Just spent three days in Vegas with the family celebrating mom’s 75th birthday. Much of that time I discovered the continuation of what has been happening for many of these past weeks, i.e. plot lines and character attributes for my new novel “Outrun the Devil” (OTD) refuse to stop spinning around in my head. I am currently reading Steinbeck’s “Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters” in which he talks about the same phenomenon, viz the existence of two worlds for someone trying to write a novel, these being the real world and the world taking form in the book. At this point there is virtually no moment of the day or night when something about OTD isn’t taking form (or perhaps breaking down) in my head.
I think this could be an excellent story, though my biggest concern is my ability to render it well. The historical scope continues to expand, and I would now like to turn this into a story about the first Jew to set foot on the American territories (spec. Hispaniola), which is in fact what actually happened. There were at least 5 conversos on Columbus’s crew, one of whom was the first to sight land after several weeks of the voyage, another of whom was the first apparently to actually set foot on land at the journey’s end. I am now toying with the idea of having the majority of the story be a very detailed recollection of some elderly fellow in the present day sharing with his family how his ancestor was the first to get here, etc, etc. This shows signs of being a large book and a complex story.