Thicker than Blood

One of the great things about attending writer’s conferences is that you get to meet lots of authors and aspiring authors and hear about their up-and-coming projects. Each year the Christian Writer’s Guild along with Tyndale House Publishing sponsor Operation First Novel and the winner is announced at the Writing for the Soul Conference. This contest is an opportunity for an unpublished author to break into the world of publishing. The competition is fierce and the novels submitted are read with eagle eyes by editors and publishers. It takes determination and perseverance, but each year one hardworking person walks into the conference an aspiring author and walks out with a book deal. This is what we writers all work towards and when it happens it is a dream come true.

At the 2009 Writing for the Soul Conference I had the pleasure of watching as a young woman’s dream came true. CJ Darlington began writing the story that became Thicker than Blood when she was in her teens. She first submitted the manuscript to the Operation First Novel Contest in 2004 and came away as one of the twenty semi-finalists. Over the next years she submitted the novel to publishers and continued to edit and revise it. Finally, when she was just about to give up on the book she decided to submit it one more time to Operation First Novel and on February 19, 2009 she walked across a stage and became an author with a book deal.

Thicker than Blood is currently in the editing process and will be published by Tyndale in January 2010. CJ has recently created her web site and posted the first chapter of her book on the site. I read the first chapter and am excited to read the rest of the book. I encourage you to visit the web site of CJ Darlington to read the first chapter and learn more about her quest to become a novelist.