Jan Stob, Karen Watson, Stephanie Broene, Lorie Popp, Jennifer Ghionzoli, Babette Rea, Vicky Lynch, Christy Wong, Kathryn Olson, and the rest of the great people at Tyndale House—for giving me my start in Christian publishing. I’ll always appreciate you!
Sibella Giorello—for encouraging me when I doubted my writing calling. I hope to write half as well as you someday.
Lori Fox—for screaming out loud at work when you heard I won Operation First Novel. You are true blue, dear friend. I am very glad to have you in my life.
Sergeant Kerry Nye of the Lititz Borough Police Department—for walking me through a DUI traffic stop. Any mistakes are mine.
Rel Mollet, Sheryl Root, Katie Hart, and Deena Peterson—for reading and commenting on early chapters of Thicker than Blood. Thank you, ladies.
Jennifer Erin Valent—for traveling the road before me. Your spiritual support has challenged me at all the right times. Thanks for praying.
Travis Thrasher—for so graciously answering all my many publishing questions.
Baldwin’s Book Barn in West Chester, Pennsylvania—for giving me my first book scouting experiences. I based all the good parts of my fictional bookstore on your store.
Tom Doherty, former manager of Baldwin’s Book Barn—for teaching me the points of a first edition For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Thank you for taking the time.
Erica Nantais—our childhood games inspired this story. I hope someday we’ll meet again and that you’ll get to read this book.
About the Author
C. J. Darlington is the award-winning author of Thicker than Blood, Bound by Guilt, and Ties that Bind. She has been in the antiquarian bookselling business for over fifteen years, scouting for stores similar to the ones described in her novels before co-founding her own online bookstore. A homeschool graduate, she makes her home in Pennsylvania with her family and their menagerie of dogs, a cat, and a paint horse named Sky.
Visit her Web site at www.cjdarlington.com
Thicker than Blood
Q&A
Where did the story idea come from?
Thicker than Blood was born on May 1st, 1995 as a story called “The City Girl and the Country Girl”. I was fifteen-years-old, and I still remember the excitement I felt at starting a new story.
As kids, my twin sister Tracy and our best friend Erica would often play imaginary games and pretend we were different characters. We had great fun role-playing and making up stories for our fictional creations. One of our characters was a woman named Christy who had a sister named May living on a farm. Sometimes during our games Christy would go to visit May on the farm. That day in 1995 I thought it would be fun to write their story in novel form. I began asking myself fun, what-if questions, including, “What if May shared Jesus with Christy?”
From the time I was fifteen to nineteen I worked on the story off and on. Christy morphed from a real estate agent to a used bookstore clerk with a troubled past. I finished the first draft, and then spent the next several years re-writing.
At twenty-four I completed what I thought would be my final draft. It was 67,000 words long, and I submitted it to the very first Christian Writers Guild Operation First Novel contest on January 7th, 2004. The grand prize for the winner was publication as well as a cash prize. Thicker than Blood placed as one of twenty semi-finalists but didn’t make it to the finals.
I spent the next four years submitting and revising the manuscript further. I added about 10,000 words to bring the manuscript up to a more marketable 77,000 words.
On September 3rd, 2008 I felt a nudge to submit the manuscript to the Operation First Novel contest again, and in November I found out it was a finalist. On February 19th, 2009 I was amazed when Jerry B. Jenkins announced Thicker than Blood as the winner of that year’s contest. I couldn’t have been more blessed with the way the Lord brought it all about. I almost gave up on the novel but am so glad I didn’t.
What’s real and what’s not?
Dawson’s Book Barn is a fictional used bookstore, but it’s based on the real life store Baldwin’s Book Barn in West Chester, Pennsylvania. That’s where I first started bookscouting, and it’s an amazing five story barn holding over 300,000 books. It’s worth a visit if you’re ever in the area.
All of the book collecting and first edition information in Thicker than Blood is real and based on my own experiences in the antiquarian book trade. Some of the book values I quote will no doubt fluctuate over the years due to supply and demand, but most first editions will at least hold their value. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway was one of the first rare books I learned about as a fledgling book scout.
The town of Elk Valley, Colorado is fictional. Basically, I replaced the real town of La Veta, Colorado with a slightly larger version of itself and added many fictional details. The Spanish Peaks are the very real and amazingly beautiful mountains overshadowing La Veta and the entire Cuchara Valley.
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
I have written stories ever since I was a little kid. My most ambitious was called “The Horse’s Story”. I remember starting it when I was eight or nine on my Dad’s old word processor. It was about a horse named Loopter who would become Joshua of the Bible’s horse. He was going to be a witness of the walls of Jericho falling down, but . . . I never finished it.
Then there was my epic (started when I was twelve) called “Moby”, about a Labrador Retriever trying to find his place in this world. He tried being a lap dog (with some humorous consequences!), a fire dog, a police dog, a sheep dog . . . he never did find out what he was meant to be ‘cause I never finished that story either! Around this time was when I started dreaming of having a book published. I knew nothing of how it worked, but the seed was planted.
