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Young author injects new life into Noah's story
UMW student Alisson Veldhuis published a religious book titled 'Sight of the Sea: A Story of the Flood.' A Rochester, Minn., resident, she hopes her 300-page novel will shed light on Noah's times.
The Free Lance-Register, February 18, 2006 by Natasha Altamirano
University of Mary Washington sophomore Alisson Veldhuis published her first novel at 19 last December.
Her favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien, was 30 when he published his first book, an academic work called "A Middle English Vocabulary," and 45 when "The Hobbit" rolled off the presses.
When Veldhuis first penned "Sight of the Sea: A Story of the Flood," she had no intention of having it published.
She wrote it for herself--to get a better understanding of the antediluvian era, the period before the biblical Flood.
"I wanted to make the Bible real and interesting," Veldhuis said. "The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah--they're dry and boring. The characters are dusty and not alive--I wanted to make them real people."
"The Sight of the Sea" is the third in a series of novels about the period between the Creation and the Flood. The first two works originally were written as plays, and Veldhuis recently rewrote them as novels and hopes to publish them one day.
"My mom said: 'You're only 17. Don't worry about getting published now--you have your whole life ahead of you,'" Veldhuis said.
So she prayed and sent her "Sight of the Sea" manuscript to a publishing company. If rejected, Veldhuis said, "I'd wait until I'm 40 if I had to."
But that wasn't the case.
She signed a contract at no cost with the independent, Frederick, Md.-based PublishAmerica. The company is a "print on demand" publisher, which produces books only when orders are placed by a customer. Many corporate booksellers often don't carry such books, but they are available for purchase online.
Veldhuis, who believes the Bible is the word of God, said she hopes her 300-page novel will shed light on the people of Noah's time.
"We basically don't know anything about the society and culture before the Flood because it all got washed away," she said. "Their society was much more civilized than people expect.
"I don't think they were half-naked savages living in tents in the woods. I think they were brilliant people because they were the direct descendants of Adam and Eve, who walked with God and talked with God."
And according to Genesis, people lived hundreds of years.
"Imagine if someone like [Albert] Einstein or J.R.R. Tolkien lived for 900 years--they'd have time to perfect their work," Veldhuis said.
She devotes two chapters to the building of Noah's ark, which, according to Genesis, took 100 years.
Veldhuis said "Sight of the Sea" isn't a religious text--it's a novel.
"It's a story," she said. "I don't sit here and give sermons. My hope is that a lot of non-Christians can read it, too."
But Veldhuis said her faith is the driving force behind her writing.
"I wouldn't have written this if God hadn't helped me," Veldhuis said, adding that she sometimes looks at her book in disbelief and thinks, "I didn't write this--what is this?"
Veldhuis grew up in Charlottesville before moving to Rochester, Minn., after her sophomore year of high school.
She attended a nondenominational Christian church with her family every week, and now goes to New City Fellowship on Prince Edward Street in Fredericksburg.
She's a member of the UMW Christian campus ministry Inter-Varsity, and she also recently started volunteering every week for a Charlottesville nonprofit group that supports the blind and dyslexic.
Veldhuis hasn't decided on a major, but is interested in English, linguistics and foreign languages. She's taken Spanish and Italian courses, and hopes to take Greek next year.
She wants to become a philologist and translate the Bible into languages into which it hasn't been translated.
Veldhuis said she writes every day--so much that's it's hard to balance schoolwork and writing.
"My brain just gets so full of ideas--it feels like it'll explode if I don't write them down," she said.
Veldhuis, the youngest of five children, said two factors influenced her "spiritually and literarily." Her mother read to her every night before bedtime, and her parents imposed a two-hour "quiet time" for the children every day, during which Veldhuis read.
"Reading in my room forced me to do something other than watch TV," she said.
Both Veldhuis' father, an endocrinologist, and mother, a high school English teacher, encouraged her to read and write.
"Reading is the secret to writing," Marcia Veldhuis said in a telephone interview from her Rochester home.
The book is available on ama zon .com for $24.95, plus shipping.
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