Tomorrow is the official release day for Window of the Heart. It seems like it's taken forever to get here and only a few moments at the same time. When Heather Greer, Regina Merrick, Erin Howard, and I met back in 2019, we had no idea four years later we'd write a series together. But mine is the third book in the series and we're set to have all four out by the end of the year. Crazy!
This little book started as a writing prompt during KenTen Writers' Retreat. All four of us were sitting at the same table and decided it would be fun to set a story in the chapel there at the park. And because Erin loves fantasy, she included someone falling through the window into a future.
Well, here we are in the real future. And in December, her character will fall through the window of our chapel into a dystopian future, complete with castle and prince. ;)

Writing can be a lonely job.
At least that's what they say. I've not really discovered it to be so because I've pretty much had someone come alongside me through my whole journey. The last few years, I've had an extra special relationship with Heather Greer and Erin Howard, getting together several times a year to hang out, write, edit, and lift each other up. We also have a constant message thread going.
I've had a few friends close by who are willing to get together every so often too. But one of them moved away and the other had a baby, so we haven't been able to meet as much.

Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to a brand-new author. I was blessed to be her content editor for her first book baby, which released last week! I think you're going to love getting to know Lori DeJong as well as learning about her story.

Lori, congrats on your first release! How long has it taken you to get to this point in your writing career and are there any lessons you can share with us that you learned along the journey?
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Thank you so much! This has been a long-time dream come true. I actually started writing a couple of years before I joined a national writers’ organization in 2002. That’s when I realized writing was more than putting words on paper. It’s a craft that has to be studied and honed. I learned a lot over the next several years. Then in 2009, my husband was laid off and we went through a long time of upheaval trying to get back on track financially. God showed up in big ways during that trial by fire, but one of the things that was laid aside was my writing. I didn’t start up again until late 2019 and joined ACFW (American Christian Fiction Writers) in January of 2020, just before Covid closed everything down. I was stunned at how different things were in the writing world after being away for so long and decided I would spend that first year back educating myself. The silver lining of Covid was that many conferences, workshops, and writers’ retreats were held virtually, and at a much lower cost, so I was able to learn a lot. It was in an online writers’ course that Love’s True Calling was born. I honestly never planned to write it. But by the time I was through with the course, I really loved this story and felt compelled to write it. It went on to win the Scrivenings Press Novel Starts Contest in 2020 and the ACFW Genesis Award for Romance in 2022. The biggest lesson I think I’d share is to never give up. Never. I wish I could get that decade back that I didn’t write, but it was always in the back of my head. I think I always knew I’d get back to it.

Having been blessed to be your content editor, I know your story better than some others. What inspired you to write a second-chance romance, a romance where characters have been separated for a while and then brought back together?

Thank you for all the valuable feedback you gave me as my content editor!
For this online course I mentioned above, I had to come up with a character and their motivation, then plot a novel based on why they want (motivation) what they want (goal). That’s how I came up with Harper, who was motivated by her need for validation. But being a romance writer, I needed a guy, so that’s how Wyatt came to be, who’s motived by the need for atonement for the guilt he carries at not being able to prevent a tragedy in his youth. I wanted these two to have a history that they bring with them into the story, so I made them childhood best friends whose paths took drastically different directions as they grew older. The first scene in the book is the first time they’ve seen each other since a heartbreaking event that happened eleven years before.
 
Your characters work in a really neat organization that helps youth develop a greater faith and stronger relationships when they might not fit in otherwise. Is this based on a real organization? Where did you get the idea?

I was a YoungLife leader in college, so ConnectUP in my books (series of three) is very loosely based on that, only much smaller. It’s a student ministry not connected to any one church or youth group that focuses on kids that don’t necessarily know Jesus personally and may be looking in all the wrong places to find their value.
 
I know you're working on your second and third books in the series. Can you give us any sneak peeks?

Sure thing. Book Two, Love’s True Home, (June 2024) is Ally and Zane’s story. She yearns for roots in American soil after being raised on several different foreign mission fields while he craves adventure, especially if it involves a foreign mission assignment. As they work together to launch more ConnectUP clubs, they start to fall in love. But when he finds his place in a foreign mission, she has to decide if she shares his calling or has to walk away to let him be all God wants him to be.
Book Three, Love’s True Measure, (June 2025) tells the story of Hunter and Shannon. She was raised in a wealthy family by a workaholic father and a mother who put her value in their position. Shannon knows her true value lay in who God says she is, not in her family name and works in ConnectUP as a ministry volunteer. Young, bright, attorney Hunter Cavanaugh considers his status to be the measure of who he is as a man. Suddenly the guardian of his fourteen-year-old half-sister, his 80-hour work weeks become a thing of the past. He’s grateful when his pretty neighbor steps in to help him with his grief-stricken sister, and he finds himself curious about the things Alexis is learning at ConnectUP about Christ. But when he’s tasked by his superiors to do something less than ethical with the promise of all he’s worked so hard for, will he measure his worth by man’s standards or God’s? And will Shannon be able to leave the ghosts of her past behind to help a young girl seeking her own value in a new world?
 
What is it about romance that made you choose that as your genre to write?

I love a happy ending. It’s honestly that simple. But that’s also the challenge in writing romance. A reader of romance knows when they pick up a book pretty much how it’s going to end. At least that the characters will end up together even if they don’t know how. It’s the “how” that the writer has to make interesting. The journey the characters take from the beginning to their happily ever after has to be compelling enough to keep the reader engaged. And hopefully pick up your next book.
 
Your book deals with a few tough topics, like alcoholism, abuse, suicide, and even the loss of a child. It definitely put me through all the feels. Was it hard to include such hard topics in the more lighthearted setting of romance?

It was. Teen suicide is epidemic in this country. Wyatt’s own experience with this is what’s compelled him to minister to kids, to hopefully help them find their way to a God who values and loves them without question or condition. Teenage abuse is also more common than most people realize, with young girls being abused by their boyfriends and not knowing how to get out. That’s Harper’s backstory. Those were really the only tough topics I’d planned for the book when I plotted it out for my online course. But as I started writing, the characters revealed new things to me that deepened their motivations and colored the way I wrote them. I love when that happens, though. As a discovery writer (fancy speak for writing by the seat of your pants), there are often times my characters will reveal something in the middle of a scene that I didn’t know beforehand.
 
Last but not least, can you please share with us one fact about yourself that very few people know?
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Hmm. This one’s difficult because I’m a pretty simple person. And kind of an open book (pun intended). So I’m not sure if there’s anything very interesting. Haha! The only fun fact that comes to mind is I was the baseball announcer at my small college back in the early 80’s. It was kind of a big thing at the time because I was the first female announcer they’d ever had, put me in the school paper and everything. That’s my only claim to fame, I guess, and it really was only about 15 minutes. Haha!
Thank you so much for the opportunity to interview with you, Amy!