The idea: August

I had the idea for August quite a long time ago. (My first notes are from 2012.) It was originally going to be a road trip, the protagonist meeting a new someone chapter by chapter, with each person who helps him having their life changed in some way. Some of that road trip is still in the book, but it morphed into a love story along the way. The root of that idea was there from the very start, as the protagonist was to escape his retirement home and go off in search of his old love. I simply shrank the road trip part and expanded the story of what happens when he finds her.

I also needed an inciting incident to start my protagonist on his journey. I focused from the start on a health crisis. I was thinking about cancer, but wasn’t sure what kind. So on a trip to Nashville in May 2022 for my younger daughter’s PhD graduation from Vanderbilt, I conferred with my two daughters. The older one is a physician (MD) and the younger one, the PhD, studied immunology and worked on how breast cancer hides out in bones. I asked them what disease I should give my hero. I wanted something that would leave him seemingly all right for his trip. They suggested amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, so I put some study into the disease. It’s relatively unusual for someone in their eighties, but not so much that it would be unrealistic. What a horrible disease. As the motor neurons slowly die, the disease paralyzes you. Death commonly comes with weakness or paralysis of the diaphragm. It was heart-wrenching to learn about, and even more so to write about. I have not yet talked with patients with ALS or the doctors who treat them. I simply haven’t had the heart to do it. But I should. I am in the process of editing August now. It’s time to finish that research.

The idea: Writers on the Storm

This idea came to me a couple of years ago in Japan. I was quite excited by it and immediately went for a walk with my wife to tell her about it. She thought it was great. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That’s clear from my early notes on the project, which contain whole scenes written out. In fact, this idea was supposed to wait while I finished The Time Well series, but I couldn’t turn it off, so I opened a Scrivener file and started typing. What came out over the course of a year writing on and off was Writers on the Storm. It’s my first try at making humor a significant aspect of a novel, and I’m not sure I really pulled it off. I think the humor got taken over by the plot somewhere around the middle of the book. But I like it. I may try to amp up the humor in the editing process, if that’s possible. I’m not sure how conducive the editing process will be to that.

The novel tells the story of a successful author who wants to change genres. But he cannot replicate his formulaic romance genre success in fantasy, which is what he most wants to write. To get feedback on his new endeavor, he joined a writing group, never telling them that he was a successful romance author. (He writes romances under a pseudonym.) But his fantasy work is so overblown that the leaders of the writing group eventually hold an intervention and tell him that he needs to stop writing because he has no talent.

So our hero decides to start his own writing group. He looks for writers who are successes in their careers but who have tried and failed at published fiction. He ends up with an eclectic mix who write everything from children’s picture books to erotica. Along the way, his life completely falls apart: career, relationships, everything. Can he stitch it all back together and add a patch here and there?

The idea: A Scowl Becomes Me

All my male protagonists are alike. They’re all me, except better looking. In all the novels except The Man Terror Club, which has no male protagonist, the men are sensitive and on the romantic side. They are not particularly emotionally resilient. They are confident in their intelligence and often overthink situations, but are not so socially adept and appreciate being propped up by a heroine. None are overly ambitious, certainly not to the point of obnoxiousness. They tend to be middle-aged. Most surprisingly, women are much more attracted to them than they ought to be, so none have to scheme elaborately to attract their female protagonist.

With that in mind, I felt the need to write someone different, someone not as genial, someone supremely confident. And I wondered what would happen if I made him a little off-putting, perhaps an irascible know-it-all. Of course, he needed some redeeming qualities as well: clever, honest, cares deeply about people who manage to break through. I would also need a situation that threw him together with the female protagonist so they could not easily escape. After all, few are attracted immediately if someone’s obvious qualities are a turnoff.

I should have put myself into a snarky mood each day before I started writing. It was necessary, because what naturally comes out of me is the type of character that is warm and empathetic. This novel needed cool and distant. But non-snarky me wrote warm and empathetic for far too many scenes. 

I kept writing anyway. I liked my characters and didn’t want to throw them away. I also wanted to discover how they got to the vague endpoint I had in mind. So my character didn’t turn out to be as big a turnoff for the female lead as I intended. Still, I came up with a way to torpedo their relationship.

