Angela's Arm

From the back cover:

"A prophecy of doom. An apocalypitc vision. A cult born in blood and bound by an unearthly secret.
Reverend Nathan Purdy knew his world had changed the moment he laid eyes on his daughter. Born with one arm with a mind of its own, Angela has no idea that she's being led deeper into her father's vision of a cataclysmic future. When she glimpses the direction he plans for her and the price she may be forced to pay, she decides to forge her own path. Will she be set free, or will she only succeed in pushing the engine of doom into overdrive?
Blending elements of horror and science fiction, Angela's Arm is a unique and thrilling departure into the surreal, brought to life with vivid characterization. Saddle up, ride out, and prepare for the unknown!"

Angela's Arm is my seventh published title, and my second full length novel. As the back cover blurb suggests, the story follows Angela and her miraculous arm as she tries to navigate a path under her father's tyrannical rule. The story is hard to box into a particular genre as it incorporates elements of horror with some science fiction and a dab of the supernatural. At its core, though, the story is about the conflict between a father and daughter.

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Background: Summoning Angela's Arm

Where to begin with Angela's Arm? That's not an easy question for a book that doesn't quite fit neatly into any one category. Even so, and as with all things creative, there was an initial spark of inspiration. For this book, it came to me as a single image without an accompanying story, characters, or setting. Yes, the barest of elements, but sufficient to get the creative ball rolling.

And what was that singular image? Appropriately, the scene from the opening pages of the book. A stern if not tyrannical looking father, a mother in a sorry state, and a baby born with one arm, but no ordinary arm - an arm with an eye, its own intelligence, and the ability to separate from its host.

Yes indeed, it might have come to me as a simple image but it was loaded with possibilities. Confident that I had something that could build comfortably at least to novella length, I wrote a sample treatment for what would become the book's first chapter. With that in place I now had something more conrete with which to work without fear of the initial inspirational idea evaporating among the day to day routine of life.

If you've read through these pages you'll know this a process I've employed on quite a few of my narratives. Every author will come to find a creative launching point that works, whether it be jotting down a rough outline, fleshing out a sample scene or two, or perhaps even making some sketches to storyboard an idea much the way directors often sketch out a movie. Regardless, it's important to acknowledge what works for you as an individual. It's hard enough to guide an idea from concept to a mature form without having to worry about losing its spark through endless mental contemplations. In short, as a bit of one author's advice, if you get a good idea - an idea that seems to have legs - write it down, even if it's just in bare note form rather than any degree of prose. A good rule of thumb is that after the initial recording of the idea if it continues to grow in your imagination then you have something to follow. If it goes no further that's not necessarily a sign to scrap the idea, but more so an indication that it might not be ready for prime time. There's no problem with that. You can always go back later and, if it still falls flat, time to move on to something else. Don't take that as a sign of defeat; not all ideas are sufficient to carry a whole story. Some ideas are in fact scenes that you can hold in storage for the time when they fit well in a story.

Okay, getting back on topic. When I had the opening of Angela's Arm jotted down the next thing was to formulate some characters and names. As usual I was fortunate to experience an exponential process on this step. Obviously the protagonist would be Angela. From there the next character to gain definition would be her father, her foil within the construct of the narrative. Additional characters grew from there along with their interconnections within the overall guise of a plot. In my typical way I had only a general idea where the story would go; how I got there would be just as much a surprise for me as it will be for the reader.

That is, and as I believe I've said elsewhere, my writing process is more organic, free from the rigid structure of a formalized outline. I prefer to let my characters guide the narrative as they grow within its structure. I find this lends depth to my characters, as nothing can happen in the plot without involvement from at least one of the characters. This by default invests the characters in the plot and, with characters invested in the plot, the plot becomes salient to the characters and thereby to the reader.

Let's talk about setting...

While all books are rooted in their environment, the degree of this attachment can vary substantially. For some books setting is almost arbitrary, perhaps by design. For other books setting is intrinsic to the story - the story simply couldn't happen anywhere else.

