Write More in 2021

I’m more thankful for a new year than I have ever been, but I wasn’t going to let 2020 go without wrestling it to the ground.

Since April, I have written more than 50,000 new words, brought a stalled 17-year project to completion and published two novel length works. I didn’t start out 2020 with these goals but through what I can only credit to divine intervention, they were cast at me and I caught them.

Ever since retiring from the Army in 2013, I have promised to finish the manuscript I started in 2003, "Archibald Lindsey’s Study of Women," but life gets in the way. In February of this year, while attending our church and hearing our pastor speak of fasting and praying, I was struck with a new story idea. I started writing that Sunday and less than two months later I finished my longest single work, "A Place of Rest," a 30,000 word novella in the supernatural genre.

Of course, "A Place of Rest" was on a different trajectory than "Archibald Lindsey’s Study of Women," which was an adult comedy, but the writing juices were flowing, and I wanted to publish. It occurred to me that if I were writing query letters to agents and publishers, I would be better off with a portfolio of completed works and not just one novella so I blew off the proverbial dust – everything is filed electronically – from a "Study of Women" and ended it with an additional 20,000 words bringing the finished manuscript to a whopping 107,000 words. That is a hefty number for a first novel, but it was done.

After about two months of trying to entice an agent to recruit me, I discovered I was spending more time emailing query letters – and everyone wants something different – than I was actually writing. To make matters worse, another supernatural horror story was eating at me to be written, but just making a living and moving into our new home in Rogersville, Tennessee during the day and writing query letters at night was leaving me little time to do what I wanted to do and what I wanted to do was tell another great story. Again, as if by divine intervention, a friend, fellow veteran and fellow struggling writer with whom I have had intermittent contact with over the last 18 years reached out to me in early summer for writing advice. As it turned out, I got the advice I needed from him. He introduced me to Kindle Direct Publishing, and I stopped writing query letters.

I hired my own editor – hired is an exaggeration; it is better to say I know people and I asked for a favor. I did a complete rewrite of "Archibald Lindsey’s Study of Women," asked my wife the artist to design a cover and proudly published my first novel. Even before "Study of Women" went live, I was already matching up "A Place of Rest" with short stories I previously wrote to publish a second novel length work in the anthology "Lil’s Spirits: This Side of the Veil." At 6:14, New Years Eve, I published that anthology with the necessary edits from my favored editor and again with my wife’s art for the cover.

I didn’t finish all my writing goals for the year. Remember that other supernatural tale I said I’m writing? Well, my earlier goals were to at least complete the initial write of that work, but I still have a long way to go with "Sorrow Hollow" that is shaping up to be a novel. So, for 2021, expect to see "Sorrow Hollow" and a sequel to "A Place of Rest" on the e-shelf as well as a paperback of "Archibald Lindsey’s Study of Women" and "Lil’s Spirits: This Side of the Veil." I wrote 60,000 words in 2020, I expect nothing less than 120,000 words in 2021.

Lil's Spirits: This Side of the Veil
Archibald Lindsey's Study of Women