I don’t really know what to say about that yet.

I thought I’d feel something bigger. Relief, maybe. Or some kind of “we did it” moment. But honestly, it’s been quieter than that. More like… it just slipped out into the world and now it’s not mine in the same way anymore.

I worked on this for two years.

There were stretches where it felt like it was moving. And a lot of stretches where it really didn’t. Chapters that never landed. Scenes that looked fine until I read them the next day and realized they weren’t saying anything. I rewrote more than I expected to. Probably more than I should have.

There were a few times I thought about stopping.

Not dramatically. Just that slow kind of doubt where you start wondering if this is actually worth finishing, or if you’re just trying to prove something to yourself.

I kept going mostly because there were moments where it felt like it was working. Not the whole thing. Just pieces. A scene would click. A line would feel right. A character would finally sound like a person instead of something written.

That was enough to keep going.

The whole thing started with James.

James the Just is a strange person to build a story around. He’s close to everything that matters, but not in the way you’d expect. He doesn’t come in as a believer. He’s not the obvious leader. He’s not even fully convinced for a long time.

And then somehow, he becomes central to everything that follows.

I couldn’t get past that.

What does it take for someone like that to change?

Not all at once. Not in a clean way. But slowly, over years. Through doubt, through watching, through building something before you’re even sure you believe in it.

That felt more real to me than certainty.

So that’s what I wrote.

I didn’t want this to read like a sermon.

Or like a history lecture.

I wanted it to feel like you’re watching someone figure something out in real time. Someone who doesn’t have the answers, but keeps moving anyway.

Because that’s closer to how most people actually live.

Now it’s done.

Which is strange.

For two years, this was something I could keep adjusting. Fixing. Changing. Now it’s just… out there. People will read it however they read it.

Some parts will land. Some won’t.

That’s part of it.

If you do end up reading it, I’d honestly just be curious what stayed with you.

Not whether you liked it.

Just what stuck.

It’s live now on Amazon if you want to take a look.

No big launch push today.

Just putting it out and seeing where it goes.

I wrote that scene at midnight. My own hands were not holding tools. They were holding a manuscript I had been revising for longer than I care to admit, in a house quiet enough that I could hear myself think too clearly.

I was thinking about my brother. How he loved the water. Loved life. And he too died young — unexpectedly, the way the people we most expect to outlast us sometimes don’t. Not on a cross. Not with any of the ceremony that history grants to significant deaths. Just gone, the way ordinary loss happens, without warning and without sufficient explanation.

Writing about James watching his brother die, I understood something I hadn’t before. Grief doesn’t ask whether you believed in the person. It doesn’t ask whether you were standing close enough or far enough. It just arrives and takes up residence and changes the dimensions of every room you walk into afterward.

This book is, among other things, my attempt to stay in the room.

Becoming James tells the story of James bar-Joseph — the brother of Jesus who didn’t believe. Not during the ministry. Not at the crucifixion. Not, if we’re reading the historical record honestly, until sometime after the resurrection, when something happened that the New Testament mentions in a single quiet line and then moves past as though it were unremarkable.

Paul, listing resurrection appearances in his letter to the Corinthians, says simply: then he appeared to James.

That’s it. No details. No explanation. No account of what was said or how it happened or what James felt when he saw his brother standing alive in front of him after watching him die.

I have spent years inside that silence.

Because what I keep returning to is not the miraculous part — though I’ve sat with that long enough — but the human part. James spent thirty years as the skeptic in a family of believers. He thought his brother was, at best, mistaken. At worst, dangerous. He watched Jesus leave the family carpentry business to wander around Galilee preaching, and James stayed home and answered for it. Managed the accounts. Explained to customers why their orders were late. Absorbed the whispers.

He loved his brother the way siblings love each other when love and resentment have been so long intertwined you can’t separate the threads. Completely. Imperfectly. With a specific kind of hurt that only family can produce.

And then he watched him die.

And then — somehow, in a way we cannot fully reconstruct — he became the leader of the movement his brother started. The man who stayed in Jerusalem when Peter fled north. The man who presided over the first council. The man Josephus describes as so respected for his righteousness that when the high priest Ananus had him executed in 62 CE, the citizens of Jerusalem were outraged. He was called James the Just.

