Well...I hadn't finished it, but it's the time for it. My occasional seasonal story.
Sins of the Fathers. Biblical in a different way.
It was a hard one to write. Not for any emotional angst, so much as I don't KNOW those experiences.
I'll give the reader here, a peek at how the sausage is made: Most writers I know, write of their own experiences.
Take Stephen King, who when young, was an immensely-talented wordsmith. His subject matter, things that go thump in the night, is novel - the first time. It gets boring fast and towards his ignoble end, it got silly. The attraction to me, was his ability to paint pictures with words - often profane but usually hysterically funny. The scene in The Shining, where the black cook gets a telepathic message from the five-year-old son of the possessed caretaker, 2000 miles away...as he drives down the freeway, as experienced by a redneck following the cook's gaudy Cadillac. Read it. Every single racial slur and curse, articulated in the kind of language that King, a prep-school teacher at the time, would have used.
But every one of his early books - excluding Carrie, which was almost-certainly written by his wife, Tabitha (a writer herself at the time)...every other one involved someone EXACTLY like King.
Salem's Lot involved a late-twenties writer who freely drank. And who trifled with young women just a tad below acceptable age limits. Like King as he was getting started.
Then, The Shining. Again, a young writer - who now has gotten into trouble with his alcoholic behavior, again like King. With a young family, again like King. Whose wife was on the verge of leaving him - probably something King had experienced at that point.
Point is, every successful writer - from Mark Twain to Joseph Wambaugh - write of what they know. Twain wrote of life on the river and the communities, with the steamboats figuring in large. Natural material for a professional pilot who had lived near the river all his life. Wambaugh wrote about the life of a police officer - a life he lived. Sometimes he wrote humorously; sometimes he illustrated the pain. But always, what he had lived.
This took me afield. It's always a struggle when that happens - not JUST that you don't know of what you speak. You ask yourself, why am I writing this? And that leads to, who the F would want to read it?
Those are not idle questions. I had long ago decided, as the world went Woke, that if I did any productive writing, fiction or anything, it would be for ME. Running down a suicide's car at a crossing on Christmas Eve, is very close to what I'd lived. I only put it out there, and if anyone likes it, fine.
When I get far afield, it starts to feel phony.
Anyway...that's at least part of why this was so slow in coming.
