Redemption

Redemption:


Someone might ask from time to time, what is the biggest thing going on in your life?


The problem with a question like that is that at any given moment something might seem more important than the next thing.  So you ask 11/14, I would have told you my new son Timothy, who was born at 8pm that day. None of my little kids, Elise (5), Ruben "Ben" (2) or Tim is ever far from the top spot, and of course my wife of 13 years, Jenny is always hovering near the top of the list, as anyone who has ever been married knows.


That said, aside from professional obligations and familial obligations, which would both fill more than one blog post, the series of novels I have been working on in all my spare time for the past eighteen months or so, and been conceptualizing for nearly 15 years would have to be right at the top of the list.


Over a series of posts over the next week or so, I will endeavor to introduce you to the stories and the characters who make up the series.


One of the fascinating parts of the process is this... I always assumed if I wrote what I thought was a kick ass book, I wouldn't have much trouble selling it.  With The Neon Roadhouse, that was a year ago, breaking the novel in half, and going through multiple revisions.  First, it was 180,000 words.  Way too long.  Cut here and there, rewrite the second half, and now what made it beautiful to me was gone.  Break it in half, go to the logical break point, and edit and relocate the end of the second half into the third book, which solves a problem with it.  Then I read the novel as it is, and it seems pretty cool, but it's all character, not enough plot, and definitely not enough of the female voice.


Diary entries are so overdone, right?  How else do you take a first person perspective and add authenticity to a character not the writer?  Put her thoughts in the diary entries, but use them sparsely.  Play that out, relocate one of the more important parts to the beginning, and then tell the tale in a slightly non-linear way over two timelines, and the result, well, I think it's pretty awesome, but there's still a problem...


Take a standard V curve, where the two points are literary and commercial.  I'm in the trough in between.  (Thanks MAG for the apt analogy).


So there's a number of ways I *could* go.  Here's what I'm going to do...


I'm going to introduce the characters in words and images over a span of time, trying to attract a following to take to a publisher and say, literary, commercial?  Who cares.