Monthly Archives: May 2011

This novel really wiped me out.  It wasn’t fun.  It was more of a purging of all the religious crap I had to deal with as a teenager, and the turmoil I felt, trying to reconcile my sexuality with what the Bible told me.  I had to stop several times, during the year it took to write the novel, and put it aside, so I could breathe again.  But in the end, I feel that I’ve produced something verging on the poetic and beautiful. 

Readers may not feel the same — they may feel that it’s cornball, melodramatic, or (worse!) dull.  But it felt beautiful, when I wrote it, and hard to express, and emotionally upsetting, and a host of other emotions.  It felt like art.

Which may make it crap, to the rest of the world.  We’ll see.  I did get some very positive feedback from my friend, Claire, who loved it.  So maybe it’s good.  I’m still waiting on other people’s comments.

In the meantime, I have so many Bible verses kicking around in my head, I feel vaguely nauseous.  Time to move on to something completely different for a while.

So, after all that talk about getting back to work on my cyberpunk stories, what ended up grabbing me instead was my drama about teen suicide and fundamentalism, By That Sin Fell the Angels.

It’s a good novel, in my opinion.  I picked it up again and immediately got caught up in it, unable to put it down until I got to where I’d left off, just before the end.  Since then, I’ve written a little over 2,000 words (about two days’ work) and I’m within a chapter of the finish.  It will probably have an epilogue.

But after regarding it as a YA novel for the past year or so, I’m beginning to wonder if it really is.  The story is told from three points of view:  Jonah, a teenager who was friends with the kid who killed himself; Terry, a teacher at the high school; and Isaac, the fundamentalist minister whose son killed himself.  All of these are narrated in 3rd person. 

When I’m writing the story from Jonah’s point of view, it feels very much like a YA novel.  But not so much, when I’m writing from Terry’s or Isaac’s point of view.  So can a novel be considered a YA novel, when only one-third of it is told from a teenager’s point of view?  I’m not sure.  But if it’s an adult novel, I’m at a loss where to send it.  Because the issues it deals with are more of interest to teens, I think, than adults.  Though, of course, that isn’t strictly true.  I still read YA novels for fun, and so do a lot of adults, and a novel about teens dealing with suicide is something adults could be interested in reading. 

I’m just not certain which publisher or agent I should approach.  Certainly, it doesn’t seem appropriate for most of the ebook publishers I buy from.  There’s no sex, to speak of.  A lot of crude language (because, hey, Jamie wrote it) and frank discussions of sex (and drug use), but nothing explicit.  There isn’t even any real romance, though there are characters who are in romantic relationships or grow fond of each other during the novel. 

But it does have something important to say, I think.  I don’t want to let it languish, even if that means self-publishing.

I guess I’ll just finish it and have some people read it, to see what they think.