Well, to begin, I finished my re-write of chapter two in The Devil’s Oak and I am happy to report that I have been making great leaps and bounds in chapter three. For the first time since I finished the rough draft, I am actually enjoying my work.
To give a brief history, I began working The Devil’s Oak in 2002 under the working title “The Creator.” Devil’s Oak was the first endeavor for me as an author of fiction (I did spend twelve years as a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent/Journalist) and I’ll tell you I was all over the place with the work. I worked on the story in my spare time while deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom – when the operation was still at its beginning. I came home from the deployment only to find a piece of sand ruined my disk, leaving me with only half of the 140+ pages I wrote. Looking back I see the destruction of my work as a blessing because it has given me more time to develop the characters and their backgrounds.
Still, Devil’s Oak didn’t come to its current incarnation until I began working as the Marketing and Public Affairs Chief for Recruiting Station Charleston (West Virginia) when I had the idea to write a fiction story about a recruiter falsely charged with rape. For those of my friends who don’t know, when a situation like that occurs it’s similar to a teacher being charged with molestation – They might be found innocent and be completely innocent, but their name is destroyed with their current way of life. As I began the story, it occurred to me that adding the horror/paranormal aspect of The Creator to the story made for a better story—That’s my opinion and since I’m writing the novel, I’m entitled to it :D
Being in recruiting didn’t help because most of my time was spent working event s and advertising to help the Marine Corps make its mission. So The Devil’s Oak had to wait until my next command, 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, where as the Public Affairs Chief, I actually could make time for my own personal dreams. I finished The Devil in the Oak while on a pre-deployment training exercise and it was suggested that The Devil’s Oak made a better title for the story. I agreed and thus “The Devil’s Oak” was born.
The only problem: I didn’t like the story at all. Regardless of the typos, grammatical errors and other miscellaneous crap about the overall story you’d expect in a rough draft, something was missing. Something didn’t feel right about the manuscript and so it sat in a box until very recently. I’m talking a two-three year gap between finishing the rough and beginning the re-write/revision.
The idea was still sound in my opinion, I just didn’t have the right way of portraying it.
When I sold 10:15 to Eternal Press, my dreams of writing went from dying embers to a raging fire and all my ideas and theories haunted me until I began writing them down, taking notes and developing any moment I could. It was time to break the old MS out of the closet of my imagination and dust it off a bit.
Unfortunately, it still sucked in my opinion – please refer to the last sentence of paragraph five if you need a refresher on my opinion. It wasn’t a work that just needed some cleaning up; it needed MAJOR REVISING. The only way I could feel comfortable with the work was to print one chapter at a time, read the chapter by itself and then re-write it from the memory of what I read. This worked until chapter three when – near the end of chapter two—I took a major turn from the original. A lot of the work is the same, but too different to go the same route. So this is the major reason for my MS taking so long before I’ll feel it is at a level to submit to an agent/press.
All I can say is my muse is pulling my strings right now. I’m loving my story and its characters, which is humongous for me since I really hated it on the first go round.
I hope everyone enjoys it when it comes out, because I’m enjoying it right now.
Have fun,
Trent
