I finished my first draft of the newest Nick Roberts thriller yesterday and will take a short break from Nick for a time and do something else different.
It’s something that has mulled inside my head for a few days and if I can get to the particulars of what I want to accomplish may turn out to be a particularly delightful story indeed.
My mother-in-law had her parents come to stay in their final years. Her mother had Alzheimer’s and her father blinded from Macular degeneration. Both were in their nineties. While the mother turned out to be a loss soul who had absolutely no idea who or what she was, or where she ended up, her father on the other hand, though blind wanted to be a part of the big picture in his daughter’s life.
Like I said, I have an idea of how I want to go about this, traveling back in time to the highlights of his life while he walks up a long driveway to the mail box. Each time he has to stop and rest on a folding chair his daughter strategically placed along the way—there are six altogether—he steps back in time and relives that event.
Of course, I will need to just make up these stories as I go: youth, teenager, young adult, family head, to older and finally to where he was now as an elderly man slowly walking to the mailbox. As is the custom, my custom at least, each story or episode must be enticing, dramatic and tension filled to capture and hold the reader’s attention throughout.
I don’t know if any of my loyal readers had ever read or saw the movie Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, but the story line is that the main character, Billy Pilgrim, exposed to the horrors of war, traveling through a time machine from past to present and then future to find a truth.
It is a journey we all take in life with more twists, turns, and bumps than many of us care to admit. In the end though it is a journey well worth the effort.
Now will it be something ready for publication in the near future? I have no idea. We will have to see.
Jerry Schellhammer 