When Nadine died in May of last year, I was certain she had taken my soul into the ground with her. It took me a long while to see that I was wrong. What she actually left behind for me was a list.
The list
She had been asking me for years to write these books, and she asked because I had already failed her once. I stood up in front of her Sunday School class and poured out everything I knew about apologetics in a single session, all of it, all at once. They came in with questions. They left with more.
That evening she told me the truth, which was her habit. That was not a lesson, she said. That was an information dump. Then she gave me the instruction I have been trying to obey ever since: write it properly, so that an ordinary person can follow it.
So I began writing down everything I had gathered since my father died in 1994. I should explain what that gathering was. After I buried him, I set out to disprove God. I did not do it as a pose. I worked at it honestly, for twelve years, and in 2006 I gave up because the evidence had beaten me. It is the only failure of my life that I am proud of. The books Nadine asked for are what that failure produced.
My first reader
My one sorrow in receiving this honor is that Nadine is not here to read the drafts. She read them after chemotherapy. She read them after proton radiation, a treatment aimed at one small area of the head, and I do not have the words for what it cost her. What I know is this: she was in pain I cannot describe, and she would still pull the pages onto her lap and ask me what happened in the next chapter.
She would sit and watch me at the board while I drew lines between my characters, hour after hour of lines, for The Cross Examination and for Ward No. 8. She was worn out, and she stayed. To the last page of her life, she was my first reader.
I will be honest about how I live now. I work or I write. I rarely leave the house. Most days I am at the desk for more than seventeen hours, as if I were racing something I cannot see and cannot outrun. I do not offer that as a model for anyone. I offer it because it is true.
I believe she would have been proud of me tonight. For most of our life together she believed in me more than I believed in myself, and I am still learning to borrow her confidence.
Becca and Stavros
I am grateful, too, to Becca and Stavros. They take a genuine interest in what I write. I am sure some of it bores them, but in all these years they have never once let it show. They read every review as it comes in. They sit through plots that could put a stone to sleep and still have good questions at the end. Some mornings, the two of them are the only reason I get out of bed.
The award
I am honored, and I count it a blessing, to have received Best Fiction Christian Author in the United States for 2026 from Best of Best Review. It covers books submitted between August 2025 and July 2026, and it is decided not by critics but by readers’ reviews. That detail is the one that leaves me speechless. These are people who finished a book, closed it, and went out of their way to say something about it. I never imagined so many of them would take to Christian novels written by a young earth creationist.
Along the way my work has been featured in CEO Times, BIZ Weekly, and Men’s Insider, and I am thankful for every door that has opened.
But if anyone has earned this award tonight, it is Nadine, Becca, and Stavros. I only held the pen.
Nadine, you asked me to write it properly. I am still trying.
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