Introducing the John Paul 2 High Team
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| The John Paul 2 High team: from left to right: top row: John Doman, author; Katie Doman, editor and writer; Andrew O'Neill, author; Ryan Corrigan, author; Jaime Gorman, editor and writer. Bottom row: Fr. Christopher Pollard, editor and consultant; Jamie Spiering, writer and editor; Craig Spiering, photographer; Regina Doman, editor-in-chief; Andrew Schmiedicke, proofreader and editor. |
What do you call a group of people who on the outside, are normal Catholics, but who have periodic crazy meetings late at night and sporadic email wars over plot points?
Well, you could call it a parish subcomittee, but that's also a good description of the John Paul 2 High Team.
The Team first started meeting three years ago when Sophia Press accepted our proposal to create a series of fun teen novels geared specifically to Catholic teens. Most of us grew up reading teen fiction, and we noticed how there were never any novels specifically for Catholic teens.
Sure, there was regular secular fiction, but lots of it could be pretty crass, and the main characters were fairly godless.
So some of us read Christian fiction, but sometimes that kind of fiction was too squeaky-clean to be really like "real life." Plus, the main characters might love God, but they never seemed to deal with the issues that most Catholic teens had to deal with.
In short, there wasn't any fiction out there for "people like us." So, we decided to write some.
And it's been a lot of work, but still a lot of fun. Together we created the characters we hope you'll come to know and love, and we created the stories we hope will keep you riveted. Right now we have fourteen books plotted out in the series, and some of us take turns writing them, under the name of Christian M. Frank.
Why do we take turns writing them? So we can publish more than one book a year. Our goal is to publish three books a year. Since it takes about a year to write a book, we needed to have more than one person writing the books.
And why use a pen name? So it's easy to find the books in the library, on Amazon searches, and so on. (Imagine how confusing it would be if Book One was published under the name of Strikeman, Book Two under the name of O'Shaughnensy, Book Three under the name of Suki Liam, etc.).
And why Christian M. Frank? Because some of us are proud graduates of Franciscan University of Steubenville, and some of us are proud graduates of Christendom College. So we thought we'd give half the name to each alma mater. And we put in an "M" for Mary, our Blessed Mother, to keep the peace between us.
One difficulty we've been having is getting everyone to come to a meeting where we remember to take a picture. These pictures are from the last meeting, but we'll try to get more up there soon. It'll probably be toughest to get our inveterate photographer Craig Spiering (who takes all our spiffy pictures) in the frame. You can tell he didn't take the one above: he never takes a fuzzy picture.
Though some of us have moved on (for a while, it seemed that all a girl had to do to get married was join the John Paul 2 High team), Andy and Heather O'Neill, Ryan, Johnny Doman, and the Spiering Duo are still with us (though the Spierings took off a year to get married). Katie, our Token Teenager joined the team to vet our "teen" dialogue and make sure it was authentic (and we kept her on the team even though she's now 21 and married to Johnny). Fr. Chris Pollard is our chaplain and checks the books against Church teaching. Jaime Berger Gorman is now married with a child and living in Texas, but she still keeps up with what's going on. Everyone is an important part of making this series work. It's been a lot of work thus far, but also a lot of fun.
So we hope you like the books, stay tuned for more, and if you think of it, say a prayer for us! Thanks!
To ask the Team a Question, click here.
To contact the current Christian M. Frank for an interview,
email christian.m.frank@gmail.com.
Join John Paul 2 High's Facebook Fan Group.
Friend Christian Frank on Facebook!
