Writing Stories

For the past ten years or so I have taken up the hobby of writing novels. It’s not unlike any other conventional hobby in that it is fun, done in your spare time, and serves as a distraction from the demands of your day to day responsibilities. But writing long and complicated stories takes a long time to complete, especially if its a hobby. But no matter how long it takes, you never get tired of the story or the characters you’ve created. In fact, you find yourself quite attached to them as the weeks become months, and for my latest…the months become years. I started writing this current story in August of 2020 and I’m still probably only halfway done. When/If I ever retire from my real job, I plan on trying to see if I can get one or all of them published. But for now, its just a cool outlet for my devilish imagination doing something I’ve always loved to do…write. Here’s what I’ve written so far:

A Life of Dreams

This is a story about a gambling savant whose gift destroys his life and eventually leads to a suicide attempt, after which he begins seeing visions of his still living ex-wife, which leads to a pseudo-reconciliation as the two of them go on a search for her long absent father. They find him, a successful but tortured attorney who himself commits suicide after meeting his daughter after 30 years of abandonment. When her dying mother shows up on her doorstep months later, all kinds of weird semi-supernatural stuff begins to happen, some of which involve a stray dog.

Saving Jack

Jack’s wife gets murdered in the parking lot of a convenience store by a deranged drug addict. This random act of violence leads Jack to abandon his life and business and flee to his cabin in Maine to attempt a recovery. While there, a stranger from his past shows up with the news that his wife’s murder may not have been so random after all. Both of Jack’s grown children become concerned and suspicious of this stranger and her motives and race up to Maine to intervene. What is ultimately revealed has the power to destroy the family. 

Reardon’s Walk

This is a strange tale about a traumatic event of betrayal that leads to a bizarre time travel episode that takes the protagonist back in time to the year of his birth. In the year 1962 Charlie meets his mother who is pregnant with…him. Back in real time, Charlie is dealing with the fallout from the witnessed betrayal and the disturbing information he has learned from his trip back in time. More strange semi-supernatural things begin to happen with the appearance of a kind but weird old lady with a connection to Charlie’s mother. Every detail of the story seems to center around the ornate beach house on Hatteras Island named Reardon’s Walk, built by Charlie’s estranged father not long after he was born. 

Each of these stories were super fun to write and all three of them were completed in roughly 8 months. The one I’m writing now has no working title and as I said earlier is only half done. But by far, it has been the most difficult and disturbing to write. It concerns a man who is living a perfectly fine life with lots of success and happiness when he suffers a nasty face-plant fall while out for a run. The blow to the head causes at first subtle changes to his personality then everything goes off the rails as he loses almost all impulse control which causes him to disappear without a trace one afternoon after a business lunch. His elderly and oppressive mother hires a private detective to find him and bring him home after coming into possession of evidence that her son has written a six figure check to some random woman in Mississippi. Conflict is everywhere, between Danny and his angry and abandoned wife, between Danny’s wife and her overbearing mother-in-law, between Danny’s feuding  business partners, and between Danny and this new, post-fall version of himself. There’s an encounter at a bowling alley, a hitchhiker with a gun, and a female private investigator with tons of issues. I am totally invested, all in on this group of characters, but at this point I can’t even figure out who the hero is and who the villain will end up being. All of them have each impulse within their personality.

At my current rate of progress, I’ll wrap this story up sometime next year.