Here It Comes . . .

<--Mum and her tree.

In about five months, The Longevity Thesis will be printed, and long at last, that nagging question that has been bouncing around in my head ever since I seriously started writing the novel is about to be answered: What's my Mum going to say?

Mum has an aversion for fantasy novels, she has never seen the appeal of Star Trek, and she certainly would never have any use for anything of the horror genre. I don't think she has even picked up a Stephen King book, unless it was to move it aside to get to the Jean Plaidy novels. Hope flared briefly when she used to watch the X-Files, but after a few seasons, she just slept through it, while waiting for the news.

I've been reading over an editing copy of The Longevity Thesis, checking it for basic content and flow of story. I'm realizing, that when you just read it, not view it as a structured entity that must have precisely interwoven plot elements and character development sequences, it's kinda gross. During the developmental stages of the writing, one of the readers in my critiquing group sent me an irate email to tell me that she was so upset with how I had treated one of the characters that she threw the manuscript across the room and would not pick it up again. It's fair to say that the novel would fall under the category of "dark fantasy". It certainly isn't a fairy tale. Murder scenes, when you stop looking at them as "crucial to the plot" are still murder scenes, with all the blood and gore and . . . oh boy, here it comes.

Mum hasn't read it yet, and the reason for that is, I know she's going to start asking me things like, "Jey, aren't you happy? Is there something bothering you? Didn't you think you had a nice childhood?" My protests that the gory stuff is all just to make the story work will do absolutely nothing to alleviate her fears that I'm headed down a dark and horrifying path to pseudomacularschizophrenialdentulocariitis. Or something along those lines.

I didn't really worry about my Mum's opinion while I was writing, that all seemed in the distant future. Now that the publication date is looming, my subconsciousness is preparing itself for the inevitable barrage of maternal disappointment I know I'm going to have to face.

Hmm. My Dad likes Dean Koontz. "Hey, Dad! Why don't you read it first?"