Abandoning the book

 I haven’t written anything here for a just under a month. For those who are still interested, that may seem like a long time between posts. You may be wondering what the hold up is in regard to the book I’ve been writing.

Well, I did continue to do a lot of work on it. Wrote a long chapter – nearly 3000 words - which explained things that had happened before the book opened. This was a chapter, however, that I didn’t intend to include in the book. It was for my own understanding of the background of the story.

And I continued to work out how events happened prior to the story, and during the first chapters. I made a kind of timeline in order to get my head clear of wondering when this or that happened.

And then I came to a stop. Not because of procrastination, but because something was disturbing me about the story. It may have been that the villain arranged for someone to die very early on in a nasty way. And that later there would be the attempted murder of probably three, maybe four, of the characters, all in the same scene.

I felt I was heading towards a much darker story than any I’d written before, even though there were deaths in the other stories too. Something in me felt wrong about this book, however. As a Christian I see it as the Holy Spirit warning me against going down the path of this particular book. Others might just consider it an intuition.

I haven’t had this feeling about any of the other books, and I got the sense that I was being warned off going along the track I was headed. It’s worth paying attention at such times. I’ve enjoyed writing the other books even though there were dark moments in them. Somehow these didn’t go against the grain. Whatever it was that I was being ‘warned’ about, I felt that I definitely had to take hold of that warning.

It may even be that I have something more important to do in the near future, and the book will have too much of a hold on my time. At this point I don’t know what that 'more important' thing might be, but I’m waiting.

So there’s no new book in the Grimhilderness series on the horizon.

When I told my wife about abandoning the book, she said, ‘Why don’t you write something completely different?’ I said, ‘I’ve tried other books in the past, but they always come out with me as the main character - and I’m always perfect.’ (I meant that the character who narrated the story, or who was the lead, always seemed to be too good to be true.) With a grin, she said, ‘Well, isn’t that the case?’

Abandoned house - similar to an abandoned book...
Photo: V.B.Speranza