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| Michael J. Webb |
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| The Oldest Enemy |
Today is a special day for my friend Michael J. Webb. Today this long time author will unveil a new website and release his latest thriller The Oldest Enemy. Okay---it won't be released today, but the pre-publicity sales start today. I checked amazon and it is available for download at this moment. If you are a fan of thrillers, you will want to download this book. If you are a hold-book-in-hand reader, you will look forward to Oct. 15 for the paper version.
Tell us about yourself. Where do you
live and what do you like to write? What are your hobbies (especially as it may
relate to your books)? Tell us about your family. Help the readers get to know
you.
My
wife and I live in Charlotte, NC and we love to travel. Our favorite “get-away-from-it-all”
destination is St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We are both big movie buffs, and we enjoy
hiking and snorkeling. We have a 112
gallon salt water reef tank, which is like having a living underwater garden in
our living room. I’ve been to Israel 15
times, taking groups on educational and service tours a dozen times. We’ve been
in the Ukraine and Honduras on ministry trips, and we try to get out to Denver,
CO whenever we can (we both love the snow-capped Rockies).
Antarctica is on my wish list (I’m working on a
novel where much of the action takes place there) and we both would like to do
an African photographic safari. I would
like to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro while we’re there, with a copy of Hemingway’s
short story, The Snows of Kiliminjaro,
in my backpack. When I was younger I did a lot of mountaineering in the Grand
Tetons of Wyoming. One of my dreams is
to hike to the base camp of Mt. Everest.
The other is to spend a couple of weeks hiking New Zealand staying at
bed and breakfasts along the way and tour Australia by car, including a
snorkeling trip to the Great Barrier Reef.
When did you decide to be a writer
and why?
In my mother’s womb. Just kidding. I wrote poetry through high
school and the first couple of years of college then tried my hand at short
stories. I soon realized that the
stories I wanted to tell wouldn’t fit into either of those molds. I started thinking about writing novels as a
career in my late twenties, but didn’t begin working at the craft regularly
until nineteen eighty-four. I spent the
next six years researching and writing a novel that was longer than Mo by Dick, War and Peace, or Atlas
Shrugged. When I finished it, I proudly
sent it off to an agent and received an eight page, single-spaced, typed
rejection letter. I had to pay this NY
Agent a fee to read the darn thing, so the rejection letter cost me a little
less than $100/page. Anyway, that
attempt at “The Great American Novel” eventually became a trilogy. The first two books were published in the
early nineties. The third book has yet
to see the light of day. I’m in the
process of issuing the entire trilogy as E-books, but that’s a story for
another day, best told on a cold winter’s morning over a cup of hot Honduran
coffee or Black tea from the Ukraine.
Oh, by the way,
I still have the rejection letter, and no, I didn’t frame it.
Too long—just
like my first attempt at a novel!
What made you believe you were
called by God to write?
God gives us the Godly desires of
our heart, because He put them there in the first place. Every good and perfect gift comes from
Him. When we are passionate about taking
care of the things that are important to Him, He is passionate about taking
care of the things that are important to us.
He is a loving Father who desires His highest and best purposes for all
of His creation. Before I accepted His
free gift of eternal salvation, He did not love me any less or any more than He
does today, almost thirty years later, and it is important for people to know
that about Him. I have had a desire to write for most of my adult
life, but it wasn’t until I turned from what I thought was important (as Moses
did when he encountered the Burning Bush) and focused on Him that I realized a significant
part of my destiny in Him is reaching people through writing with His message
of Love, Redemption, and Restoration.
What is your message? What do you
hope to accomplish through your writing?
I am, at heart, a teacher, and I desire to share
many of the exciting things I have learned from sitting at the feet of my
Master for almost three decades. I also want to engage people who in any way, shape,
or form put God in a box. He constantly amazes me every day with His “newness”
and challenges me to test my own personal doctrinal beliefs against His Word
and the Holy Spirit--and to measure my effectiveness at sharing the Good News
by the only standard that matters to Him:
the Fruit of the Spirit.
