Prelude to a Post: I love writing. I have more ideas for stories than I can get down on paper (as if we use paper anymore). Anyway, having said that. I am not the best blogger. Sure it’s writing, but I live in a world of fiction where I create the characters, the setting and the details that bring the story to life. Blogging is talking about something real, whether it is about me or a book, or something else. But I wanted to try to kickstart my blog again. And the idea I came up with was to write a conversational introduction to my books. So, here is the first one. I hope you enjoy.
My debut novel was The Widow’s Husband (TWH) but it was not the first book I wrote. There were three predecessors.
Now the first was something I wrote when I was rather young and at the time I was proud of my achievement. Of course, as is the case with first achievements, when I reread the manuscript a few years later I realized just how bad it was. Therefore, it sits in a dark box in the recesses of my storage for abandoned ideas.
The second, Payback, I will get into in another post, as it is the second book I published. Moving on to the third was titled Hall of Druids and, as the title suggests, was a fantasy novel. I look it over from time to time, however, unless the ideas for my mystery novels stop, I doubt I will go back to it.
TWH was a unique experience for me. It was a story that crawled into my mind one morning while I was getting ready to start my day. Out of no where I had the what-if thought “What if you were accused of murder, but due to mistaken identity, you were also the victim?” Okay, I admit I am strange. I get unusual thoughts and ideas all the time. But this one really intrigued me.
Soon after that, I was on a road trip with my wife and I mentioned the idea and some of the details that I had come up with since that initial thought. It piqued her interest as well. We started bouncing ideas off of one another as we drove, which really helped pass the time. It also created a mental outline of what would eventually become THW.
Originally I had titled it, The Man No One Knew. It was after all a story of a man who needed someone to back his story, but the only person who really knew him, for reasons of her own, lied. I changed the title before publishing because I thought The Widow’s Husband told you exactly who the players are. The woman who, by lying, became the widow in the story, and of course her husband.
TWH is not a mystery, as most of my writings are. It is more an entertaining (at least that is what was intended) story of the growth of the people involved and the mishaps that occur along the way. And although the two main characters are the focus of the novel, a lot of their story is based on their interactions with the many supporting characters.
TWH is the longest book I have written to date. However, it was also the fastest I have ever managed to complete. It was fun to write. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing every time I sit at my computer. But TWH was fun. The ideas just kept coming to me and I couldn’t wait to come up with the next detail.
All of this being said. TWH is also interesting to me because my readers have mixed emotions. This is due mostly because of the ending. It has been said, in my more negative reviews, that the ending was rushed, or that I just ended it because I couldn’t think of how to end it. I find these comments interesting because I worked tirelessly on the ending. Rewrite after rewrite after rewrite. I came up with what I thought was an appropriate ending. Some people love it, others do not. Even my wife is not the biggest fan of the ending.
But the story itself is just fun. I hope you will give it a try. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. And, of course, I hope you are one of those who enjoys the ending as well.
Get more information here: https://williamcoleman.net/books/thewidowshusband/
Or look for your favorite format here: https://books2read.com/widowshusband
Thank you,
William Coleman
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