The
History of Moore Hollow
Moore Hollow started out as a joke. It was a
pretty good one, if I say so myself. What would be the absurd, fantastical
extension of the murky history of dead people apparently voting in elections (I
explored some of that over at my blog)? Actually raising the dead to do
the dirty work. It's one thing to manipulate paper, it's a whole different
thing to create a cadre of zombies to actually cast ballots on your behalf.
But a
good joke does not a story, much less a novel, make (although many great jokes
are, in and of themselves, great stories). So I had the idea, the question was,
what to do with it?
Moore Hollow
was initially going to a be a short story focusing on King Tommy, the corrupt
politician at the heart of things. It would be about his bold plan to raise the
dead and how it backfired in the most interesting of ways (no spoilers, such as
they are). But that straight forward approach didn't really appeal to me. I
went in a different direction and decided to have another character, a modern
character, investigate the legends of zombie voters and see what he can find.
Thus,
was the protagonist, Benjamin Potter IV, born. I knew from the beginning I
wanted Ben to be British and a down on his luck journalist. Then a funny thing
happened as I started to play around with the short story - Ben became more
interesting than I thought he was. What was his background? Why would he cross
an ocean and come to West Virginia and poke around a small mountain town? The
more questions I asked, the more answers I got and the more obvious it was becoming
that I wasn't dealing with a short story, but something bigger.
So, naturally,
I stopped writing. I've always been someone who sits down to write a particular
thing and if that thing starts to change in front of me, I need to step back
and get some distance from it. I put the aborted short story version of Moore Hollow to one side and started
digging deeper into Ben's life. The more I filled in his back story, the more
the story started to shift. What had led to me getting this far, the initial
joke, settled further and further into the background.
I sat
back down to write Moore Hollow the
novel during National Novel Writing Month in 2012. What I thought was going to
be a funny little story about a scheming politician and zombies was now a tale
of a family feud that went back years, of a man whose life had hit the skids
and who was trying to make things right, and of a little town with a secret
that it might not want the rest of the world to learn about for its own
peculiar reasons.
I'm
not a huge fan of when writers anthropomorphize their work and talk about how
characters won't do what they tell them and whatnot. But I understand how one
of the great thrills of writing is heading off into country that isn't just
undiscovered, but wasn't even in the neighborhood when you started. Moore Hollow was like that, sprawling
from a quick bit with a few characters to a novel filled with people I didn't
know I needed to write about. Until I did.
What
happens once you solve a mystery? Sometimes that’s the hardest part. Find out
in Moore Hollow, available now at Amazon.
JD
Byrne
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/JDBAuthor
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