I can trace the genesis of Operation Lotus Sunday to June 2004. However, before I get to that, I want to set the stage of where I was in my writing career at that time.

The place was the Write To Publish Conference in Wheaton, IL. This was my first national conference to attend, having been to one regional conference in early 2003. I came there to pitch my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant, to editors and agents. It was completed and polished with several rounds of edits. I had another idea in my back pocket, the start of my second novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, which I was ready to share if the opportunity arose. Other than this, I was planning on attending classes, meeting other writers, and generally enjoying myself.

The first day I was able to pitch DLA to an editor, who passed on it. I had an appointment with a second editor the next day, and hoped for the best. The classes were turning out quite good (though I took a couple that probably weren’t the best for me). As we talked about each others’ books and writing “careers” I got to thinking about what my next steps would be.

For me, I was in the process of deciding if I was a writer, or if I was someone who had written a novel. DLA was done; FTSP was outlined but not started, and whether it would ever be written was an unknown. Did I have more books in me? I was working on my poetry book at the time, but I knew that was almost certainly not for commercial publishing. So where was I going?

Construction on the campus of Wheaton College, the venue for the conference, meant difficulty of moving around. There was no evening coffee shop on campus, and I didn’t want to walk off campus to find one. So after the evening sessions I went to the computer room in the dorm and updated on e-mail and a few web sites (no laptop in the family back then). And thought about what I could write. An hour later I was alone in my dorm room, and thought some more. Slowly over those four days, ideas for more writing projects came to mind.

I’ll tell about the two main ideas in the next segment.