"Achieving Your God Given Dream" by Brandt Dodson

A warm welcome to today's guest blogger, author Brandt Dodson!

The Narrow Way –
Achieving Your God Given Dream

Dreams. We all have them. They’re one of the many things in life that we share - that make us human. And yet most of us flail about, seemingly unable to define what it is we’re really looking for or to develop a plan for achieving it. I know. I’ve been there. But there is Godly advice on how to achieve your dreams – your ambitions – and it is found in Psalm 37: 4 & 5:

Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this. (NIV)

See? Isn’t that simple?

Not.

First of all, most of us have, for one reason or another, removed God from our dreams. We’ve kept Him out of that realm of our life because we’re often not sure that we want Him invading that part of our life. We trust Him with our eternal salvation, to heal us when we’re sick; we even ask Him to bless our food. We pray that He will keep us safe when we travel, and we pray that our loved ones will find Him. But trust Him with our dreams? Take the chance that He may say, “No, this is not my will for you”?

Preposterous.

Our dreams, our desires, are personal. Very personal. And very close to our hearts. And the things that are the most personal often tend to stay that way. We keep them close, seldom sharing them with anyone. Even God.

But that’s a mistake.

For years, ever since grade school in fact, I have wanted to write. It was the only thing – and I mean the only thing - that ever came easy or that I enjoyed. Whenever we were asked to write a theme or short story I felt like I had been given a pardon, a genuine chance to show what I could do. So it was only natural, I suppose, that I would develop a desire to write.

But like many people who reveal their dreams I was told that mine was impossible, unachievable, unrealistic, and maybe even a little bit irresponsible. After all, I had a duty to provide for myself and my family, and harboring an unrealistic dream of becoming a writer – a novelist no less – could only lead to a life in the gutter where I would inevitably land with my wife in one arm and a bottle of bathtub hooch in the other. Not a pretty sight and certainly not the things of which dreams are made.

So, unwilling to envision such a future for myself or my family, I went to medical school. And after four years of the most intense studying I had ever done, followed by a residency of 80-100 hour weeks, I opened my own practice.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited again.

I discovered that patients don’t beat a path to the door of new doctors, so I had plenty of time on my hands. And I still had a dream. I began to write again. And I read everything I could get my hands on in an effort to learn the craft - and then I began submitting – and collecting rejection slips. I submitted to every magazine I knew that would publish short stories; I even wrote non-fiction pieces.

But my dream was fiction. Novel length fiction. And yet, publisher after publisher had no interest in the type of fiction I wrote. And then I discovered Psalm 37: 4 & 5.

And I turned my dreams over to God.

Delight yourself in the Lord. I hadn’t been living like that. Sure I went to worship each Sunday, taught Sunday school, and even served as an elder. But I wasn’t delighting myself in God. I wasn’t committing my way to the Lord. Neither was I willing to trust in Him. Not with my dreams. Those were mine.

The path to success, whether it is defined as a happy life, a solid marriage, or achieving an unfulfilled dream, runs through Jesus Christ. The narrow way.

Now I’d like to tell you that I had found the secret. But I didn’t. What I did find was a new way of life. I learned that I had been putting the cart before the horse (sorry for the cliché) and had put the things I desired ahead of the Giver. I had put my desire to write on the throne of the One who gave me that desire.

And I was writing for me. I was writing secular fiction with a Christian world view. And the publishers I talked with weren’t interested in that.

And then God did the kind of thing only He can do. He gave me a different desire. I no longer had ambitions to write the novel that would endear me to Oprah or land me on the New York Times Bestseller list. In fact, as nice as all of that would be, I began to see it as empty, hollow. If that was all there was for me, I no longer had a desire to pursue it. The new dream God had given me had purpose and if I didn’t fulfill that purpose, all of the accolades in the world would leave me with the same empty feeling as an unfulfilled dream.

I now had the desire to write a novel that would reveal the truth of God; to write a novel that would honor Him.

Once the new desire began to form it wasn’t long before God directed me to a CBA writer’s conference. And within a year, I had a three book contract. A contract that has now been extended several times. God gave me a dream and then reshaped it and put it to work for Him.

I learned a valuable lesson.

