My Latest Obsession

It is an extraordinarily inconvenient thing to write a book. Inspiration comes when it will, morning noon and night. When you should be focused on any number of other more pressing concerns all you can think about is the latest plot point that keeps dancing around in your head. If you’re wondering why my blogposts have been fewer and farther between lately, this is the reason. This latest flurry of inspiration began almost as soon as I arrived in Maine in mid-September and hasn’t stopped since.

I began writing this one in May of 2023. The first 12 chapters or so flowed quickly but then, as is often the case with me, the story went cold for a couple months. I wrote some more during the Spring of this year before another cold period. Although being in Maine is great on many levels, I’ve never done a ton of writing while I’m there. This fall was different. At Loon Landing there’s a loft room with a spectacular view of the lake and the most comfortable chair in the house. I would climb up there on the ladder and sit in the chair and almost immediately the words would come. They have continued to come ever since.

The story centers around a young man whose life is turned upside down by a massive inheritance from his wealthy and eccentric uncle who he hardly even knows. As the story unfolds we see how the sudden and unexpected fortune changes his life and his relationships. Hint: It’s not good! The more he learns about his Uncle the worse it gets. Eventually he begins to question everything he thought he knew about his life. The rest of the story is essentially a voyage of personal discovery that takes him to Wyoming, the Cayman Islands and eventually back home to the mountains of Smyth County, Virginia….or not, I haven’t finished it yet so I’m not entirely sure how it will end.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. The story has been living rent-free in my head for over a year now. I have included the first paragraph of the story below for your consideration:

Stanley Randle Clyde had been on his death bed for seven months, as obstinate and unpredictable in death as he had been in life. It had started as a stubborn cough, turned into pneumonia, then morphed into a months long bout with dysentery. A lesser man might have succumbed to the pneumonia, but Clyde was no lesser man. Despite raging diarrhea and dehydration, the man had never lost his mental acuity. Up until the very end he had been able to communicate his various instructions to the nurses unlucky enough to have tended him with amazing specificity, regularly requesting particular brands of Irish whiskey to help settle his stomach. He recognized every face that had visited him during his interminable passing, being especially careful to insult each of them by bringing up their most embarrassing failure. And still they came, an unending stream of family members, to pay their respects to the great shrinking giant, hoping against hope to make one last favorable impression. This level of respect and devotion towards the dying is always reserved for one of two sorts of people—the beloved or the ridiculously wealthy. Stanley Randle Clyde was not beloved.