So what eventually got you writing?

From the age of 18, it was always something that I had to do. But it wasn’t until I was about 25 and had just finished my Masters degree in forensic psychology in Australia that I thought, This is that time when I want to go back to this, and I want to give it a decent shot.  Even my ideas about the story had changed. My family had spent between 1996 and 2000 living in Indonesia, which was right during that time of the east Asian financial crisis, and they been evacuated from Jakarta in the midst of civil unrest and riots. It was a bit of a scary time.

So I was visiting in Indonesia during that whole four-year time period and had started to track what was going on politically there. When the violence really broke out in 1999 I felt like, Wow, this story is the one I want to write about this mission trip. It seemed like it should be set in the midst of a conflict, a modern conflict that is actually happening today, and see if we can untangle it. There were so many layers to what was going on in Indonesia that was just fascinating. And I thought, What would happen to a team of teenagers who were somewhere nearby when what happened happened?  What would that be like? So that’s when I started to go down that path of really thinking, I want this book to be about teenagers, but at the same time I want this book to be set in the midst of a really real conflict today. That’s a really long answer to your question, so I guess about 18, but it didn’t really start to take shape until my mid 20s. 

That’s exciting. And then, you kind of broke the rules. You didn’t go about pitching it in the usual way with some sample chapters or getting an agent. You actually wrote the entire manuscript of My Hands Came Away Red and sent it out to people that would take it unsolicited, correct?

Yeah, I wasn’t thinking about publication when I wrote it. I wrote it because I always knew in the back of my mind that [publication] might be an option one day, if I was very. very lucky.  But it was that feeling of “I have said I’m going to do this, I feel tasked to do this, so just do it. Now is the season to do it.”  In retrospect, it might have been wise to do a little more preparation.  To learn, for example, that manuscripts are not typically 170,000 words long, which was how long it was when I had finished it. So, I overwrote drastically.  That’s how little I knew.  I was like, I’m gonna write it, so I might as well just finish it. So I almost didn’t let myself think about publication until I was finished. 

I always thought that that was jumping too far ahead in the process.  And I just feel, compared to how challenging it was to write it, I feel so blessed by the publication process.  I didn’t know what to do when I finished it, so I started thinking about, What do you do with these things once you finish it? And I looked up publishers who took unsolicited manuscripts, and I sent it out to three of those. Two of them were interested, and Moody was actually the very first publishing house I had queried.  So, that was just, it just felt like an amazing God thing.