gracemorph300 Grace, describe yourself for our visitors.

I’m an Irish New Zealander living in Germany. I grew up on Star Trek and Narnia, which eventually led me to write sci-fi, but often with a fantasy twist as well. I love reading, especially Stephen Lawhead’s books and the new wave of Christian sci-fi and fantasy like Sharon Hinck, Karen Hancock, Kathy Tyers and so on. I also like messing around in the kitchen and believe recipes were made to be variated upon (What? No eggs in the house? Let’s use chocolate pudding instead!). I have two cats, who are really my kids! I mess around with web design and make all my own sites and the graphics on them, and I like to invent things if there’s a need – like a desk-protector to stop the cats chewing on my mouse cables, or a rain-catcher below a leaky pipe to save water for my indoor plants. I’m very active on the Internet at places like Shoutlife, Myspace, and the Lost Genre Guild. There are so many awesome people I would never have met otherwise!

How do you find time to connect with God?

In the morning when I get up I like to make a huge cup of tea with loads of honey in it, and listen to Irish instrumental hymns or worship music. It takes a while for me to wake up (I am NOT a morning person!) and the music seems to fill me with calm for the day as I sit there and chat with God.

Tell us about your journey to publication.

This was a learning journey. Early on I realized there’s not much of a market for Christian sci-fi and decided to self-publish and see what happens. This will allow me to market it to niche fans while keeping my costs low. Along the way I’ve learned lots from my crit partners and fellow writers pursuing the same path. I’ve taught myself formatting, graphic editing for the covers, Internet marketing, self-editing and style basics, and sent the manuscript off to the printer when I decided it was ready – after seven rewrites!

Tell us about your current book.

Faith Awakened is set in Ireland of the future and explores questions of reality and virtual reality in a spiritual sense.

A computer technician gets more than she bargained for when she helps survivors enter virtual stasis to escape a raging plague. The technology takes them into a fantasy virtual world which they thought they’d designed, but they find themselves tightly under God’s control at every moment.

How did you come up with ideas for this book?

Ever since I was little I’ve asked myself if it would be possible to go back and do things differently. And then came the thought that if this was so, I might be in a re-run right now and not know it. This idea eventually led to the basic plot concepts found in Faith Awakened.

What’s next for you?

I have a bunch of ideas and one of them seems hotter at the moment – a saga vaguely like Pilgrim’s Progress except that it happens in space during an epic journey of seven planets, and it has a fairytale kind of feel including romance and the entire Gospel message.

Where can visitors find you online?

My main book site is at www.faithawakened.com

And for a links page with other locations including YouTube, Goodreads, the Lost Genre Guild, and much more, please visit www.faithawakened.com/hang.html for a complete listing.