Ondrea Keigh Interview Published on: 06, Nov 2025

It started with a need for something to do while I was deciding how to proceed with my animal training business. I had shut down the business during COVID and then relocated. So, when I got settled, I started working on getting the business up and running again, but I found myself hesitant to get fully back into animal training. This made me question if I was meant to continue pursuing animal training as my career, so I took some time to reevaluate. Writing was something I wanted to do back in high school and college, but I was swamped with classes, so it got shoved to the back of my mind. When I realized I had some time to try it out again, I got to work. Once I had some stories written, I realized I loved it! I dove in and found that not only did I enjoy it, but I was good at it, and I could still apply the things I learned in college and during my years as an animal trainer. I started sharing the books I wrote with people I knew, and talked to an author friend who walked me through what it would take to publish. I prayed about it and found that this was the route I felt I needed to take for my career. I have a lot of wonderful people in my life who helped me get here, and now I have three books out on Amazon and multiple short stories available through my newsletter! It has been a wild ride, and I am excited to see where God takes me!

Yes, I love the tiny home life! It does have a big impact on my writing process and creativity because I don’t have an office. I have had to develop some really well-established environmental cues for myself to make sure I can focus and get work done in the space where I both live and work. That means my writing process is very planned out. I have set work hours and writing hours that I stick to daily. As for creativity, living in a tiny space has motivated me to go out and experience nature in more ways than I used to. I do a lot of brainstorming on the beach during the summer rather than just sitting at my desk because sometimes I just spend too much time in one space. This time out in nature has influenced a lot of my writing and definitely has an impact on my ability to create stories. If I spend too much time inside, I find it harder to focus and I feel less creative, so I make sure to get outside every day.

It took me a while to learn this about myself, but stories have served an important role in processing my own struggles and questions in life. When I stopped to think about it, I realized that I had been creating stories since I was a child. It was just such a natural process for me by the time I became an adult that I didn’t really think of it as storytelling. That was just how my brain worked. Stories were just one of the many tools I used to make sense of the world around me. When it came to writing books, writing Ben’s story really helped me process questions I had about what it means to have faith in a dark world. I think true entertainment does not just give us a chance to jump into a different universe, but it also offers us a chance to learn things by observing how the characters work out their problems in their world. So, the idea of taking something I was working through that I knew others were also struggling with and turning it into a fun epic that I could share with others was something that really excited me! Stories really do have power, and I felt like the world needed more positive messages of faith and hope in the stories being shared.

I use my undergraduate degree in psychology way more than I thought I would as a writer. I studied mostly developmental psychology and criminal psychology, and then after college, I went on to study applied behavior modification as an animal trainer for ten years. Those particular topics have been great resources for developing my villains and finding ways to build challenges for my main characters in all my books, but especially in The Mission and The Gate. A big part of psychology is understanding how people respond to their environment and why people make certain decisions, and those things are also a big part of writing novels. When it came to writing characters for The Mission, all of that played into the process for each character. However, it was especially helpful with regard to one particular character. I won’t say who it is, as I don’t want to give anything away, but I definitely drew on the things I learned about relationships and the way certain actions and behaviors impact people’s perceptions of one another.

Yes, the dragon with a split personality was a fun one to create! Honestly, there isn’t really one way that I approach the process. It depends on the creature and what purpose it serves for the plot. When I created the Great Beasts of the Southern Mountains, I just thought, what animal would be the most terrifying thing to meet at night in the woods? I came up with this sort of scarred, grey wolf the size of a bull. Then that inspired other animals, and I ended up with these beasts that are kind of a mash-up of various animals; some look more like wolves, some look more like bulls, and others look like bears. I just needed something that would really put these characters in a position where they would have to fight together to take down even one of these things or be really experienced to approach it one-on-one. For other creatures, I have used animals I see in real life for inspiration. Sometimes I will ask my newsletter subscribers if they think a certain animal would make a good fantasy creature or good inspiration for one. But I create creatures as I need them. So, they are often a product of the characters’ circumstances and the world-building I am doing at the time.

I love to connect with readers! My newsletters are my favorite way to do that. I find that learning about my readers and learning what they like really impacts how and what I write and create. My goal is to entertain and spread the message of hope in darkness, and to do that, I need to know my audience. What messages do they find helpful? What struggles do they want to see people overcome? What do they find funny? What do they find encouraging? All those things and more help me when I am writing stories because, really, the stories are for the readers. So, staying connected with them is a big part of my writing process.

