The Road Cain Walks, Take Two

I’ve written a book no one’s read.

No, I don’t mean The Road Cain Walks (almost no one has read that) but the book that came next. With the working title The Inseparable, it’s a sprawling epic fantasy that exploded into my head on a trip to India. I’d completed a full first draft and started on a rewrite when something happened that set the trajectory of my writing journey.

I had another idea.

A lot happened in the years between publishing The Road Cain Walks and getting The Inseparable on paper. I met a girl and fell in love. Went back to college and graduated summa cum laude. Got a job and got married. With an English degree, I aimed my career as near to writing as possible. My official Plan B was to become a copyeditor, but even now, after 13 years of making a living at it, the industry is hard to join. Plan C was working for the publisher of a medical research journal.

The journal managed their subscriber data with an iMac, the same type of computer I used to write the entirety of The Road Cain Walks. Mine died shortly after I published the book, leaving the only copy outside of the landfill a CD I’d been unable to access. On the day I noticed the computer, the gears started turning.

I was in the initial stages of The Inseparable’s rewrite, testing tweaks to major plot points to hone the project’s edge. “Making it weirder” is how I describe it. I haven’t read a word of the most recent draft in nearly 20 years, so I’m not sure the exact timing or reason, but dots emerged that connected the events of this new story with The Road Cain Walks.

I’ve always been a Stephen King fan, especially in the interconnected worlds of The Dark Tower series. As most avid fans of similar media (books, TV series, movie franchises), I had theories of where the story headed. Most, if not all, fell flat, leaving me kind of dissatisfied. Wouldn’t it have been so much better if he’d done exactly what I wanted? Within a few years, the TV show Lost left me with the same feeling. Clear narrative arcs I’d expected never materialized—so I decided to use them myself.

It would have been easier if I spent a couple months writing fan fiction for both series to get it out of my system. Instead, I chose a harder path I’ve never regretted. I decided to start my own book series.

I could have used The Inseparable as a starting point or brainstormed another idea to get the ball rolling, but those unconnected dots had other plans. It was clear The Road Cain Walks wasn’t going to take the world by storm from the website of a Canadian vanity press, but self-publishing meant I still owned the rights. I could do whatever I wanted with the story.

I’ll spend the next several posts getting into the weeds about what goes into my rewrite process, but the key point here is that I stumbled into it.

The montage version of the next 11 years involves stops and starts to get the story where I wanted. In that time, my medical publisher employer closed its local office, which allowed me to leapfrog into that original Plan B: becoming a copyeditor for another medical publisher. Bad finances took that one down and gave me the opportunity to do the same work on my own. Two mentors died: one who influenced who I am as a person and the other as a copyeditor. My wife and I had a daughter who changed everything about me for the better.

When I finished the new and improved The Road Cain Walks, it had tripled in length. At over a thousand pages, the story had grown richer all around. It had a full cast of unique characters, a tangible setting, and a plot that felt as big as the ambitious series it kicks off. The problem was I’d already published another version of the story.

I could have made tweaks to distance it from the original and slapped a new title on the manuscript, but that felt deceitful and false. The title had grown new meaning in the second iteration, the characters as connected to their names as I am to mine. So I did it my way.

I queried enough agents to realize the industry wasn’t interested in a new version of a failed self-published novel. It also wasn’t interested in one long enough to double as a doorstop. The idea that traditional publishing was no longer an option made me jump the gun again. I contacted a friend named Justin Doring, an amazing tattoo artist in Lebanon, TN, to design the cover and used my professional publishing experience to format the pages between.

Original ePub cover for The Road Cain Walks, 2nd edition

As stubborn and impatient as it was to republish the second draft as if it was the final version, I’m proud of how it turned out. The story is a leap of progress, its most glaring flaw that it’s overwritten. But connecting The Road Cain Walks and The Inseparable gave me the false impression this step was prescriptive instead of an integral part of my process. I needed more time to develop as both a writer and an editor.

I wouldn’t realize any of that for another eight years, after making the biggest mistake of my writing career.

Print cover for The Road Cain Walks, 2nd edition