Human Connections Novels

The World We Live In – Books

Human Connections Novels help to bridge our interpersonal lives. Whether we are related by blood, love, or circumstances, the lessons we learn shape our world.

What do the following three sentences have in common?

Clare, wearing a long nightshirt, stood in her living room before an antique bookshelf, holding a family photo of herself as a baby in her mother’s arms…

Relevance studied storm clouds as big as motherships progress across the somber sky, dropping rain showers as they went…

The spring I turned eight was wet and stormy…

They are the first lines in recently completed work. In the first novel, Newearth Progeny, Clare Erlandson discovers that motherhood means a whole lot more than she imagined possible. In the second novel, Newearth Relevance, her son learns what family really looks like. In the third – a children’s story – Wise Home, a little girl discovers that wisdom isn’t only for adults.

Though there’s still work to do on each project, I feel a blessed sense of completion. These stories have been developing in my mind and pounding on my heart for a long time. It’s a joy to finally birth them onto the page. Where they go from here is still a mystery but one I am willing to accept for now.

As I focused my energy on writing this summer, I contemplated how my various books, stories, reflections, and poems connect. While weeding the garden, explaining the benefits of not overdoing things to the zucchini plants, I realized that they (my books, not the zucchini) exist in the same universe. In a unique way, they all belong in a world where animals have something important to say, and humanity needs to listen to an inner voice that often gets drowned out in our technically advanced society.

Mapping the books’ connections was tricky, but here is a start.

A map of the family lineage in the OldEarth Encounter series clearly shows how the families are tied together. DNA spoke even before we had Ancestry.com.

The first three books in the OldEarth world involved Aram, Ishtar, and Neb. Georgios arrived on the scene in the first century AD, and Melchior continued the family lineage in the fifth century.

The family line carried through ancient history into the modern world in the lifeblood of Anne Smith in Last of Her Kind. Though Anne’s direct lineage ceases, the Newearth world picks up with Kendra – a direct descendant of Doctor Mitchell and Clare – a blood relation to Mr. Erlandson, the principal who tried to help Anne during her crisis pregnancy.

The next Newearth novels continue with the same characters, so their connections are clear.

My short story collections, It Might Have Been and Other Stories and One Day at a Time and Other Stories are set in our contemporary world, which would have been right before Last of Her Kind. The Adventures of Tally-Ho would fit there, too.

Homestead is an offshoot, an alternate future of Last of Her Kind but would fall into that same era of human history.

Encounter and other Science Fiction Stories & Novella and my poetry collection, Hope’s Embrace, belong in the Newearth Universe, reflecting the post-contemporary world and the transition from a human-dominated planet to a place where humans are in the minority and alien races hold an uneasy alliance.

Of course, I can’t honestly fit The Road Goes Ever On – A Christian Journey Through The Lord of the Rings and my two My Road books into the OldEarth or Newearth universes, except to allude to the honest reality of a woman trying her best to make sense of a bewildering world.

It seems clear to me, in reflection of my efforts to join various storylines, that connecting the dots between our human experiences throughout history and within family and community groups isn’t always possible. Perhaps it is better this way. The mystery of our connectivity, hidden DNA lineage, generational families, and shared cultures and societies allows our imaginations to fill in the dots.

The human race is intimately joined in ways we have yet to discover—with or without DNA tests—leading from a shadowed past to an unforeseen future.

The best thing about facing each new day is seeing where it will take us. Rise and shine; it’s time to pick up a good book and enjoy the journey.