A WORK IN PROGRESS
Right now I am at about 7,000 words. That only leaves about another 80,000 to 90,000 words to go. Hey, you have to be an optimist if you are investing the hundreds of hours it takes to write a book.
Mickey Spillane observed that the beginning of a book entices the reader to buy it, and the ending gets the reader to buy the next one. In a sense, the preface sets the hook for both the beginning and the ending. Here is the current draft of the two paragraphs of the preface.
US Route 15 runs from Walterboro, South Carolina, to just over the New York state line, ending in a little town called Painted Post. Between there and back, you hit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where Union and Confederate soldiers clashed under a hot July sun in 1863, transforming the rolling fields and wooded hilltops into hallowed ground known to millions of tourists and school children.
If you keep going north from Gettysburg on to I-81, you come to a smaller piece of hallowed ground, an unmarked place of grief and sorrow known only to a few. That's where I was headed on a crisp autumn afternoon that held a hint of the winter season that lay just around the corner.
I know that without the context of the plot this probably doesn't mean much. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much to give away here. The theme could best be summed up by this William Faulkner quote: "The past is not dead. In fact it's not even past."
The plot revolves around an ordinary guy who finds himself the target of a very complex operation designed to achieve an end that totally is not justified by the means. It is a political intrigue driven by our guy's past involvement in a suicide hot line. Nobody comes out of this a hero. There are no happy endings. There is only what comes next.
October 25, 2009
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