I need to come up with another distasteful but redeemable character. I had an interesting idea about an American road trip for a family that’s disintegrating. I have also thought about sequels to The Man Terror Club and The Time Well, although I already know those characters, so they wouldn’t stretch me as much. 

Maybe an ax murderer. I’ve already done a nice-guy kidnapper and a well-meaning serial killer. Perhaps someone not so stabby, another curmudgeon.

The idea: The Time Well

I made my first notes for The Time Well two years ago when I was thinking about what might happen if someone were to travel in time. Someone appearing in the past would automatically create a new future, but what happens to the old future? What if it ceases to exist? Then all that space-time would be annihilated, including all the people. I imagine someone would fight to stop that annihilation. Governments might try to outlaw time travel, scientists might sign agreements never to do it, etc., but in a world where something is possible, eventually someone will do it. So if you didn’t want anyone to travel in time and you had sufficient resources, would you become a vigilante to stop it from happening? That was the basic idea for The Time Well. 

Time travel researchers have been dying in strange accidents ever since the mechanics of time travel were first theoretically posited in 2040. But in 2068, the band of billionaires who have been ordering the murders miss killing a researcher and murder his family instead. With nothing left in this time line for him, the scientist surreptitiously builds the world’s first time machine.

I envisioned The Time Well as a trilogy of novels. As I wrote, though, I realized I did not have enough story or subplots to fill three novels. What I had was working well, though, so I cut it down to one novel with three parts. The second and third parts turned out to be heavy on the love story part of the plot but light on science fiction, so I did a rewrite. Now the middle part is not tense or gripping enough, so I am rewriting again. Unfortunately, in the process the book has expanded (it’s now nearly one hundred forty thousand words). That’s too much story for one book, but not enough for three. So now I must decide what to do with it yet again!

The idea: The Keeper

The Keeper is another idea I had years ago. I was watching a superhero movie on television and wondered what would happen if a regular person started acting like a superhero—not believing he had superpowers, just intervening to stop crime. But what do you do with the criminals once you stop them? The idea bounced around in my head for a long time. I made notes on it at various times and even made some abortive attempts to start in the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2016. But the story, although interesting to me, had problems. I tried to set it in America, but I realized I did not know the vernacular of an inner city (the south side of Chicago, where I lived nearly forty years ago). Then I thought about setting it in a small town out west (Springerville, AZ, my wife’s hometown), but the setting would not have had enough crime to drive the story.

As with many of my ideas, it sat and waited. I considered it for National Novel Writing Month in November 2018, but went with a new idea instead, Vision More Glorious. I made more detailed notes for The Keeper the next spring, though, and was ready to write when NaNoWriMo rolled around again in November 2019. The first draft took only thirty days.

The novel bears little resemblance to the superhero idea that I began with. A foreigner living in Tokyo becomes depressed but does not want his daughters to have to live with the pain of their father’s suicide. So he decides to get himself murdered. That’s not a simple thing to do in Tokyo.

The Keeper has been through a major revision and two rounds of editing by my wife and me. It is six months away from being ready to give to readers to get some feedback before sending it out for a professional edit. I hope to go to market with it in two to three years. It could happen faster if there were not so many other projects ahead of it in line.

The idea: Vision More Glorious

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’ve participated in each of the last two years’ typing marathons. In the lead up to the first, I was concerned about having a story inspiring enough that I could tap out half a novel in thirty days. But then I started musing on the role of psychoactive medications in my life, how they affect my mood and even my perceptions, the whole way I view the world. I wondered what would happen if a medication could not only alter the way I think, but the actual way I physically see everything around me.

Vision More Glorious follows a young English teacher in Tokyo who takes part in a drug trial for a new antidepressant. To his amazement, it quickly alters the range of light he is able to see, giving him a wonderful, though almost useless, superpower. After the tale of faithless love I told in Kintsugi, I wanted to write a sweeter, more hopeful love story. I found this one, though, wrapping itself up at about the fifty-thousand-word point. There wasn’t enough to it. So I added a drug company as a complication. That got me to ninety-five thousand words that were not entirely internally consistent. So I did a significant rewrite after NaNoWriMo to fix things. That included writing whole new scenes and weaving details together so they made a whole story. I’ve done a lot of editing even since then, but Vision More Glorious is now ready to give to a few readers for feedback before I send it to an editor.

