Tim Green Will Return

Well, we made it: welcome to 2013. New Year’s Day is the perfect time to talk about the future with one eye on the past, and that’s definitely the agenda for today.

First up is a minor housekeeping item. Every post I’ve made on this blog from the very beginning has featured as its title a song title or lyric fragment. This has been a fun game to play, but as the post count has risen, it’s come to feel somewhat limiting. So, it’s time to move on and let the post titles say what they need to say, whether or not a songwriter ever said it before. (Of course, as you’ll see below, that’s not going to stop me from throwing in an appropriate video at the end of a post as the mood strikes…)

Next up is a quick update on the book. I’m pleased to say sales continue to perk along, with the promise of a review or two on the horizon and presence on the shelves at a couple of local bookstores in the Monterey Bay area. Also, two reminders. One, Believe in Me is available not just as a paperback through Amazon, but in electronic format for the iPad, Kindle, Nook and Sony Reader. Two, you have the opportunity to play reviewer yourself if you’d care to leave a few words behind on the book’s Amazon page.

And finally, as promised previously over on our BIM Facebook page, a few words about what’s next—once again, looking forward, but with an eye on the past.

Believe in Me is the story of an unexpected friendship between two damaged men, both in search of redemption. It is, and was always intended to be, a standalone novel, complete and self-contained. But as any writer will tell you, no matter how much of the story you already have formulated in your head when you begin to write it down, unexpected things happen in the telling.

The narrator of Believe in Me, Tim Green, is mourning the death of the only parent he has ever known, his father, a music writer for a rather Rolling Stone-ish publication called Noise. That background sketch is essential to the experiences and emotional arc of Tim’s character in the story, and is filled in to a large degree via a series of flashbacks. When I finished the book, I knew I had told the story I came to tell, and more.

But what I realized after I was done is that one element of Tim’s life that I had very purposely shoved off to one side in the process of crafting the above backstory was not going to go quietly. While I don’t think the absence of a definitive resolution to the dangling thread I left behind undercuts the impact of Believe in Me, it nagged at me—in part because it was so fraught, and therefore rich with storytelling potential.

Somewhere around the time I was beginning to cast about for my next writing project, playing around with a couple of story ideas I had jotted notes on over the years, I recognized that one of them could be cross-fertilized with the element of Tim’s story in Believe in Me that still called out to me for exploration, and that going down this road would propel Tim into a whole new environment with an almost entirely new cast of characters, all leading up to an absolutely huge moment that will change him forever.

So, yes, I can’t say exactly when, but I am far enough into the story now that I can tell you with complete confidence: Tim Green will return. And he’s bringing some very interesting new friends with him…