PANA - Like many a stay-at-home mother, Charyl Miller Pingleton has plenty to keep her busy.

She's a wife; husband Tracy Pingleton is a sergeant in the United States Air Force stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. She's a mother; Michael, almost 9, has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and Anna, 7, is more severely autistic and cannot speak. She's a doer; she is learning to tune pianos, knits and maintains a free Web site to help find and support local authors, www.geocities.com/Find_Local_Authors.

And now she's an author who has now published her first book, "The Revelation of John: A Spiritual Novel," and previously released a novella, "Angel Unaware."

Q: The writing process, is this break time? Is it a chore? Is it easy?

"I write mainly when my kids are in school or have gone to bed for the night.

"I will write for several weeks at a time every day, and then not write again for several months," she said.

"It is easy for me when a good plot idea has popped into my head and my hand can't keep up with the words."

But that's not always the case. At other times, she confessed, when she's trying to finish something she has started, it becomes a chore.

"I would say at this point it is mainly a hobby; maybe one day it will become something more."

Q: "The Revelation of John" isn't your first venture into writing but why did you decide to do it?

"I've written since I was a little girl. I wanted a typewriter when I was small so I could make my own 'books' and 'newsletters.'

And that's not all. Pingleton has what she described as "a ton of unpublished work (short stories, poems, essays, etc.) that I did in high school just as personal writing. I wrote a little for the high school newspaper and I had a few articles published in the local newspaper several years ago. I also wrote a couple of articles for a small-time spiritual magazine in Florida as well."

Pingleton runs her own personal weblog and recently signed up with AssociatedContent.com as a basic Content Producer.

Q: The promo for the book calls it inspirational fiction but would you consider this a somewhat allegorical novel at all?

"I wrote my last two books, because I rarely found fiction that was spiritually-inspired but also added an element of the mystical (such as angels, ghosts, visions, intuitive abilities, other life forms, etc.).

"I only had the choice of very religious Christian fiction or over-the-top occult novels. There didn't seem to be anything in-between."

Even Pingleton worked in a bookstore for a couple of years, she never found anything she really liked.

"'The Revelation of John' came out of the want for a book with an uplifting Christian foundation, that added a little bit of mysticism."

Pingleton prefers her writing to be very readable and light, not overly-poetic, with a little bit of humor for good measure. She also prefers to publish works that are not tremendous in length, so the reader doesn't come away bored.

Q: Gathering from the title, I would presume your faith is important to you? Can you tell why?

Pingleton raised a Methodist, grew up in Pana and graduated from high school there in 1996.

She feels, she said, that organized religion has an important purpose.

"But, I tend to gravitate more to the spiritual side of faith. Starting from when I was a child, I began to be more interested in more new age-type and mystical sides of spirituality.

"I am very interested in learning about Jesus the man and spirit. I also have always been interested in factual scientific wonders (astronomy, deep space, different dimensions, electric forces, earth science, quantam physics, etc.) and how they tie in with God/The Higher Power."

Pingleton tends to feel that God has a sense of humor and that all things happen for a reason, "even if we don't know that reason just yet."

She wants her readers to take away a message from "The Revelation of John: A Spiritual Novel:"

"I hope that after taking in this small novel, the reader will begin to look at life in general differently; that he/she will stop taking things for granted and start looking more closely at those little 'coincidences' in life.

"Basically, I want people to come away with renewed purposes for their lives.

"I hope that the readers of my books will feel as if they have a movie playing in their minds as they read. Hopefully people will think 'What if…?' when they read my books.

Arlene Mannlein can be reached at amannlein@herald-review.com or 421-6976.

About the book

TITLE: "The Revelation of John: A Spiritual Novel" by Charyl Miller Pingleton

TYPE: paperback, 120 pages

ISBN: 1424143500; ISBN-13: 9781424143504,

PUBLISHER: PublishAmerica, Dec. 28, 2006

LIST PRICE: $13.95, $16.95

AUTHOR'S WEB SITE: charyl.blogspot.com

AVAILABLE: amazon.com; barnesandnoble.com; publishamerica.com; through most bookstores through most bookstores by using Ingrams/Books-in-Print