I don’t
view myself as a “Christian” author, but as a writer who pens stories from a
Christian worldview. There is a major
difference in those perspectives--and not simply one which is a matter of
parsing words.
At the
core of my writing are two sentiments expressed by the Ancient of Days--one in
the Old Testament, and the other the New.
The Prophet Hosea wrote: “My
people perish for lack of knowledge . . .” and the Apostle John tells us that
if we love God and keep His Commandments Jesus will manifest—openly display—Himself
to us.
Both of
those staggering ideas are woven into the fabric of everything I write.
We are living
in “perilous times,” as prophesied in the Bible, and there are an awful lot of
misconceptions about God and His Word and the nature of the spirit realm among
Believers and Unbelievers alike. It is
more imperative than ever before that anyone who sincerely seeks God’s face, as
Moses did, must not focus on their individual “religious” or “doctrinal” beliefs,
but on developing an intimate relationship with God and His Son through the
Holy Spirit using His written Word as their infallible and unfathomable guide.
If we do
that, the rest takes care of itself.
Who is your main audience and why?
Anyone who loves to read
thrillers, mysteries, suspense, or wants to venture into a new genre. I want my readers to feel like they have
figuratively eaten a ten-course meal when they finish one of my thrillers. I also have a passion to reach those who are
not yet Believers, people who read secular thriller writers, especially men (in
general women tend to read fiction more than men). My goal is to become a significant alternative
voice in the secular fiction realm and develop a recognizable and accepted
platform to express a God-centered worldview instead of a humanistic one. In the process, I hope to have the support
and encouragement of my Brethren.
What is the greatest challenge you
face as a Christian author? Why is it your greatest challenge and how do you
intend to overcome it?
Whew, that’s a deep question, and it ties in to both
the one above about my “message,” and why I write. It is very hard today to write almost
anything without offending large groups of people on either side of whatever
coin is being tossed, whether in the religious or political arenas. I’ve discovered over the years that I push
the envelope of the sensitivities of both secular and Christian readers with
both my fiction and non-fiction works.
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| The Master's Quilt |
Interestingly,
the once seemingly divergent, but actually parallel, thematic aspects of both Christian
and secular fiction are now catching up with one another--and converging. What
used to be taboo in Christian fiction is now routinely written about-and either
tolerated or accepted--and what used to be offensive to secular readers who
felt they were being proselytized under the guise of engaging fiction is now
more accepted than ever before-- if it is done wisely. To paraphrase Dickens,
“It is the best of times, and the worst of times . . .”
The short
answer to your question is this: My greatest challenge today as an author is
striking a balance between the sacred and the profane in such a way that I
engage the maximum number of readers and have the greatest amount of impact--in
both camps--without sacrificing what the Lord puts in my heart to write.
Please provide a brief
listing/description of all the books you want to promote.
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| Balaam's Error |
My current supernatural
thriller, The Oldest Enemy, which
won a contest last fall sponsored by Risen Books (www.dndbooks.com),
releases as an E-book September 28th, 2012 and as a paperback October 15th. My first non-fiction book, In the Cleft of the Rock: Insights into the
Blood of Jesus, Resurrection Power and Saving the Soul came out in 2007. The
Master’s Quilt and Balaam’s Error (new
title The Nephilim Parchments) came
out in the early 90’s as part of a trilogy.
The third book, Song of the
Seraphim, was never published. I’m
in the process of publishing the entire Giants
in the Earth trilogy as E-books later this fall. My first two supernatural thrillers and In the Cleft of the Rock can be purchased
on Amazon.com @ http://www.amazon.com/Michael-J.-Webb/e/B000APGU40/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1348097179&sr=1-1
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| In The Cleft of the Rock |
Your readers can follow
me on my FB Fan page at http://www.facebook.com/MichaelJWebbBooks,
or my website www.michaeljwebbfiction.com. I can be reached by e-mail at michaeljwebbbooks@gmail.com.
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