From doubter to martyr. From the brother who hid in the crowd at Golgotha to the man who stood in Solomon’s Portico and said his brother’s name out loud in a city where that name was dangerous.

That is the transformation I wanted to understand.

I should be honest about what the final stages of this book have been like.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that belongs to the last weeks of revision. It is not the productive exhaustion of drafting, when you fall asleep with scenes still assembling themselves behind your eyes. It is the exhaustion of precision — of reading a sentence for the fortieth time trying to determine whether the word settled or the word landed better carries the weight of what a character just understood. Of realizing at eleven at night that a plot thread you introduced in chapter four has an echo in chapter thirty-six that you haven’t fully drawn out, and that drawing it out will require changes in three chapters you thought were finished.

Of lying awake thinking: is this the right word, is this the right scene, is this the right book.

Every writer knows this. What I didn’t anticipate was how personal it would become.

I started this novel as a historical fiction project. A research problem. James the Just is one of the most underwritten figures in early Christian history — present at every hinge moment, essential to the movement’s survival, and almost entirely absent from the popular imagination. I wanted to give him a story.

What I didn’t plan was that I would spend the final months of revision thinking about my own brother.

Not because our relationship resembles James and Jesus — it doesn’t, not particularly. But because writing about brothers at all, with enough attention and enough honesty, eventually surfaces something true about what it means to love someone you grew up alongside. The specific texture of that love. The way it contains so much history that sometimes you can barely see the person in front of you for all the versions of them you’re carrying.

The way you can fail them and still be loved. The way love persists across denial and distance and all the small cowardices that accumulate in a life.

The final scenes of this book are about a man who realizes he has become, over thirty years of ordinary choices, someone capable of facing what he once ran from. Not because he found certainty. He never fully does. But because the community he built, the people he stayed for, the work he kept doing even when he couldn’t name what he was doing it for — all of it added up to something.

It added up to a self.

I cried writing those scenes. I am not especially prone to crying over my own work. But something about James standing in the place where his brother died, in the city where he once said I don’t know him, and being asked one more time whether he is what he is — something about that broke me open in a way I wasn’t expecting.

I was thinking about my brother. I was thinking about all the ways we fail the people we love and all the ways love survives the failing. I was thinking about what it means to stay. To keep showing up. To build something in the ordinary hours that turns out, over time, to be a life worth the cost.

The book releases at Easter.

I did not plan this deliberately, and then I did, and now I cannot imagine it any other way.

Easter is the day Christians mark the resurrection — the event that James, in my telling, can never quite verify and can never quite dismiss. But Easter is also, quietly, the day that belongs to the people who stayed. The women at the tomb. The disciples in the locked room. The brother who didn’t believe and then did and then built and then died for what he’d built.

James is not the Easter story most people tell. But he might be the one most of us are actually living.

Most of us are not mystics. Most of us do not have visions on the road to Damascus or voices from clouds. Most of us have the slower version — the evidence that accumulates across years of watching mercy work, of seeing what happens when people choose each other despite cost, of carrying a question we can’t answer but can’t put down either.

Most of us are still measuring. Still waiting to be sure enough to cut.

This book is for those people. The ones who love without certainty. The ones who stay in the workshop after everyone else has gone home, still at it, still shaping something they hope will hold.

It’s for my brother.

It’s for the brothers we’ve denied and the ones who looked at us with understanding anyway.

It’s for every person who has built a life on faith that felt more like stubbornness than certainty, and found out, in the end, that stubbornness and faith might be the same thing.

Becoming James releases this Easter. If you’ve been waiting for it — thank you. It’s ready in a week or two. Or as ready as I can make it, which is the only kind of ready there is.

I spent years hiding what happened at the cross.

Not literally—I mean in my writing, in early drafts of Becoming James. I wanted to skip past that moment where James denies his brother Jesus. Get to the transformation faster. The redemption. The part where he becomes the leader everyone remembers.

