Dear Wanderer,
Since before I can remember, I’ve been writing stories in my head to put myself to sleep at night. Unfortunately, they grew like kudzu and took over my neural pathways until, around age 14, I had to start putting them on paper before they choked out everything else like, oh, things that my grades depended on. I’ve been writing ever since, with the exception of a five-year sagging middle—er, I mean, hiatus—during which a lot of stuff happened. Now here I am, a few decades later, putting them out on the ’net before they choke out my hard drives.
In ’94, I had a creative writing class in college for which I wrote John 3:16. The character I created only as a symbol of the theme of the story overwhelmed me and demanded my attention—much as he did the protagonist’s attention in the story. Knox Hilliard’s been part of my life since.
Really, Knox caused my five-year hiatus. He confounded me with who he was and what he wanted me to do with him. I couldn’t work out his angle, couldn’t reconcile his plot, couldn’t make him do anything I wanted him to do. Thus, I not only didn’t write, I didn’t read the rest of my own work. I had burned it to disk, burned the paper manuscripts, and put it all behind me.
Then one day in August 2007, after a particularly grueling work week, I sat down at my computer and wandered my hard drives for some cheap entertainment. I rediscovered characters I had created a decade or more before and realized that I wasn’t half bad—and why in the world had I given up on them? I went to bed that night very, oh, tired at myself.
When I woke up the next morning, the entire plot problem I’d struggled with for 12 years had resolved itself. Now, I had to be willing to scrap what I’d already written and go back to the source material/structure (thanks, Will!), but all the major plot turns had worked themselves out. Only the details remained. Knox was happy and, well, keeping Knox happy is a tightrope walk.
Thank you for your company, and I hope to keep you entertained (if not hot, bothered, and thinking) with my oddball paradigm of religion, money, politics, and sex.
MoJo
