The End is just the beginning
At 8 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, I typed “THE END”. I looked at it, then centered it. I looked at the word count. I finished a novel in 85,000 words, short of my mark, but as so many before me have said, the story is over when it ends. Like the wars I write about in this novel, the work continues.
That’s not the end is it? It is the beginning. It is the 2nd of July in 2024. I started this novel, “Captain Henry”, in January of 2022. I know because of the dedication I wrote. I started a book in 2022. After a few revisions, it languished in the digital drawer of incomplete works, opera imperfecta. This spring, the ending for “Captain Henry” came to me. The ending provided me with a target to aim for. I re-wrote the elements so that each supported and pointed towards this final scene.
That was this morning at 8 o’clock.
Last evening on a late call with my marketing person, we faced the realization that our efforts to promote book #1, “The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County” haven’t created the buzz we wanted. We are 10 weeks from the pub-date. There is no book #3 if book #1 goes flop. That’s the anxiety. That the goal. How do we get people interested in a book? How do we draw readers into bookstores, pick the novel off of a shelf and walk to the counter?
“Did you find everything you were looking for?”
“Maybe?” She’s holding a blue novel with a black road carving the snowy and forested terrain of an unknown place. “Have you read this?”
That’s the question every author asks. The answers are what we fear. The first answer bifurcates into Yes and No. Yes, I read it. No, I did not. The Yes, bifurcates further, doesn’t it? Did you like it? Would you recommend it? Blah, blah.
What is Captain Henry? It is a novel that is more autobiographical that I should admit. I pick up two characters from “The Little Ambulance War”, Sam and Brighid. Together, they have a small part in that novel. We meet them together around a fire pit at following a pig roast at Chief Alex Flynn’s house. The members of Trowbridge Rescue drink and bitch about new setback in their EMS agency. Sam and Brighid carry their story forward in “Stolen Mountain” due out in 2025.
In Captain Henry, we roll time back to Sam’s first second deployment to Iraq. The story is told in three parts that plait together. Sam writes sanitized journal entries while she serves as a military intelligence officer with the U.S. Army near Baghdad. Bound by so many rules and laws, the journal entries let readers sense the confusion that American soldiers felt during 2006 when a civil war emerged from the rubble of our own invasion. The rules prevent her from describing the military action firsthand.
Brighid waves goodbye to Sam at the military post near Killeen Texas, a base then called Fort Hood. Through Brie’s telling, we explore the challenges of being a soldier’s special person.
Meanwhile, Brie decides to research her family’s roots in New England. She find an ancestor named Captain Henry McDonald of Springfield Massachusetts. He lies about his age and enlists in the United States Army in 1870. During his hitch, he and his squad of soldiers patrol northern Georgia during the Reconstruction Era and early Jim Crow days of the American post-Civil War south.
I got to explore America’s involvement in war spanning a century and a half. Through the research, I recognize that me, my family and my ancestors have never missed the opportunity to stand up and thump people over the head on behalf of our nation. Right or wrong, we’ve gone. In my research, I found that we missed a few skirmishes in Mexico and the liberation of Granada — which is story I did get to hear first hand all those years ago. One of the EMTs I worked with was a medic during that escapade. I think we missed Gulf 1, as well. All of my ancestors that served in the American Civil War fought were members of the same Massachusetts unit, that includes a drunken cook and a combat soldier. I wrote a novel about war.
Within an hour of finishing, I email the manuscript to my editor.
Now the work begins in earnest. Promote this book, polish the 2025 book readying it for publication, then market that book. Meanwhile, make sure that the 2026 book is as good as it can be.
I felt rushed to finish a book that won’t be published for 2 years. Why? Because there is another book pushing aggressively to get written. It wants my attention. See? The End is just the beginning.