New Book this week!

It is finally here. The Six-Liter Club released this week on April 6. This baby has been a long time coming. I wrote the original version in 2003 during my first year in Kenya. Written initially under a different pen name for the secular market, when my agent shopped my alter-ego around, alas, the novel had too much Christian content for the secular market. But my protagonist, who is an African-American female, the first trauma surgery attending at the Medical College of Virginia in 1984, is not a Christian. Therefore, her lifestyle isn't Christian. She is definitely in need of redemption! For this reason, the Christian Booksellers Association publishers thought the book too "edgy" for publication by a Christian house. So, I was caught in the middle: too Christian for the secular market, too edgy for the Christian market.

After two years of searching, my agent (Natasha Kern) finally found a home at Howard Publishers (division of Simon and Schuster). They had a unique request for this book that they understood was "pushing the envelope": write something else first. They wanted the book for publication, but didn't want to publish it as their first Kraus novel. So, that's where Salty Like Blood came into the picture. I showed a Howard editor what I was working on and they said, we'll do that first, then publish The Six-Liter Club the year after that.

So that's why this book has been seven years in the making. I did have to do some revisions to make it a bit more acceptable for the Christian market. Don't get me wrong. I don't write anything graphic, but a few scenes were altered to soften its impact on very conservative readers.

I don't want to shy away from tough subjects just because the activity is unchristian. Think about the Bible. There is plenty of sin going on. It's just not glorified. That's where I draw the line. I would never write a scene involving sin and not show in some way that there are negative consequences to it.

This book involves some significant backstory from Africa. The protagonist, Camille Weller, is an orphan. Her mother, a Congolese native, was married to an American missionary surgeon. Her parents were killed during the Simba rebellion in the Congo in the mid 1960s. In my research, I read the accounts of several martyrs, Christian missionaries who were killed during that horrible time. When I realized that my immediate neighbor, Steve McMillan, shared the last name of one of the men I'd read about, I asked him about it. As it turned out, one of the missionaries who was killed was his father. Steve had lost his father at age eleven in the Simba rebellion and yet later returned to serve the Congolese people as a missionary himself.

The original idea for this story came to me as I was sitting in church one Sunday morning when my pastor, Phil Smuland started telling a story about some American missionaries in the Congo during the Simba rebellion. A missionary stepped out on his front stoop and looked to the north. The Simbas (the name of the group revolting against the new government of Congo) were going house-to-house killing all of the westerners. He looked south and saw the same thing. In a few minutes the slaughter would reach his home. In desperation, he killed a few of the family's chickens and sprayed the blood around the kitchen. He then hid below his house with his family. When the Simbas arrived a few minutes later, they saw the blood and "passed over" the home, leaving the family unharmed. What a beautiful picture of the Passover this is. I immediately started thinking about weaving a new novel and somehow incorporating this imagery. Again, I can't give away how this relates to the new book, because I don't want to spoil the story.

Anyway, I'm rejoicing this week because The Six-Liter Club is finally here. It is yet another witness to the grace of God in my life. I'm not foolish enough to take credit for this stuff myself. It is the God of grace who empowers imperfect fingers for his work.

Thanks and enjoy reading,

Harry Lee