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| Michelle Shocklee |
I met Michelle
Shocklee years ago at an ACFW conference, and we've kept in touch since. I’m so thrilled that we can celebrate the release of debut novel with her. Enjoy as Michelle shares part of her journey to
publication. ~ Dawn
God’s
Timetable is Perfect
The famous first line from the book Moby Dick is familiar to most of us.“Call me Ishmael,” Herman
Melville wrote in 1851. Well, sometimes I want to tell people to “call me
Sarai.” You know, from the Bible. The woman who waited most of her life for a
child. No, I’m not waiting for a baby. God wonderfully blessed me in that
department twenty-six years ago, and again two years later, with two of the
most handsome, smart, talented, funny young men you would ever hope to meet.
(Yep, I’m a bit biased and proud of it!) The reason I feel like Sarai, or Sarah
as she was later called, is because I have been waiting to give birth to my
first novel for ages. I mean, ages.
All my life, I’ve been an avid reader. As a young woman, I
devoured Janette Oke books, dreaming of writing my own novel someday. That day
came when I was twenty-five years old. I worked for a mortgage company doing
icky things that involved massive amounts of numbers. Numbers and Michelle
don’t typically get along, so the position was not a dream job. On my lunch
hour, in order to get away from those icky numbers, I took my lunch to a nearby
park and read. One day, the beginnings of a story popped into my head.
Characters came to life. Plots sprung up out of nowhere. Excited, I started
taking a large yellow notepad with me instead of books, furiously writing out
the scenes as they appeared in my head like a movie. Months and months later, with
a stack of several notepads in my car marked up with edits, I wrote THE END. Of
course, I knew it would be a best-seller!
Fast forward to today, twenty-something years later. You’ll
note my bio doesn’t say “best-selling author” Michelle Shocklee. Nope. You see,
that manuscript—as well as the next six manuscripts—was never published. I’d
made the mistake many newbie authors make, and that is believing I knew how to
write a novel. Boy, did I have a LOT to learn!
My debut novel, THE PLANTER’S DAUGHTER, the first book in
the Women of Rose Hill series,
released a few weeks ago with www.LPCBooks.com.
I am super excited! But you know what? I might not have ever written this
particular book if I’d been published years ago. The journey to writing this
book, which is truly the book of my heart, included rejections, revisions, and
untold hours of writing books that will never see the light of day. And I am
perfectly fine with that, because God’s timetable and plan is perfect. The
years leading to this point were not wasted. I enjoyed a lot of life while waiting for the birth of this
new “baby.”
Just as God fulfilled Sarah’s desire for a child, He is
fulfilling my desire to be a novelist. But it’s in His timing, not ours, that
dreams come true.
Adella
Rose Ellis knows her father has plans for her future, but she longs for the
freedom to forge her own destiny. When the son of Luther Ellis’s longtime
friend arrives on the plantation to work as the new overseer, Adella can't help
but fall for his charm and captivating hazel eyes. But a surprise betrothal to
an older man, followed by a devastating revelation, forces Adella to choose the
path that will either save her family’s future or endanger the lives of the
people most dear to her heart.
Seth
Brantley never wanted to be an overseer. After a runaway slave shot him, ending
his career as a Texas Ranger and leaving him with a painful limp, a job on the
plantation owned by his father’s friend is just what he needs to bide his time
before heading to Oregon where a man can start over. What he hadn’t bargained
on was falling in love with the planter’s daughter or finding that everything
he once believed about Negroes wasn’t true. Amid secrets unraveling and the
hatching of a dangerous plan, Seth must become the very thing he’d spent the
past four years chasing down: an outlaw.
Born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Michelle Shocklee is a Rocky
Mountain girl at heart. But after living in Texas the past thirty years with
her tall Texan husband, she has grown to truly appreciate the Lone Star State’s
rugged beauty. Her family lived in Williamson County, the setting for her debut
novel The Planter’s Daughter, for
more than twenty years. She and her husband currently live and work on a
400-acre ranch in the Texas Hill Country where they can often be found spoiling
llamas, sheep, and chickens. She is a contributing author in numerous Chicken
Soup for the Soul books, magazine articles, and writes the Life Along The Way
blog.
The
Planter’s Daughter is the first book in The Women of Rose Hill series, a historical series set on a Texas cotton
plantation before and after the Civil War.
Visit these sites to learn more and connect with Michelle:
