Author's Empty Nest
The new mystery-suspense novel, Witness Tree is on submission.
Today reminds me of the early stages of being an empty-nester (many years past, now). I’ve sent my new mystery-suspense novel, Witness Tree to a publisher, and I feel something like the uncertainty of sending a child out into the world. You think they’re equipped. Certainly, you hope you’ve done your job. But you can’t know.
Like the first days of being an empty-nester, you don’t quite know what to do with yourself. Not yet. The things you did, the responsibilities you had, are past. You’ve lived so long one way that you wonder what you did with your time before children (or in this case, a book) came into your life. And, as with children, all the things you said you wanted to do but couldn’t now loom. At the outset, though, you can’t seem to actually do them. The book has taken so long, and gone through so many revisions that as I sat at my computer this morning, I didn’t know what to do without some nagging problem dragging me to the chair.
In WITNESS TREE, the leadership battle for a shadowy white supremacist group breaks into the open when newly sober ex-con David Paterson is the only witness to an execution, turning his hopes for a new life into a fight for survival. It’s set in a relentlessly soggy, rural Oregon, and the title plays off the presence of a tall pine tree near the scene of the killing. Originally bearing “witness” to a surveyor’s property marker, it now bears witness to an execution and Paterson’s own unwanted burden.
The protagonist of Witness Tree, David Paterson, finds himself “homesick for a place I’ve never been,” his dreams shattered by what he saw while huddled in a Porta-Potty near the job site where he’s a day laborer. His drug-fueled past puts him in the frame for the murder. And in the sights of the murderers. The stakes are lethally high, and not just for David.
As he uncovers what the murder was meant to hide, he finds drugs, money laundering, crooked cops and a pipeline of Aryan Brotherhood parolees used as foot soldiers in a coming race war. David can never be sure who is out to get him—bent cops, militia triggermen or an old pal from his drug days who may be setting him up. Again. Worse, it looks and feels like the murder of a friend he saw in prison. Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut, like before. But keeping your head down carries its own risks.
Like David (though happily minus the murderous hordes), I want to start the next thing, begin the next project. But I’m oddly at sea.
James McCrone’s stories pose questions about the nature of power, the choices we make and the lessons we don’t learn. He’s the author of the thriller trilogy Faithless Elector, Dark Network and Emergency Powers, about a plot to steal the presidency and set up a puppet government; and Bastard Verdict, where a looming second referendum on Scottish Independence threatens to expose irregularities in the first.
He’s the current president of the Delaware Valley Sisters in Crime chapter, a member of Mystery Writers of America (NY), the Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and the Philadelphia Dramatist Center. He lives in Philadelphia.
Yep, ending a big project is hard…and if it has “your” people in it, I imagine it is even harder! (Mine are just buildings, but I love them, too!). Enjoy your freedom and let your mind wander.