​I'm not sure when I decided to write a novel. Nor am I really (what I perceive to be) the typical would-be novelist, which I perceive as those who love to read, love to write and, perhaps, have either education or employment in writing or language. Or those who just want to say "I'm a novelist."

I meet none of those criteria.​

Yet, ​I had an idea for an interesting book about a year ago and filed it away. During many longs days milking cows, making cheese, slopping hogs, preserving food (and praying for a child) I found myself thinking about the idea here and there. Daydreaming, really. Just kind of wondering what the book would be about, what the story would be and how it might end. That sort of thing. I told myself that I'd take a stab at writing it when we dried the cows off for the year, which for us is around Memorial Day. We keep them dry until just after Labor Day and begin milking and making cheese.

I'm not sure what I expected when I sat down to write a couple of months ago. I set up a private writing area. Actually I stuck a table in the rest room in the garage and labeled it the toilet bowl. And so, I climbed into the toilet bowl dutifully every day for at least 4 hours or so and began writing. No outline to speak of, no plotting whatsoever, no "character notes." Don't really know what much of that stuff is anyway. The only "training" I can claim was having read Stephen King's wonderful non-fiction book "On Writing". In it, he described how he has never plotted and only starts with a situation. Like, I wonder what would happen if a woman and a child were trapped in a car by a rabid dog (Cujo). Then he begins writing and the characters come alive and the story is unearthed by the author.

Honestly, that sounded crazy to me. I mean, you'd have to be pretty fearless to start writing and produce a few hundred pages, only then to find out the story was tangled and had no direction. Then again, that style appealed to me. So I began and I wrote, one word at a time.​

And it happened. Characters came to life, walked on stage and demanded a voice. Other characters that I thought would be prominent faded into obscurity with their weak voices and vanilla perspectives.​ Scenes appeared logically, dictated by the fossil I had unearthed (King's metaphor) about the story and, in the end, it became about something very different than I had visualized. Very different, with an outcome that surprised me.

I wrote 105,000 words in about six weeks which became about 34 chapters and just over 400 pages. The suspense novel is called Poisoned Soil and has gone through a couple of draft revisions since then to cut the word count back to 97,000 or so and is being professionally line edited now. After all, I gotta get this project finished before the cows scream to be milked next month. ​It is set in Georgia, primarily Rabun County and Athens.

I guess my question is, are there any readers out there who also want to write? Have you written? Are you intrigued by the process? I really fell in love with it and have ideas for another 6-7 novels, but that'll have to wait until milking time is over!.

And then, I'll climb back into the toilet bowl​