The works of John L. Stone
Books
Three published works—an exploration of the choices that remain ours when much of life does not, a metaphysical novel about what may lie beyond a single lifetime, and a historical novel imagining the Bennet family in the years before Pride and Prejudice.
Historical Fiction — Newest Release
Before Pride and Prejudice
A Novel
Set in the English countryside in the years before Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Before Pride and Prejudice imagines the earlier lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet—from courtship and marriage through the birth and upbringing of their five daughters. As Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia gradually become the young women Austen's readers know, the novel explores the love, disappointments, family relationships, and circumstances that shape the Bennet household. Rather than reinventing Austen's characters, the story asks what might reasonably have happened before her novel began to make them the people she created.
An original novel — not affiliated with the Jane Austen estate.
NONFICTION • PERSONAL AGENCY & LIFE CHOICES
C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Model: Choosing Love Instead of Fear
Seven Areas of Personal Agency
What remains within our control when so much of life does not?
CHOICES: Choosing Love Instead of Fear grew from John L. Stone's graduate research into stress and the factors that influence how people respond to it. An unexpected finding became the foundation of the book: while much of what happens to us lies beyond our control, we continue to exercise meaningful choice in important areas of our lives.
Using the C.H.O.I.C.E.S. model—Community, Health, Occupation, Investment, Creativity, Education, and Spirituality—Stone examines seven areas in which we retain personal agency regardless of wealth, status, privilege, or circumstance. Rather than promising control over life itself, CHOICES explores something both more modest and more useful: recognizing where choice remains possible and understanding how the choices we make can influence the way we experience and respond to life's challenges.
METAPHYSICAL FICTION
Fuller Sight
A Metaphysical Novel
What if understanding a life requires seeing beyond the life we remember?
Fuller Sight follows Danny Anderson, whose life ends after an act intended to protect someone he loves. What follows takes him beyond the world he knew, where a life review and encounters with lives that came before begin to change his understanding of who he is and what his life has meant.
Through Danny's journey, Fuller Sight explores love and fear, sacrifice and consequence, death, reincarnation, and the possibility that our lives may be connected in ways we cannot perceive while we are living them. Rather than offering answers about what lies beyond death, the novel asks readers to consider what might become visible if we could see our lives from a fuller perspective.
A NOTE TO READERS
Fuller Sight explores profound questions of life, loss, and what may lie beyond. The story includes a character who makes a deliberate choice to bring his own life to an end. Some readers may find this aspect of the story emotionally difficult. Within the story, however, his decision proves not to be the escape he imagined it would be.