If we don’t want to spend our lives chasing the wind only to be disappointed when we catch it, we must put God first in our lives. If we do that - and do it because that is His rightful place - He will give us desires that are in line with His. And then He will fulfill those desires in a way that we cannot. And His way is always the best way. After all, He’s God, the narrow way. And He can be trusted with our dreams.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brandt Dodson is the creator of the Colton Parker Mystery series and the author of the stand alone crime novel, White Soul. He comes from a long line of police officers and was formerly employed by the Indianapolis office of the FBI. Brandt is a board certified Podiatrist, specializing in peripheral nerve surgery for the treatment of painful neuropathies. He is a former United States Naval Reserve officer and currently resides in Southern Indiana with his wife and two sons. Brandt’s latest novel, Daniel’s Den, was released by Harvest House Publishers on February 1st, 2009.


ABOUT THE BOOK - Daniel’s Den

Daniel Borden and Laura Traynor live two different lives.

Daniel is a successful stock analyst in New Orleans. Laura operates a bed and breakfast in the Shenandoah Valley.

He is wealthy, enjoys racquetball, and lives with Elvis, a black Lab. She is a struggling single mother, works two jobs, and lives with her young son, Andy.

But when unseen forces send hit men after each of them, a twist of fate drives them together as they are forced to flee their common enemy.

In a high stakes game of cat-and-mouse, they learn just how big the cat can be.

And that it’s no game.


WIN THE BOOK

If you’d like to be entered to win a copy of Daniel’s Den, just leave a reply to this blog. I’ll pick a winner at random on February 13th. Please leave an email address so I can contact you if you're the winner. (To prevent spammers from trolling for your email, please use this format with the brackets--you [at] yourmail [dot] com--or something similar.) Good luck!

Meet Brandt Dodson - Interview & Book Giveaway

Today we’ve got another first! I’m thrilled to welcome my first male guest, author Brandt Dodson, whose new book is White Soul. Let’s meet Brandt!

THE BIO

Brandt Dodson was born and raised in Indianapolis. He is a board certified Podiatrist and the author of White Soul and The Colton Parker Mystery series from Harvest House Publishers. He resides in southern Indiana with his wife and two sons and is currently at work on his next novel. You can visit Brandt at www.brandtdodson.com.

THE INTERVIEW

JA: Your latest novel is White Soul. Please tell us about it.
BD: White Soul came about because I have a fascination with crime fiction and that’s especially true when the novel deals with organized crime. I think it’s one of the greatest scourges we have and one of the greatest drains on our economy that we’ve ever faced. Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that these groups make their money and grow their influence because they prey on the weaknesses of others. In short, because they know the temptations that many people face and are all to willing to capitalize on them.

Satan works the same way. Every one of us has been - and will be - tempted. Now we are not all tempted to sin by the same thing, but we all have our weakness. Even the most solid among us, will crumble if we do not keep our guard up as Paul warns us to do. Undercover officers face temptations as a matter of course. So when I decided I wanted to write a novel that confronts this issue, I could find no better vehicle than a novel about a Christian undercover officer who must deal with the temptations that surround him. To further add to the luster of the lifestyle he’s investigating, I set the story in Miami, the capital of flash and materialism.

In White Soul, Ron Ortega penetrates a group that is run by a ruthless drug lord name Ricardo Estevez. Estevez is trying to rebuild The Corporation (a real entity, by the way) in order to seize control of the drug flow into the U.S. and build new opportunities in the new, post-Castro Cuba. (Which we’re beginning to see) As his investigation proceeds, Ortega must answer the basic question: “Do the right thing? Or do the desired thing?”

JA: Your hero, Ron Ortega, is a cop torn between his family and his professional ambition. As someone who comes from a long line of police officers, how much of your personal experience were you able to put into Ron?
BD: In the sense that I grew up in a family of police officers and clerked with the FBI, I’ve been able to build the story off the psyche that cops seem to share as well as my own experiences. But other than that, the novel is built wholly off a mix of speculation and research. Which is not unusual, by the way. Mario Puzo is alleged to have once said he got everything he knew about Sicilian crime families from the public library. (Unfortunately, he didn’t have the internet)

JA: What do you hope people take away after reading White Soul?
BD: That temptation comes at us when we are at our most vulnerable and that if we going to resist it, we must live close to God. “Abide in me,” Jesus commanded.

In White Soul, Ron Ortega is a what I call a “functional” Christian. His conversion is real, he attends church services, and might even pick up the Bible on occasion. But he is not maximizing the opportunities that God has provided. He isn’t living as close to God as he could and therefore, like a moth, he is drawn to the flame.

