Gina Holmes/Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

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. Read the rest of the column here.