On May 18, 2004, Billie Rae was sitting at the kitchen table at her home in northern Michigan when a peculiar thought started to form in her mind.
She had just visited a friend in mid-Michigan, and during that visit her friend had related the story of one of her young female clients. Working as a children's counselor, this friend had a case on her hands that was truly ripped from the local headlines. In fact, when her friend started to describe this young girl's case, Billie Rae remembered the news reports of the crime years earlier.
"How on earth do you approach that?" Billie Rae had to ask her friend. All she could see in the situation was desperation ... desolation. It was evident, as her friend explained, that here was an example of where faith and work collided, where one's occupation had no choice but to sit within the framework of one's deepest held beliefs. Her friend was, above all else, a Christian.
Her friend's story nagged at Billie Rae until, on this particular day in May, an idea began to gel for a new story to tell, a story that explored the desperation of this dark criminal case, but one that also served to ultimately provide the answer. The more she thought about it, sitting at the table, the more ideas began to drift into her mind.
She disregarded it, for a while. She had no interest in beginning another novel, quite frankly. "Rubi" was about to be released into print later that year, and she had just finished writing "Call Me Mary Magdalene" two months earlier. The laborious road of editing that second novel still lay before her. She considered this new potential plotline wonderful and tremendously inspired, but she dismissed it nonetheless.
The idea was not so easily dismissed, however. In the ensuing weeks, more and more details were added to this new project, first just in her quite-unwilling brain, then finally typed loosely into a Microsoft Word file she named "Untitled project 5.18.04." At that point, Billie Rae determined that if this was, indeed, a project the Lord was asking her to take on, then He would clear the way for her to do it. He would make it happen. Nothing is beyond His power, after all.
In September of that year, Billie Rae moved to Metro Atlanta, Georgia, and the "Untitled project 5.18.04" Word file moved right along with her, tucked conveniently onto the hard drive of her computer -- and added to rather regularly.
It was one year later that Billie Rae felt led to actually begin writing the book. A full list of characters had been drawn, a rough outline had been set, locales had been established and even named. On May 18, 2005, one year after the initial idea arrived, she dug in. She wrote one scene a week, by hand, on breaks from ministry work during the week, then typed each scene in that following Saturday, doing some initial editing as she went. She finished the novel about a year after that, then began the process of editing. And editing. And editing.
The further the project moved along, the more exciting it became. Now that it's complete, Billie Rae truly believes it's the most important thing she's written. It certainly came about in a way that was different from anything else she's written. Discernment is tough business sometimes, she has learned, but she has every faith that if "Enie" is not meant to succeed, it won't. And that will be OK by her. Because the story will still, in essence, be told.
It is Billie Rae's prayer that this story -- which is actually not about her good friend's young client, but about the effects that a horrific crime has to all those who are involved -- will be a blessing to you.
Enie
A Story of Redemption
New in 2009
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What's different about "Enie" ...
- It is Billie Rae's first novel written in the third person, rather than the first person.
- "Enie" is set in the South, unlike her other two novels, which were set in Detroit.
- Proper names (city names, street names, character names) have, for the most part, been derived from the names of Billie Rae's grade-school classmates in rural Michigan of the 1970s.
- As a special initiative in honor of her mother, who died of lung cancer in 2007, and in pursuit of the message of "Enie," Billie Rae mailed 100 free copies of the novel, fresh off the press, to family and friends who've supported her in her writing career, all through 2009.