I would have to say the ocean. I started writing shortly after I moved to a beach location, and being around the ocean really made my creativity explode. I love to walk on the beach and take pictures of the rocks that create the little tide pools. It was actually these pools and the ocean that inspired many locations in my fictional worlds and helped me come up with the ship Lyonsword, which is a mysterious ship with an interesting past and some unusual abilities that is mainly featured in The Mission.

I love to write fast-paced fight scenes to keep up the excitement levels. Once I have all the fight elements written, I like to let the characters take over a little bit and just see how they react and see what comes up as I am writing. A lot of the emotional side of the fight scenes happen in editing after the scenes are created, and I know how the pacing will go. This allows me to write out a fight scene in a technical way and focus on the general flow of the fight, then go back and turn it into a great story moment when I can really zero in on the characters’ emotions.

Yes, all the time. There are many locations and scenes in my books that were inspired by adventures in the woods I grew up exploring and the jungles around where I currently live. The tropical storms I have experienced living in Florida have also played a part in a few settings. I didn’t grow up here, so I wasn’t well-versed in the storms, though I knew they would be part of living here. Living near them, though, is different than just knowing about them. Thankfully, I haven’t been through a really damaging storm, but I have been much closer to them than at any point in my life before, and it’s eye-opening to the power of natural storms. The opening scene of The Mission was actually inspired by the storms I have witnessed and experienced living near the ocean. And that scene turned out to be one of my favorite scenes to write.

I think art is a great way to process internal struggles and beliefs, and writing is a big part of that for me. Writing my novels was a really therapeutic experience, and I learned so much about life and about my faith walk while writing these books. Not only did writing these novels teach me about myself, but I also had some really faith-deepening experiences, like the time an answer to a prayer came inside an error that was printed in the first copy of The Story that I ever got! That experience was really amazing! Overall, the whole process of writing these novels has just been a great learning opportunity and blessing that I will always carry with me.

The biggest challenge was the mental state that Ben finds himself in at the beginning of the story. I wanted to create an intimate space where readers could really understand what Ben is feeling, but I didn’t want to lose that epic fantasy world-building. I chose to write The Arlin Trilogy in first person for this reason. I needed to be able to express the tiny world within the bigger world and build space for the audience to experience Ben’s changing perspective from only himself to the world around him. I plan to use other perspectives for future books, but first person was important for telling Ben’s story. It was a challenge, though, to explore what was going on without being able to put anything other than what Ben was aware of on the page. My wonderful editor, Laura, helped a lot with that process, and I learned a lot about how to show rather than tell, as I had to have a lot of what was going on, even the world-building, expressed through Ben’s words, thoughts, and body language. It was challenging, but super fun!

I would say the plot. I tend to think of one scene first, and then I focus on finding out how my characters got to that scene and what happens to them afterward. The world-building kind of grows from that process, and then I learn more about the characters as I figure out what they are doing, where they are going, and why they are making the decisions they are making.

There are a lot of ways I like to strike the balance between realism and optimism, but one of my favorites is through the use of character dynamics. As the author, I can create a cast of characters with some who represent that realism side of life and some who represent the optimism side of life. One of my favorite characters, and a fan favorite, is Otto Bilden. He is a little like the comic relief. But he also carries his own scars and fears. While I wouldn’t quite call him optimistic, he was created as a way to add a bit of contrast to Ben’s darkness. Solace Devo was another character who came about because I needed someone who was very different from Ben, who could add a sense of hope to the story. Solace could definitely be described as optimistic, so she was important for creating that balance as well.

Yes, Jeb, Ben’s horse, was mostly a product of my experiences training horses. I love gentle training methods that promote joy in the learner as much as the trainer, and I have experienced the amazing bonds you can build through kind and positive reinforcement, science-based training with horses. When I thought of Ben and his struggles, he had lost so much and was in this grouchy, painful stage of life, but I wanted to show that he had this depth of feeling, that he could really be caring and gentle. So, showing that in his relationship with Jeb was really fun, not just as an opportunity to use those skills from my previous experiences, but also as a way to share Ben’s sort of hidden personality. It was also a great opportunity to explore what it means to have faith that isn’t blind. I learned a lot about faith from training animals, and Ben is kind of exploring this idea of what it means to have faith in something you can’t see or fully explain, but not having “blind faith.” It was really fun to use the animal training process and relationship to help Ben understand that concept in a similar way that it helped me understand the same concept.

Yes, of course! I discovered AllAuthor through the Alliance of Independent Authors. AllAuthor has been a great way to get news of my books out to people through posts on X. It has also provided great opportunities to chat with readers on the AllAuthor platform and learn more about them. Overall, it has been a great experience!