But the story kept pulling me back to that moment. To James in the crowd of onlookers, face turned away, trying to disappear among strangers while his brother died. To the soldier asking, “Are you kin to that one?” To James shaking his head. Lying. Then—and this is the part that haunted me—redirecting the soldiers elsewhere. Not just saving himself, but actively putting others at risk to make his denial believable.

That's not just saving himself. That's throwing others to the wolves.

And it’s the most important moment in the entire book.

Failure as Foundation

Here’s what I learned writing James’s story: transformation doesn’t happen despite failure. It happens because of it.

James doesn’t become a leader by getting everything right. He becomes one by facing what he got catastrophically wrong. By carrying the weight of his denial for thirty years. By building a community not from a position of moral authority but from the raw honesty of someone who knows what it costs to fail someone you love.

The early Christian community trusted James precisely because he didn’t pretend. He couldn’t. His denial was too public, his shame too fresh. So instead of offering certainty, he offered something rarer: the courage to keep showing up anyway.

That’s what failure teaches. Not humility in the abstract. Humility as lived experience…. the kind that makes you gentle with other people’s doubts because you remember your own.

Doubt as Companion

The hardest part of writing James was resisting the urge to resolve his doubt too quickly. I struggled with this all the time.

Peter sees the resurrected Jesus. Mary Magdalene sees him. Eventually five hundred others see him. But James? James finds an empty tomb. He sees something in the garden he can’t explain. He discovers a carved wooden lamb his brother made him years before, inscribed with words that feel like permission to question.

And then he has to decide: What do you do with evidence that points toward something impossible?

Traditional religious narrative says you either believe or you don’t. Faith or doubt. Pick a side.

But James’s story taught me something different. He doesn’t resolve his doubt. He acts within it. He opens his workshop to gatherings even though he’s not sure what he believes. He helps people even though he can’t explain the resurrection. He builds community not because he has answers but because people need somewhere to belong while they figure out their own questions.

Doubt, in James’s story, isn’t the enemy of faith. It’s faith’s necessary companion. It keeps faith honest. It prevents certainty from calcifying into cruelty. It allows for the possibility that what you believe today might deepen tomorrow.

The Cost of Visibility

By the end of the novel, James makes a choice that defines everything: he refuses to hide anymore.

The temple authorities are watching. People are being arrested. His community is being documented, names recorded, consequences mounting. Everyone around him is urging safety—close the door, scatter, wait until the danger passes.

And James says no.

Not because he’s finally certain. Not because his doubt has vanished. But because hiding—choosing safety over truth—nearly destroyed him once. He can’t do it again.

That’s the transformation. Not from doubt to certainty. From cowardice to courage. From hiding behind rocks to standing visible, knowing exactly what it might cost.

Why This Story Still Matters to Me

I wrote Becoming James after my brother died. After spending years avoiding the hard questions about faith, meaning, what remains when everything you thought was solid collapses.

James’s story gave me permission to ask those questions out loud. To admit I didn’t have answers. To build something anyway—not from certainty but from the stubborn insistence that showing up matters even when you don’t know what comes next.

Failure taught James that transformation doesn’t require perfection. Just willingness.

Doubt taught him that faith doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means choosing to live as if love matters more than fear, even when you’re not sure.

Those lessons are the ones I needed. The ones I’m still learning.

And I think they might be the ones a lot of us need right now.

Becoming James releases in 2026. It’s a story about the brother who hid, the leader he became, and the thirty years between cowardice and courage. If you live in the tension between doubt and hope—if you’re trying to figure out what to build after everything breaks—this story is for you.

My editor sent me notes this week. Line edits, scene expansions, ideas about pacing and cultural texture. The kind of work that reminds you a book is never truly finished—it’s surrendered. But buried in the markup was a line I keep returning to: “Overall, I am so proud to be working with you, the novel is well-written.”

I’ve read that sentence a dozen times. Not because I need the validation—though I won’t pretend it doesn’t help—but because it marks something I didn’t see coming when I started writing Becoming James years ago. I thought I was writing a book about doubt. About a man trying to lead when everything inside him says he’s not ready. About the brother of Jesus stumbling through grief and uncertainty, searching for a path forward that makes sense.

Turns out, I was writing about myself.

As we step into 2026, I find myself grateful for things I never thought to name before.

