It Took Twenty Five Years
about writing a book
Twenty-five years ago, I started writing a novel. This week, I finished it. It didn’t take me that long to write it; it only took a few months. I spent twenty-five years becoming the person who could finish it.
In 2002, I was only three years from the most traumatic experience of my life. I had become a drug addict and lost almost everything—defrocked after fifteen years as an ordained minister, arrested, unemployed—you know the drill. I was three years into slowly finding some hope again.
I was sitting in my office, enjoying the thrills of a new laptop. It was the earlier days of the internet: AIM, MSN (Google wasn’t even a thing, yet.), Email, Blogging, HTML websites, Live Journal and the sound of dial-up. A friend had sent me an image, via the miracle of email, of a black-and-white photo of a road winding through the woods. The image moved something in me.
I replied with a few lines of creative writing, and the story began (The actual first lines follow. Don’t judge. It got better).
“That road, eternally dark and damp, always leading out of town to the same house, the same now seldom remembered history. The story is all but gone, as are those who were there, but I, I alone drift back again tonight to a time before I knew of malformed creatures and a darkness so completely void of light that it could seized your spirit in terror, a time when I was waiting beside that road.” —Cam
I wrote a few chapters, enough that the characters began to live in my mind, and then life interrupted me.
Recovery took work. My children grew into teenagers, then young adults, while I was building a career—sales, then marketing, both of them good to me. There were hikes. There were ordinary Tuesdays. Life, mostly, just kept happening.
The story stayed with me, and from time to time I would dig up the files and write a bit, then rewrite a lot, but I never got past chapter four.
I took a writing class. Joined a writer’s group. Wrote more nonfiction than fiction. Published a small book of sermons, Wishful Preaching: Things I wish I’d Said from the Pulpit. Not a very good book. Don’t buy it.
The fiction novel stayed with me. I thought I was writing a supernatural adult-style novel. A sexy supernatural woman meets an average Joe. Superhuman abilities, phenomenal sex, fast cars… all that. It never really clicked. It waited.
Every novel has a secret, and sometimes, even the writer doesn’t know it until it’s written.
Six months ago, with newfound time in retirement and a more mature mind and heart, I picked up the story again. The creative door swung wide, and soon I was exploring uncharted territory. What happens when someone carries grief and guilt for 150 years? How does morality change when time no longer matters? What happens if you are given immortality without your consent? What happens when someone fully arrives at self acceptance?
The story flowed out of me as if the characters were standing behind me, telling me their choices, feelings and struggles. The book ended up being about much more than the supernatural—personal freedom, self-acceptance and the way those things get very messy, most of the time.
Cam is still standing beside that road, in the story. Damp. Dark. Waiting for something he doesn’t understand yet. I know that road. I’ve been standing beside it myself for twenty-five years. This time, I finally walked him past it.
The book is called The Gift. I hope you’ll walk it with him.
The Gift. Coming Soon.
Hello, ! I’m Kim E. Williams, a retired, sixty-something man with a life history of ordained ministry (defrocked), marketing, sales, training and now writing. (more about that here) I’m obsessively writing essays, fiction and poetry these days and your support helps me write and keep from going back to work.
Budget Limited? You don’t have to miss out. Pay what you can, plan: Monthly $1, $5, or for those on a strict budget, $9/year.
I can’t wait to read it 🖤
How exciting! Massive congratulations