Everyday Witches

The nexus that I’ve come to in my novel has gotten to a pretty dark place, and while I thoroughly enjoy those type of stories, I find them difficult to write. Having marinated on the writing of Steven King and Dean Koontz in my youth, I have found that at times my writing can veer in that sort of direction and while I enjoy it, it’s not necessarily the place my heart lives. In fact, that was part of the reason I decided not to pursue publishing my first novel. Although I adored the story itself it had some pretty dark places that I think would probably require some polishing and I wasn’t sure if it was a task I wanted to take on at the time.

But this time around, I wanted to do something different. The characters are ordinary people, who just so happen to be witches, and are called by a sense of honor and duty to protect the green Earth and its inhabitants. I wanted to find a way to articulate with some beauty and engaging style, the chaos of everyday life in a setting we can only imagine. It was at this point in the novel that I was planning on a scene where one of the main characters, a dashingly handsome young witch would instruct the newly fledged on all things witch. I have decided to scrap the scene, for brevity and because I think I already touched on the topic enough throughout the previous chapters that it isn’t entirely necessary to the overall story.

Which brings me to the darkest of scenes, where the dashingly handsome young witch is kidnapped and the main characters are experiencing scenes concurrently that will lead up to the resolution. I think that by balancing some humor and some love with the darkness I am mitigating the darkness of the scene itself, but who knows? Everything is subjective. And time will tell.

Anyway, I read somewhere that Stephen King’s ‘The Dome’ (my all time favorite of his) was actually the first book he ever wrote. Apparently he didn’t publish it at the time, but went on to write many more novels that he did publish and then eventually went back and published the original too. It gives me hope that perhaps, sometimes a trial run is all we need to get to the place where we are really ready to begin. Darkness and all.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out the story yet, it’s laid out by chapter at Everyday Witches: chapter listing