What I’ve Been Up To Lately…

Let me pull this blog off the shelf for a moment, blow the dust off it. *Cough! *cough! And scrub the rust from the once shiny surface–see if I can’t get the engine of writing started once more.

Allow me a moment to explain what has happened since 2018. Or, in the words of Inigo Montoya, “No, is too much. Let me sum up.”

I took a promotion at my job. I had been working with an agency supporting developmentally disabled adults, and I moved from being an Assistant Manager in 2018 to running the home as the Residence Manager. What I did not anticipate at this time was the toll it would take on either my energy level nor my creativity. A few years later, in May of 2020, I received a potentially life-changing text from Cary Solomon, a director and producer of such films as God’s Not Dead, Unplanned, and Nefarious. Cary was interested in my novel Nicholas to turn into a feature-length film. At the same time, he was also interested in developing material for television, and wondered if I had anything. I immediately pivoted from writing novels to writing screenplays for television, and I lobbed several pitches at him. One of them he took real interest in. It was a story called Independence. More on that in a moment.

I wound up writing upwards of eight scripts for Independence, with a plan to develop several more. This took several months and involved a lot of back and forth with editing and suggestions in my efforts to get the project green lit. During this time, he and his partner Chuck relocated from Hollywood due to its impending demise to Dallas, Texas. While there, they felt compelled to change up their business model and move into distribution more than production, with the unfortunate result that my project had to be shelved.

You can imagine my disappointment: to be so close to the fabled brass ring!

Another development: In August of 2022 I was invited to come and serve as the interim pastor for a church I had interned at over twenty years prior. This church, Christ’s Church Guilderland, had once been running with several hundred attending, but between the pandemic and other challenges, had seen their membership dwindle to less than a hundred. After praying about it intensely and discussing the matter with some seasoned saints and advisors, I took on the roll of interim pastor at this church, traveling from my home in Rochester to Albany, New York each week for many weeks in a row. Others helped out now and again, but my energies were now being split between serving as a full time residence manager and also as a weekend relief preacher at a church three and a half hours away.

Finally, in September of 2024, the church agreed to bring me aboard full time, and in December of that same year I left the job with the group home.

I’m still commuting, and now that things have settled to a dull roar, I have finally begun writing again. Oh, and I left something out. After Cary informed me they wouldn’t be able to develop Independence, I took at look at the eight and a half scripts I had written. And I really liked them. I really like the characters I’ve created and the whole world and scenes and everything about them. I decided the best thing to do was to rewrite the scripts into short-form novels and release them myself.

The thing about a script that is different from a novel is primarily two-fold: you only get to describe what you can see and what you can hear. That’s it. Other senses, such as smell and taste and feel, do not come into it. Nor do feelings or thoughts. All those things you are utterly dependent upon the actors to convey through tone, facial expressions, and body language. A good actor will bring his or her own sense of the character to the script and express it the way they best understand it.

Taking a script back into a novel is challenging for this very reason. All the things that get left out of a script have to be put back in. The other challenge is POV (point of view). In a script, the POV is always the camera, and you can switch it about from character to character and scene to scene with barely a pivot needed. In fiction, any time you are expressing a thought in a person’s head, or describing what they are seeing, you want to get the scene into their POV. It’s considered poor writing to, for instance, describe each character’s thoughts within the same paragraph or scene, unless you have the “Omniscient” POV, which is a little cumbersome to maintain. It feels more “distant,” from the characters, and therefore less genuine. I tend to avoid it for this reason.

Bear in mind, I had eight of these stories to develop. Well, eight and a half, really. And I also have two to three more unwritten ideas still wandering around the back of my mind.

I decided this morning that I could release six of these as a “season” on Kindle and other ebook platforms and then after the “season,” compile them into a printed novel. This also gives me the flexibility to continue developing the second “season,” which is still being created, but which (doing it this way) is already about half done.

All that is to say you can expect a new project from me to arrive in the next few weeks to a month. I’m debating on starting the release of these in July, to correspond to the holiday of the same name, but I may choose to go sooner. One of the challenges will be coming up with a good cover design, and though I’m loathe to do it, I may have to farm this out.

And just so I’m clear: it’s not that I stopped writing novels completely. I still have made progress on other stories I’ve hinted at. For instance, my faerie novel “A Midsummer Night’s Fear” is very close to being done. I’ve even worked at a new Janelle Becker book as well as toyed around with the second book of the Dragon’s Eye Cycle, though I fear that project may need to be abandoned completely. The other story I started working on, and I actually put a lot of time into this one, was a series called, “The Breaking of the World,” which was all about the story of the American Independence. I wanted to tell the full story in novel form, and I had to go all the way back to 1763 to start with Pontiac’s rebellion in the Detroit area, because that led to the Proclamation of 1763 by King George, which eventually led to the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and so on and so forth ’til we wound up in armed conflict with Great Britain. The problem here was not having too little to work with, but frankly, too much. And the American Revolution is sacred history. I don’t want to make something up and get it wrong if I can actually find out what happened and get it right. I haven’t given up on the idea completely, but it is a massive undertaking.

So. I’m back. I’m writing again. And more material will be out soon.