The Forgotten Novel

This is an oddball story, for sure. On my Mac, I have many dozens of folders that are manuscripts completed, submitted and published. I have 13 years of blog folders that contain several hundred posts for a given year. I have astrological charts and reports for many years.

You get the idea here. My hard drive is jammed.

So the other day I started going through these files, making copies of the ones I wanted to keep, and deleting the ones I didn’t need. Then I noticed two folders called That Other Place, with different dates in 2018. I opened the one with the most recent date in July 2018. It was more than 80,000 words and when I scrolled to the end, there was an epilogue. In other words, it was finished.

And I’d never done anything with it. Why not? I started reading and couldn’t stop – 80 pages the first night, another 100 the next night, and then I finished on the third night. A plane is en route from Cartagena, Colombia to Orlando, Florida and crashes into Disney World. Several thousand  people are killed because Disney, of course, is open for business.

The story takes place in the afterlife and in physical life. It evolves into a murder mystery with shifting timelines and shifting memories among the characters – some of them dead, the others alive. And ultimately, it’s a story about how our choices at any given moment can change not only our lives, but our destinies.

The idea is one that has intrigued me for years. But I don’t remember when in 2018 I wrote it or why I didn’t do anything with it. I didn’t send it to my long-time agent, Al Zuckerman and am not sure why.

Al retired in the fall of 2020 and I don’t particularly feel like going on an agent hunt. It’s time consuming and even if an agent finds an interested editor, the entire process to publication can take 18 months to two years. So I will go through it again, send it to people for feedback, and then submit it to Crossroad Press. They’ve been publishing our backlist and original titles since 2011.

During the pandemic, Rob and I started ghostwriting through a British online site, Reedsy. Crossroad has taken several of those books.We have two originals coming out from Crossroad this year – White Crows, a Mira Morales novel, and a non-fiction book, The Shift: Reports from the Mystical Underground.

Crossroad, I’m convinced, is a new paradigm in publishing. The CEO, David Wilson had a vision and launched the company in 2009 with backlist titles – out of print – by sci-fi writers. We had him on our podcast, The Mystical Underground, last December.

David Dodd, the illustrator for Crossroad, is a whiz kid at covers. Give him an idea of what cover you would like to see and he creates it.

So those are my thoughts and discoveries for this full moon in Virgo on March 18 (yeah, about 3 weeks ago). My lesson? Delete nothing until you’re absolutely sure what it is!