JeffKirvin.net

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve come to terms with why I write. Writing is my stab at immortality, at leaving a legacy. Once I had that figured out, the next question became: what do I write?

I’ve got a lot of ideas, a lot of projects that have been sitting on the back burner for a decade or more. When I decided it was time to write for publication, I went back over the list and considered each in turn. I was looking for a specific kind of idea. Something that interests me enough personally to dedicate a year or more of my life to writing it, as well as something that is actually publishable.

A lot of my ideas suck. A lot of anyone’s ideas suck. Story ideas are a dime a dozen and for good reason. Most of them are losers. They either don’t capture the imagination, or they do but only because they’ve already been done, or they’re interesting as ideas but, in cinema terms, “unfilmable,” ie they just can’t make the transition from an interesting mental exercise to a real story. I’m a storyteller, I’m not interested in “thought experiments.”

So one by one I narrowed down the list, also keeping an eye out for things that the 21st century book buying public seems to like. I’m not writing a story about a boy wizard just to cash in, but if certain themes are popular and have been for a number of years, I’d be foolish not to consider them.

Frankly, it came down to two ideas that were well-tread territory, enough so that I almost chucked them both and gave up. Stephen King notes with wry regret that his most popular work among his fans remains The Stand, written nearly 30 years ago, and I understand how he feels. No matter how much I try to branch out, my inner muse comes back invariably to two characters, fictional spectres who haunt me until I get them right: Mike Carlton and Daniel Cho.

I’ve revisited Carlton recently and lost steam. As much as Mike’s story interests me, it lacks staying power in part because it doesn’t go much beyond one book. In many of the original drafts I’ve done over the last 20 years, Mike dies at the end. I didn’t plan on that this time around, but it’s still a pretty dark story lacking much in the way of redemption.

Daniel, on the other hand…

Between Heaven and Hell has done moderately well as an ebook. I sell half a dozen or so copies a year even now, ten years later. But as I go back and reread it, I cringe. There’s no way I could in good conscience submit even a revised and polished version of BHH to an agent today. The book has fundamental flaws and weaknesses that make it look to me now like what it is: an enthusiastic but amateurish first effort by a writer still learning the craft. And yet, the story remains strong and vital, engaging enough for many readers to look past the quality of the writing itself.

And more importantly, it’s a “gateway drug”, the prequel to another story I keep trying to write, the Unification Chronicles. I keep hesitating over UC in large part because in the back of my head, BHH is still “unfinished” and I need to do this in the correct order.

So here’s the deal. I’m starting work on Revelation the first in a full trilogy of novels that revise, expand and improve the story I first epublished as Between Heaven and Hell. In this effort I’m largely taking the characters and themes that worked and chucking the rest, starting over from scratch. The new books will be broader, deeper and far less naïve than the original novel, set in the current post-9/11 world and written using all the tricks of the trade I’ve learned in the last decade. When I’ve completed the first one, I’ll find and agent and then a publisher, and we’ll get the whole trilogy published in print before taking on the sequel trilogy of UC. I’m doing this the old fashioned way, paying my dues, working within the admittedly broken system and seeing if I really have the stuff to get on the shelf along with my idols.

And tomorrow, we’ll talk about what role you the reader will play in all of this.