The Birth of My First Beast (Or The Story of Writing My First Novel)


     If you’ve read my novel, A Murder of Saints, you may find this interesting. If you haven’t, perhaps this will encourage you to go purchase it.
     A Murder of Saints is something that began way back in 2007. The idea sprung from something which occurred at a church where I had attended youth group in my teen years. Mind you, all that sprung was the idea. The actual events were nowhere near as bad or as far-reaching as the events that unfold in my novel. But a seed was planted in my brain through witnessing a terrible event transpire inside a place where no such thing should ever occur.
     Not that it should occur anywhere. (NOTE: for those who haven’t read the book yet—intrigued? You should be.)
     So, some years later, I was in college taking a creative writing class, and working on short stories. They were fun little tales, nothing I’m terribly proud of particularly, but nothing I’m ashamed of either. They reflect a young man with a broad imagination learning to hone his craft. But back to the point...
     So, I’m in this class, and have four or five short-stories I’ve turned in, and I kept wondering if I was capable of telling a longer tale. To be quite honest, I wasn’t sure I could. All I had ever written up to that point was short work, tiny microcosms of the lives and events of my characters. But I was reading, rather voraciously, people like Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, and my all-time favorite author, the great Stephen King himself (whether claiming The King as my favorite writer is cliché or not, the guy is a phenomenal writer, and the snobs who would accuse such as a cliché are quite free to eat my ass). The one thing that always stood out to me about these guys was the fact that their novels were, generally speaking, rather large tomes. They took their time developing characters and not rushing situations. They laid out the landscapes and invoked the five senses. You could really feel every aspect of the worlds they created. Well, maybe not Dan Brown so much, but you get my drift.
     This was something I noticed was missing from my short fiction. Not that I didn’t include descriptions or try to tell a real story-arc with my characters, but it just wasn’t on the same level as it was with these guys. They really knew what they were doing.
     So, I decided I was going to give it a go myself. My man The King often says that the two keys to good writing is that you must read a lot and you must write a lot. I was already doing the reading, so it was time to start the writing. All I needed was an idea.
     A thousand and one things swirled around in my head over the next weeks. Nothing was sticking. Nothing was evolving. After a time, those weeks turned to months, and the months to years. And so on; you get the picture.
     Back into life I fell, and my dream was once again put on hold. I was working in my family’s water well drilling business in the northern part of East Texas, working long hours more often than not, and coming in on weekends as well. People tend to freak out when their only source of water is on the glitch, so I had to be there to service them. Amazing how people act when their water stops flowing for ten minutes.
     Time marched on, as time is wont to do, and more years passed. Finally, I remember being in a conversation with a friend of mine, Sam, who is about my age and was in that same youth group with me when we were kids. We were reminiscing about old times, and of course, we turned to talking about youth group, as we had a lot of memories at that place. Lots of friends. Quite a few kids. Church camps. You know the drill.
     Then it came up. What had happened. All those years later, it was still something we had a hard time accepting. Awful things often are. But it had, and it came up. I remember thinking how terrible it was, and though none of the ramifications of which I wrote about in my book had occurred in reality, I began to think of what could have happened.
     And A Murder of Saints was born.

     Though it didn’t start life as A Murder of Saints. It actually took its first breaths and formative years in this world under the name Mr. Macabre. Somewhere during its adolescence, however, a dawning ‘duhness’ fell upon its creator, and we had the name legally changed. Thank God.
     I dove into the story, creating characters that seemed to take over the writing process for me. Like I was just the button pusher, but they were the real story-tellers. Before I knew it, I was well past the length of my longest short-story, and still only just getting started. I felt my confidence rise, and I began to think I really could tell a novel-length story. I really could tell a long-arc with lots of characters.
     I was ecstatic.
     I wrote everywhere. At the time, I was living in a small, single-wide mobile home. I didn’t make very much money at the time, and it was all I could afford, but it was nice enough. I had no real complaints. But I found that the place I wrote best was on an ancient dinosaur of a laptop while I sat in a glider chair in my closet. No joke. The bulk of this story was written in a closet.
     I would take my laptop with me on trips and try to write, but I noticed that while I could write anywhere, I seemed to write the best—and most—in that closet. It was weird, I know.
     Then I hit a wall. It was a strange wall, too. It wasn’t that I didn’t know where I wanted the story to go. In fact, I was so far into the story at that point, I only needed another two or three chapters to finish it. But nonetheless, things came to a screeching halt.
     I just couldn’t finish it.

