January 2 - My First Novel

January 2, 2017

My First Novel – The Spartan Sisters

This is a rewrite from a blog in August, 2016, about my novel of the Trojan War.

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 started teaching 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, by Euripides.  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, and 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.  I think that was fear of being rejected.  What if people thought it was a stupid idea or they didn’t think my writing was that good?  But I can’t begin to describe the joy I felt writing.

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 real meaning.  Without the Greek gods I could explore things like why Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon when he returns from war or why Achilles gets so angry at Agamemnon or why Helen runs off with a total stranger.

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. 

Spring of 2016, 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 and had published it as an e-book on Amazon.  I didn’t sell a lot of those e-books, probably because most of my friends either don’t read or they read books made of ink and paper.  In mid-December, I discovered that Amazon had started publishing paperback books.  A few weeks later my book was in my hands.  My dream of many years.

And now my nightmare!  I can’t tell you how many times I edited that book.  I have read it over and over too many times to count.  I have my new novel in my hands and am reading it and now glaring at me is an error.  What?  Yes, I found a mistake.  I read the book cover to cover and found a dozen mistakes.  I learned a lesson, you can never edit too much and find someone to edit for you, if possible. 

I told my dad the other day about that and he laughed.  He said he has a friend that looks for first editions, especially those that are known to have errors.  It seems they are more valuable than those without errors from future editions.  I guess that means if you bought one of those, you have something that might be valuable if ever I am a famous author.

It has been corrected, and hopefully the errors are gone.  I hope you decide to buy my book.  It is my baby.  I love it.  I want you to love it.  I’m in the Dallas area through mid-February.  If you are here, and you buy my book, I will gladly sign it for you.  In fact, I want to sign and say thank you for supporting my new career.

If there is someone you know who loves a good book, please share my blog with your friend.  I would love that person to read my novel and tell me what she thinks.  The best way to get my book in the hands of book lovers, is to share it with friends who love books.  If you are that book lover, please read it and tell me what you think.  

Below is a link to my author page on Amazon.  There you can learn more about the books I have recently published.  If you buy a book, please leave a comment in the recommendation section.

Mark's Amazon Author Page

You can also go directly to Amazon.com to purchase the Spartan Sisters:

Purchase Spartan Sisters by Mark Potter