Every so often, someone expresses curiosity over what’s in that digital drawer of dusty manuscripts I’ve been storing up since sometime 2001 or 2002. Actually, I’ve tried a little of almost everything. Here’s the dish, newest to oldest.

To read my writing online, feel free to return to the site home page and browse Scita > Scienda journal.

8. Allfather (historical fantasy)

The king of the survivors of Troy must save his people from new round of genocide.

 

Heremod woke suddenly, having fallen asleep on his feet. A stringy red tendril flopped in his eyes, and he jerked back. His arm twitched, but the manacles binding his wrists overhead prevented him from brushing the ruddy threads aside. It was only his own hair, but it looked far too much like a macerated ribbon of flesh left by a whip’s strike or the slash of a knife.

Right. It’s supposed to be this way, this time. Patience.

 

First in a planned 3-book plus 2-spinoff series drawn from northern European myth and legend. This one’s the project that told me how much I love historical fantasy.

7. Sunny Winters and the Country Life (contemporary comedy)

A self-absorbed hospitality expert sets out to conquer rural life.

Mother had always called him “the Englishman.” This had seemed absurd to Sunflower Winters when she was small, because he was obviously Arabic. The first few years, she used to practice closing her eyes and listening to his perfect British diction. Every April for eighteen years, he had come to the Winters’ Peach Bed and Breakfast to see spring dawn on the Okanagan.

Unfortunately, shortly after 9/11, that Texan woman had started showing up as well.

An unfinished contemporary comedy with a fictionalized Manitoba small-town setting. Pays tribute to all the best of the hilarious rural stories we’ve ever heard or invented. Donkeys in the mist!

A NaNoWriMo 2008 project. I read the day’s work out loud to the family every evening, and have not yet been forgiven for not finishing it.

6. Nunzu (international thriller)

A Mozambican soldier of fortune must save a naive British sociologist from the country he loves.

The island seemed much larger from beneath the forest canopy than it did on any map. Ignored for generations, it hovered quietly in the Indian Ocean, thirty-two miles from Africa’s east coast, north of Madagascar.

It was that rainforest canopy that drew us there; more specifically, the things beneath it.

Inspired by a friend’s medical mission trip to Mozambique and my subsequent accidental discovery the blog of the missionary he served with. Between his reports, the missionary’s posts and pictures, and my own research of how the Cold War scarred the country, I fell in love with that place. I realize there’s a little land mine issue and white folk get heisted there, but I still want to visit someday.

A pre-NaNoWriMo test run to see if I could pull off the daily word count of about 1700. Yeah, not a problem. I’d like to go back to this one at some point.

I have a casual interest in developing Nunzu into an ongoing series. Theo Nunzu’s this enigmatic character who just inexplicably acts according to his culture and his violent background, and we only find out why by getting dragged into the whirlwind of his life. That’s a great seat-of-the-pants writing experience to have.

2, 3, 4, 5. That Prairie Series (women’s contemp)

The first four manuscripts I ever completed. In each story, secondary characters appear and take on starring roles in the next installment. I didn’t plan it that way, I think I was just exploring characterization and wanted to get to know them all better.

Book One: The Heritage of Tears

A sheltered Canadian Mennonite girl entrusts herself to a charming ex-addict.

An idle skim of dust swirled in the space between parked cars, over road and sidewalk. Clouds passed over and shifted the miraculous August light from side to side across the little Canadian town, teasing the leaves of the overgrown Manitoba maples that hovered behind the buildings like back-alley thugs. It smelled warm. It smelled like asphalt and fryer grease, grilled sandwiches and petunias, with a faint waft of leaking fluid from someone’s old pick-up truck nearby. It was a beatific, Edenic prairie summer.

Amy Wiebe choked back tears as she followed the man she loved down the old limestone steps of Oak Creek Community Church.

Amy is one of the most enjoyable characters I’ve ever written. She’s not one I really identify with–I mean, she’s happy and hopeful in the main, she’s well-adjusted, she’s resilient, and her naive streak is no match for her compassion and pragmatism. But I just love imagining what it would be like to be that kind of person.

Here we briefly meet Jeff Turner, a minor character with a complexity that startled me. Jeff keeps throwing a wrench in everything, always heading offside from the stereotypes he seems to play at various moments. He’s Amy’s former high school sweetheart and the obnoxious roommate of the guy she marries, and he doesn’t help her save her marriage later on.

Completed in 2003, this abysmal 95,000 words of sheer dreck was my first baby. Begun in total secrecy when Dave started night shifts and I was trying to cope with the aloneness, it became my learning tool through a couple of years in online critique group. Five drafts of craft study later, I set it (and the series) aside to work on other things. When it comes out of the wine cellar, I think it could turn out to be a fair decent vintage.

Book Two: The Fellowship of Sinners

A disillusioned Christian must choose between his alcoholism and his friend’s life.

Nicodemus Schroeder’s chest burned. It was a wild, unfathomable mix of anger, pain and sorrow. He locked it down deep inside before it could interfere with his ability to drive.

