Building The World of Kedoshim - Part One (Introductions)

Greetings, 

I am so excited to share this post with you today! I will likely be doing a video on this soon as well for Facebook. But let's lay it out here and now because this is an epic story. 

Kedoshim: The Untold Journey was a concept I came up with in 2012. After developing two of the characters for a college assignment in 2009 and then using those same two characters in a VBS I ran a year or two later, the idea hit me like a load of bricks. What started out as a story that would parallel the book of Acts but focus on the fictional siblings Nathaniel, Zadok, and their sister Elena was something I never thought would be what it is today. Then, in 2014, when my wife and I began discussing creating more than one story, I outlined 4 books that never actually got written. Thus, Kedoshim: The Journey Remembered was born. I still have blog posts from 2012 and 2014 that I wrote focusing on these two entities. At the time, I was super excited to see where God was going to take this little storytelling dream of mine and for a while, my heart was filled with the motivation to keep going. 

Little did I know how much life would get in the way over the next several years? My writing career migrated to focus on Devotional Writing because that is what I felt I was meant to do. While I self-published, co-authored, and collaborated on multiple books with others, my career also enabled me to begin working for respective online website ministries, such as Our Daily Journey (Our DailyBread), and The Gospel Daily, things did not go like I thought they would. I got so wrapped up in the commercialism that I honestly believe I lost my drive to continue writing. My last publication in that world was a very special Christmas Story titled Reflecting Christmas which  I wrote and dedicated to our Firstborn in 2016. Oddly enough, I released a second edition of it in 2018, with her beautiful additions, that has a special place in my heart, even today.

The reality of it all is that life just got in the way. In 2017, I made my way back to my Biblical Fiction Roots when I released my first novella, Petros Journals. This is a story that brings Peter's hands-on experiences to life from the gospel as if he is telling the story of Jesus. It became pretty popular, but that didn't last long either. In the same year, I wrote the original draft of Finding Philemon, a hybrid Devotional/Short Story that I hoped to get published traditionally. When Nothing came of my hopes and dreams on that project, I put it on the shelf and stopped writing, almost altogether. Something changed in me during this time, and I lost a huge part of my identity without even realizing it. I moved on with life and left my career as a writer to the dust building on that figurative shelf. 

Well, 2023 hit and something awoke in me with a fury, I'd never even realized what building inside of me since 2018. I discovered episodic writing and had this strange idea that I would do that. So, with some major encouragement from my loving wife, I started looking into it more. At first, there were just ideas, and then one night that shelf-stricken failure of a story came back to life. I turned Finding Philemon into what it is today, 18 episodes of the deepest part of my heart literally pouring itself out of me. Then, as I started adapting that story and expanding it something took hold of me. One night, I spent close to 5 hours literally laying out idea after idea in the bedroom with sticky notes. When my wife told me, 'Matt, you're putting too much stuff on the wall, there isn't enough room.' and suggested I use the living room, things just sort of exploded and The World of Kedoshim started taking shape. 

Finding Philemon is just the first chapter in this new world I'm building, and I'm super excited to share it. Almost every day, more thoughts and ideas make their way to the forefront of my mind and there are now at least 14 different stories building their way through the books of Acts and into The World of Kedoshim. I have so much more to say on this, but the bed is calling my name for now. Please feel free to come back and read Part Two once it's up. Next time, I will share more about Kedoshim and what it actually is, but I had to get the introductory post up first. 

Thanks again for visiting "The Gathering Room,"

M.J.E. 

PS (You can find all episodes of Finding Philemon that are currently published on Amazon by going to this affiliate link. You can also follow my author hub, Writing the Journey,  on Facebook.)