The Writing of My Novel
This week, I finally did my last revisions to The
Righteousness of Our Cause and published it with Amazon.com as an e-book. The novel had been screaming to escape from
my word file for five years. I began it
in 2006 and finally had it copyrighted in 2008.
Over the years, I had proofed and rewritten, and finally discarded it as
obsolete, trite, too full of clichés, and badly written. I have often said that the only thing worse
than reading a bad novel is writing one!
Finally, in the middle of my medical leave of
absence from the church where I am interim pastor, I came to the conclusion that any novel has
something to say or to express. I had
started writing the novel during a time of anger with my church denomination
and then tried to take a fictionalized journey in the novel with two characters,
Eric (a seminary student) and Beka (a medical resident) in their attempt to
save their Church and their country from a group of power mad people. This plot became a metaphor to what I felt
was (and still is) an incipient but real infringement on the principle of
separation of Church and State.
The plot may be thin, but the moral of the
story is as thick as the present problems we find in the religious political
terrain of our country today. Some who
read it will find the killings, violence, and diabolical actions of Church
leaders too fantastic to believe. Those
of us who have watched and experienced the religious turmoil and battles in the
last few decades will see them as metaphors for what has happened to many
people of faith who have left the denomination or faith altogether. Happy reading!
