Christian M. Frank

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.

So we hope you like the books, stay tuned for more, and if you think of it, say a prayer for us! Thanks!