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.

Website: 2nd anniversary

This month is the second anniversary of the website! I have written a lot during that time. I now have a row of seven complete novels in binders on my bookcase. I finished the seventh this week while hiding from the pandemic.

Neyuki is currently with my editor, but the edit should be done this month. I am so looking forward to her feedback. 

The Man Terror Club, Kintsugi, Vision More Glorious, The Keeper, and The Time Well are waiting to be edited, although I plan to introduce them here on the website over the next few weeks. I may have to find more than one editor, as I am getting too far ahead. The Keeper and The Time Well are new in the last year, although they were both ideas I’d been sitting on for a while. I’m casting about for a new novel, and feel a little at sea. What if someone asks me what I’m working on? Having written two novels in the last year, and having spent considerable time editing six of them, I need some inspiration. I certainly hope I have flashes of insight and can produce more than one novel in the next year.

I also want to write some short stories this year. I have a couple on the back burner, one waiting to be finished and one waiting for the idea to fully form in my head.

Unfortunately, I am lagging far behind in my efforts to publish. I still have not given up on traditional publishing for Under Shōko’s Bed, but I’ve got to restart my agent search, which flagged while I wrote The Keeper and The Time Well. That part of being a writer is what I put off most easily. It’s hard.