I have been working for thirty years on a novel. I call it "The Missing Person." It is not a mystery story per se, but I have tried to fill it with suspense. It does have a mystery at its core, but it is more than just a mystery story.
It is about a young man who was abandoned as a toddler and, before he settles down to marriage and a career, he wants to find out who abandoned him and why. This is not easy to do. Twenty years have passed; clues are virutally non-existent, and his family and fiancee want him to move on with his life.
Of course, it is to be a spiritual story. God must be in the story, and He must be glorified in the story. To some extent, that is the easy part.
The difficult part has been making the elements of the story come together logically. What happens to one character often has an effect on another character. Making the interchanges in the multiple stories involved has been a challenge to say the least.
I had the story completed once. I let my wife and daughters read it. Their reactions were mixed. I wasn't pleased myself. So, I scrapped what I had written and started again.
Will this novel ever see the light of day? I do not know. If God can use it, He will. It likely will not be a commercial success.
But if some people read it, and are encouraged by it to trust Jesus Christ, then my thirty years of writing will be vindicated. All I have to do is finish it. That will take a while longer.
But at the age of 68 as I am, I don't have another thirty years to write a second novel.
