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.
Jamie Fessenden's Blog 