I’m grateful for family. Not in the abstract, Hallmark way, but in the specific, grounding way that matters when you’re trying to build something from nothing. My family held space for me to disappear into James’s world. They didn’t ask me to hurry up or make sense or produce certainty. They just let me work.

I’m grateful for a clear mind….which is a funny thing to say about a book born from grief. When my brother died, clarity felt impossible. But somewhere in the process of following James through his own loss, through his failures and his fear, I found a kind of focus I hadn’t felt in years. Not the clarity of answers, but the clarity of knowing what questions matter.

I’m grateful for support… from readers who’ve followed this journey, from an editor who sees what this book can become, from people who believe stories still heal us even when they don’t fix us.

And I’m grateful for the story itself. For James, who still teaches me things I didn’t know I needed to learn.

Here’s what surprised me most about writing this book: how easily the old tools came back.

I spent two decades as a journalist and producer, building scenes from interviews, watching how people move and speak and carry their truths. I trained myself to see—to witness without imposing, to construct narrative from raw life. Those skills felt distant when I started writing fiction. But the moment I stepped into James’s world, everything I’d learned came flooding back.

I could see the dust in Nazareth. I could hear the cadence of his doubt. I could feel the weight of leading when you’re not sure where you’re going.

Turns out, journalism wasn’t just a career. It was preparation. Grief handed me a story I had to tell, and journalism gave me the tools to tell it.

My relationship with James has become something I didn’t expect.

When I started, he was a character. A historical figure I was trying to understand, to animate, to make real. But the deeper I went, the more I realized: James and I share the same uncertainty. The same reluctance to lead. The same tension between what we believe and what we can prove. The same exhaustion that comes from living in a world that demands certainty when all you have is doubt.

James had to find a way forward in the aftermath of his brother’s death, in a movement that didn’t make sense, in a world that was hostile to the truth he was trying to carry. He had to lead anyway.

I don’t know what 2026 holds. I don’t know how this book will land or who will need it or whether it will do what I hope it does. But I know this: I thrive in uncertainty. Not because I’m brave, but because I’ve learned that uncertainty is where the real work happens. It’s where meaning gets made. It’s where stories become true.

James taught me that. Or maybe I taught him. Maybe we’re teaching each other.

The book is nearly finished. My editor is keeping me busy with expansions and refinements, pulling more tension from scenes I thought were done. There’s still work to do. There’s always more work to do.

But as I look toward the year ahead, I’m not thinking about publication dates or marketing plans or any of the machinery that comes with putting a book into the world. I’m thinking about the people who live in the tension between doubt and hope. The ones who are searching, not knowing. The ones who need a story that doesn’t offer answers but offers company.

That’s who I wrote this for. That’s who I’m still writing for.

Happy New Year. May 2026 bring us all the courage to lead in uncertainty…and the grace to keep going when we don’t know where we’re going.

—P.B. McKenzie

The first thing most new authors notice is the sheer number of vendors. You will see publicists, launch strategists, Instagram tour companies, TikTok creators, email blast services, pay per review schemes, Amazon ad managers, course sellers, and consultants who promise bestseller status. You will also receive direct messages with offers you never asked for and invitations to “exclusive promotions” that somehow never seem to end. The volume makes it hard to know which opportunities are legitimate and which are simply hoping you are inexperienced.

Then there is the cost variation. One service will offer a “full launch campaign” for $99. Another will offer what sounds like the same thing for $4,500. One influencer will post a reel for the price of a coffee. Another will charge more than an entire month of your mortgage. The deliverables rarely line up with the price tag. Some companies offer a list placement in a newsletter that reaches no real readers. Others provide actual hands on strategy and measurable results. The gap between the two is enormous. If you are not careful, you can pay a premium for a package that delivers almost nothing.

As a first time author, you need to keep your guard up. Not in a cynical way. In a wise and grounded way. Many vendors are excellent and genuinely want to help. Others rely on authors not knowing what is normal, what is standard, and what is unrealistic. Before you buy anything, ask yourself three questions. Does this vendor show real proof of past results. Do their deliverables match the price. And does this service align with how my readers actually discover books.

