Wages

This Tuesday means six years since my first novel, The Wages of Grace, was published.

It’s hard to believe, honestly. What’s even harder to believe is that it took me almost twice as long to write/publish it!

But time is a funny thing.

Somewhere back in 2009, which at once seems like yesterday and a whole lifetime ago, I was selling jewelry to retail stores for a manufacturer. My territory was Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, so as you can imagine, I had a lot of time in the car and with only my thoughts to keep me company.

One day that I will never forget, I was driving on Interstate 40 coming back to Nashville from Memphis, and a very simple idea dropped out of the sky: two brothers, fighting over the same girl, and she dies. There was maybe a bit more to it, but not much.

Still, the thought was thrilling, and I wasn’t even sure why. After all, it’s not like that story hasn’t been told before in some form.

I pulled off at the next exit and started scribbling furiously. And that’s not like me, or at least it wasn’t like the me I was then. But something deep inside was telling me to lean into this idea and don’t let it slip through my fingers.

And here’s the weirdest thing of all: I was not a fiction writer then.

Sure, I had always enjoyed writing, but I did not consider myself whatsoever to be a writer, write. At most, I wrote songs. In fact, I was in the middle of recording an acoustic, singer-songwriter EP which never came to fruition.

I couldn’t shake the idea, though. And at the time, I didn’t even have a computer. I remember the first scribblings of what was to become this novel taking place on business center computers in hotels.

When I finally did get a computer, in part to work on this project, I password protected the draft, subsequently forgot the password, and lost the initial draft of the first two chapters forever.

That was just one set back. There came the organization of the thing… how does one mold the lives of characters whose interactions map over each other? How does one fit that onto a coherent timeline? How does one keep track of whose birthday happens when and what historical events might impact the story?

As it turns out, drafting a full-length novel requires a much different set of skills than does writing a three minute song.

To be honest, I gave up so many times. My internal critics harangued me at every turn.

You’ll never get it published.

No one is going to read this.

And if they do, they’re not going to like it.

No one cares.

Have you read Cormac McCarthy?

You’re not him.

You suck.

And maybe my internal critic wasn’t all that wrong, but I didn’t let that stop me.

Something inside said keep going. Something inside said, even if one person reads this and gets something out of it, even if no one reads it but you finished it, it’s worth it.

Sure, in retrospect, there are lots of things I would do differently. Sure, I wish it could reach a larger audience.

Looking back now, I am incredibly proud of this novel and what it stands for, not only in its content, but in what it stands for in my life. An actual publisher put their name on it. I published a damned novel while in the middle of law school. Many people have reached out to say that they got something meaningful from the story, that it made them think or that they missed the characters after they finished it, and that’s the biggest achievement of all.

There are so many people I want to thank (again) for their contributions to this novel. I think you largely know who you are.

But most importantly, I want to thank every reader who has taken the chance on this novel. The fact that so many of you have lent hours of your lives to reading this book is one of the great honors of my life.

Thank you again. There is more to come… slowly… but there is more to come.

All the best,

Brandon