Monk Quixote

No fur­ther bets. I’ve had all the reviews and com­men­tary I can use on my first draft, and I’ve thought and mulled and pon­dered and teased and rubbed and rung bells and talked and thought some more. I have the revi­sions I want to make to the plot in my head. Hav­ing had to describe the novel to lots of peo­ple in the past few weeks I think I finally have the teaser and the syn­op­sis reduced into words that might prompt a reader (or agent, in this case) to pick it up.

~o~

The long blurb

We all have our demons to fight; we all have our bur­dens to bear. Monk Quixote is the story of how two estranged men — father and son — deal with theirs.
Tom Esher’s com­fort­able mud­dle of a life is turned upside-down by the dying wish of Frank, his estranged father — a request that will lead Tom on a quest — for under­stand­ing, for­give­ness, and redemp­tion.
He trav­els from his safe, pri­vate, unique uni­verse of rules and rou­tines that exist mostly in his head, into Frank’s world — full of strange, chaotic peo­ple in unfa­mil­iar places — where myths and hopes are bound up in near-sacred objects, tal­is­mans and books…and peo­ple drink a lot.
At the same time, he will try to jug­gle his job, his ‘not sure where this is going’ rela­tion­ship, his ‘nor­mal’ friends and the min­i­mum of basic house­keep­ing with the amount of time he spends in an entirely vir­tual world — where he re-invents him­self as Monk Quixote, a silver-furred hero that is every­thing that he is not.
Through a series of jour­neys, intox­i­ca­tions and chance encoun­ters, Tom uncov­ers secrets about his father that paint both of them in a new and occa­sion­ally star­tling light — includ­ing dis­cov­er­ing a trea­sure more pre­cious to Tom than, well, lev­el­ling up as Monk Quixote will ever be.
By finally accept­ing the series of coin­ci­dences and their con­se­quences that have led to his present, Tom learns to for­give him­self for some of the choices he has made in his life. In doing so, he frees him­self from some of the chains he has unwit­tingly tied him­self to…
How much of this is delib­er­ate on Frank’s part, and how much is sim­ply the Gods of Irony play­ing with Tom, is left to the reader to decide.

~o~

So now all I have to do is take my writ­ing axe and go lop down some adverbs, hone some char­ac­ters and clear the path for my plot a lit­tle.  On the plus side, there’s rel­a­tively lit­tle re-writing. On the minus side, my track record with tweak­ing is not great — I am one of the few edi­tors I know whose word count increases when they edit.

I have been lis­ten­ing to a Span­ish lan­guage Don Quixote audio­book, so I must try not to write the word ‘cas­tanets’ too often in my edit­ing win­dow. I have also just started the excel­lent The Three Evan­ge­lists by Fred Var­gas, so if I sud­denly intro­duce some apos­tles and beech trees, well, we’ll know where they came from…

Ok. Enough now. Pre­var­i­ca­tion upon dis­place­ment avoid­ance upon avoid­ance tac­tic. I have five days to get this draft out to agents before my 38th birthday.

Ladies and gen­tle­men, no fur­ther bets.

Wish me luck.