     Time began to march on, the insistent wench that she is, and the story began to stagnate in my mind. I was still a young man then, only about 24 years old, and though this novel was the best thing I had produced at the time, I was still very much learning to hone my craft.
     The time continued to lengthen, and I got the point that I wasn’t even pulling the document up to look at the blinking cursor anymore. I just didn’t have it in me. I can’t really explain why, to this day I don’t think I really know, but things had just stopped. I couldn’t go on.
     A couple years passed, and I decided that maybe I just needed to write something else for a while. Dive into a different world altogether and see if it could reset my brain and creative flow. Then I could make like Stella and get my groove back, then go finish Saints. So that’s what I did.
     I began writing a fantasy novel full of Orcs and Goblins and giant talking cats with psychopathic tendencies and uncontrollable blood-lust...you know, like regular cats, but bigger. I wrote it in serial form, a chapter at a time, on my Myspace blog (that should be an indication of just how far back this was). I saved the chapters in a document for safe-keeping.
     It all happened again. I was writing all the time again, and churning out chapter after chapter of really fun stuff in this fantasy world. And okay, I’ll admit it, I’m not much of a fantasy writer. It’s not my field. I don’t know all the origins of Orcs and Goblins or what they are supposed to look like precisely (outside of Lord of the Rings), so I just marched on making up my own rules as I went.
     It was a really fun story.
     The tale got stranger and broader, and twists and turns began to crop up. I was falling in love with my characters more and more every minute. They had once again taken over, and I was just punching the time-clock for them.
     And then, it all happened again.
     I got very close to the end. Right in the middle of the big climax at the end, as a matter of fact, and it all came to another screeching halt. I just couldn’t finish it. I couldn’t understand why, and I couldn’t manage to move past it. Again, I knew where I wanted things to go by this point, but there was some sort of brake engaged that I couldn’t undo.
     So, the stagnation began all over again.
     I won’t bore you with a lot of repeat details, and since this is running long, I’ll try to get to the end quickly. More years went by. Lots happened. Children were born, I was given more responsibilities at work, and thus, had to give more of my time. I had a family, work, and church groups going, and I wasn’t making any time for writing.
     Then, everything changed.
     I won’t go into the details of all of that, it’s a personal matter and it was ugly, but I found myself in a new place with lots of spare time on my hands.
     I came across some of those old short-stories one day and decided to put them up on Amazon as Kindle releases. So, I did that. Then I came across those two, ages old novels that were just almost finished and...
     And something let go. I don’t know what and I don’t know why. They say timing is everything, and I guess the timing was finally right. I went through both stories, cleaning them up, knocking the dust off my brain, burying myself in them. Then, when I reached the place where I had been stumped before, I burst through the wall and charged ahead. I wasn’t writing in the closet anymore, but out in the open, taking in everything around me, and that energy just surged through my fingers and filled the screen of my computer.
     I finished it.

     It was an unreal feeling. It had been nearly ten years since I’d put the first words down, and I had finally finished it. Finished a novel. I could do it. I had done it. It was nowhere near as long as some of the books by my hero authors, but it was, without a doubt, a full-length novel. The feeling was...indescribable.
     Between then and now, there have been another two years of trying to get the thing published. Suffice to say I finally got it there - A Murder of Saints debuted on September 29th, 2017 - and the final word count was just shy of 100,000 words...right in line with most mainstream authors.
     The tale of the woes of trying to get a novel published can be saved for another day. That’s not what’s relevant. The story is. The creation. The breaking through.
     I hope you enjoyed it. Hell, I hope you bought it and feel you got your money’s worth out of it. But even if you hated it, if everyone hates it, it was worth it.
     Every damned moment.

     Now go and buy the damned book here. Ooga-Booga.


C.M.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Attempting to make a splash...