This blog is associated with The Catholic Conspiracy family of Catholic bloggers; and as an author I write from a Catholic world view. But what does that mean for my novels? Are they "Catholic Fiction"?

It all depends on what you mean by "Catholic Fiction".

As a blogger I've written extensively about the Catholic faith in a number of venues, and most notably at my Patheos blog, "Cry Woof!". There my goal is to talk about the Catholic faith: to explain, to teach, and to enlighten.

As a novelist, though, my goal is to be a teller of tales: to entertain, to amuse, and, I hope, to make you laugh. In that sense, I hope that my work is Catholic fiction in exactly the same sense (if not in the same degree) that the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and Tim Powers is Catholic fiction: that is, fiction written by a Catholic. I may occasionally touch on Catholic matters in my books (the S'Mary's World project, which I hope to get back to one day, concerns a Catholic colony world) but my intent as a novelist is never didactic.

Teaching is teaching and storytelling is storytelling. Mixing the two is possible, as C.S. Lewis did in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce; but precisely what these two books gain as teaching tools they lose as stories. My aim is different: the tale well told, and the laugh honestly earned.

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