JA: By the way, I love book cover art, and I have to say the cover of White Soul is just great. Is that a gun I see in the clouds, or are my eyes playing tricks on me?
BD: I had the same question when I first saw it. No, your eyes aren’t playing tricks. It’s a gun. I had an opportunity to meet the cover artist during the last ICRS (CBA for all of us oldies but goodies) and to tell him how much I have enjoyed and appreciated every cover he’s done. He just happened to have a mock up for White Soul with him and when he showed it to me I was ecstatic. When you write (or at least, when I write) I have an imaginary cover in my head. But I must say, the covers I have mentally pictured are in no way as good as the ones he does. He’s a very talented artist. I’m very fortunate.

JA: There are four books in your popular Colton Parker series. Do you have any more adventures planned for Colton? Is White Soul the beginning of a new series?
BD: I have several Colton Parker novels in my head, ready to go. But for the moment, my publisher has asked for some stand alones. White Soul is written as a stand alone, but could also be part of a series. I’ll have to see what develops. My next release, Daniel’s Den (January 2009) will be a stand alone and a straight suspense novel.

JA: I read that you were contacted by a porn actor after he read you first novel, Original Sin. What an awesome thing to be able to reach someone who isn’t the stereotypical “Christian fiction” reader! What’s the overall response been to your books?
BD: Very good. Very solid. My intent was to write for a male reading audience, an audience that has largely been neglected. In that sense, we’ve been successful.

My personal mission statement, as it relates to my writing, is to generate enough thought in the reader to have them go back to the Bible for more information. If I can direct my readers to become God’s readers, I will have completed the task that I feel He’s given me to do. The awesome thing about writing is that it covers the spans of time and space. I had a missionary in China recently contact me about an article I wrote over eight years ago. So you never know who your writing is going to touch, where it’s going to touch them, or how. I’m convinced that God meant for his people to be a reading people. After all, He wrote the greatest bestseller of all time.

JA: Besides being a successful fiction author, you’re a husband, father, and board-certified podiatrist. What does your family think about your literary life?
BD: They’re supportive. If they weren’t, I couldn’t do this. And I think they’re proud of me, but it hasn’t reached the point –yet- where my wife is willing to stand next to my chair while I have dinner and fan me with a big feather. (I say, “yet”. She’s says, “Never”) Karla and I have been married for almost 28 years. She still tells me to take out the garbage. To my sons, I’m just dad. And that’s a good thing to be.

JA: What’s something that people would be surprised to learn about you?
BD: That I like poetry. I read Dickens, Eliot, and local Hoosier favorite James Whitcomb Riley. I think poetry adds to life and it can add to a better, more economical use of language in nearly any writing endeavor.

I also like to cook.

JA: What authors have had the biggest impact on you?
BD: Chandler, Hammett, and Robert B. Parker, for obvious reasons. But it was Dean Koontz who got me to reading again. I had just opened my solo practice and since patients don’t exactly beat a path to your door in those early years, I went to the mall and bought a copy of The Bad Place. I read it and was impressed enough to read something like 12 or 15 of his backlist titles over the next two or three weeks.

I’ve also been influenced by Ken Follett, Tom Clancy, Jack Higgins, Ed McBain, and recently, Brad Meltzer and David Baldacci. From the classics, I like Poe (nobody, I mean NOBODY creates mood better than him), Dickens, Twain and London. (Dennis “Doc” Hensley turned me on to Jack London by opening up his work for me in a way I wished they had done when I was in school)

JA: Last but not least, how can people keep up with your latest publishing news?
BD: I have a website which is probably the best way. I can be reached at www.brandtdodson.com. I answer all correspondence and keep the site updated. I also blog on Amazon and on Keep Me In Suspense at www.keepmeinsuspense.com.

I enjoyed speaking with you, Jennifer. Thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you, Brandt, and continued blessings to you in your writing journey!

JEN’S REVIEW

This is the first book I’ve read by Brandt Dodson, and I became an instant fan. When I picked up White Soul, I had just finished reading three chick-lits in a row, so I was ready for some serious action… some testosterone, if you will. Man, did Dodson deliver!

In undercover agent Ron Ortega, Dodson creates a character who wants to do what’s right, but is constantly reminded of what he perceives as his shortcomings. Entrenched in the decadent and dangerous subculture of drugs and organized crime, Ron is surrounded by temptation. Through twists, turns and non-stop action, Dodson delivers a compelling, energetic story that is sure to challenge and entertain readers.

WIN THE BOOK

If you’d like to be entered to win a copy of White Soul just leave a reply to this blog. I’ll combine the responses of my Blogger and ShoutLife blogs to pick a winner at random on April 11th. Please leave an email address so I can contact you if you're the winner. (To prevent spammers from trolling for your email, please use this format with the brackets--you [at] yourmail [dot] com--or something similar.) ShoutLifers will be contacted via ShoutMail. Good luck!