Publishing your first book is a major milestone. Marketing it is another. When you understand the landscape, you are far less likely to overspend or fall for empty promises. Protect your budget, trust your instincts, and remember that real growth often comes from steady, thoughtful effort. Not from the loudest offer in your inbox.

Me? I’m finding myself thinking what I always do, which is, you can do it yourself. For better or worse

.

I didn’t decide to write a novel the way people decide to run marathons, learn languages, or finally clean out their garages.

There was no vision board. There was no declaration I made to friends over coffee. No dramatic moment where I knew, with certainty, that I was a historical fiction writer.

I just started showing up at 5 AM with a question I couldn’t answer and a blank page that wouldn’t judge me for trying.

The question was simple: What if a man I’d never met, who lived in a time I’d only read about, could teach me something about becoming the person I was supposed to be?

I was unaware at the time that posing the question would necessitate two years of early mornings. I didn’t know it would mean sitting with my doubt so often that doubt started to feel like a companion. I didn’t know that writing historical fiction meant learning to carry other people’s grief alongside my own.

But I also didn’t know that beginning again—really beginning, not just contemplating beginning—would change everything.

The First Sentence

There’s a particular kind of terror that comes with writing the first sentence of a book.

Not because it has to be perfect. It won’t be. You’ll rewrite it thirty times, and it still won’t sound the way it did in your head.

The terror comes from knowing that once you write it, you’ve crossed a threshold. You’re no longer someone who wants to write a novel. You’re someone who is writing one.

And that changes the stakes.

Because now you have to keep going. Now you have to face the page tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Now you have to sit in the uncertainty of not knowing if what you’re making matters to anyone but you.

I wrote my first sentence on a Tuesday morning in February. I remember because it was still dark outside, and I could hear my neighbor’s truck starting up for work. The sentence was terrible. Overwritten. Trying too hard.

But it was there.

And once it was there, I couldn’t pretend anymore that I wasn’t doing this.

The Middle Miles

Nobody talks about the middle of writing a book.

Everyone wants to hear about the inspiration—the lightning-bolt moment when the story arrived fully formed. Or they want to hear about the ending—the triumphant finish, the relief, the champagne.

But the middle? The middle is where most people quit. I nearly did.

The middle is where you realize you have no idea what happens next. It’s where you read back what you wrote yesterday and think, “Who wrote this garbage?” It’s where the characters you thought you knew start making choices that don’t make sense, and you have to decide whether to trust them or force them back in line.

The middle is where doubt lives.

And doubt is a patient tenant. It doesn’t evict easily.

I spent months in the middle of my novel wondering if I was wasting my time. Wondering if anyone would care about a historical novel set in a time most people have forgotten. Wondering if I was too late—too old, too inexperienced, too far behind the writers who’d been doing this since they were twenty.

The only thing that kept me going was this: I kept showing up.

Not because I felt inspired. This was not due to a sense of inspiration or clarity. But because I’d made a quiet promise to myself that this time, I wouldn’t quit just because it got hard.

The Grace We Don’t Deserve

Here’s what no one tells you about writing a first novel: it will ask things of you that you didn’t know you had to give.

It will ask you to sit with silence. To struggle quietly. To write scenes that make you wonder if they will resonate with readers. To face impostor syndrome daily.

It will ask you to keep going when no one is watching, when no one cares, when you’re not even sure you care anymore.

And then—if you’re lucky—something shifts.

Not all at once. Not in a way you can point to and say, “That’s when it happened.”

But slowly, quietly, you start to realize that the story isn’t just something you’re writing. It’s something that’s writing you.

Did you create characters to explore faith and doubt? They start asking you questions about your own belief. What grief have you inflicted upon them? It becomes a mirror for the grief you’ve been carrying. The transformation you’re writing for them? It’s happening to you, too.

This is an unexpected grace.

It's not that writing a novel clarifies everything. Not that it solves the unanswerable questions or heals the unhealed places.

However, it does hold them in place. It creates a space where doubt and courage can coexist side by side. It serves as a reminder that transformation occurs not in dramatic moments, but rather in the quiet, unglamorous ones where you choose to start anew.

