Beauty in the Differences (Guest Post by Kellyn Roth)

Hi, everyone! I'm so excited to be participating in the Novelists in Novembers anthology blog tour with Wild Blue Wonder Press! You might remember that I participated in one of their anthologies last year, and I was so excited to support this next round of authors. 

Today, I'm sharing a guest post from Kellyn Roth. I absolutely love reading Kellyn's thoughts, both on her newsletter and her Instagram, and I'm so excited to share her thoughts with you about anthologies and beauty in the differences. 

But first, very quickly, I wanted to share a few things with you about the anthology--namely, where you can purchase it. I got to be an advanced reader, and I noted they had even more diversity of stories in this anthology than the last. I definitely enjoyed the read and it's the perfect nostalgic fall read. So go ahead and click the button below to grab your copy, and then enjoy Kellyn's guest post!

order here

​Also, this blog tour comes with a GIVEAWAY. Everyone who enters the blog tour for the release of Novelists in November will be entered to win a free paperback copy of the novel and a $25 Amazon gift card!

​Enter the giveaway using the button below. Entrants must be 18+ or have parental permission to enter. This giveaway is open to US and international winners. If you need to find any of the other blog tour stops, check out the graphic above or kellynrothauthor.com. 

Enter the giveaway

Hey folks! I’m Kellyn Roth, and today I’m sharing a guest post on Rachel’s blog to celebrate the release of Novelists in November, the second anthology out with my indie publishing company, Wild Blue Wonder Press.

This is the second anthology I’ve published, but I’ve prepared three, planned dozens more, and participated in a few others over the years. An anthology is defined loosely as, “a collection of selected literary pieces.” When I first set out to publish anthologies with Wild Blue Wonder Press, I had a number of thoughts about how I’d do it, and at last I landed on what I really wanted to do:

I wanted to feature excellent Christian creators from differing backgrounds with different stories. I didn’t want to publish the same kind of stories over and over again, though I also wanted to appeal to the same core audience who had become accustomed to my historical family sagas and romances.

Basically, I wanted to be different but not too different.

The thing that is the same in my anthologies? They are all Christian fiction written by Christian writers, primarily for Christian readers, and they are all (just because I don’t have the knowledge and staff yet for speculative fiction) realistic fiction in some way—meaning they are contemporary or historical stories, not fantasy or sci fi.

Though I would consider myself a fairly conservative Christian who believes in all the typical things that would get one in trouble with the average person, I also believe that Christians have a major problem with judgmentalism about things that ultimately don’t matter. Not salvational issues—not even things that are condemned in the Bible—but the most niche little personal choice things that shouldn’t offend anyone.

But they do.

So when I am choosing stories to be featured, I’m trying not to choose ones that are all same. I am especially trying to choose authors who stand out to me as having something interesting and different to bring to an anthology and to the Christian fiction world that I can appreciate even if it’s not exactly what I bring.

I think we need people in the community who are far more conservative than me—but I also think we need people who have less “conservative” convictions in a world where “conservative” means picking fights with anyone who isn’t exactly like ourselves—even if the things they are interested in or talk about or care about are not in any way wrong, sinful, or so on. Some things I cannot endorse, of course. I want to run a press with a basics of ethics and morals, but … other things?

If you were waiting for Wild Blue Wonder Press to come out against celebrating Christmas and even things like moderate drinking or piercings, you’re in for a disappointment. I have convictions about, well, everything, but I have never felt that my convictions ought to be for everyone. And also, of course, my convictions are sometimes less conservative!

But I think there’s a beauty in that. We all come from different backgrounds and as such, what we are led to do and say is different. And I think rather than isolating ourselves and pretending our way is the only way, we should allow ourselves to embrace those slight differences when they are truly harmless and not prohibited by Scripture.

This is true of controversial things, yes, but it’s equally true of little insignificant but beautiful things. In both my collections, I’ve loved getting to feature a variety of different types of main characters and situations and even subgenres under the women’s fiction umbrella. Some of our stories have different tones, some feature more blatant Christian themes than others though all could be called Christian fiction, and some are more serious or more light-hearted.

I think there is value in things that are written for a specific person, but I do also enjoy putting together these anthologies that are so specific—I mean, Christian women’s fiction is already a pretty narrow genre!—but still have room to highlight people from different experiences.

What do you think about all this? Agree to disagree?