CHRISTINA Bless, 16, never seems to be content with being a normal teenager. She doesn’t spend time texting on a smartphone or dawdling her time away on the more popular social media. When she is online it’s most likely to study, research a new story or sell one of her imaginative creations.
Bless is a whirlwind of activity. She’s been involved with 4-H Club for years. She competes in equestrian gymkhana events. She’s an artist. She sews costumes to attend movie premiers and comic cons. She practices archery and she makes handmade chainmail clothing. Oh, if that’s not enough, she’s teaching herself to play the violin and guitar.
Home schooled, Bless reads a lot. She’s really into fantasy and science fiction and admits to having read the unabridged version of “Lord of the Rings” three times. Her favorite authors are—not unsurprisingly to those who know her—J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
What makes her truly unique, though, is that at 16, she has already self-published her first book, a novella titled, “Born of Courage,” which is being sold on Amazon under her pen name, Christina Bennett, and she is already writing her second, a faith-based novel, “Wings of Light.”
“I’ve always had a love of story,” she said of her journey to become a writer. “I started reading really independently pretty young, around four or five. Books have always been a big thing at our house. I read pretty much anything. I lean toward sci-fi and some fantasy, if it’s done well. There’s such an overabundance of bad fantasy. I like speculative fiction, which is what I’m writing now.”
Her own adventure tales came from oral storytelling, or role playing with friends. She said she made two early attempts to write down her stories.
“I tried one when I was around nine, but it was a complete rip-off of ‘Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,’ (an animated movie from DreamWorks starring Matt Damon and James Cromwell). I changed a couple words. That was my favorite movie then. I still love it.”
She made another half try at writing a book when she was 12. She managed to finish the synopsis, but decided it was overburdened with clichés and set it aside. She was recently cleaning out her desk and came across it again and it went into the shredder.
“I was going to do a graphic novel,” she said. “That didn’t really get anywhere. It was experimental. I’m taking a little bit of the concept behind it and tweaking it and going to write a time-travel novel after the one I’m working on now.”
She didn’t give up, though, and began working on “Born of Courage” as part of her online high school curriculum that involved a one-year course on how to write a novel.
“You write a book over a year and they teach you storytelling,” she said. “I had the idea going in and that I wanted to write a mediaeval story.”
The curriculum was more structured than Bless likes when writing.
“I had to write a full outline and I didn’t particularly like it,” she said. “It didn’t feel right. Outlining feels too rigid. It’s like trying to fit the story in a box. It worked for that story, but it’s not my favorite way to work. What I’m doing now is by-seat-of-my-pants writing. I have a couple of plot points. I tell my characters they’re going on a bus and going to Chicago, and then New York and Tulsa. I don’t really care what they do in between, but that’s where they need to go. That’s how I prefer to work because it’s more spontaneous.”
The story is set in the mythical country of Auchterburgh. There’s a good king who dies early in the story, leaving a young daughter to fend for herself. And there’s the evil king. The girl impersonates a boy, runs off to become a warrior in an army that her brother heads, and eventually overcomes the evil king—all in 128 pages.
She said she likes to play with words and their sounds to come up with the names of locations.
“Most of the details are actually German because I liked how it sounded, such as the Battle of the Burgeon Mountains. Burgeon literally translates as ‘mountains.’ So, it’s actually the mountain mountains,” she said of her in-
side joke.
Bless readily admits she’s not the fastest writer. Her average daily output is 100 words, though she has had sporadic days of 500 words. Speed is not her intent. Solid storytelling is what she’s after, especially as she works her way through “Wings of Light,” with a goal of at least 50,000 words, making it a full-blown novel.
“Wings of Light” will be her first faith-based speculative-fiction novel. For those unfamiliar with the term, speculative fiction includes characters created out of imagination and speculation rather than reality and everyday life. Her story involves what she calls ‘half angels.’ She’s quick to explain these aren’t fallen angels or the Nephilim of the Old Testament, but they are biblical in nature. She said she knows she has to come up with an original name to call her creations to avoid comparisons with the darker variety of angels.
She hopes to have the book completed sometime in November and wants to approach a traditional publisher, rather than self-publish again. She explained that she self-published because she did not think a traditional publisher would take it on and the process of getting it on Amazon was remarkably simple, so she went that route.
“We also wanted to give it away as Christmas presents and it’s a long route to go through traditional publishing,” she said. “I ordered 40 copies, some for gifts and some to sell. I went to a weeklong workshop and before I went there I told everybody I was bringing copies if anybody wanted one.”
Her mother is not only her home-school teacher, but also her primary editor when it comes to punctuation and grammar. When it comes to the story itself, Bless enlists her friends.
“We have the online forum, so it’s on there and I let people critique it,” she said. “On my last one I had at least 10 people, each of them doing one draft. I had two people give me full novel critiques. I ended up doing seven drafts.”
When she’s not writing, she’s either studying with the ultimate goal of going to college where she wants to major in kinesiology, the scientific study of human movement, or she’s involved in one of her many hobbies. One of the more unusual is the making of chainmail, or ring-
mail, clothing. When you consider how much tedious work goes into making anything out of tiny chain rings, it’s easy to understand how Bless can spend hours creating fanciful stories.
“The ringmail came about because I’m very much of a visual learner,” she said. “It’s the same reason I learned to knit and crocheted. I have a couple of friends who do it and thought it looked like fun. It’s not a super popular thing because it requires a lot of patience.”
Her most ambitious project so far was a shirt made from 30,000 rings.
“I have a friend who is a blades man. He makes knives and I did a trade with him,” she said. “He made me this gorgeous dagger and I made him a shirt of ringmail. It took over 200 hours to make. I’m working on a shirt for myself. It cost about $150 in materials. It’s not a money maker. I just do it for fun.”
ChristinaBless’ book ‘Born of Courage’ is available for purchase on Amazon
at http://goo.gl/OXPnHc.
