Deep Dark House

Deep Dark House was my first attempt at writing a novel. 

I worked the evening shift at a coffin factory - which later became the setting for Seeing Crows - during summers off from college. My shift would end at 11PM and I would often spend my nights writing after I got out. Working the line in a factory gives you a lot of time to think, and I spent a lot of it working through what was going to happen next in the story. It really was a great rhythm for writing.

It was originally called Spook House, which I thought was perfect at the time, and was totally unused. In the ensuing years - decades actually - a few novels, and even a comic book, used the name.  Leaving me back at the drawing board when I was finally ready to release it. For some reason, I was enamored with the idea of Deep Dark Woods - how a forest at night is exciting, dangerous and mysterious all at once. And how an abandoned house had the same kind of allure.  So Deep Dark House was born!

Revisiting the novel after 20 years was an adventure in and of itself - seeing how far I had come as a writer, and how infatuated I still was by the premise of the novel - itself meant to be some kind of cross between The Shining and John Barth's The End of the Road. Many of the story's themes persisted through my later writing and I could see the kernels of things I would keep working on as I kept writing.

I found my early writing to be full of long, expository sentences and didactic tangents. And exclamation points! I updated the novel as a true revision - not a re-write from scratch - because I didn't want to lose the original energy, chemistry and language that made the original story unique - and occasionally intense - but didn't hesitate to cut anything that didn't drive the story forward - even passages I loved. I cut over half of the novel, leaving a fairly short piece of writing. Given that these are all being released digitally, I decided not to flesh it out any further - that it was the tight, taut piece of writing that worked best for the story - the opposite of my first try. And committed to the idea that word counts and page numbers don't matter. Just the story told at the pace, and the length, it demands - and as long as the pages keep turning. Until they're all gone.