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.

What I Create When No One's Watching

Some creative work exists entirely for an audience.

The polished post. The carefully considered release. The project shaped from the beginning with publication or performance or presentation in mind. That work has its place. Sharing creative work with the world is quite meaningful, and I take it seriously.

But there's another kind of work that happens when nobody's watching. That's where integrity and dedication come into play.

The journal entry that will never be read by anyone else. The scene written just to understand a character better, with no intention of putting it in the manuscript. The creative experiment that exists purely to find out what happens if... No audience, no stakes, no outcome required beyond the learning.

It's where you find out what you actually think, what you're genuinely drawn to, or what energizes you when external validation is removed from the equation entirely. The work you do when nobody's watching tells you things about yourself that the public work can't, because the public work is partially shaped by awareness of how it will be received.

But the private work feeds everything else.

It's also where the most genuinely surprising creative discoveries happen. The ones that eventually find their way into the public work in forms you couldn't have planned. The unseen work over time becomes the foundation of the seen work.

Create something today that no one will ever see. Then, take a moment to discover what it tells you.

Do you have a creative practice that exists just for you? Something that never gets shared? What does it give you? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The Discipline Needed to Produce Greatness

In the world of writing, everyone wants to talk about inspiration.

The moment the idea arrives. Getting into the flow where the words come easily, the work feels effortless, and the creative output exceeds expectations. Don't get me wrong. Those moments do happen. But they're also not where most of the work gets done.

Most of the work gets done in the mundane, ordinary sessions. The ones where you sit down solely because it's Wednesday morning, and mornings are when you write. The ones where the words come slowly and require hard-fought excavation. The ones that don't feel like anything in particular is happening, but as they accumulate over weeks and months, they turn into something worthwhile.

That's the discipline and the more boring aspect of the writing life. It's not always about the dramatic public declaration, the meaningful pivot, or the inspiring story of deciding to take the work seriously. Sometimes, it's just the quiet, unglamorous practice of showing up when nothing in you particularly wants to do the work.

Inspiration is a visitor. Discipline is a resident.

The creative people I most admire are not the ones who wait for the right conditions. They're the ones who create the conditions. Who protect the time, sit in the chair, open the document or the sketchbook or the instrument, and begin. Not because it always produces great work. But because it produces work, and work is the only raw material that can produce greatness.

Show up. Do the thing. Let inspiration find you already working.

What does your creative discipline look like on the days when you don't feel like showing up? I'd love to hear what gets you to the chair in the comments.

Is Creativity a Gift or a Calling? Yes

People ask this as if it has to be one or the other.

Either creativity is something you were given or it's something you were called to do. Like it has to be either a natural aptitude, a talent distributed at birth like eye color or height or a vocation with weight and purpose and intentional direction. The debate implies a choice, as if the answer changes what you do with it.

I think it's both, and I think them working in tandem makes a huge difference.

A gift without a calling can stay perpetually potential. Admired, occasionally exercised, but never fully inhabited. You have the ability but not the orientation, the talent but not the direction. The gift sits in you like an instrument no one plays, capable of music that never gets made.

A calling without a gift is its own kind of frustration. The deep sense of purpose unmatched by the capacity to execute it, the vision outrunning the ability to bring it into being.

When both are present, thought, and when the gift and the calling align, the possibilities become nearly endless. The creativity stops being just a thing you do and starts being a thing you are. It becomes the lens through which you see everything else, the mode through which you process experience and make meaning and contribute something to the world that only you, with your particular combination of wiring and history and perspective, could have made.

But the most important part? It's something you shouldn't take for granted. Something you should steward well.

Whether it arrived as gift, calling, or both, it showed up in you for a reason. The question is what you'll do with it.

Do you think of your creativity as a gift, a calling, or something else entirely? I'd love to hear how you understand it in the comments.

What Grows in the Waiting

Waiting is not nothing.

It feels like nothing, which is part of what makes it hard. But when you're in a season of waiting for a door to open, for clarity to arrive, or for the next chapter to make itself known, the absence of obvious progress reads as absence of movement altogether. Nothing is happening. Nothing is growing. You are simply standing still while life moves around you.

But that's not what's actually happening.

Seeds do their most important work underground, invisible, in the waiting period before anything breaks the surface. The gardener who digs them up to check on the progress interrupts the very process trying to be confirmed. Sometimes the most faithful thing is to leave the ground alone and trust that something is happening in the dark that doesn't need your intervention to succeed.

I've spent a lot of time in waiting seasons. More than I would have chosen. And I've had to learn, imperfectly and repeatedly, the discipline of treating the waiting as part of the work rather than as time lost from it.

What grows in the waiting is often exactly what the next season requires. Patience that couldn't have been developed any other way. Clarity that only comes when the noise of activity quiets down enough to hear it. A deeper understanding of what you actually want, as opposed to what you thought you wanted before the waiting stripped away the less essential things.

The waiting is not wasted. It is actually, in its own quiet and unglamorous way, quite productive.

What you're growing in the dark will matter a great deal when the light comes. Just wait for it.

What has a season of waiting produced in you that you couldn't have grown any other way? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.