About

S. Daniel Smith is a follower of Jesus, husband, father, career Navy officer, and freelance writer living in the Hampton Roads area on Virginia. He has covered churches, disaster relief efforts, and Christianity in the military for periodicals such as EFCA Now, The Living Church, and the Baptist Standard. In all, Dan has been published twenty times in a dozen periodicals, both online and in traditional print.

He is seeking opportunities to further serve God through his writing by submitting articles, queries, and letters of introduction to Christian magazines throughout the United States. Dan is also seeking publication in secular magazines, predominantly in the Virginia/North Carolina area, with a focus on the Hampton Roads region.

You can find a complete publication list by clicking Published Clips above. He also sends out a monthly newsletter to subscribers, which you can join HERE.

Saving Ebenezer: The continuing saga of a man named Scrooge,* is Dan’s first work in Christian historical fiction. With a straight face, he credits the Holy Spirit with the idea for the story and believes that God led him to write it. This fact humbles him regarding the story and the mostly good reviews the novella has received. It’s also part of the reason there’s no follow up story. He believes that Saving Ebenezer is probably a one-off story, something he was supposed to write for a purpose and not as the first book in a series.

A fun fact about Dan: He cans grape jelly from a vine in his backyard.

Dan is a 2005 graduate of Park University (BS Management/CIS) and a 2013 graduate of Liberty University’s School of Divinity (MA Religion).

The Five Women

Dan fell in love with writing and books as a boy before he could even read or write. A late bloomer, he would have his mom copy sections of World of Weapons and the family encyclopedia sets so he could call them books. That love was furthered in the 3^rd grade when Mrs. Bird would let Dan read sections of a book he was writing to his classmates. It sounded like a suspicious mixture of White Fang and Call of the Wild, but still, Mrs. Bird humored him because it was at least his own words. In High School, It was Mrs. Johnson’s literature class that encouraged him. Growing up poor in Southeast Kansas meant Dan wasn’t an early adopter of the personal computer, but Mrs. Johnson would let him check out a school laptop regularly so he could write his stories, which included great galactic battles between oddly humanoid creatures. Several years after Dan was first published, Diane McDougal became a mentor of sorts when he became an occasional contributor for the denominational periodical EFCA Today. She taught him to write tight, not waste words, and to get to the point. Diane’s impact is still felt in Dan’s writing even today. Finally, Dan knows that his writing is far better because his wife of 22 years, Alicia, regularly goes through red pens on his drafts. Being vulnerable to Alicia through his writing has grown and humbled Dan tremendously, and it’s all been very much worth it.

*Affiliate Link: I may make a small commission if you use my link for ordering the mentioned book. It won’t change your cost and it’s one way to help support what I do. Thank you!