Angela's Arm falls into this second category. From an author's standpoint I always held an interest to do a story set in the midwest, roughly circa 1870's, as this was a time and place with few equals in its time period and in following time periods. For Angela's story to work I needed a setting of vast empty space to provide the physical and ideological isolation her doomsday preaching father would seek for his small group of followers. Later, when things change and her father and his group take on their individual mutations, the setting reinforces his inclination to keep their secret safe from the outside world. Although perceptions of isolation have nothing to do with the actual physical presence of of other people it most certainly has an impact on the human psyche in terms of being held to account to outside standards.

Only in the context of physical isolation can the conflicts of Angela's story emerge, or perhaps find fertile ground for their fruition. Much of the story is based on the concept of perceiving and understanding an order to the world in which the characters live. When Angela is young she has no perception of the outside world, so what she sees of the bizarre things around her are not bizarre but simply normal. Perception, in this case, is purely relative and subjective in nature. Later, when she is older and meets some people from the outer world, she is forced to make a reckoning on her perceptions. What she sees of the world is no longer as simple as looking through one lens. Rather, she must now make the bridge between two rather different sets of morality.

Yes indeed, setting as a principal factor in a story.

And about the story itself...

In some ways Angela's Arm was a different type of story for me to tell. In comparison to my other full length novel published at this time, The Digital Now, Angela's story has little of the mental and philosophical gymnastics of the world Carly Westing inhabits. Which, if you enjoy that element of my writing, is not to say that Angela's story is simplistic, but more so that by nature of its time and setting it is perhaps more visceral in nature. For all the time I have to spend in front of a computer to pursue my interests as an author, if you have read some of my stories you'll know that technology is often something shunned by my characters. That's not a personal statement on technology (at least, not consciously) but more so that my characters tend to be somewhat fractured from the world. In respect to Angela's story that factor is built in by default because the temporal setting of the story predates modern technology.

More than anything else, though, what I sought to create with Angela's story was a more direct and fast-paced narrative. To that tend I'll sidetrack a moment to relate a little story. While sitting at a craft show with one of my author friends, Russ Moran (check out his website here), we drifted into a conversation regarding the length of chapters in a book. While that may seem to be a purely technical issue, Russ brought up a psychological point that shorter chapters make a book not only easier to digest but faster to read. Stubborn as I am I had to immediately mount my artistic high-horse and disagree that shorter chapters create choppy narratives and hinder the ability to develop more complex subtexts in plot, theme, and so on. At this point in time I had finished Angela's Arm and was well toward my final proofing before going on to publishing. After our conversation, however, it continued to hold my thoughts. Given that Angela's story was basically complete I decided to conduct a little experiment and re-visit the chapter breaks. I took a narrative that was all of nine chapters in its original form and reformatted to roughly twenty-five chapters.

With that done it was time for another re-read...and lo and behold, I was surprised how much a difference it made. That said, and my personal editor's opinion pounding on the door, I must point out that the pacing and overall narrative structure of Angela's story supported the shorter chapter lenghs. In comparison, or perhaps in contrast, The Digital Now would become incomprehensible if sectioned into shorter chapters, as it would fragment many of the shifting philosophical arcs into pieces to minute to hold together. Even though the shorter chapter model worked for Angela's story, I would be remiss if I left a suggestion to fellow authors that changing the chapter structure was as simple as splicing in page breaks at regular intervals. Although it was not a major restructuring of the book, it did take some work to once again smooth out the narrative and ensure that each chapter had a definitive start and stop with a corresponding hook or lead into the next chapter.

And there you have it...more or less. It's hard to talk about Angela's story without giving too much away, hence the unwitting trend on this page to drift more into technicalities of the book's narrative construction rather than the story itself. Angela's Arm came at a strange time for me, as I felt I was starting to build momentum in my local area between my own activities and the activities I planned and pursued with my authors group. Little did I know a few months later a serious medical situation would intervene in the calm life of my family, forcing me to set aside much of my author activities. No sooner did that thankfully meet a good resolution than I started to hear about this weird virus in China...and then came the long haul of the pandemic.

As the saying goes, Life is what happens after you make plans. Oh well.