I am working on a sequel for the novel The Ruin. The Ruin: Subtitled A boy's quest to rebuild his self-worth by seeking refuge in the wilderness, was launched by Arborwood Press in February of last year. My main character Cliff emerged from his self imposed exile stronger and more self assured than he had been at any time since he was 4 years old. Because the book is presented in semi-flashback we can assume that he remained that way. But as one reviewer commented there were a number of questions left hanging. What of the immediate future for him. How did he cope immediately with the "real" world? There were still "demons" out there he was no longer in an environment where he could hide. So since February it has been perking in the subconscious. My wife was putting together a couple of "one a day Christmas bags" for our daughter and daughter-in-law. Those are bags with an undetermined number of wrapped gifts of feel good items that are to be opened, one a day in the days following Christmas until the bag is empty. She didn't count them but thought each bag had around 25. Things like note pads, lent removers rollers and refills, chap-stick... you get the picture. It is unwrapping he gift that counts. One of the gifts was a steno pad wire bound down the side instead of across the top. When my wife does this shopping she does much of i at the Dollar store and she buys them in sets of two so that neither girl is slighted. When she saw the notebooks, she bought several.
She gave one to me. I love those. It went by my chair and in it went the first paragraphs of the as yet un titled sequel to The Ruin. Actually that is the working title: Sequel to The Ruin. Somewhere a phrase will jump out and it will shout USE ME FOR THE TITLE.
When I read books by my favorite authors I look for those passages that jumped out at their creators and shouted out at them. I love sharing those moments with the author. I can picture the author stopping, laying down pen, taking a sip of coffee, considering it and underlining it, maybe writing it on a post-it and pressing it against the outside of their pad, or if they are working at their computer, putting it on the bottom of their monitor so they can study it as they work.
Then maybe they have that all figured out and write their story around the title. I had several titles for my novel before I settled on the simple core feature The Ruin.
When I wrote The Ruin, I wanted it to be, although fiction, to be realistic. I did not want it to be fantasy. It dealt with real themes. I tested everything that my 14 turning 15 year old main character did against whether he could realistically do that. I used as the measure boys of the same age that I knew during the time period in which it was placed, doing the kinds of work that I had him doing.
I work with an author Jim Henson who is a retired mental health professional who in his practice specialized in dream therapy. Dreams were a component of my novel and through the development of that part of the book I consulted with Jim to see if this was plausible.
He and I were discussing the difference in writing this kind of fiction yesterday and the kind of fiction that both of us are use to reading. The book that I had just finished was exciting and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but I knew as I went along that it was more fantasy than reality. The author could suspend reality and create situations and men and women who had traits that wouldn't meet the test. Nor did they really need to to tell an exciting story, a "page turner" if you will.
The sequel to The Ruin will meet the same requirements as did The Ruin. It will meet the test. It takes a little longer to do it this way as I have to really weigh the ramification of each action because some actions truly take a suspension of reality to get him out of it, thus thinking through an alternate course of action which in the long run usually makes a better story. Sometimes I have to let it lie move to another section and let the subconscious figure it out... I don't know why but that solution seems to usually happen sometime in the middle of the night.
I'll let you know from time to time how the sequel is progressing.
Respectfully submitted,
Kenneth Fenter
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