He was never going back to Oak Creek.

Here we meet my favourite character of all time: Nick Schroeder. And my second-favourite character, Katharyn Blayne. (No, they don’t like each other at all.) Dave has frequently accused me of torturing poor Nick for fun throughout this and the next two novels. I blame Kat–she’s the real culprit.

Nick is an average small-town guy who professed a Christian faith in the wake of his father’s untimely cancer death. He then went off to university for a few years, where the bush party ethos became a full-time hobby. On the flipside, he never really got the hang of faith. This story is the start of that learning curve.

After his tiny church implodes under the pressure of internal politics, Nick flees west to the college town where he got his Education degree. Unbeknownst to him, a former member of his youth group has done the same. Jeff Turner is just starting to get his life sorted out, while Nick is determined to let his own fall apart. An English teacher, Nick is soon less than sober during school hours, and falling into the arms of another former youth attendee–one who’s now married.

Here, we also meet Cecilia Grimaldi, a character I created in high school but had no story for. Cecilia’s a musician, a composer in fact, and a complete bohemian. She’s fiery, warm and loving, strong and mercurial. Cecilia is who I would have been in another life (and here you thought Kat Blayne was my avatar).

Book Three: The Graveyard of Repentance

Nick Schroeder risks his fragile faith to reach out to a woman who’s sheer trouble in motorcycle leathers.

Nick Schroeder glanced at the threatening sky that chased him as he drove. The humidity was killing him. And he wondered if he was crazier now than he had been a few hours ago. Life seemed to be headed from foolishness to sheer incomprehensible nonsense.

He just kept following the road signs, counting off the kilometers. He had no idea where he was going to end up. Repentance 12 km, the next sign said.

Another favourite character takes on life here: Kat’s much-older brother, sometime extra parent and protector, the rather Irish small town pastor Jason Blayne.

Well, Nick lands on Jason’s doorstep out in the little town of Repentance, and the rest is small town history. There’s a gravestone with a connection back to Jeff Turner and Cecilia Grimaldi, an odd young man with a horrible family secret related to his mother’s sudden departure, and an enigmatic old native guy named Marvin Whitecrow who knows everything and says nothing.

I was reading Maeve Binchy at the time, and I noticed when I went back to the manuscript later that Jason actually has an Irish voice, which is as it should be. In spite of a quiet self-presentation, this unassuming middle-aged pastor went a few rounds in Belfast’s riots before joining his wealthy parents in Chicago, horrifying them with his newfound personal faith, and taking on the challenge of ministering in Cabrini Green. Jason is not afraid of anything.

That’s about what it takes to deal with his impossible little sister, who disappears by motorcycle to drift around America’s small towns whenever life doesn’t please her royal pain-in-the-rearness. However, where Jason’s marshmallow-heart-meets-iron-discipline approach fails to make a dent on Katharyn, Nick Schroeder’s Brat Whisperer skills begin to make inroads just as her life falls apart.

Book Four: The Weakness in the Tree

A country pastor welcomes a broken family into his xenophobic congregation.

Jason Blayne takes center stage in a return to the town where it all began: Oak Creek. Struggling with his middle agedness and the spiritual static of ministry obligation versus ministry calling, Jason is confronted with a controversial newcomer to the town.

My name is Emily Moss, and this is my ocean.

Here is where I drowned years ago, in a place with no water to speak of. I was only a small branch, snapped off by the inward rush of a salted sea. That tear-filled flood ripped me away from my roots and swept me in directions I never could have gone on my own.

Someone reached into the maelstrom and caught me. A thoughtful sort of gardener, he grafted me in where I was meant to be. But it was painful.

Quiet, frowsy, and a perfect replacement for the antiquated librarian who has just become post-mortem, Emily Moss is on the run with her two teens. And she’s about to file divorce papers on the husband whose unrepentant neglect has destroyed her ability to believe in herself, and nearly destroyed her children’s lives.

As Emily recovers a kernel of the faith she only caught briefly at teen camp, Jason realizes that not only will none of her new spiritual family understand her divorce–he, their pastor, has fallen in love with her.

I am eternally grateful to Emily for being the one who put me in touch with my voice. If Cecilia is who I could have been in the past, Emily is who I could be in the future.

1. Serebinth (Speculative)

A brain-damaged woman battles the spiritual forces seeking control of her inner world.

This story was actually the birthplace of the Kat Blayne character. She’s a childhood friend of our protagonist, Charla Serebin, and the only person who has any success crossing the perceptual barrier that has Charla locked away from the outside world.

I began Serebinth in about Grade 11, quit it in Grade 12 (all before becoming a Christian), and subsequently threw out the old files. But the world just wouldn’t leave me alone. I picked up the idea again in about 2005-2006 and drafted a rough plot line. I do not know if I’ll ever finish this one, because the world remains largely undiscovered. As of 2008, it went back in the wine cellar again, fermenting quietly into something better (I hope).

I’ll post an excerpt someday when I have an opening I’m sufficiently happy with.