“Dude, your book was great! I read it in a day. I started yesterday morning, and I didn’t go to bed until I was done last night.” A great compliment that drove a nail into my heart. It took me nine months to write that novel and you read it in one day? And really the story was twenty years in the making.
As I sat down to write this I realize that the story is much older than that. True I first penned the story of Arthur Creed and his descent into insanity twenty years ago. It was poorly written and unpublishable—partly because of timing and partly because as I found out later, it wasn’t finished. Suddenly in my home office one sultry morning Arthur Creed met Samuel Elijah Johnson and a novel was born. The story was finally complete.
Of course this is a simplified version of the events that took place for this work to come together. Arthur’s story is my reaction—my answer to my upbringing. I think I wrote it in a fit of rebellion originally—almost a “if you thought I was bad before check this out” story. I put it away after a couple of rejection slips and after letting only a few friends read it. They said it was good, but some looked sideways at me as if to say “that is totally screwed up.” It was the best compliment they could have paid. I knew I was screwed up so writing a screwed up story seemed a logical step in my journey.
Since then I have learned to reconcile my past with who I am as a person and as a writer. I was writing non-fiction making decent money and working part time at a museum when I decided I should embrace fiction—what I really wanted to write. So I compiled some short stories and put together Broken Bones, a collection I released last year. It met with great success and minor criticism. At the same time I was writing Redemption.
I learned and moved on. Redemption is a much more tightly written and edited story. Reading it you will discover what church and prison have in common. You will find that to find Redemption and make wrongs right again sometimes it takes more than you ever thought it would. Sometimes you have to go farther than you could have imagined.
I am now working on a sequel tentatively titled Confession. I hope you enjoy the journey of Redemption as much as I have. It has been a much longer one for me than it will be for you. Read it in a day? It is okay to tell me. After all I may have saved you a twenty year journey.
Troy’s work may be found at:
www dot troylambertwrites dot com
You may contact the author directly:
Author at troylambertwrites dot com.Look for Redemption on Amazon, Goodreads, and at your favorite local bookseller.
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