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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If you're one of my Facebook friends, you may have seen me posting status reports about this chapter reaching 7,200 words (or about 22 pages in a standard mass-market paperback). Yeah, I expected it to be shorter. I mean I'm only re-telling part of Genesis 19 and it's only around 1100 words. I do reference Genesis 14 (the war in which Lot was taken prisoner) and 17 (when God commanded Abraham to remove some excess skin), but I took 6.5 times as many words to tell the tale than the King James Version of the bible does.

Anyway, 7,200 words was too long, so I found a good break point and split it. You'll get approximately half today and the other half next Monday. I hope by the time we reach the conclusion of the tale of the destruction of Sodom next week, you'll feel it was worth the longer journey.

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