My First Thriller: Tosca Lee

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It probably goes without saying, New York Times bestselling novelist Tosca Lee is a woman possessed.

You may not want to say it too loudly, but after all, her first novel was about the devil. And she describes herself as stubborn and determined, a characteristic she picked up from years of classical ballet training. And a trait, frankly, that’s not bad for a writer. She wanted to be a ballerina, not a writer, but a groin injury at age 14 cured that notion. 

There’s something fearless about her. A biblical scholar, a self-proclaimed Christian since age eleven but not a member of a brand-name religion. No, she relies more on non-denominational churches and appeals more to any reader interested in fantasy suspense. She is loved and vilified by Christians, agnostics, and atheists alike.

Who does that?

“When it comes to writing in the Christian market, I consider myself on the fringe,” she says.

The people that vilify her, she says, had motivations that made sense to them at the time. But she humanizes and forgives her critics, seeing past their differences, although she admits she is sometimes stung by them. 

After her first book, Demon: A Memoir was published in 2007, she ran into a friend at a Christian writers’ conference who praised it. “I was surprised people were reading it. I didn’t know what I was doing and how I fit into this community.”

Then her novel started getting nominated for numerous awards, Christian and otherwise. To say the least, her books are not the Hallmark Channel version of chaste Christianity. Instead, she inserts biblical figures into real settings filled with grit, dirt, suffering, and misunderstandings.

Hers is a journey started in childhood, blessed by a father in her late teens and nurtured by long years of searching, researching, and summoning her inner prose. It has been called lyrical by critics. Poetry is probably more accurate. This simple passage from an early chapter of Demon: A Memoir, exemplifies her writing:

“We walked again, and for several moments there was nothing but the steady sound of our heels on the sidewalk and the occasional brittle leaf that skittered across it, joined from time to time by the orphaned bits of conversation from passing pedestrians and the cars on Massachusetts Avenue. In the distance a church bell chimed the half hour.”

Her talent has been recognized around the globe and now cable television and Hollywood have come calling. A series is in the works for one book and film rights were optioned for two more.

Her first novel, Demon: A Memoir, is a thriller about a book editor, Clay, who meets Lucian in a small restaurant. Clay can’t make heads or tails of this guy, but he gives Clay a weird, awkward feeling. Gradually Clay and the reader begin to understand Lucian is a demon and Clay starts wondering: Why is he hanging around me? 

Demon: A Memoir engages you in a stunning opening chapter with its haunting yet engaging tone. Just an ordinary guy, down on his luck, his last appointment of the day is a no-show, so he walks into a hole-in-the-wall eatery and is greeted by Lucian, whom he’s never met but who knows him intimately. Clay soon realizes this was his no-show, the one he thought was coming by the office.

Demon: A Memoir came about by accident for the Roanoke, Virginia native. Lee used the role of a fallen angle in an online role-playing game and became obsessed by the idea for a character in a novel. She ran with it and completed her first draft in six weeks.

Her fiction writing up to that point was, she admits, unpublishable. Her first attempts sit locked away in her Nebraska home where daylight will never find them. 

What possessed her to write about the devil and to pull all of the elements together into her first published suspense novel? An English major who minored in International Affairs at Smith College, Lee thought of writing fiction but had never gotten serious about it. While home in Lincoln, Nebraska, for spring break her freshman year, she was riding in the car with her dad when she brought up recent books she’d read. She told him she’d love to write a novel. Her dad, knowing she would be returning to her summer job as a bank teller in a few months, offered to pay her what she would earn at the bank if she would spend that time writing a novel instead. But she’d have to treat it as a job and put in the hours every day.

“That was a no-brainer,” she says. “I wasn’t bank teller material. But it was a job.” She was already scheduled to spend a month that summer abroad at Oxford, so her writing time would be squeezed into two months when she returned.

That was the beginning of her writing career. There were lots of stops and starts early on, as with any writer. She never had formal training. “The only creative writing class I took was a short story class. I barely eked out a B-minus for the class.”

 She even thought she was finished and started shopping it to Christian publishers around 2000. Every one of them took a polite pass. So, she started hunting for agents to intervene on her behalf and found Joyce Hart of Hartline Literary. Even with Hart’s help and after rewrites and numerous submissions, it took six years before she found her first Christian publisher. 

“I got rejected by every single one of them. Some of them twice,” Lee says.

She’d read about a new Christian imprint in a newsletter and asked her agent to submit to their editor. She did, only to learn he had left for another publisher. So, her agent followed him there and he agreed to publish Lee’s novel.

Colorado Springs-based NavPress was willing to take a chance on her provocative style mixed with Christian storytelling, which may say something about the conventional guardrails around Christian publishing at the time.

Her novel became an award-winning bestseller. It may best be described as a suspense novel with a religious theme, and it was quickly embraced not only by Christians, but by agnostics and atheists. Lee was on to something. 

How does any writer create a novel that touches an audience that wide? Was it the combination of historical fiction and suspense? Or was she making Christianity provocative and capturing a whole new audience others failed to recognize? Since her debut novel, she’s written novels about Judas (Iscariot) and Eve (Havah: The Story of Eve) and many more Christian suspense novels. The Bible, after all, is filled with fascinating stories. She’s just spiced up the writing style. And maybe that’s the magic in today’s world that has granted her success. She’s taken those tales as fully her very own and possessed them.

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Demon: A Memoir

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Start to Finish: 6 years

I want to be a writer: Age 19

Experience: Writing for PC Novice magazine, later to become Smart Computing. Knew nothing about computers at the start.

Writing Time: Six weeks

Agents Contacted: 5

Agent Responses: 1

Agent Search: 1 year

Submission to Publisher: 2006

Time to Sell Novel: 6+ years

First Novel Agent: Joyce Hart, Hartline Agency

First Novel Editor: Jeff Gerke

First Novel Publisher: NavPress

Inspiration: Anne Rice, Marian Zimmer Bradley, Arthur Golden

Advice to Writers:  Never give up. Write with all the moxie you can muster. Be bold. Later, when your books come out, you will be criticized, and you’ll need to find that safe space in your head. My number one rule in writing is to write as if no one will ever read it.

Website: ToscaLee.com

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