It wasn’t until I was sixteen and discovered writing how-to books and magazines like Writer’s Digest and The Writer at the library that my apprenticeship as a writer began. I devoured everything I could on the craft. I was so excited that you could actually learn to write. Being homeschooled taught me how to teach myself, so it was a no-brainer to teach myself how to write better. I learned so much from those books, but I learned the most from reading other novels.
Were books a big part of your life growing up? If so, what books would you say influenced you most as a child?
I loved to read! One of my favorite activities was going to the library. My sister and I would come home with bags and bags full of books. What a luxury to have so many available at my fingertips.
I loved the Childhood of Famous Americans series (Will Scout, Boy in Buckskins was a favorite), the Landmark series (I re-read The Swamp Fox of the Revolution several times), the We Were There series, and of course Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Jr. and the like filled my bags, too. And then there were the animal stories like 101 Dalmatians, the Dr. Doolittle series. And Narnia. I LOVED Narnia. They all influenced me without me even realizing it. But later, when I was an early teen I picked up Piercing the Darkness by Frank Peretti. Nothing was ever the same after that, and my desire to be a published author of Christian fiction flourished.
Do you put yourself into your books/characters?
There’s a little of me in all the characters I write. Christy’s background stems from my own experiences in the antiquarian book world, but there’s also some of me in May too. She loves the outdoors and animals like I do.
How much research did Thicker than Blood take?
The most research I had to do revolved around cattle ranching. Half of the book takes place on a modern day Colorado ranch, and I knew nothing about ranching when I first started. But over the years I have amassed a collection of books on the subject, subscribed to magazines like Farm & Ranch Living, and kept my ears tuned to anything and everything ranching. So really, I’ve been researching this novel as long as I’ve been writing it. The rare books parts of the story didn’t take as much research, but even so, I had to check my facts and make sure I
was getting everything right.
What was the most interesting fact that you learned while writing Thicker than Blood?
It still surprises me what books end up being valuable. Old doesn’t always mean rare. You can have a book from 1850 that’s worth five bucks and a novel from 1991 worth thousands. Think Harry Potter. A true first edition Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone (UK edition) can fetch over $20,000. And sometimes a book’s dust jacket can be even more valuable than the book itself, which is crazy.
What is the main theme of Thicker than Blood?
The main theme of this novel is that love is thicker than blood. God’s love, that is. As Christy and May Williams find out, their blood ties were not enough to keep them together. It takes something more to make them a family again. Another theme that’s important to me is that no one’s ever too far gone for God’s love to reach them. We might think we’ve screwed up too many times, that God could never love us for what we’ve done, but in reality God’s just waiting for us to take one step toward Him so he can wrap his arms around us.
Do you outline, write “by the seat-of-your-pants, or do something in-between?
Oh, how I wish I could outline a book and know all the twists and turns before I start! But then again . . . that might take away some of the fun of discovery. I’m pretty much a seat-of-the-pants writer. I do generally have a basic concept before I start. For Thicker than Blood I knew I wanted to write about two estranged sisters, but I didn’t know exactly how the book would end. In early drafts I had things stopping rather abruptly. It usually takes a couple re-writes before I discover exactly what it is I want to say.
Are there certain foods or snacks which keeps the words flowing for you?
I love a good cup of strong tea, and a triple cappuccino doesn’t hurt the word count either. I don’t really snack on food much when I’m writing, which is probably a good thing. Unfortunately, I do sometimes find myself in the kitchen when the words don’t come.
How does your faith affect your writing?
My faith is the reason I write. Several years ago I was questioning the value of writing as a ministry, and the Lord brought to my attention that Scripture in Ephesians which talks about each of us being called to different things. When I got to the part about evangelists, I felt like the Lord was telling me that was my calling. Through my writing I have the chance to share the greatest story every told. Maybe someone who would not receive from a pastor or a preacher would pick up a novel. That’s my hope---that people would read my stories and understand how much God loves them.
Bonus Scene:
I originally wrote this scene as a Prologue to Thicker than Blood to give readers a little of Christy’s history at the start of the story, and to help create empathy for her. But later I decided it diminished the power of the opening scene where she’s arrested.
It was the pounding at the front door that woke Christy Williams. She rolled onto her side and groggily eyed the clock. 3:11 am. Were Mom and Dad just getting in? They’d been at a convention all week for Dad’s new job and were coming in late to be home for her eighteenth birthday tomorrow. She squinted at the clock again. Today, actually. But they should’ve been back by now, and why would they be knocking?
Christy pulled up on her elbow, listening. She’d made her fifteen-year-old sister May go to bed at ten since it was a school night, but she’d waited up hoping to greet her parents. When they hadn’t arrived by midnight she’d gone to bed herself.
Another flurry of knocks made Christy sit up. Mom and Dad would’ve let themselves in. Why weren’t they answering the door? Were they so exhausted they couldn’t hear the pounding? She threw off her covers with a groan and felt around in the blackness like a blind woman for her bathrobe. Cinching the belt around her waist, she opened the bedroom door and listened. More knocking. Only louder.
