My First Novel
When I was a kid, I loved Greek mythology. When a new school year would begin, I would
open my literature book to find out if there was a section on it and had it
read within a day or two. I read every
mythology book in all my school libraries and the Duncanville Public Library
too. And then I would read them again. One of my high school teachers convinced me
to participate in a state academic competition in the mythology division. I was sure that I’d do average, but I won! All that reading paid off.
Years passed and I was a new teacher at Nash Elementary (now
Intermediate), in Kaufman, Texas. One
rainy, boring Saturday I was watching an old movie based on the Greek tragedy The Trojan Women. It is about the women captured after the fall
of Troy. As I watched, I realized I knew
every character and her importance to the story.
For fun, because I was bored, I started writing down
everything I remembered about the Trojan War.
After a day of writing I had more than a dozen pages. I looked at it and realized I had the makings
of a novel. I started that day writing
feverishly. If I wasn’t at work or
church, I wrote. When there was
something I forgot or couldn’t see the connection to the story, I’d buy a book
to help me figure it out and read all week to know every detail. It was a long time before I told anyone about
my novel, more than a year.
A few things bothered me about the Greek stories. The characters did not seem well
developed. Helen was no more than a
pretty mannequin. Why did she do what she
did? Some characters were super heroes
one minute and a crying baby the next.
That didn’t feel right. Not
everything about the war is in the Iliad
or the Odyssey, some are in the Greek
tragedies, like The Trojan Women or Ajax, and a dozen others. I didn’t want my characters boring and I
wanted them to have reasons for doing what they did.
One of my decisions that came late in my writing was to
eliminate the Greek gods altogether.
With them my novel would just be a fantasy and my characters ceased to
have any meaning. Without them I could
explore things like why Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon when he returns from war
or why Achilles gets so angry at Agamemnon.
The story of the Trojan War has a hundred characters. Eventually I cut the novel down to four main
characters: Agamemnon, Helen, Clytemnestra, and Achilles. I never could get rid of Odysseus, so he is
still a major character. The other guys
could stay in the novel, but they became secondary to the others. There are a
lot of secondary characters! My main
characters needed a backstory for their lives to make sense and that is what I
tried to do. The secondary characters
make the backstories more believable.
This spring, as I was preparing to come to Bolivia, and I
was saving all my novels on flash drives, I came to my final decision. I need to tell it in first person. These guys needed to tell their own story so
I could say what they think. That
changed a lot of scenes. A lot needed to
be eliminated and some things needed to be added.
And then one night, at the end of July. I was finished. Yes, I am finished. Soon, I will be publishing my novel on Amazon,
as a Kindle book. There will be more
about Amazon later (and there are also Amazons in my book) and formatting my book for Kindle.
There are a few details I am working on, but I am publishing
soon. I might only ever sell 50 copies,
but my twenty year-long odyssey is over.
My first novel is complete.
Spartan Sisters coming
soon!
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