Onward...

I'm sorry it has been so long since I was last here, but the time away was well spent. Because, you see, I found the key that unlocked the true beginning of my new book. There will be no looking back, no turning back now.

Every single writer has a different way of working, a different way of getting to that strange point at which a book is born, and may continue to grow until it reaches the book's equivalent of maturity, i.e. publication. For me it has taken years, and a lot of attempts that have ended up in a folder on my desktop titled "Novel Frags" -- for fragments of novels, of course.

Before I go on here, I want to make it clear that this "work in progress log" is in no way meant for self promotion of anything I may write or have written. It is only to respond to people who've asked about what I'm working on, and sometimes, to tell more about how I write, the process. For anybody who is interested.

OK, back on point: The process of getting where I am now has been convoluted, and I guess because it has a happy ending, it may be of some value to anybody who finds themselves stuck in some sort of convolution to hear about it. I'm going to begin by telling the happy ending first: my new work in progress is titled

FIREFLASH: A Tale of the Latents.

But you will have to wait a while to know why it's called that (unless you're one of a small group who helped me find exactly the right words, and you know who you are). Remember, this is about process.

OK, now we go back a few years ...

After my series was cancelled, and after my standalone CUT TO THE HEART, I'd been intending to write something contemporary. It would be a "big book," which means big in numbers of pages, numbers of characters, and in the scope of the story. I wanted the big book to be a thriller, about the kinds of things that have interested me all my life, with the result I'd collected a lot of research material I wanted to use. In addition, I thought it would be good to aim it at the year 2012, because of the Mayan and Hopi prophecies that the world we live in will end on December 21, 2012. Personally, I just want to live to see what happens that day, and the day after that ... because I do believe there will be a day after, but wouldn't it be interesting if something really big really did happen? Those afore-mentioned things that have interested me all my life include all the stuff that is often supposed to exist, but can't generally be seen with the naked eye, such as ghosts and apparitions, angels and demons, and all that kind of thing. So I started off with this disillusioned priest who sees an apparition in Chartres Cathedral at 3 a.m. on New Year's Eve, 2011. I got a plot. I got a title. I developed a few characters. The idea grew ... and grew ... and grew. It became somewhat unwieldy and so I broke it down into two books.

Now during this time of growing unwieldinss, other things were happening: One was that Dan Brown published ANGELS AND DEMONS and then, THE DA VINCI CODE ... and although his central bloodline idea had never occurred to me, much of what I'd been gathering in research over the years was also in his books. Yay for him, bummer for me. He beat me to it, in a very, very big way. The biggest. Then there were all the authors who were much more ready than I was to jump onto his coat-tails. A lot of what I'd written, I had to throw out. This became like rinse and repeat; I ended up with a whole lot of chapters in my Novel Frags folder. I became discouraged.

Another thing that was happening was personal: my health had begun to decline as early as ten years ago, and it continued getting worse. And worse and worse, and I became even more discouraged.

I gave up.

Now here is the really good part, which I hope makes all the mess above worth having read through: Yes I gave up, and that bleak, dark time lasted until one fine day I realized that what I'd given up was writing for publication. Writing with the idea that somebody else would be reading it someday. I hadn't given up writing entirely. I didn't have to do that. In fact, I couldn't do that, because for better or for worse, I could not stop telling stories, making them up in my head.

Suddenly, I was free.

to be continued...