I spent most of the day yesterday out at my local coffee shop, trying to put the finishing touches on the second book in the Jeremiah Hunt trilogy. It was a tough day – one of those days where the words don’t want to cooperate and your thoughts are easily sidetracked. Definitely one of those days when you throw up your hands in the middle of it all and wonder why you ever got into this crazy business in the first place.
I finally called it a day and went home. I spent some time with my wife and kids and after dinner realized that I hadn’t looked at the day’s mail. A package had arrived in the afternoon while I was out and I discovered that it contained several books. I got myself a cup of post-dinner coffee, grabbed a book out of the box, and settled down in the living room to read with my six dogs lounging around my feet. (Yes, I said six, and no, they aren’t little dogs by any stretch of the imagination, but that’s a post for another day.)
I read for about an hour, which at my reading speed was enough to get through about half of the paperback in my hand and by the end of it, I remembered why I suffered through work days like the one I’d had earlier.
See, the books in the box were the author copies for my first Rogue Angel novel, The Spirit Banner. I’d written it more than a year ago and in between I’d written three other novels, so the story wasn’t so fresh in my mind and I came to it almost like an outsider picking it up for the first time. Even though I knew what was going to happen, the time between finishing the work and having it arrive in my mailbox had been long enough to allow me to appreciate it from a perspective different than the one I’d had the day I’d mailed it off to my editor.
I’ll be the first to say it isn’t perfect. Nor is it going to win any awards. Truth be told its nothing more than a cinematic popcorn style adventure with lots of action and a beautiful sword wielding heroine getting into trouble time and again.
But reading it again for the first time in more than a year, I was transported from the confines of my living room to the distant plains of the Mongolian Steppes, racing along with Annja Creed and her companions as they searched for Genghis Khan’s long lost tomb. Simply put, I was entertained.
And isn’t that what it’s all about? Entertaining our readers? Taking them away, if only for a little while, to somewhere else? Letting them experience life through a different filter or set of circumstances?
Opening that box made my day and the enthusiasm I felt after spending time in Annja’s world made getting up this morning and wrestling with my manuscript again just that much easier.
(If you’re interested in joining Annja for a trek across the steppes yourself, THE SPIRIT BANNER is available for preorder and goes on sale January 12, 2010.)
