And Now for Something Completely Different...

Image: AI Image of an indecisive writer

I am happy to report that after 14 days in the hospital, two surgeries and ten weeks of at-home IV antibiotic therapy, I am no longer struggling with my health, having been given a clean bill health from all of the doctors working on my case. Even the brain fog is receding, so if I miss posts in the future, it just means I'm being lazy and not committed to my craft. I am also throwing myself into writing fiction again. There are two issues that I am struggling with as I grapple with rediscovering my voice.

The first is purely physical: I write in the early morning. I get up around 4am in order to have the time and solitude I require to write. While I was dealing with my health, I was exhausted and spent days sleeping. Renewing my commitment to rising early has been as difficult as returning to the gym. I feel like I've lost everything and some mornings getting out of bed feels impossible. It does not help that Rooster and Poppy, who get up with me, have also reset their body clocks to waking much later. Now they want to cuddle in bed at 4am rather than join me in the office. It is almost impossible to get out of bed when your dogs want to snuggle.

The second challenge is reconnecting to the narrative I am crafting. I always have multiple projects in some stage of development. At this time, I have seven projects in some stage of development. I work on a project until I hit a narrative dead end--a problem I cannot resolve in the moment--or until I grow bored with it, and then I move onto another, but I never junk anything. I will rotate through the projects until I reach the point with one of them that I cannot let it go, and then everything else is abandoned until I have wrapped up the work. Projects I'm ignoring at the moment have working titles of The Grave Bride, The Canopy, Privilege, The Changeling, Redemption and a non-fiction work In the Garden.

The project I'm focused on at the moment is Judas in Hell. The novel is two stories, thematically connected, but narratively separate. Returning to the manuscript after two and a half months, I'm facing a writing crisis unlike anything I've dealt with before. The entire structure of the novel is wrong. I'm no longer interested in both narratives. I have just lost half of my novel. To rebuild it, I have to go back to the beginning and build out secondary characters, give them voice and point-of-view, and challenge the current narrative voice. I worry that I'm changing the novel in a way that reduces it, somehow, but it also feels like this is the only way to move forward.

Writing is an act of faith. As a storyteller, I make decisions that lead to outcomes that are unknowable to me know. Will this tighten up and improve the story, or am I losing something important and meaningful? How will it change the reader's experience? In two months, will I suddenly want to go back to the original idea, and need to cut much of the new work to get back to the true narrative? After such a long layoff from working on this story, these questions feel overwhelming.

Earlier this year, I shared that my novel The Devil's Interval, A Novel of WWII Intrigue, was under contract to be published this year. Unfortunately, the small, independent publisher I was working with was unable to meet their deadlines and I have cancelled the contract. I am currently looking for a new publisher to work with.

Some much has happened in our nation since I stopped writing that it would take an entire book to comment. Just remember, we cannot abide cruelty. There is no place for it in this world and supporting a regime that delights in cruelty is morally wrong.

Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to https://readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway/love/1 you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck!