All in Good Time

Meet Ruth Logan Herne, an author in Guideposts’ new mystery series, Miracles & Mysteries of Mercy Hospital

- ELENA TAFONE

It’s not quite four o’clock in the morning at Blodgett Family Farm in the hills of upstate New York. The fields and pumpkin patches may be draped in darkness, but there’s a light shining in the farmhouse window. Ruth Logan Herne, an award-winning inspirational fiction author, is hard at work.

Ruth gets up a little after three o’clock every morning to write. Though she has a home office, she rarely uses it. She prefers to sit on the family room floor with her laptop.

“When you’re older, hips and joints don’t necessarily like soft furniture,” she says. “We have 14 grandchildren, 11 of whom live nearby, and they like to bounce on the furniture. Not a couch or a love seat in that pretty little family room has support anymore. But it’s not about where you write—it’s about the words on the page.”

Ruth has penned more than 60 books this way, waking in the middle of the night and cranking out at least a thousand words before dawn.

It’s a routine that began more than 20 years ago. Back then, Ruth was running a daycare out of her home. Though she’d dreamed of becoming an author since she was a little girl, between her job, the farm, and raising six children, she barely had time to sit, let alone write.