About Sheila Rodriguez
I write fiction about people who are trying to hold their lives together when God has other plans.
I’m also a former geology student, a homeschooling mother of three, a traumatic brain injury survivor, and the woman who spent years translating her husband’s late-night theology deep-dives into something the rest of us could connect with. There’s a through-line in all of that. When I saw it, it changed everything.
A Faith Shaped by Real Life
My faith was formed long before a car accident changed my life, but it was tested and refined as I learned to live with a traumatic brain injury. Living with limits forced me to learn what it actually looks like to trust Jesus when strength is reduced, answers are nonexistent, and life doesn’t resolve neatly.
That season clarified something important: faith that stays theoretical is fragile. Faith that is practiced – daily, imperfectly, and honestly – can endure.
That’s what I write about. Not the idealized version. The real one.
The Cost to Go Back
Elena is thirty-five years old, deeply in love with her husband, homeschooling their three children, and living a life she has worked hard to build. Then a car accident gives her a traumatic brain injury that erases her memories of all of it.
Two years later, still piecing herself back together, she discovers a hidden room with a console that displays her past as a grid of relive-able memories. Then she discovers it can rewrite them.
Every button she pushes gambles her family’s existence. She must choose between grasping for control or surrendering to the God who has been with her the whole time.
Drawn from my own experience surviving a traumatic brain injury and the long, uneven road back to myself.
THE RHYOLITE CHRONICLES
Series in Development
When the boomtown of Rhyolite, Nevada is transported to another world by an experimental aether machine, its survivors build a new life among strange flora, transformed animals, and emerging steampunk technology. After ten years, a faction breaks away into the Hask Mountains to build a utopia of their own.
It becomes anything but.
Two teens escape the cult’s grasp and stumble into an abandoned fortress where a hidden library holds the lore of their people… and the shocking truth that freedom exists beyond their mountain prison. Before they can finish reading, an airship descends carrying strangers who will change everything.
I’m building this world in conversation with my readers: the questions, the decisions, the behind-the-scenes. If you want to be part of that process from the beginning, join the list.
I don’t write idealized versions of faith or life. I write about what it looks like to walk with God when things are…
What You’ll Find Here
On this site you’ll find updates on both books, honest writing about faith and real life, and behind-the-scenes glimpses into what it actually looks like to build something from scratch while recovering from a brain injury and homeschooling three kids.
No performance. No polish that covers the mess. Just what I’m actually learning.
For practical discipleship tools: journals, Bible study resources, and the AI tool my husband Brandon built visit us at Field & Cannon, the company we built together.
Fiction that doesn’t flinch
That works in ordinary life
Honest and unfiltered
Books and brain injury