I know it’s way, way too early for this, but I’ve already started playing around with cover designs for my novel-in-progress. Here’s what I’ve got so far (click for a high-res PDF):

It’s a study in white space, this cover. The great expanses of emptiness signify the loneliness, the futility, of daily existence. The key–islanded as it is within those ample tracts of nothingness–symbolizes our conviction that we know what we think we know, that we are what we think, that the unknowable is, in fact, knowable. The title and the author’s name are motion-blurred–smudged a smidgen–betokening the unfathomable speed of life’s passing. Years melt away into the void, faster than we care to admit, and all along the way we convince ourselves that we hold the key to understanding.

Actually, that’s all pretty much BS. I just pushed some pixels around until I found something I liked.

In the past I’ve been reluctant to talk about writing projects while they’re underway. It’s probably not unwise to play it close to the vest. A novel is no trivial jaunt, it’s a voyage. It’s like walking 100 miles on a road you build as you go. Anything can happen along the way. I’m absolutely certain that far, far more novels have been abandoned than have been finished.

After his legendary and remarkable debut, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison never really finished his follow-up, though I’ve read that he would talk about it to anyone who asked. If I remember correctly, Shelby Foote also “talked away” the novel, called Two Keys to the City, that he’d intended as his magnum opus. He set it aside it write his magisterial history of the Civil War, and by the time he took it up again, his mental image of the great novel had become so perfect that he couldn’t write anything that matched it.

It’s all too easy to let that kind of thing happen. I nearly lost The River In Winter that way. Before it was even called The River in Winter, I’d thought about it and talked about it and fantasized so extensively about its perfection that when I tried to do the actual writing, I was paralyzed. No mere words could live up to my idea of it. It hovered just out of reach, glowing like some kind of angelic apparition.

So I’m not going to say too much about this new book. I’ve got over 28,000 words so far, which means I’m perhaps a quarter or a fifth of the way there. That’s a decent chunk; I’ve got some momentum. I’ve also got a vague outline in my head. I’m writing to that outline, but I’m not making an attempt to lock it down or flesh it out beforehand. In other words, I’m letting the story find its own way.

I will say this: Jonah, the protagonist and narrator of The River in Winter, is also the narrator of this book. It is both a prequel and a sequel, set partly in the 1970s and partly in the present day.

I will confess, too, that I’m using fiction to work out some of the emotional upheaval I experienced when my dad died. To my mind, that’s what fiction is for–and the whole process is deeply fascinating. Though I set out with the specific intention of writing about my dad–my dad, not some fictional avatar–Jonah’s father has taken on a life of his own. He’s somewhat like my dad, but he’s not my dad. He’s not even really a fictional avatar; he’s just … John Murray.

You may be wondering… Why is the book called The Little Seven? What does that even mean?

Not tellin’.