I spent about five years writing Somewhere Out There In The West, and now the time has come to let go of the story, and turn it over to the reader.

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Writing the story began when I discovered a page I had written nearly thirty years ago in an old notebook. What I had discovered, after some editing, became the first page of the novel. Finding it ignited my imagination, and I began to write the story.

It was the summer of 2012 and I had been reading a number of “conspiracy” websites that were always talking about the coming changes on December 21, 2012. Reading the websites were like reading real-life fiction, and they fueled my imagination as I wrote the beginning of the first part of the story. At the time it’s working title was “The Late-Great American Novel.” The first chunk of the book was written in a few weeks and then sat around for several years.

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It took several rounds of picking up the manuscript, working for a couple of weeks on it and then setting it aside again. Having never written a novel I had no idea how the process would go, or even if my story would ever get to the end and become a book.

I’d made extensive notes about the story, and at one point I planned for the story to be stretched into a series of books. Most of my ideas ended up getting tossed aside or left unused in my notebooks, waiting to inspire me on some future story.

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This last summer I decided to take another look at my story. Around this time I created a graphic of a couple of toddlers from an old photo and turned them into alien-looking creatures.

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They fired my imagination and within a couple of weeks I had written another story that took place in the same universe as my first story. The new story was just novella length, about as long as the story I had already written. My wife suggested I combine the stories, which is an idea I had had in my head for several days. The stories coexist nicely, like two episodes of the same show, and were brought together in the epilogue.

The novel all takes place in the same universe, but tell a number of different stories. Part I could be read by itself, Part II could be read by itself, but together they make for a fun and interesting ride once they’re combined with the epilogue.

So finally the book is done, and I’m going to let go of the story, and turn it over to the reader and their imagination. I could keep tinkering with it, but I have other stories to tell, other novels to write.

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Until later, best of health,

P.S. The links to buy the book…