are spelling/grammar checkers and analyzers that give you metrics for the whole manuscript (overused words, redundancies, glue words, etc.). But don’t forget about the research, plotting, and planning stages, each having their own array of tools you can choose from.
I sat on a church pew one Saturday morning watching my children practice their Christmas program. It was going to last almost two hours, and I didn’t have anything except a notebook to occupy my mind.
Three days earlier, I had finished planning my first novel, but other than about thirty pages of notes, I hadn’t yet written anything. I wanted to write it, but I needed something to propel me into the actual first draft.
How did I find myself writing a story about Renaissance-era religious dissenters?
Since I can remember, I’ve had a love of geography. Some of my first memories were from watching the 1990 animated movie, The Rescuers Down Under. There’s a short scene where the heroes relay an important message from New York City to Australia. The camera zooms out to show a map and how a telegraph message went from point to point, halfway around the globe. I would have my Fisher Price globe with me and would trace my finger across the places where that message landed.
Trailers for movies have been around for a long time, but it wasn’t until video distribution became simple in the mid-2000’s (especially in the advent of YouTube) that book trailers came into existence.
For Heretics of Piedmont, I read from multiple sources that a trailer is helpful, but not totally necessary. I didn’t pursue it until just before that book’s release in September 2021. Video production is not at all something I was comfortable with, so I scoured Fiverr for a seller who could develop in a style I liked.
Did you know the Waldensians had their own translation of the Bible? It was probably translated from an Old Latin version (often called the Vetus Latina, not to be confused with Jerome’s Latin Vulgate) into Old Occitan (also called Romaunt or Provençal over 1,000 years ago.
In Heretics of Piedmont and its sequel (whose name is yet to be revealed), I wanted to add a couple places where the Waldensians quoted or read from the Bible in their native tongue. I mentioned the book, The Romaunt Version of the Gospel according to St John, in the Selected Bibliography section of Heretics of Piedmont, which ended up being an incredible resource for understanding the Occitan Bible. The author, William Gilly, transcribed the entirety of John’s Gospel from the original parchment manuscript into easily consumed text.
Part way into writing Heretics of Piedmont I found myself typing the phrase: “after a few minutes.” I paused, shut my eyes, and doubts entered my mind. That wasn’t the first time I had used a phrase like that, but it felt like I should check into it.
Heretics of Piedmont is set in the 15th century—1458 to be precise. Did people even think in minutes and seconds then? Did numerical time-of-day exist in the common person’s mind? After some study, I found that most people—especially those outside the major cities—only thought of time in relation to the sun’s position in the sky.
The last few pages in Heretics of Piedmont, after the story and epilogue, are acknowledgments. I am very thankful for those who supported me through my first writing journey. You can read those pages for yourself, so I’ll refrain from reiterating them here. I want to give special attention to my wife, Andrea.
A few years ago, I remember her asking me a question: “What’s one of your dreams you’d like to see come true.”
Have you ever read a story—whether a novel or a children’s book—where you rolled your eyes at the unbelievable? In fantasy and fairy tales, we expect to encounter extraordinary or even absurd characters, people, and settings. That expectation allows you to continue on and enjoy the story despite the fiction. But if we experience a contrived plot or unfactual statement, no matter the genre, we feel cheated and deflated.
I would say the genre of Heretics of Piedmont, historical fiction, has a similar but deeper challenge. Very little has been written about fifteenth century Waldensians. What accounts exist are described in, at most, a few vague paragraphs. I admit, I was deliberate in choosing that century versus the later ones; we have many more vivid accounts in the 16th and 17th centuries. Historical details of men such as Joshua Janavel or events like the Piedmontese Easter are easy to find. The preceding periods of Waldensian history are spotty and mostly from their papal enemies.
We are in an age of endless information—one might even argue too much information. Not only can we find a diagram illustrating the Pythagorean theorem in seconds by reaching into our pocket and tapping a glass pane a few times, but we also know minute life details of our friends, acquaintances, and strangers around the earth. For most of us, information is both easy to access and readily available.
I decided to write Heretics of Piedmont in the fall of 2020. This was a time when the United States, after a lull in restrictions during the summer, began to lock down again. However, to write the novel, I needed information—lots of it.
Modern society, perhaps more than ever, drives us to consume. We consume products then dispose of them when they become outdated. We absorb all that our phones, computers, Alexa’s, and streaming service demands. Though some of us may spend less time consuming than others, we still devour food, media, and words daily.
And what of our relationship with God? We can sit under preaching three times per week. We read and prayerfully consider the Bible, which of course is all good. But I argue that just as we consume, we also ought to create.
With a story set in the fifteenth century featuring oppressed Christians, it is impossible to avoid talking about the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, they were the ones doing the oppressing. In a sense, it would be easy for me to paint the Catholic Church as pure evil—the persecutors of God’s people, the Mary-worshipers, the harlot of Babylon.
But Heretics of Piedmont would be very edgy, boring, and frankly, a bad novel if I went down that road. I certainly wouldn’t want to read a book like that. Representing the Roman Church with a straw man might seem like the way to travel, but I would be doing my readers a great disservice. I could have used scare quotes around the word church when speaking about Catholics, leaned into conspiracy theories about Jesuits (even though they didn’t exist yet), and resorted to a cheap caricature of what the medieval Catholic Church was.
