ACFW 2026 Genesis Finalists

At one time, this contest was called the Noble Theme, back when ACFW was in its early years. I was a finalist myself for 2 years before selling my first novel, so I'm certain the names listed below will soon join the ranks of published authors. And here they are:

2026 Genesis Finalists

Contemporary

Elise Browning - Chasing Light
Kate Mackereth - Binding Vines
Sarah Nichols - All the Ways We Come Home

Historical

Bryan Harsh - The Sign
Terri Miller - The Year They Buried King Cotton
Shannon Skaer - The Prisoner in the Library

Historical Romance

Jessica Gustafson - A Price for Her Hand
Amy King - More Precious than Silver
Megan Southon - Carry Me

Mystery/Suspense/Thriller

Marilyn Brandon - Finding Juvie Blue
Will Eason - Endgame Protocol
Jeffrey Friedel - Twelve Words

Novella

Lakeisha Heeringa - A Shard of Truth
Suzanne Montgomery - Storm Waters Rising
Bill Quimby - Ring Walker

Romance

Amy King - The Tempest
Grace Lakin - Considering Calla Lilies
Tiffany Miller - We’re Only Mostly Married

Romantic Suspense

Cherie Fresonke - A Dream Worth Fighting For
Jess Noble - True Believer
Brittney Peek - Cold Case Files: Off the Record

Short Novel

George Brooks - Grit and Greed
Laura Elizabeth Salas - Their Second Chance Family
Dave Sprecher - When Steeples Fall

Speculative

Faith Behrens - The Queen’s Assassination
Kimberly Cornelius - The Healer Prince
Kimberly Cornelius - The Temple Atoner

Young Adult

M. A. Bellers - Into the Rising Sun
Allison Cook - Gems of My Father
William DeWitt - The Memory Room

A huge congratulations to all the finalists!

The Story Isn't Finished Yet

This is where I am right now.

Not at the end of something. At the middle of several things simultaneously. That's where creative people almost always are if they're honest about it. A novel in progress. A blog finding its rhythm again after too long away. A speaking calendar taking shape. A brand that is still becoming what it's meant to be. A homeschool year about to begin. A life that is fuller and more complicated and more alive with possibility than I could have predicted when the long quiet season finally ended.

The story isn't finished. Not even close.

I think about this when I'm tempted to measure the present moment against some imagined finished version of things. You know, with the novel completed, the platform established, the work fully recognized, the life tidily resolved into something that makes obvious sense from the outside.

That imagined finished version is a fiction, and not the useful kind. Real stories don't resolve into tidy conclusions. They keep going. They open into the next thing.

What I've learned, slowly and with significant resistance, is the middle is where all the living actually happens. Not the beginning, where it brims with potential, and not the end, with its satisfying conclusion or retrospective clarity. But the middle. Complicated and unresolved and full of loose threads, and where the story is most alive.

I'm in the middle. You probably are too.

And we need to keep telling our story. Thank you for being here for this part of it.

Where are you in your story right now? Beginning, middle, or somewhere you can't quite name yet? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

When the Work Feels Like Worship

There are mornings when I sit down to write and I feel different.

Not every morning, mind you. I want to be honest about that. Most mornings the work is work. It requires effort and attention and the willingness to push through resistance, and it produces something useful if I'm fortunate. It also produces something that needs significant revision if I'm not. That's the ordinary version, and it's the one that shows up most often.

But occasionally something different happens. The resistance falls away. The words arrive with a clarity and an ease that seems to truly be going somewhere. The work stops feeling like something I'm making and starts feeling like something I'm participating in. Like something larger than the manuscript, larger than my own creative effort, moving through me rather than from me.

I don't know exactly what to call that experience, but I know what it feels like.

It feels like worship.

This isn't exactly easy to explain without sounding either mystical or religious, and I'm trying not to be either. But there is something in the act of creating, of taking the gifts and the calling and the unique perspective you've been given and using them fully, at full capacity, toward something true. That connects to the act of praise in a way I find impossible to deny.

We were made to create. When we do it wholeheartedly, something in us recognizes the rightness of it. Something settles. Something sings.

That makes showing up worthwhile, even on the ordinary mornings that don't feel like anything at all.

Have you ever experienced a creative moment that felt like more than just making something? A moment that touched a deeper place? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Small Acts of Creative Faithfulness

Not every creative act is a grand gesture.

Most of them aren't. Most of them are small.

• A paragraph written before the house wakes up
• A sketch made on the back of an envelope
• A melody hummed into a voice memo while driving somewhere ordinary

Small, unglamorous, unremarkable in the moment. Accumulated over time into something that matters.

I've been thinking lately about the phrase creative faithfulness. It's the practice of showing up consistently for the work, in whatever form that showing up is available to you in a given season. Not the heroic version where you sacrifice everything for the art. The quiet version where you carve out fifteen minutes because fifteen minutes is all you have, and you protect it with everything you have.

This reframing has helped me in the seasons when grand gestures weren't available. When the manuscript wasn't moving and the schedule was impossible and the conditions for serious creative work simply didn't exist. In those seasons, small acts of faithfulness kept something alive that might otherwise have gone quiet.

• a journal entry
• a voice memo
• a single scene written badly just to prove the words were still there

Small doesn't mean insignificant.

In creative work, small and consistent almost always outperforms grand and sporadic. The daily paragraph outlasts the occasional marathon session. The sketch made every morning becomes the body of work that the weekly large-scale effort never quite produces.

Be faithful in the small things. The small things are doing more than they look like they're doing.

What does a small act of creative faithfulness look like in your daily life? The tiny practice that keeps something alive? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The Project That Scares Me

Do you have a project sitting in the back of your mind that you haven't started yet? I do!

I'm not going to tell you what it is, partly because it's not ready to be spoken out loud, and partly because I think most creative people know exactly the project I'm talking about without me having to name mine. I'm sure you have one too. The idea that keeps returning no matter how many times you set it aside. The one that feels more personal than anything else you've made, more exposed, more likely to fail in a way that would cost you in a significant way.

You think you're not ready for it, but you might be more ready than you think.

Fear is a reliable indicator in creative work, but it points in two directions, and you have to learn to read which one it's signaling. Sometimes fear means stop. The project isn't right, the timing isn't right, something needs more development before it's ready to be made.

But sometimes fear means go.

It means you're standing at the edge of something that matters enough to be a bit scary and uncertain, something that has the potential to be the most significant work you've done, if you can find the courage to begin it.

The project that scares you most is usually the one that has the most of you in it. Which means it's the one that has the most to give.

I'm working up to it. Maybe you are too.

Maybe we both just need permission to admit it's there to muster the courage to take that first step.

Is there a creative project you've been afraid to start? One that keeps coming back no matter how many times you set it aside? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.