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Dronefall My Books The Birth of Dronefall

The Birth of Dronefall: The Story

I’ve had a lot of dreams like this: Who are they? We don’t know. What do they want? Can’t say. But they’re peeping at the windows, and we’ve got to hide.

I was researching for a project in college when my interest in drones and mass-surveillance solidified. I started to conjure up a future where drones ran the world. They dominated the airspace, delivered the packages, cleaned the chimneys, kept the peace, and few questioned it. This was a world that believed constant surveillance was the only way to protect the public. But in the end, humans still had to call the shots. Someone had to decide who was a threat.


For my main character, I picked out a cynical young woman who believes she’s irrelevant and invisible to society—until someone behind a monitor (or is it just an algorithm?) seems to target her as a threat. So, she takes off and joins her only friend in a neighborhood full of Christians that have their own reasons they wish they were invisible.


I don’t know. A story about a gang of people who hunt surveillance drones just sounded kind of fun to me. There was just enough escapism in the sci-fi concepts to pull me in. I wanted to write a dystopia, but I didn’t really want it to be a non-stop bummer story. The fact that so much of my thematic material was going to hit a lot of readers close to home made me want to make an effort to try to add some contrasting material—explosions, fascinating technology, unusual settings, vibrant characters, and even a decent bit of humor, if I could really pull all that off.


Most importantly, I wanted to give something great to Christian readers. I never meant Dronefall to be an evangelism tool. Life goes on after you get saved. It isn’t easy, either. I wanted to write as a ministry to other Christians, like me, who wanted to step back from the chaos and confusion of life and see life’s spiritual battle from a new vantage-point. I wanted to show them people they could identify with in a world rougher and scarier than their own still standing up for the things we believe in.  


I don’t think the goal of Christian dystopia is to be alarmist or get everyone dreading the future. Instead I want to make Christians aware of the direction the world is headed around us. Because no matter how it looks, it’s a good direction. It’s God’s plotline. You’re a hero in his story and a part of the most thrilling and magnificent epic imaginable. 


If you read the Dronefall series, you’re going to start recognizing elements of it in the world around you. But I hope, beyond the pain the state of history gives you, you’ll discover a sense of exhilaration. Now is the time to stand up, speak out, and shine brightly with the truth of Jesus Christ. This is what you’re on earth for.      

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Dronefall My Books The Birth of Dronefall

The Birth of Dronefall: The Seeds

Through the heart of my Alma Mater’s main campus runs a railroad. A slow freight drags through a few times a day, typically, covered in weathered graffiti. Whistle wailing and detuned bell chiming, it shakes the library where I lived most of my college days.

As a student, I wore a lot of dark eye-make-up and went around with my backpack slung over one shoulder, which was bad for my back. I was there for academics only and typically sat in the back of the class avoiding participation. I made good grades and no friends, but I didn’t really care. I had an idea for a new book.

The idea was born under vaguely hostile conditions. The vagueness, in fact, was part of the inspiration. As it turns out, mainstream society, even in my small town has some kind of a problem with Christianity. There were a few occasions when this was very obvious, but most of the time it was just subtle enough to make me wonder if I was imagining it. Maybe I just have that “Christian Persecution Complex” they talk about. That weird paranoia that evangelicals have where they suffer from delusions that the world is out to get them. No idea where such absurd thoughts would come from.

And yet, why did so many professors feel the need to use their classes as platforms to spread their anti-Christian beliefs? In Ethics, Christianity was an outmoded faulty guide to right and wrong, in Logic God was impossible and ridiculous, in History we watched a video on the Scopes trial that took up a disproportionate amount of class time and portrayed Christians as truth-hating loonies. I learned that Christianity was an enemy of art, science, progress, personal responsibility and free thought. It promoted racism, sexism, slavery and fear and hatred of other cultures.

And it wasn’t just on campus. I remember one incident in particular on a chat-group on Goodreads. It was one of those groups where sophisticated adults have sophisticated discussions about world events. There was a thread about Islamic terrorism. Almost immediately, the topic was hijacked and changed to a slightly different subject—the increasingly relevant problem of “Christian terrorism.” Someone mentioned the Crusades and how it was probably “in their DNA” by now.

Everywhere I looked, I could see the true face of Christianity being hidden from the world and a grotesque caricature replacing it. Christians are told to keep their religion to themselves or else they’ll be discriminating against those with other beliefs. But Christianity isn’t going to be forgotten. If God’s people keep their heads down the rest of the world will have no problem building a hideous strawman in the void.

How long will society emphatically deny that they have a problem with Jesus Christ, his truth, and his followers? How long will the post-Christian world insist Christians are delusional for noticing the world is hostile to them and their God?

That’s what I wondered in that train-rattled library during my college days.
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Dronefall My Books The Birth of Dronefall

The Birth of Dronefall: The Gap

I think I was thirteen years old when I dropped Return to Harmony on the floor and didn’t bother to pick it back up. I told my mom I didn’t like books that were about quote, “people’s lives and how they feel about them.” I really wasn’t that into the fluffy inner struggles of young ladies and how their bland love interest’s hair smelled.

When I was thirteen, I liked stealth military aircraft and meteor showers and those little kits where you can hatch things. Honestly, I still prefer those things over reading stories about people’s lives and how they feel about them. I actually have a kit for triops on my desk as I write this. I can’t wait to get it started. Hope it works.


So, I noticed fairly early that the Christian fiction market was a little lacking. There are quite a few sweet romances out there starring heroines with rather obvious problems who learn rather obvious lessons and get the guy who was rather obviously designed for them. Apparently, this appeals to Christian women. I have no idea what male readers are supposed to pick up. Maybe Christian men don’t read fiction.


I started writing fiction of my own when I was about that [author name]-dropping age. There was a frolicking joy in the process of invention that I found addictive. Naturally, I leaned toward science-fiction. At last, my inner worlds took shape as real places—planets, alien landscapes full of fantastic geography, bizarre life-forms and near-magic technology.  My teenage adventures in The Stardrift Trilogy saw the first manifestations of my writer’s voice, and on that journey, I learned the dark art of finishing novels.


I didn’t stop writing after The Stardrift Trilogy. I had a mission—a gap to fill. I wanted to write thrilling imaginative stories that took Christian fiction far outside its stale narrow box. The truth of Jesus Christ isn’t restricted to the tidy easy messages and quick prayers of light inspirational women’s fiction. It’s vast and wild—reaching through all time and space, deeper and wider than any of us could ever imagine. So much unexplored potential was tantalizing to me.


As I grew up, new facts of life came into my broadening horizon of awareness. The world around me was changing—faster and faster. The future was coming. It was right at the door. It was a strange exotic future, full of horror and hope. I began to realize something about the future. Much of it can be seen in the present. In fact, the closer you look, the harder it is to see the line between the two. 


I graduated from high school not really knowing what my personal future was going to look like. All I knew for sure was that I was going to keep writing, and keep following God. Eventually, I chose what seemed to be the path of least resistance to me. I was going to study music at the university in my hometown.