The idea: Kintsugi

I have quite a few American friends in Japan, and there’s one thing many of them do that puzzles me. My inscrutable friends separate for the summer, the husband staying in Japan to work and his family going back to America. It’s not at all uncommon (except in this year of COVID-19) for them to leave the day after American School in Japan lets out for the summer. They return just before school resumes in the fall. I always feel so sorry for the poor, pitiful men left behind, and I wonder that it is not a recipe for marital disaster. From that worry, my novel Kintsugi was born.

The name Kintsugi comes from the technique for mending broken ceramics with lacquer. The lacquer is most often golden in color, and it makes the break look as if it has been filled with pure gold. Pieces can end up more beautiful after the break than they were before. 

Kintsugi is a story of faithless love, what can happen when spouses are separated, and whether shattered hearts can be mended. The novel follows an American couple, their marriage weak, who separate for the summer, and a Japanese couple, their marriage even weaker, separated by the demands of their careers. When the fates of these two couples intersect, the complications test their characters and relationships. Can they mend them kintsugi-fashion to be better than before, or will they simply have to sweep up the shards and throw them away?

The novel also gave me a chance to explore my interest in Japanese ceramics. In fact, the filename while I searched for a title was Arita Girl. Arita is renowned for its ceramics and was the first place in Japan where porcelain was made. Unfortunately, the novel still has small gaps. They are waiting for me to take a trip to Arita. That is near the top of my list of post-COVID activities, but until I either get a vaccine or somehow catch and survive the virus, it has to wait.

I wrote the first draft of Kintsugi in the spring of 2018. It needed significant work, though, and I revised it the next spring and summer (2019). Now the novel has gotten too long, and I need to cut and tightened it. I was hoping to do that this summer, but other novels (and life) demanded my time. I think it will have to wait for the winter.

The idea: The Man Terror Club

The idea for The Man Terror Club came to me as I was waking up one morning ten years ago. Who knows what odd places thoughts steal in from when you’re only half awake, but I wondered how an elevator operator might fight back if she was being sexually harassed. As my somnolent imagination meandered, it strayed toward acts of physical resistance and retribution, and the title The Man Terror Club popped into my head. 

It may be the most evocative of all the titles I’ve written, but I worried about creating the story. That title deserved a brilliant book, and I wasn’t yet confident enough in my first two novels to believe they had prepared me to produce something of that caliber. I experimented with the idea in 2010-2012 as a short story, but I didn’t feel ready to write even that much. 

So I waited.

I got more serious about writing in 2017. I rewrote Under Shōko’s Bed and Neyuki and improved both novels. How much more experience would I need before I could do justice to my idea? I thought it best to write at least two more novels before I tried The Man Terror Club. The problem was I didn’t have two other stories that moved me as The Man Terror Club did, so I finally resolved to just do it. In the spring of that year, over two months, I produced the first draft. I did not have the entire plot firmly in mind from the beginning, although I knew things would take a dark turn and end in murder. I envisioned each of the pre-murder chapters as a short story focused on a different member of the club. As I wrote, though, the women’s stories blended together and lost their short story flavor. 

Still, each chapter for the first three-quarters of the novel is told first person from a different character’s point of view. (After that, narration stays first person, but already-introduced characters narrate sections of the chapters.) I didn’t realize at the time that I was flying in the face of writing pundits who warn neophytes and even more advanced writers never to write first person with a large cast of narrators. You should have few narrators and preferably only one. But what I attempted, eleven narrators, is not unheard of. William Faulkner used fifteen first-person narrators in As I Lay Dying. Of course, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, while I remain unpublished. Nevertheless, I wanted to try.

Perhaps the most surprising experience of writing The Man Terror Club was how much I came to like the characters. While all the women have been betrayed, abused, or discarded, they remained kind, giving, and caring. Their love for each other heals them, and that healing is most of the story, not their terrorism as they lash out at the evil men do.

