Six Novels and Their Lessons: A Writer’s Reflection

Driving home from the dog park tonight, a random image from my past popped into my head. It was a scene from the fourth novel I finished sometime back in about 1992. You probably know that Shara was my first published novel, originally released in 2003, but it was the seventh novel I’d completed. I finished my drive home tonight thinking about those first six books I wrote, so I thought I’d tell you about them.

My first novel, composed on a Smith-Corona Electra XT typewriter, was The Prometheus Syndrome. To the best of my recollection, I finished that first draft in 1988. I’d seen a television news report about an old fella in, I think, Tennessee, who could predict the weather with a jar of bear fat. I was fascinated with the idea of ghosts and zombies and somehow this all came together in a story about a discredited professor leading a band of hillbillies to capture travelers in Tennessee. He would then capture their emotions in bear fat with the ultimate goal of creating a group of zombies to get back at those who wronged him. I submitted the book to publishers and agents for quite a while before I put it away. I never let it go, though. I kept working on it, rewriting and revising, and eventually, in about 2014, Permuted Press offered me a three-book contract with The Prometheus Syndrome as the first book. But, they soon announced they were changing their publication model, so I got out of the deal and published the book myself in 2015. You can buy a copy here.

As I was submitting my first book, I began working on the follow-up, which I called The Living Dark, a title I was really proud of until I saw one of those many late ’80s horror paperbacks with the same name. Anyway, this one was the first of many explorations of religion and faith I was to make in my fiction. This one played on my H.P. Lovecraft influences, with a charismatic Oklahoma preacher who planned to sacrifice his virginal adult daughter to an elder god named Dhargolmet, or the Living Dark, in exchange for godhood. Although this was my first novel set in my home state, it isn’t one I’ve kept working at. Oh, I’ve messed with it a little off and on, but I don’t know that it’ll ever see publication. It’s pretty bad. In terms of my career, it’s really only significant for being the first story set in my first fictional town, Windy Acres, Oklahoma, a town I’ve used a few times since then, including for The Dead of the Day, the novella I just finished.

For my third novel, after having no success in horror, I looked to the love I had before falling for the scary stuff. I wrote a fantasy novel called Tarod the Nine-Fingered. It didn’t know what kind of fantasy it was back in 1991 when I finished it. It was too gritty to be a The Lord of the Rings disciple, but not gritty enough to be a descendant of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. It is the story of a young barbarian from the hills of a fictional world who comes to civilization hoping to get help for his people. Instead, he finds himself becoming a drug-addicted king controlled by a wizard. He gets away and has a couple of adventures that are a result of the mess he made as king. Because it wasn’t well written and didn’t even know what it wanted to be, nobody wanted to publish it. But I wouldn’t let it go and kept coming back to it through the years, tinkering here and there. I finally published it in 2023 and you can get it here.

My next attempt was a mix of fantasy and horror I called The Fetch, another title I was proud of at the time, but has since been used several times. A fetch is the ghost of a living person. This novel was about a teenage boy, shy and repressed, but with anger issues. His father taught him to count himself into a meditative state when he feels his anger getting out of control. He does that at work one day, and finds three doors in his mind. He opens one of them and later wakes up to find he killed the manager of the store where he works. He ends up in an asylum, where a psychiatrist tries helping him deal with the embodiment of his rage, called Scratch, who is capturing souls from the place where they travel between dreams. This is another one I keep going back to and editing. I did a complete revision, putting it in first person, present tense as a young adult novel, but I’m not happy with that, either. Will it ever be published? I don’t know. When I finished it, I was amped up about the next project and never even submitted The Fetch.

The first four stories of Tarod are meant to be the beginning of a long, on-going series. That idea for a series continued in my fifth book, a post-apocalyptic dystopian called We the People. This one takes place after a world war, when an Earth cult has taken over the world government. A boy unhappy with his assigned career gets sent to a prison zone that was once hit with a nuke (the area was once known as Colorado). He finds an underground facility once called NORAD and learns a bit about the old world and begins a revolution. This was written during my first political awakening. I guess it’s no surprise that no publisher or agent wanted it. Despite its overt political message, my writing was improving. This one is still unpublished and I’m pretty sure it’ll stay that way. It was the last book I wrote in my hometown of Enid.

Shortly after finishing We the People, I moved my growing family to Oklahoma City and joined a writers’ group that turned out to be mostly romance authors. Their influence rubbed off on me and I gave that genre a try for my sixth book. Bold Bounty in its first incarnation was a straight historical romance novel without any spice. Now, it’s worth noting that the idea for Shara was already brewing and close readers will notice that the characters of Morwen Angmire and Shara Wellington are, physically, pretty much the same person. I didn’t submitted Bold Bounty in its original form. In 2016, I rewrote it, making the bad guy a werewolf, and in 2017 Hartwood Publishing accepted it for publication. However, after only being out in e-book for a few months, the company dropped the book and my pseudonym Adri Amanti because it wasn’t selling well. I republished it in e-book and paperback in 2020. It’s been under contract with three narrators for an audiobook, but no one ever finishes the narration.

I finished Bold Bounty while I was working on my bachelor’s degree and the first draft of Shara. I got that degree in December 1999. Shara was first published by the doomed 3F Publications in 2003, about a year before I finished my graduate degree. The publishing journey was just getting started.