L.J. Beene

Author and illustrator L.J. Beene is a pastor’s wife who has spent her entire adult life working with children in an economically disadvantaged community. A balance of being logical, empathic, and creative has been instrumental in her forty years of work with children of all ages. She has served in ministries from nursery age children to troubled teens. The study of God’s Word and its fundamental truths has had the greatest influence on her reasoning and logic. As a child she escaped into and lived in the stories she learned in Sunday School. At nineteen she picked up the Bible and started reading it for herself and never put it down. She has a passion for stringing together Bible themes and digging for those golden nuggets of universal truth with all the eureka enthusiasm of a feverish gold-digging miner. Her natural empathy deepened from her experience in working with children especially those wounded by an absentee parent. She has listened to many troubled teenagers whose goal in life was—to not be that parent who abandoned them. It was when counseling one of these teens that the idea of Warrior of the Dragon Fields materialized in her head. She could vividly imagine the child being helplessly drug off in the clutches of a dragon’s tail while feeling the gut-wrenching reality of what an absolute fight it is to help them from becoming the person they so desperately do not want to be. This experience inspired a storyline that uses biblical narratives and imaginative portrayals of Bible characters to illustrate God’s redemption and the fight to save others from the Dragon’s domain. Her natural creativity, expressed in her teaching style, vivid imagination, and love of art, is the right brain counterpart to the logical left where logic merges with imagination, where the serious side meets quirky, where thoughts are expressed in poetry, where reason is brought to life with feeling and intuition, and where her inquisitive observation of people pulls the sensitive introvert into social interaction—basically, a walking contradiction. Growing up she loved the outdoors, sports, and was passionate about rescuing birds from her cat. While she loved learning and was a good student, testing and grading gave her anxiety. Never able to risk exposure of asking a question, she became a self-learner. Interests that she self-explored as a child were drawing, reading, poetry, sewing, baking, and any kind of crafting. These qualities and experiences finally culminated in writing her first book during the Pandemic. The foundation of the story begins with the logic and knowledge of the Bible, adding to that is the imagination of escaping into Bible Stories of her youth, and finally, the inspiration and empathy gained from her work with children. However, she still needed illustrations. Overcoming conflict and self-doubt, her creative side finally decided to just go for it and do it herself. It was the right decision. Empathy inspired and logic wrote, but creativity c