With my ongoing interest in the characters, I have even been bouncing the idea of a sequel around. I am taking notes and considering key characters, plot twists, and terrorist acts. I worry it may be premature to start a sequel before the first novel is even published. But The Man Terror Club, while not finalized, is just about ready for professional editing. I don’t think the fundamental story will change. And I want to spend a few months living with those women again. They are lovely people (who do extreme things), and more of their story ought to be told.

The idea: Neyuki

The introduction of my second novel, the thriller Neyuki, may seem a long way off, but like Under Shōko’s Bed, it has been with me for years.  It is actually the first novel I started writing.  I was working at another university then, a small school in rural Japan.  The faculty were a terribly dysfunctional lot and there were some people who over time gave every indication of being just plain bad.  It was the first time in my life I had ever worked with anyone like that, and it was quite disturbing.  So I started writing a novel as a sort of self-therapy to deal with all of the craziness.  A good friend, however, heard that a school in Tokyo was looking for someone.  She actually had to help me through the application process, as I was seriously depressed.  But I finished the application, they interviewed me, and I got the job.  Thanks to my friend, I have been happily living in Tokyo ever since.

With the move to Tokyo, my writing stopped for a couple of years.  But I couldn’t stay silent forever, and soon I was writing Under Shōko’s Bed, and when I had a couple of drafts of that done, I turned to Neyuki.  It was easy to write.  I simply thought of all the madness at my last job.  Perhaps the most difficult thing was to make sure I did not have specific people in mind as I wrote the various characters, but soon the characters were real enough to me that I was not thinking about any actual people.  Writing really is amazing in how it draws you in and fills your mind.  It’s a wonderful, sometimes almost other-worldly, experience.

Writing Neyuki, though, did not go so smoothly.  With a first draft complete, the dear friend who had been my muse through Under Shōko’s Bed and that first draft of Neyuki told me that she did not want to see Neyuki anymore, that she thought it was obscene.  (It did not offend others who read it.)  Perhaps I will write in a future post about losing my muse and what it took to start writing again, but let me just say it was traumatic.  It took years to return to it in earnest.  I did my best to make Neyuki less objectionable.  When it is introduced and reader reactions begin to come in, I will have a better idea of whether I succeeded in that, but my beta readers have not had trouble with it.  No matter the reaction, though, I think the novel is indeed disturbing, as it deals with the lengths to which people will go for money or power, and the depravity to which they will sink out of lust.  Even that, though, is often tied to money or power.  In a way I suppose I am lucky that I have little of either one.  And if I keep self-publishing novels, I think I am pretty well guaranteed to stay that way.

The idea: Under Shōko's Bed

I am the first to admit that Under Shōko’s Bed is an odd tale.  If the story is charming at all, I think the oddity is part of the charm, though.  The germ of the story came on a visit to a dear friend of mine.  (She is also the one who chose the name of the main female character, Shōko Kawasaki.)  I had been suffering on and off with depression for years, and when it was time to leave the friend who so buoyed my spirits and go back to my day-to-day routine, I told her that I wished I could remain a little longer, that I would be happy just to stay under her bed.  She laughed, which always lifts my heart, and I said goodbye and went home—and started ruminating.  I had begun a novel before, but lost the motivation when I changed jobs and felt no more need to push out creatively to compensate for frustration in my work.  But the idea of someone who is broken enough to actually carry through on my suggestion, to be so shattered that he would curl up under a friend’s bed, stuck in my imagination.  I have known despair.  I have wished I was dead, unable to stand the incessant pain of knowing my entire life would amount to nothing.  I could imagine a person acting that mentally ill, because I was very nearly that bad off.

So in the periods when I wasn’t depressed, I wrote.  I wish I could say that the writing is what healed me.  It certainly helped, but what banished the depression completely two and a half years ago was finding the right doctor and then the correct combination of medications.  Now the depression is gone, although not the daily struggle, so I continue to write.  The healing goes on with each little success, but more than that, I simply enjoy getting the stories out of my head, turning them into words.  Hopefully, those words will spark others’ imaginations too.

Finally, if the character’s depression in Under Shōko’s Bed rings all too true, you have my deepest sympathy.  Just know that there is light at the end of the tunnel.  I overcame depression and I believe that you can too.  It’s worth trying—it truly is—even if just for today.