What I’m Learning

I’m still writing my novel. I continue to revise, grapple with scenes that refuse to cooperate, and persist in writing even at 5 AM when my inner critic is asleep.

But here’s what I’ve learned so far:

Beginning again isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about deciding that the questions matter enough to keep asking.

It’s not about knowing you’ll succeed. It’s about knowing that the trying—the showing up, the sitting with the hard parts, the refusing to quit—is its own kind of success.

And it’s not about producing something perfect. It’s about producing something true.

Because the truth is, we’re all in the middle of our own stories. We’re all carrying doubt and courage in equal measure. We’re all trying to figure out who we’re becoming.

And maybe the most honest thing we can do is admit that we don’t have it figured out—but we’re beginning anyway.

A Question for You

I don’t know where you are in your own story today. Maybe you’re at the beginning, staring down that terrifying first sentence. Maybe you’re in the middle, wondering if you should quit. Maybe you’re at the end of something, unsure whether to start again.

But here’s what I want to ask: What would it mean to begin again?

Not perfectly. Not with certainty. Just... again.

What story are you carrying that refuses to stay quiet? What question do you need to ask, even if you don’t know the answer yet?

What would happen if you trusted that beginning, even without knowing how it ends; is that not courage enough?

I’d love to hear from you.

If this resonated with you, I’d be grateful if you shared it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you want to follow along as I finish my first novel, subscribe below. I send weekly essays about doubt, courage, and the unexpected grace that finds us anyway.

There’s a moment that happens after loss—one most people don’t talk about because it feels too small to name.

It isn’t the immediate shock. It isn’t the deep grief. It isn’t even the stretch of numbness that follows.

It’s the moment when you pick something up that belonged to the person you lost, and you realize you’re holding more than an object.

For me, it was finding an old pack of my brother’s cigarettes.

He’d kept them hidden from his kids—tucked up high on an old shelf under a shed roof. The kind of secret that wasn’t really a secret, just something he kept to himself.

I found them after he died. I still walk by that spot from time to time. There’s an old butt up there, one he must have extinguished. I can still see it.

I’ve never moved it. It felt more like stepping into a room where the air still held someone’s breath.

I think everyone has an object like that—something small that becomes a doorway. Not to the past, but to the unfinished conversation between who we were and who we’re becoming.

I’ve been thinking about that lately as I work on Becoming James. The novel is historical fiction, but the grief underneath it isn’t.

And the deeper I get into revision, the more I’m confronted by the quiet truth that the stories we write don’t stay on the page. They follow us. They shape the way we move in the world.

They become the objects we carry forward.

Some people carry faith. Some carry questions they’ve never said out loud. Some carry regret, or gratitude, or the quiet wish that they’d been braver in a moment that mattered. Some carry the stories their parents told. Some carry the ones their parents refused to tell.

Most of us carry all of it at once.

And maybe that’s part of the work—learning to sort through the weight, to keep what keeps us human, and to set down what no longer belongs in our hands.

A storyteller I admire once said that grief is the price we pay for loving people at all. I think that’s true. But I’ve also learned something else:

Grief is also an inheritance. A harsh one. But an honest one.

It wants something from us—it asks what we’ll be like after.

As I write this, two photos are pinned to the wall above my desk. One of my brother and one of my father. They don’t mean what they used to. They’ve changed, the way objects do when you’ve held them long enough to see past what they show.

I look at them when the writing gets hard. Not for comfort, exactly. Just to remember that the hardest stories aren’t the ones we write—they’re the ones we live our way through before we’re ready to tell them.

I don’t know what you’re carrying these days. But if you’re here, reading this, I hope you know you don’t have to carry it alone.

Walk me through a building I’ve never been in, and I’ll still know where the parking lot is. Come up from the subway, I’m already oriented to the street grid. Some wiring in my hippocampus just works that way.

The real map I carry, though, is my reporter’s notebook. Beat up, ink-smudged, crammed with scribbles in the margins. While part of my brain tracks physical space without effort, these pages map something messier: what people actually said, the detail that explains everything, the question I forgot to ask.

I never get lost finding my way around a city. But the notebook—that’s where the real navigation happens. The margins hold the stories that matter, the ones you can’t find with any compass.

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