I finished one pass of polishing The Empty House a short while ago. When I edit by reading silently, I see only what I think is there, not what is really there. Polishing means reading aloud slowly and carefully, word by word, which lets me see small things that needs fixing. If my voice rises in pitch, I know I have to slow down. 

I had thought that I would have to make four or five polishing passes, each one with a different, specific objective. I won’t have to do that many, because this time I was able to read not only for text, but also for my style, which has changed over the years; for punctuation, which is to indicate how to read aloud, not necessarily according to the rules of grammar and punctuation; and for clarity, that is, would a reader actually understand what I wrote. There were places which I didn’t understand what I wrote, and those places took a lot longer to fix. I was very pleased with the results when I finished. 

But as I neared the end, I realized that there were other objectives that needed their own attention, such as the mood of the story; the narrator’s voice; a character’s thoughts without using ‘he thought;’ making sure that I and the reader could visualize what was there and what was happening (a special form of clarity) since sometimes even I couldn’t visualize it; and sometimes, if necessary, a kind of stage direction instead of a full description of certain actions, a kind of tightening.

And now I need to take another long break, to distance myself, so that I can read with fresh eyes. During this break I will be rereading an old novel of mine (working title The City Will Get You) which I finished for submission in 2008. I got some good rejections back then, which helped me to understand what could be improved. 

I had put it aside, intending to get to it later, and lost track of it while working on other projects. Darcy thinks that now would be a good time for me to pick it up again, and so far (only the first forth pages), it looks like it will be worth the effort, even though it will take more work than I had hoped, and is rather more dark and grim than other things I have written. I don’t have to finish it, but even just a reading will take a while before I get back to The Empty House.

My earliest documented date for The Empty House is November 3, 2014. That is the date of the computer file, which at that time I considered to be a final draft, as I had been working on The Empty House for a long time before that, mostly on paper, all of which is lost. 

I can remember first thinking about a Lovecraftian story as told by Shirley Jackson while I was on a train, on a business trip with Diane, in about 2004. Darcy was in college at the time. I had a notebook and wrote down a lot of story/chapter ideas, producing a good sort of outline/sketch. 

But I had no real characters, just stand-ins as it were. I worked on the story off and on for a long time, mostly on paper the way I used to do it, using just temporary character names. Then I got a new edition of the Call of Cthulhu table-top game, decided that I would tell my story as if my characters were playing the game, occasionally interrupting their developing story with player comments, and I created my characters with that in mind. And then I realized that these characters would not be playing a game, they would be the major characters in the story itself. And that’s when I created the file on the computer, dated November 3, 2014. 

I finally got back to it on May 21, 2023. Some if the 67 chapters were only notes, others were clean second drafts. And now, after more than a year, including breaks, of bringing the whole thing up to being ready to be polished, I need another break to refresh myself, as I have done before. 

Many of the chapters now give me chills, or thrills, and I want the whole book to do that. Not just for the chills, when it is properly scary, but also for the thrills, when my characters come alive as real people, and their relationships with each other evolve.

I said some time ago that I hoped that I would finish by Christmas. Christmas came and went, and I began to say that I hoped that this time I really would finish by Christmas. But now I don’t know. It will be done when it is done.

 I will never write the second and third volumes of what I imagined would be a trilogy. I will, instead, work on The Reluctant Baron (working title) and The City Will Get You (maybe Into the Weird) and other unfinished stories which I have discovered in my archives. And on any new ideas that may come along. And I do get new ideas, even now.