Yesterday, I printed out the manuscript – 467 pages – of What the Wind Brings, the historical novel I was “meaning to write” for more than forty years. I sent it off to a top agent in New York. He is not my agent – I’m without representation again – but he will be if he likes the book well enough to represent it.

Here’s how it happened. In my mid-teens, I used to read a lot of historical fiction. I especially liked the novels of Lionel Sprague de Camp. The summer I turned sixteen, I started to write one, but didn’t get far. I’d read somewhere that Alexander the Great, after he’d conquered the world but before he died in Babylon, had ordered someone to take a ship south through the Red Sea and along the east coast of Africa. The idea was to circumnavigate what the ancients thought was a big island, eventually coming up the west coast and back into the Mediterranean at Gibraltar.

I never got beyond a couple of chapters, but from time to time after that I would poke around in libraries, trying to find any more information about the quite possibly mythical voyage. Along the way, I came across Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition, which mentioned a legend about a supposed tribe of white-skinned folks living down near the pointy end of South America. That legend could have played into a scenario explaining why Alexander’s explorers were never heard from again.

It was while I was trying to find more information about this probably apocryphal tribe that I saw a footnote in some book that mentioned that a group of African slaves, shipwrecked on the South American coast, managed to establish an independent polity that survived for generations. I thought, “That would make an interesting historical novel.” Thus began a desultory process of trying to learn more about these self-determining Africans.

I ran into some difficulty because almost all the scholarship about the events was in Spanish and published in academic journals in Latin America. They were hard to get and my Spanish was of the “¿Donde esta la pluma de mi tia?” variety. But I gradually began to get a picture of what had happened and where and when. And against that background I began to think about the characters – historical and fictional – who might figure in a story I would want to tell.

Years went by while I wrote all kinds of other stuff, years that turned into decades. Finally, in 2014, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded me a major grant to write the novel. I did some more focused research, established a proper timeline and got a good sense of what was happening in Ecuador in the middle to late sixteenth century. In 2015 I started writing.

Now it’s done. Three drafts. A big stack of paper. And it’s winging its way to New York.

Now I cross my fingers and wait.

But here’s the thing: I’ve written some thirty books of many different kinds over the years, and sold all but a few of them, so the experience of saying “that’s a wrap” is not new to me. Except this one feels different. I have a sense of having completed a long-running process that has been humming away in the background to my life since I was a very young man. It’s an odd sensation. Mostly, as a result of my strange rootless upbringing, I live in the moment. The past fades as soon as I take my eye off it, and especially now that I’m closer to seventy than sixty. But right now I’m feeling connected to that sixteen year old I left behind on some curve in the highway, long ago. It’s as if there has been a cord that tied us together but it was always slack. Now, suddenly, it’s grown taut. I can feel the me I used to be.

And I’m thinking, that Alexander the Great boat trip might make an interesting novel.