JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

Gina Holmes, a single mom of two and full-time nurse, dreamed for more than a decade of becoming a writer. After four unsold novels, Holmes started a blog for aspiring writers. Last year she was signed to a two-book deal with Tyndale House Publishers.

Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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Gina Holmes' journey to becoming an author could make a great novel.

It started sometime about 1998, when Holmes was a recent bride, a newly minted nurse, a transplant to Roanoke and the mother of a young baby.

Holmes, now 38, wondered what else she could do to earn money for the family. She knew she could write -- for years, everyone had told her she was a good writer.

So she tried greeting cards, and failed. She wrote a children's book, poetry, a short story -- and failed again and again and again. She published an article or two but it was a lot of work for little pay.

The rejection slips piled up alongside her frustration. Occasional near misses drove Holmes into fits of despair.

It may not surprise you to learn that the Raleigh Court mom of two wound up going back to nursing full time.

But what might surprise you is that she's one of the newest authors in the stable of a major publisher in what Publishers Weekly calls the growing genre of Christian fiction.

She delivered her fifth novel, "Crossing Oceans," to Tyndale House Publishers on March 30. It will be published in 2010.

The Illinois-based publisher hit it big in the Christian fiction market with the "Left Behind" series of thrillers and publishes about 40 new fiction titles a year, in addition to Bibles and many other religious texts. Tyndale wants another novel from Holmes, too.

And at long last, she's making some real money.

Holmes sat at her dining room table one recent morning and told me the story of her journey. Dates and times are not the New Jersey native's strong suit, so please don't hold us to a precise chronology.

The simple secret is, she never gave up.

Not through different full-time nursing gigs.

Not through the birth of another son, Levi, now 7.

Not through her then-husband's job loss, or a rocky marriage that ultimately ended in divorce on, of all days, Valentine's Day 2008.

Not when her laptop went kaput a week before her final deadline.

"It's lonely and hard, and very few people can ever make a living at it," Holmes said. "I love writing. If quitting was an option, I'd have taken it, but alas, I'm a writer."

There were a few high points and many low points along Holmes' journey.

One of the highs was the first check she earned. It was for an article about acupuncture published by The Roanoker magazine in the summer of 1998.

She credits Kurt Rheinheimer, editor-in-chief of Leisure Publishing, for kindness and patience.

"He basically taught me how to write an article." Holmes said. "I kept making changes he suggested and he would keep sending them back."

She doesn't recall how much she earned for that article, only that it seemed like a lot of work for a little pay.

"I hated writing articles," she said. "Nonfiction compared to fiction -- it's like eating your vegetables compared to dessert." Rheinheimer said he barely recalls her.

Another came in 2000 or so when Holmes submitted a short story to Allison Bottke, editor of the acclaimed inspirational compilation series "God Allows U-Turns."

Bottke responded with a beautifully handwritten acceptance letter. It wouldn't pay a lot -- about $50 and a free copy of the book. "The main thing was a byline," Holmes said.

"Six months later I got another note: 'I'm sorry, we had to cut a few stories and yours was one of them.' I cried. It was pretty crushing."

But she did not give up.

The first novel

All of that rejection might leave you wondering why in the world somebody who couldn't make it in greeting cards would ever set her sights on a novel.

The inspiration came one day at her former church, Faith Alliance, in North Roanoke County.

"A girl at church -- she was around 17 -- was standing at the podium and talking about writing her second novel. And I said to myself, 'If a 17-year-old can write a novel, then surely I can.' "

About six weeks later Holmes wrapped up the first draft of "Saving Eden." It's about a young woman who flees a troubled marriage only to wind up in the middle of a dangerous love triangle.

Holmes spent the next 18 months editing the book, then sent copies off to publishers. Except for one editor who suggested some revisions, all she got was a bunch more rejection letters.

She had never felt so hurt in her life, she said, than "when I realized the book was not going to be published. It really took my breath away. I think I was curled up for two days in a fetal position."

But she did not give up.

A blog about writers

By 2004, Holmes had learned a lot about everything she had been doing wrong.

As an example, she cited the children's book she wrote in the late 1990s. She printed it in 16-point type, one big publishing house no-no.

The characters were speaking fruit, the text rhymed, and it had a blatant moral about prejudice. Three more big no-nos.

"Looking back now, it's absolutely embarrassing," Holmes said.

Her husband, who was also a nurse, took an increasingly dim view of her obsession. But Holmes kept going.

