I just read a Seth Godin blog post, What's It Like (the sad story of the hot pepper), in which he summed up one of my greatest conflicts/challenges in talking about Hell on $5 a Day.

The point that Seth makes is that for most projects, you have to be able to be able to categorize it. People don't want to know what it is, but what it's like. That gives them a quick, experiential point of reference they can build on. "It's like King Kong, but with a giant bunny" lets the audience's memory/perception quickly fill in a whole bunch of blanks so you don't have to.

On a rare occasion, though, your project is so unique, it defies a simple categorization. You can't get that quick hit of familiarity. You either have to describe it in full, without the aid of familiar references, or you have to say "it's like nothing you've ever had. Just trust me and try it."

People would ask me to describe my novel in just a few words, and I couldn't. It wasn't a "vampire novel" per se. It just happened to have a vampire in it. Some of the story was driven by Alain's vampirism, but a lot of it wasn't. There was a lot of borrowing from Dante, some from Milton... Categorizing it was very difficult for me. I was too close to it to be able to boil it down to a few catchphrases and keywords.

I didn't know if it was that unique, or if I just didn't want to categorize it. To categorize it feels like you've not only limited it, but you've taken away a degree of its uniqueness. So, as the creator of an "artistic" work, it's quite possible I was merely resisting categorizing my story rather than the story itself resisting categorization. Every child is unique, right? Even if they aren't.

But when you're trying to sell a work, saying "just trust me and try it" is not a great approach if you haven't built trust with the person. Furthermore, when you say "this is unlike anything else," you have to be 100% sure it is unlike anything else. If someone gives you the benefit of the doubt, reads it, and says "this is just like...", you're screwed. You asked them to trust you about it's uniqueness and lost.

I'm still on the fence over whether my novel is resisting categorization or I'm resisting categorizing it, but Godin has given me some insight that is helping me look at it more honestly. If I want to sell it, I need the best answer for "what's it like" that I can find.

So, after 4 chapters, I'm finding I can crank it out, but I'm not happy with what I'm cranking out. It's too raw, too first-draft. I don't have enough time to really craft.

When I posted Hell on $5 a Day I came in with a lot of it already written, so much so that I was never writing a new chapter less than 2-3 weeks before it went live on the site. Once a chapter was done, I had at least 2-3 weeks if not more to tighten it up and make it right. Part of this was because I had that huge bunch of it already writtten.

This time, I gave myself a month to not only plot and get writing, but to even decide which of many story ideas I was going to go with. And while I've been having a good time with the writing, I'd have loved to tuck those chapters away for a while so I could really tweak them.

So, I figure a novel a year is a good goal when you're trying to raise two kids, deal with a job (or job hunt) and deal with another stressful situation I'm not at liberty to discuss (legal, not medical). I'll come back and re-start Sodom All Over Again after Thanksgiving, a year from when I started running Hell on $5 a Day.

I'd rather give you a good novel in 6 months than a mediocre one now. This has been a hard decision, but right now, it's the one I have to go with.

Thanks for reading. Hope you'll still read the blog.

Don't know if this is confusing, calling this chapter one, since there were three chapters of prologue before it. Anyone, anyone?

Yes, this is the chapter I had the epiphany about in my car, which made me smack my steering wheel and accidentally engage cruise control. If you don't know about the epiphany, then you're probably one of the billions of people I am not yet friends with on Facebook. If you want to get my status updates in your friend feed, friend me on Facebook (and include a note that you're a fan of the novel).

Even after that epiphany, it still kicked my butt. I don't want to ruin any surprises, so I'll post an after-note in the comments about some of the issues I encountered while writing this chapter.

When we last left the story, Sodom was destroyed and God put a binding on the angels Azazel and Shemhazai not to fight again or to make major efforts to influence the course of humanity's development until the spring of 1946. And just so you don't have to go back and try to figure it out, the World War II sequence in the last novel ended in the late summer of 1943.

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I was thinking who I would cast if this was being made into a movie. I do that from time to time. I haven't got a bead on Shemhazai, yet. But I'm thinking Simon Pegg for Vikiel and Jim Parsons for Azazel. I know Parsons plays a wimpy brainiac in his current TV show, but I think he's got a great villain inside him, waiting to be set free.

Here's a question that bugged me as I wrote this chapter. I mention a donkey cart, but back in "the day" they called a donkey an ass. So would it have been more proper to call it an ass cart? That just didn't sound right.

This chapter finishes up the biblical-era prologue. Next week, we'll catch up with Alain and begin the main story.

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