To Slay a Dragon

I like to joke how this is sort of two novels which kinda got merged. This occurred whenever inflicted with burn out during those heavy days I pounded on the computer keyboard writing Three Cheers for Father Donovan. For anyone who's never done it let me attest as to how the necessary research and the required language translations extract a costly toll. {Latin is the official language of the Holy See. Yes some Vatican documents are translated into English but many are not.} Thus it is agony to enjoy the ecstasy for me to say J.D. you did good job. And it happens only when it's over... It never fails. I always embark on writing one of these grandiose epic historical novels completely cognizant of the scope but utterly ignorant of the scale. Such was the case writing The Bolsheviks...Three Cheers for Father Donovan...The Black Madonna to some degree. It is a one to four year odyssey in which I will ask myself many times J.D. is this really worth it? It must be. I always persevere until completion. However in search of a diversion I would-from time to time-seek escape by prattling about the exploits of the Rearchek Langer Machado and Benelli families. Nothing much. Twenty pages here. Thirty pages there. In the end I found myself with a lore of exactly two hundred pages when it came time to submit my manuscript Three Cheers for Father Donovan to the publisher. Then came The Pontchartrain Connection. I never experience a need for any down time when I wrote that novel. For some reason with that novel I was in a state of perpetual writer's groove from start to finish. {Writer's groove is what I call that weird clarity of knowing full well beforehand as to where this is all going and how my characters will get there.} Once again after handing my publisher the manuscript for The Pontchartrain Connection I did find myself examining those two hundred pages and saying J.D. let's finish it. So I did. Hence everything from the point when Sherrie and Sheba fall in love onward constitutes the new novel. Everything prior to that is the old. As my copy-editor Mandy told me after a review of my old script Gee J.D. why all the sex? Answer: I was toying around when I wrote it. So why in the hell am I boring my readers to death with this whining confession as to why I wrote what amounts to a trashy potboiler? Well folks the answer to that is two-fold: One it makes for a fun read. Two another epic is in the works. Yes it's about to happen all over again. I am now toiling with my attempt to mate Mary Shelly's novel Frankenstein with Dale Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. The outcome will be something I call The Maltese Messiah. Now there is some good news: I have in the works not one but two novels to fall back on should I need a break...The sequel to this novel The Unholy Family and the follow-on novel The Run for the Roses... May the God of Our Fathers be with me!