I'm deep into the rewrite of the second draft of my book about Mr. Apology. With any luck, I'll have a new version ready in a few months, and then back to the thankless task of looking for an agent or publisher.
In the meantime, I wanted to put this little snippet out there. Today I'm beginning to work on the chapter about Allan's misadventures with Richie the Serial Killer. This is the hardest section of Allan's life story to get right - the point where he lost the thread of his own work and veered off into madness. How do you account for an artist's crazy blundering without discrediting his entire life's work?
In Allan's case, it starts with Richie's deception. The poisoned fruit of the tree of knowledge. Here's a snippet I wrote today, which I like a lot, even though it may be a bit overwrought, in which case it's not likely to make the final cut ....
Deception happens much like love in the sense that it can be both sudden and drawn out; it's a muscular thing, the very sinew of life, the way it propels us forward and back at the same time. Deception and love are further alike in that they often start as an infatuation which then builds into a spell that holds us powerless in its sway.
In full flower, a grand deception ends up functioning as the negative corollary of love; nothing more than the mutual investment in an outright lie comes to serve as the all-but-unbreakable bond of attraction between two people. Such was the nature of the bond that formed between Allan and Richie the Serial Killer.
