Writing updates

One of the things I started this blog to do was to provide updates on my writing, especially my books, and I’m glad to say I have a few things to bring y’all up to date on.

The Wanderer

My latest novel’s working title is The Wanderer. It’s set in 6th-century Britain and was inspired by movies like Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Miller’s Crossing, and Last Man Standing; as well as the work of writers I admire like Cormac McCarthy, particularly Blood Meridian; and, most important of all, what remains us of Anglo-Saxon literature—obviously things like Beowulf, but also shorter works like “Waldere,” “Deor,” “The Sea-Farer,” and, of course, “The Wanderer,” which inspired the whole book. I’ve joked that this novel is a Western, just not set in the West you usually think of. I’m pretty excited about this story.

I began the rough draft in June 2019 and finished it a few months later, in October. In the new year, 2020, I spent a few months reading through the rough draft and marking it up in red pen and highlighter, and that summer, during all the shutdowns and the travel my family did, I began making changes based on my first read-through and markup.

Those corrections moved very slowly—with mostly myself to blame—but I’m glad to say I completed those manuscript corrections earlier this week.

I’ve now got the manuscript in the hands of a few early readers who are going to give me feedback, upon which I’ll base my next round of rereading and revision. After that stage of revision, I’ll hand out a hopefully improved manuscript to a new round of readers and repeat. These stages are especially crucial, since, as the writer, you get into your own story up to the eyeballs and need people who aren’t privy to the inside of your mind to tell you if what you were doing worked and made sense—or not. The Wanderer is in many ways the most ambitious novel I’ve written, so I’m both hopeful and not a little anxious.

The goal is to get the book out soon, but also to get the book out in the best shape it can possibly be. While I don’t have a set-in-stone timeline, I am trying to step up my efforts now.

More to come, but like I said—I’m excited about this one.

Other stuff

My primary creative attention has been on The Wanderer for several years now, but I have been preparing a lot of other stuff, including whatever I’m going to write after I’ve finally finished (or simply prayed over and released) The Wanderer. These include some short stories and novellas and three or four novel-length projects (out of approximately twenty pretty detailed ideas I have in my notebooks) that I think are in enough of a state of preparedness to go ahead with soon. But the less said about those projects the better.

One I will mention is a project adjacent to The Wanderer but in a different medium, one that I hope to present to y’all in the future as an appetizer for the novel. Stay tuned!

The blog

After some incredibly fertile months on the blog this winter and spring I let it cool off a bit from the last week of June onward. This was precisely to devote the last mad burst of energy needed to get my first corrections on The Wanderer across the finish line. Now that I’ve accomplished that, I’ll be returning to the blog. I have several book reviews I’ve been meaning to write, and plenty of opinions I’ve been trying to work out in writing.

Again—stay tuned.

Happy Independence Day!

I hope y’all have all had a good Fourth of July week and a pleasant weekend. I return to work from vacation Monday but still have some traveling to do before the end of the summer, and I’m glad to say the last week has been great.

Thanks as always for reading!