Christy crept down the hall to her parents’ room. No lights. No voices. They must’ve come home and crashed right after she went to bed, though she was surprised she didn’t hear them. She usually slept lightly until they were home.
At the end of the hall she saw May’s bedroom door crack, and her sister stuck her head out.
May yawned, her light brown hair sticking to the side of her head. “What’s goin’ on?”
“Someone’s at the door,” Christy whispered. “I’ll get it.” May had an important history test tomorrow, and she needed to be in her prime. Being woken in the middle of the night wasn’t exactly conducive to remembering who Ferdinand Magellan was.
“Go back to bed,” Christy said and waited for May to close her door before venturing downstairs. Without even trying schoolwork came naturally for Christy. She aced every test and hardly had to do homework.
But no matter how many hours May studied, she was barely maintaining a grade point average of 2.0. It never had made sense to Christy how two sisters could be so completely different.
When Christy walked into the livingroom and saw the muted red and blue lights swirling on the ceiling through the sheer curtains, she knew who was knocking. And when she checked the driveway and realized Mom and Dad’s car wasn’t there, dread gripped her stomach. She slid the deadbolt and swung open the front door.
Two uniformed police officers stood on the porch. One had gray, almost white hair, the other could’ve been only a few years older than her.
“I apologize for waking you like this, Miss,” the older one said. “But is this the residence of Peter and Blythe Williams?”
Christy hugged her sides. She felt something rise up in her throat but quickly swallowed it down. “I’m their daughter. Why?”
“Can we come inside for a minute?”
“What did they do?” Dad had gotten into a bar fight a few years ago and had to spend the night in jail. Christy still remembered waiting anxiously at home when Mom went to bail him out.
Had her parents stopped for a round of drinks before coming home?
Exchanging a glance with each other, both officers hesitated.
“They were in an accident,” the younger one finally said.
“Are they . . .” her voice squeaked, “okay?”
“Miss, I’m sorry but--”
“What hospital?” She could feel her throat constricting. “Can you take me?”
“Miss.” The older cop glanced down at his shoes then met her eyes. “I’m so sorry. They both died at the scene.”
Christy mutely stared at the officer, his words hitting her like a tennis ball to a wall. They bounced right off. Her parents couldn’t be dead. They had it wrong. It was someone else’s car, someone else’s Mom and Dad. Hers were coming home for her birthday. Any minute now they’d drive up and prove these officers wrong. It wasn’t the first time they’d stayed out this late. They couldn’t be dead. This was just one huge, awful police mistake.
But even as Christy’s mind spun out the reasons why it couldn’t be true, somewhere deep inside she knew it was. Tears involuntarily sprung to her eyes. “What happened?”
“Their car hit a tree. They didn’t suffer.”
“Are you . . . sure it was them?”
The officer’s eyes were full of sympathy as he nodded.
Sobs convulsed inside her, but somehow she held them back. She had to stay strong. May was up there in her bedroom, probably sound asleep again.
“Is there someone we can call for you, maybe a relative or a neighbor?”
She glanced at the stairs. How was she going to tell her sister Mom and Dad wouldn’t be coming home? What was going to happen to them now?
Discussion Questions
If your book club reads Thicker than Blood and is interested in talking with me via speakerphone or Skype video, please feel free to contact me by email at [email protected], and I’ll do my best to arrange something with you. Thanks for reading!
1. Aunt Edna counsels May that God could be bringing Christy to her thoughts for a reason. Do you believe God often leads us through prompts like this? Wher
e during the story do you see God prompting May?
2. How would you describe Christy and Hunter’s relationship? Are they just friends or something more? Do you think their relationship will change after the events of the story? In what way?
3. What antiquarian book fact surprised you the most? Have you read any of the books Christy found in Aunt Edna’s library?
4. What was your first impression of Vince? When did it change? Are there negative influences in your life that you need to leave behind?
5. Why do you think Christy goes to the funeral only to run away from it early? What is she running from and why?
6. Who was your favorite character in the story? Which one did you most relate to?
7. Talk about the relationship between Christy and Jim. How would you describe it? Why do you think he pushes Christy’s buttons, and why does she respond the way she does?
8. Even though May says she forgave her sister years ago, do you think she really did? Why or why not? What causes May to change the way she thinks about Christy?
9. What is your favorite scene in the book? What makes that scene stand out for you?
10. Why do you think Christy has trouble believing God could love her? How did her perceptions about God change throughout the story? How have your ideas about God changed over time?
11. Which character do you think impacted Christy most for the Lord? What people in your life encourage you to grow closer to God?
12. What do you see as the theme of this novel? How does the title Thicker than Blood play out in the story?
13. How do you think May will react to Christy’s final gesture toward her? What would that scene look like?
Want to read more?
Mountainview Books, LLC presents:
BOUND BY GUILT
by C. J. Darlington
Turn the page to read an excerpt!
Bound by Guilt
Chapter 1
Don’t you ever feel guilty?” Roxi Gold cracked open her icy can of Dr Pepper and took a long sip.
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