11/17/2025

    My fourth novel is testing me. The characters don’t seem to want to play nice. I wrote 40,000 words, then scrapped the lot and started over. I’ve written 22500 words now, and some of it pleases me. But why can I not do what experts advise and just keep writing, leaving the editing until later?  I find that if I don’t go back over what I’ve written, things get out of sequence and I can’t move forward. I need to fix anything that is broken before I can move on.

    My working title was The Legacy, but I toyed with the title On Apple Tree Hill and neither please me. Hopefully something more enticing will come to mind before I finish writing - if that ever happens. I am a notoriously slow novel writer. A Will of Deceit took three years! 

    The idea for this novel originated from a scene in A Will of Deceit. Lawyer Brittany McFarlane handled a case for two women who sued their mother’s estate after the family farm was left to their brother. Their father had handed them both off to the altar with generous dowries. Each received an amount roughly equal to one third of the value of  the farm at the time. But the value of the property had increased substantially since their father passed away, and they wanted a slice of the increase. The fact that it was mostly their brother’s hard work that increased the value didn’t matter. The fact that their brother had supported and cared for their tyrannical mother for ten years, suffering every day, was seemingly irrelevant. The fact that the farm was their brother’s livelihood and their greed could potentially force its sale didn’t matter. Brittany McFarlane encouraged their greed, and while they compromised some from their initial demands, they eventually won a settlement that placed their brother in a precarious financial position. 

    Writing that scene, I was reminded of a man I knew in my teen years who had inherited the family farm after his father committed suicide. He had two very mean sisters and a tyrannical mother, and he hated farming. But he had been raised to understand duty and heritage. He had an obligation to support his mother and to continue a family tradition. Eventually, that burden crushed him and he hung himself from the same tree his father had hung from a decade earlier. For some reason, I felt compelled to honour him in a story - fictionalised of course.