She decided to find out how other successful authors had made their first big breaks. So she scoured the Internet for interviews with them. And she started a blog, called Novel Journey -- www.noveljourney.blogspot.com.

Soon, she was doing her own interviews with authors -- some big names such as Nicholas Sparks, Dean Koontz and Michael Palmer -- and posting those to her blog.

Holmes also began attending writers conferences in places such as Asheville, N.C., and Minneapolis. Every vacation was another writers conference.

Three more novels

At one of them, she became fast friends with two other aspiring writers, Ane Mulligan, from Atlanta, and Jessica Dotta, from Linville, Tenn.

They became her partners on the Novel Journey blog, which Writer's Digest in 2008 named as one of the 101 most-valuable Web sites for writers. They also critiqued one another's work with the kind of frankness that calls for a thick skin.

Though the blog began as something to reflect her personal journey in the writing game, Novel Journey "kind of morphed into a site that is known for author interviews," she said.

She and her partners accept no advertising, so the blog produces no revenue. But Holmes said it gets a fair amount of traffic. Her site administrator tells her it racks up 20,000 to 40,000 hits a month.

Holmes also carried on writing Christian novels, which she said are pretty much like most other fiction, but without the cuss words.

"I didn't necessarily set out to write 'Christian' novels. But I'm a Christian, and what you write is going to show your world view."

In "Demon Chase" Holmes created a female exorcist. In "Nailed Open" a bride hunts down the person who shot and killed her groom on their wedding day. "Ruthless Mercy" is about a labor and delivery nurse whose patient is mysteriously poisoned.

By now, she had an agent. But that wasn't doing her much good. None of the books sold.

But she did not give up.

'Crossing Oceans'

All of this time, Holmes continued to work as a maternity nurse for Carilion Clinic -- that's where some of the ideas for "Ruthless Mercy" came from.

But by then, her marriage was breaking up.

In the midst of that, she started her fifth novel, "Crossing Oceans." Unlike the other four, it wasn't a suspense novel. It is what Holmes calls "women's fiction." Her synopsis describes it like this: "A dying mother returns home to face the ghosts of her past and tell the man she left behind that he's about to inherit a daughter he didn't know he had."

"I started writing that in a very dark period of my life, when I was going through a divorce. I was walking around with all that guilt, with my children, and trying to do the right thing," Holmes said.

By last summer, Holmes had finished five chapters. She had a new agent, Chip MacGregor, who courted her because, he said, "from the first time I met Gina, I thought she had the ability to be a star" in the Christian fiction industry,

MacGregor shopped the unfinished novel around to some publishers. Meanwhile, Holmes made plans for another vacation from her nursing job -- the American Christian Fiction Writers conference in Minneapolis.

'It's OK to scream'

This conference would be a bit different. Usually Holmes spent a lot of her conference time trying to wrangle meetings with publishers so she could pitch her work.

This time, MacGregor called her before the conference and informed her two publishers had requested meetings with her. Both of them were very interested in "Crossing Oceans." One of them, Tyndale, told her "we really want this book," Holmes said.

"It was bizarre to me, after so many years of rejection, to be courted," Holmes said. "They were trying to sell me on them." That was a real switch.

The deal inched closer to fruition as the fall of 2008 went on.

One day late in the fall, MacGregor called Holmes' cellphone while she was at work in the Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital nursery.

"He said, 'Gina, it's OK to scream. You've sold your book.'

"I was standing in the nursery ... working, surrounded by babies and doctors. Tears kind of welled up in my eyes. I had to sit down and put my hand over my heart, and said, 'Oh, my gosh.' "

Holmes is bound by contract not to reveal the precise size of her two-book advance. But, she noted, in the parlance of the publishing industry, a "nice advance" is anything up to $50,000. A "very nice advance" is $50,000 to $100,000.

"I got a very nice advance."

Karen Watson, associate publisher at Tyndale House, said she expects "Crossing Oceans" will be about 300 pages, give or take a few, in paperback, when it hits bookstores next year.

Today, Holmes is still working as a nurse -- now at Catawba Hospital. She could have quit her job, but instead used her advance to pay some bills. You never know with the writing game, anyway.

After signing the contract, Holmes spent most of her free time finishing up "Crossing Oceans," waking up at 2:30 a.m. and writing before her boys got up and went off to school, and before she had to head in to work.

Even with the novel delivered, she hasn't had much of a chance to celebrate.

After all, there's another one to write.