Still Here Still Writing

I published my last book in 2015.
I published a novella six months later. It was a prequel to my novel, Lazarus Rising. I remember thinking, this is it, I’m off and running now. Two books out. Momentum. The next one would come quick.
That was eleven years ago.
Let me get something out of the way right up front: I never stopped writing. There were drafts, chapters, false starts, a master’s program in Theology, and hundreds of pages in a variety of manuscripts I may finish someday. My wife will tell you I’m disciplined. She’s not wrong. But discipline and publishing turn out to be two different animals.
So what happened?
Life, mostly. Teaching. Family. Adult children who have a way of becoming people while you’re busy typing. And, if I’m being honest, the thing I’m always trying to be honest about, a good stretch of fear dressed up as preparation. I told myself I was researching. Studying. Getting it right. I was doing some of that. I was also hiding.
Turns out you can hide behind a keyboard just as well as you can hide behind a bottle. I have experience with both.
Here’s the good news, and it’s the reason I’m finally back on this blog after letting it collect dust: I have a new novel. Just about Finished. And coming soon.
His name is Isaac Freeman. He’s also a former Force Recon Marine who did his time in the eighties, back when the Cold War was still brewing and the men who did the quiet work got their medals in rooms without windows.
Isaac now belongs to a Society. Vatican-approved, though you won’t find it in any directory. Their job is simple to state and nearly impossible to execute: protect the Church. Not the buildings. Not the institution’s reputation. The Church and its people.
Of course, every story does need its villain, and this one has been living in my head for quite some time, John Costello.
Costello was a detective once. He isn’t anymore. What he is now, what he has become, is something I’ve spent years trying to write honestly, because I don’t think evil arrives with horns and a pitchfork. I think it arrives the way it arrived in my own life: one small compromise, then another, then a day when you look up and can’t remember which choice was the one that turned you into something your mother can no longer recognize.
Costello has orders from above. Or should I say, below. He’s working his way through the bishops of the United States. And somewhere along the line, Isaac figures out that America isn’t the whole operation. It’s one theater in a much larger war. A spiritual war.
I have described my main character as “a Catholic James Bond,” the American 007 for the Church here in the U.S. There are guns. There are cars. There’s a man who knows how to get into places he shouldn’t be and out again before anyone realizes it.
But here’s what I became clear, and what finally got the book written. You see, Bond has gadgets. Isaac has the Sacraments. Bond has a license to kill. Isaac does too, but with a twist. The true mission is to save. One must lead with grace and forgiveness. A difficult task when dealing with those possessed by a demon.
Every thriller ever written asks whether the hero will survive. I wanted to write one that asks whether he’ll be the one saved… and whether he understands the difference.
That’s the book. Action, yes. Conspiracy, absolutely. But underneath it, the only question I’ve ever really known how to write about: What happens to a man when the thing he’s been running from finally catches him, and turns out to be Love? What happens when the Holy Spirit is chasing you? Only to catch you the moment you trip, and fall.
I’m going to be posting here regularly again. Not because I’ve become a marketing genius overnight, but because I’ve missed it, and because I think some of you may have been waiting a long time and deserve better than silence. On that note, I hope you like my new website!
If you’re one of the folks who read the first two books and wondered whether I’d fallen off the earth: I appreciate you. Genuinely. A writer with two published books and a long silence isn’t owed anybody’s patience, and some of you gave it anyway.
As far as this blog is concerned, yes, there will be updates on the new book. But there will also be something I have wanted to do for quite some time, talk film. More on that in future posts!
So if you’re new here, welcome. You’ve arrived at a good moment. The long part is over.
Finally, I said earlier that I hid behind preparation. That’s true. But I’ve also come to believe something else about those eleven years, and I say this as a man who spent many years of his life certain that God was either absent or just plain angry.
I don’t think I could have written this book in 2016. I don’t think I knew enough yet: about grace, about evil, about how a decent man goes bad in increments, about what it costs to come home. I had the story. I didn’t have the understanding.
My plans, as I’ve had to learn more than once, are not His plans.
So the book is late. Eleven years late.
Or perhaps, it’s right on time.
More soon. Considerably sooner than eleven years. Back from Publishing Purgatory.
— Anthony