know it. I was seated in the pew and going through The Great Negotiation - what I gave and what I didn't give, what I wanted to do, and what I feared to do.
And then the simplest of solutions occurred to me: Write for God. Write for Him. Write only for Him.
Begin now, as you walk out of this church after Mass, to be a writer only for Him. Take whatever talent you have, and experience you've acquired, and put them to work strictly and entirely for Him. Never write another word that is not for Him. Write His life! Write for Him.
Broken being that I am, I did not implement this commitment until December of that year. But the Consecration was made that summer afternoon, and a veil was lifted from my eyes, and immediately the preparation for the work began.
The year itself was one of perfect disaster.
Within weeks of my decision to write for the Lord, my husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and within four and one-half months he was dead.
During Stan's final illness, I wrote one more book of the Vampire Chronicles, and a strange book it was. It completed the story of the novel Blackwood Farm and closed the Vampire Chronicles as a roman-fleuve, but it also gave voice to my strongest longings to be joined to Christ in a new and complete way.
My hero, the Vampire Lestat, the genderless giant who lived in me, was as always the voice of my soul in this novel, and it is no accident that he begins it with a cry of the heart,
"I want to be a saint, I want to save souls by the millions!" Lestat had to tell the truth because I had to tell the truth, and by the end of the novel, confessing his failure ever to be anything but a rambunctious reprobate and Byronic sinner, he nevertheless resigned as the hero of the books which had given him life.
Be gone from me, oh mortals who are pure of heart.
Be gone from my thoughts, oh souls that dream great dreams. Be gone from me, all hymns of glory. I am the magnet for the damned. At least for a little while. And then my heart cries out, my heart will not be still, my heart will not give up, my heart will not give in the blood that teaches life will not teach lies, and love becomes again my reprimand, my goad, my song.
And so on the day after my birthday, October 5, 2002, Lestat made his farewell. This character who had been my dark search engine for twenty-seven years would never speak in the old framework again.
And my life as a child of Christ, a writer for Christ, a writer consecrated to Christ, began.
Chapter Twelve
It wasn't untill the fall ll of 2005 that I published the first part of my life of Jesus: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
From the summer of 2002 through the spring of 2005, my life was consumed with research. I studied not only the ancient historians Philo and Josephus, and all the New Testament scholarship I could lay hands on, but Scripture itself, reading over and over again the Gospels until the language, to which I'd grown so dead in childhood, came alive again, and the vital story of Christ's life flowed through chapter and verse.
Now this was no small feat, coaxing the Gospels to come alive, and it took tremendous dedication; but it was also incredibly rewarding.
It was again a period of relative isolation from contemporary goings-on in Catholicism, and organized religion in general, a period of study that had to do with the New Testament canon and how I might create a probable fictional world for the Christ to whom I was committed body and soul.
My reading skills improved beyond all expectations; I sought days of study without interruption, and finally long nights in which to complete the book in the silence of the sleeping house, with a lone guard on duty to provide meals and coffee for which I barely stopped my work.
Very early on, as I worked on the first book, my commitment was to the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation, the magnificent love story of God and man which had drawn me back to religion in the first place, the great and beautiful tale of Jesus becoming one of us.
My studies of Jewish life in the first century were also key to my research. I was powerfully influenced by Professor Ellis