Create Unforgettable Characters

For Your Fiction

Character Creation For The Plot-first Novelist.

Hi I'm Jeff Gerke a guy who loves Christian speculative fiction.Christian fantasy. Christian science fiction. Christian time travel. Christian spiritual warfare.
Christian supernatural thrillers. Christian "chillers." Christian alternate history. Christian pure speculative. I even like Christian speculative gaming, manga, comics, animation, machinima, and animation.
If it's Christian and it's speculative, I'm there. I discovered the power of speculative fiction when I was twelve years old and the original Star Wars (Episode IV) came out.
I couldn't express it then but I knew something had happened to me when I watched that movie.
I went back to the theater and watched that thing eleven times in a two-week period.
I felt as if someone had unscrewed the top of my head and plugged this alternate world directly into my cerebral cortex.
The next time it happened to me was when I was in college and I discovered The Lord of the Rings.
The university library had one stinking copy of the entire trilogy and, wouldn't you know it, someone else was reading it at the same time I was.
By the time I had finished the trilogy I had realized there was real power in these stories.
I had seen worlds and creatures I had never imagined, and suddenly I was no longer satisfied with stories of the mundane.
If it didn't have a speculative element to it, I wasn't interested.
I realized something else. I realized that I wanted to figure out how to wield this kind of power for myself.
Here was true magic, and I would not rest until I had become an adept.
Along in here I became a Christian. I started wanting to read and write speculative fiction with a holy edge.
I wanted to write a Christian Luke Skywalker who counted Christ, not the Force, as his ally.
Then I developed an idea for a series of novels set in a mythical place I called Dragonsgaard Castle.
Dave Lambert, then senior fiction editor at Zondervan Publishers, saw something in those stories.
He worked with me on revisions and, though I never got the thing published, it was a taste of what was to come.

Most importantly, we've garnered a reputation of producing quality speculative fiction.
With God's blessing, Marcher Lord Press has become the pathfinder company I always dreamed it would be.