Not Resting On My Laurels (2)

part 1

As I'd stated in my last post, I have two incomplete novels that I'm having an incredibly hard time in deciding on which to work on next. Today's post will examine the candidate for the Never Say Die party.

The candidate for the Never Say Die party is entitled "A Betrayal of Vows".

If this sounds familiar, it ought to be, because it's the long version of my current chapbook Betrayed.

This one had a peculiar birth, death, rebirth, killed again, brought back on life support, squashed like a bug, surviving like a cockroach, stomped to death like a wine grape, and yet is still clawing its way back to rap on my chamber door.

If this sounds confusing to you, imagine how confused I got while searching the memory banks for this one. Nevertheless, in its full uglified glory, is the story about the life of a story that simply would not stay dead.

This story was written sometime between 2006 & 2008. I can't quite pinpoint the year, 'cause I was doing a boatload of writing back then (all of it pretty atrocious, save for one short story) and as soon as I'd finish one story, I would start on another.

This story was basically my 2nd attempt at writing a dual plotted story, and by all accounts, it was mediocre. Nevertheless, being blinded by my inflated opinion of my writing, I sincerely felt that I did a whiz bang job on this story. However, people smarter than me did not, so to the slush pile it eventually went.

Two years later, having started doing the blogging thing and in desperate need of material, I resurrected the story and posted it on my blog. There it stayed for a little over a year, until I started looking for something to self-publish.

I dragged the story out from the slush pile and believe it or not, started writing two new versions of the story: one, the chapbook version that you see for sale on my book blog; and two, the novel length version. At the same time.

Back then, I did have some major moose-size testicles when it came to multi-tasking my writing.

Anyways, I decided to write both of these things in '09 and unlike my early attempts, this time I had at least a year of gathering practical writing tips and advice from writers like Charles Gramlich, David Cranmer, Travis Erwin and David Barber. So armed, I decided to do something that I never did with a novel, but often did at work.

Research.

I started writing the novel version by using Google, my memory and a ridiculously large out-of-date road map. The end result become a novel with a setting that started in Connecticut, turned into a flight, then a road trip that went through parts of Maryland and ended in Virginia. As a matter of fact, this novel become one of my better efforts at writing a dual plot.

As plot one became the wedding, the flight and the honeymoon, plot two become where the wife decided to cheat on her husband with her bff.

As solid as my writing was for this novel, things eventually grounded to a halt, as I had decided, after much waffling, to self-pub the short story. So the novel went on the back burner, not that it wasn't going to be headed there soon.

I was slowly having problems in writing the second plot, simply because finding a handle on how to get to where the short story opens up at was becoming increasingly impossible.

Since I'd decided to self-pub this story and make a few dollars (ha!), there remained the problem of what to do about the version I had posted on this blog. The solution, while pretty clear to me, also was pretty drastic. Thus, the first of only three times in the history of my blog happened: I nuked the story. 32 posts in all vanished in one fell swoop, or rather, one click of the button.

I presently stand at the following places with this novel.

1} With the main plot, I've written up to where the chapbook actually starts at, which totals about 6 chapters.

2} With the second plot, I'm kind of at a crossroads. I have the MC's wife thoroughly besotted with her bff and I have the wife as the husband in that relationship. This issue I'm having is that I'm trying to get them from the apartment to where they're making out hot and heavy in the front seat of the car. Once I can get to that, then I can properly incorporate and expand on the chapbook itself. This has five chapters written, so overall, the book has a total of 11 chapters completed.

And just so you can get a basic idea of what this one is about, please take a stroll over to It's Always Saturday In Suburbia (if you can) for a short excerpt.

to be continued