Where Do You Get This Stuff?
Recently I was looking over the blog posts I’ve done so far and realized I never explained how Destitutio Quod Remissio came to be. Since this is often a question people ask, particularly how it got its title, I thought I would finally give the book’s background.
First of all, I have to say, DQR would never have come into being were it not for the guiding of the Lord. If you open the book to the dedication page it says: “This book is dedicated to the glory of God, Whose forgiveness brings light into the darkness of man’s destitution and without Whom there would be no words worth writing. Throughout the entire process I felt very much guided by the Lord and more than any other story I’ve worked on, this one seemed to write itself. That may sound strange to a non-writer, but I’ve often said the best way to describe writing a novel is, it’s like getting an advance copy of a book you would want to read.
The literal timeline for the book began in January of 2009 when I was in my second fiction writing course at WVU. We were given two short story writing assignments that semester and for the first one I had a very clear image in my mind’s eye of a home on fire and a man, the homeowner, coming upon it unawares. 
I knew I wanted to deal with the themes of forgiveness and reversal of fortune, because I feel like the latter can really highlight the first and make it all the more beautiful. Also, growing up as a Christian, I was touched deeply and early on by the stories of martyrs. Out of those strands, DQR, as a short story, was woven together. The title was even present at that time, which I must admit was initially chosen in an artful fit intended to lend the right feel to the story from the opening (you can read more about the title, and its significance and meaning I later realized, in this post: ).
When it came time to get the story critiqued by the class I was shocked to find out it resonated very well, even with non-Christian students. A number of my classmates offered that night to help me transform the short story (about 10 or so pages long) into a novel, if I so desired. Hearing that really stunned me, because I had never given thought to transforming my course work short stories into novels. Particularly DQR, because I felt at the time it was finished. At some point I may share the original story on here, but it is sufficient for now to say the story was a bittersweet one and had a number of similarities and differences from the novel in print.
After that semester I actually ended up doing the novelization of the second short story I wrote for the class, The Fire and the Fount. Doing so took almost two years, and after if I finished another novel, The Journey. So by the final semester of my undergraduate time at WVU, I was in need of a project to do my creative writing capstone on. Remembering peer comments from three years prior, DQR seemed the ideal fit. Over the course of January to May 2012 I wrote about 22,000 words of DQR. The cap stone project portions are chapters 1-4, 13-14, with some modifications, of course. You might notice I had a pretty big gap inserted in the final chapter layout, which was intentional. I did the first four chapters and then jumped ahead in the planned storyline to do some important scenes in the book that I wanted feedback on. The nice thing about WVU’s creative writing capstone is they let you do occasional peer critiques with small groups of classmates, but you get to have regular reviews and feedback from a MFA student. The MFA student who helped me was Rebecca Thomas, and I should mention my professor was James Harms. Both of them really helped guide me at the start and encourage me in my work. As did the professor of my short story class, Emily Mitchell.
After I graduated, I kept working on DQR in spare time, while starting a new job at the state of West Virginia’s Division of Infectious Disease Epidemiology. I do their web programming for them and data mining from the infectious disease tracking system. On top of that my fiancée at the time, Shelly, and I began planning for a February wedding. In April of 2013 I started a masters program with SNHU, all the while working away on DQR. By the end of 2013 it was finished and I found out about a contest being held by CrossBooks, which was an imprint of LifeWay/B & H Publishers. I entered the newly finished DQR.
I tried my best not to look at any contest announcements leading up to their selection of the winner in April of 2014. I also tried to pray with sincere heart, asking the Lord to let the book win only if it would bring glory and honor to Him and though it would be hard for me to accept, if He willed for someone else’s entry to win, to help me with that as well.
On the 14th, I got a phone call while at work that I wasn’t able to answer. I didn’t see the number or bother listening until I got home that evening. I might not have checked the voicemail even then had my wife not gotten a phone call from her brother in Florida, which left me idle for a while. There are not words for how excited I felt and how blessed and absolutely erupting with thanks to the Lord when I heard the message say DQR had won the contest. I’ve been writing original stories since I was nine, and finding out this one, this novel which was so dear to my heart, would be published had me jumping up and down!
There was a lot of aspects of preparing a book for publication I hadn’t ever considered. I thought the book was finished, but ended up doing three or so rounds of edits, throughout the book (not major changes, but ones I felt were significant), many of them adding layers of historical authenticity to even minute elements of the story (i.e. what seasoning, furniture and building materials would the Romans have used, etc.). It was a good experience and really tightened up the book. By the end of the process, I had to decide to keep the title in Latin as it was, or choose an English title. I agonized over it quite a bit, before I really started considering what the title means (again see that previous blog post to get those details). In the end, the title was tied too significantly to the book’s core theme and I couldn’t do away with it.
This might have been the long winded way to say DQR began as a short story with a very clear opening scene and basic themes, and with the hands of the Lord guiding me like a master painter does a brush, it was made into what it is today. As much as I thought I knew of writing, my experience with this novel in particular has instructed me on so much more.
