Works in Progress: Isn't Everything in Life and Art a Work in Progress?

I'm not sure how or why works of fiction come to life. In my case, I simply allow the characters in a novel or novella to surface and tell their stories. I try, best I can, to step out of their way and let them be whomever they want to be. The moment I try to impose a defined structure or fabricated plot on those characters that's when they rebel and make me pay the price. Like rebellious children, they wreak havoc on the author's house, disrupting everything in sight.

All of this, of course, falls into the category of shoptalk: the kind of drips and drabs of writers trying to figure things out, an inner dialogue with the writing self, and not truly relevant to readers of fiction and non-fiction. Who cares how and why a work arrives on the page and how those pages multiply into a book?

Okay, that said, a new work has emerged over the last four months (hence, my silence in blog postings). It's a work of speculative fiction, shorter than usual (my novels typically run 80,000 to 100,000 words), and it definitely has an edge.

Here's an image from the title page:

The work picks up and extends the main character from Of Gods, Royals and Superman: A Novel. namely, Christopher Reed. I won't call it technically a sequel, but rather, part of a larger work, maybe part of a series, not quite episodic like what you see on television, yet a jump forward from the original story.

Christopher Reed, in my humble opinion, deserved to have a kind of sequel, another chance at life, perhaps in another world. Of Gods, Royals and Superman left him hanging on the edge of a cliff, literally, or figuratively, whatever. As I say, you have to give your characters license to be themselves (as in real life, right?) and do the unexpected, which Christopher Reed does in this new work of fiction.

Stay tuned, as the cliche goes, and I'll do my duty to announce the details when all's well that ends well.