I don’t know that the title came to me right away. I began to work on the novel in October 2000. I think. Could have been September or November, but I think it was October.

Understand that I knew nothing at all about writing a novel. My favorite novelist at that time were Herman Wouk and James Michener. Still are. They wrote family sagas, intergenerational tomes of considerable length. That’s what I started to write. I figured write the kind of novel I like, and surely there were millions of other book readers out there who liked the same thing.

So, knowing nothing about novels, not understanding such fundamentals as active vs. passive voice, show vs. tell, the utter idiocy of adjectives and adverbs, and commercial length, I began. I also knew nothing about how someone went about publishing a novel, or what kind of novels publishers were looking from by a debut novelist, but I didn’t need to know that for a few years. I just began writing.

By the end of December 2000 I had about 15,000 words. I think that was through what is now about chapter 4. At that point I laid it aside. I was building committee chairman for our church, and we were in the midst of a $2.8 million expansion. It would open in May 2001. Also in that month our son graduated from college, our daughter was married, our son moved to Boston for grad school. I was tired, and I think I kind of vegetated through the next few months. In August 2001 I had a heart attack scare, which slowed me, but during that time I started writing serious poetry. All of which took me away from the novel.

I believe it was December 2001 that I remembered I had started a novel some time before. I found it on our computer, re-read it and probably made some edits, and plunged back into it. All the while I was writing poetry, working on the harmony, doing my day job, and winding down from the church building project follow-up. Then in February 2002 we moved from our house of ten years to another house thirteen miles away.

The work associated with the move caused me to suspend work on the novel, but surprisingly I increased work on the harmony. I was able to do that in bits and snatches, a verse at a time in the evening. The novel, I found at that time, required a couple of dedicated hours or else I didn’t want to work on it.

A month or two after the move I got back on it, and made good progress. About that time my wife decided we should become foster parents. In our early 50s. I agreed, and from April to Sept 2002 we took the classes needed for being foster parents. Our house was licensed a foster home in September 2002, and the next day we were assigned brothers age 9 and 5. A month later we were assigned sisters age 4 and 5 months. So our empty nest suddenly became filled with children 9, 5, 4, and 5 months.

All of which has nothing to do with the novel. But it sort of does. I had written enough of it that I really wanted to finish it. I think when we got the foster children I was somewhere around 60,000 words. I didn’t know how long it was going to be, but I knew the material I wanted to cover. So I decided I was going to write at least 500 words a day. Most of these were in the evening, after the kids went to bed, when I was physically exhausted from dealing with them but with my mind still active.

At 500 words a day during the week and more on the weekend, I slowly completed the book. I think it was the first Sunday in January 2003 that I wrote three thousand words, two of which were “The End.” The first draft of Doctor Luke’s Assistant was finished.

And so is this post. In the next couple of posts I’ll talk about the research, aims I had in writing the novel, and then some of the early steps toward seeking publication.

See here for the first post in this story.

Go here for the next post in this story.

When does a book begin? I thought I had written on the pages of this blog something about how I came to write Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I said so publicly the last couple of days. But earlier today I checked my posts, and discovered I didn’t. With this post now I begin the story.

I do this because I just finished a five-day free promotion of DLA, and on the day after the promotion it has been selling. After 5,039 free downloads, today (as of 9:30 p.m. Central Time) I sold 31 copies and had one borrowed. That’s a good number for one day, especially after selling a grand total of 1 copy in the 2 1/2 months previous. It’s not “quit yer day job” money, but I’m excited. Based on today’s sales it stands at #33 and #45 on its two genre Amazon bestseller lists.

But I prate. On with the story.

It must have been around 1998. I was engaged in some personal Bible study, reading through the gospels one after the other. I read Matthew and Mark and moved on to Luke. At some point I realized that Luke described something differently than M&M did. I think it was the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. So I turned back to the other two gospels and did a close reading and comparison. Then I checked the gospel of John, which had yet some different information.

This was about the time in my life that I had become interested in creative writing. In my career as a civil engineer I had done a lot of writing: construction specifications, business letters, technical reports, construction site reports, marketing materials. All of it dry and monotonous. Well, maybe with the marketing stuff I had to get a little creative, but still on dry subject matters.

But I started writing some humorous work-place pieces, spoofing our company. I posted a couple of them anonymously on company bulletin boards, but I was exposed within a couple of days. Having the creative writing bug, I joined a writers critique group in the next town over, and began sharing pieces. But maybe I’m prating again.

Back to the gospels. Somewhere in mid-1998 I decided to write a harmony of the gospels. Not a parallel column type, but an integrated text type, where the information in all the gospels is woven into one seamless narrative. I’m not sure exactly when I started this because I didn’t date the papers, but the first sheet is my handwriting on the back of some scrap paper from my office, which has a date 6/28/98. That’s pretty close to when I started.

As you can imagine, that’s pretty big project. By the middle of 2000 I was well along. I’d filled a steno book with my handwritten text of notes and harmonies, sometimes working verse by verse with the four gospels side by side, all the time thinking about how these gospel writers wrote their books. Matthew and John were eyewitnesses, so I didn’t worry too much about them. Mark is thought to have recorded the teachings of Peter, who was an eyewitness. Assuming that was true and that Mark was a faithful witness of what Peter wrote, I figured Mark’s gospel was fairly close to an eyewitness account.

But Luke! He wasn’t an eyewitness. I began to wonder how he learned some of the stuff he learned. He must have found and interviewed people, I figured. During the second half of 2000 I thought about this more and more. When I encountered some piece of information in Luke’s gospel that wasn’t in Matthew, Mark, or John, I began to work scenes in my mind. I imagined Luke finding a witness, interviewing him, then going off to some lodging somewhere to write a fraction of the gospel, but having Mark’s and Matthew’s gospels as reference documents.

All this time my interest in creative writing was increasing. The workplace humor became a series called “The Gutter Chronicles: The Continuing Saga of Norman D. Gutter, E.I.T” (Engineer in Training, now changed to Engineer Intern). That’s a long story I won’t get into now, and I only mention it to demonstrate how my creative writing interest and, hopefully, skills were being honed.

Finally, somewhere around October 2000, I kept thinking over scenes, and it suddenly occurred to me: Why not write a novel about how Luke wrote his gospel? About the same time it occurred to me that Luke, being a Gentile, would have been severely hampered if he went to Israel in the First Century and tried to talk with Jews, let alone enter the temple. AGH—ain’t gonna happen. So I knew he would need a Jewish man to help him in the work. The general outline of the novel came together quickly.

I see, however, that this post is already long. I will end there, and continue in the next post. While I was writing this I had one more sale of DLA, and it went to #31 and #42 on its genre bestseller lists, and is now at #4787 on the overall Amazon paid Kindle store.

Perhaps the ultimate compliment a writer can have is when someone calls their book a page turner. “I stayed up all night reading that book, it was so interesting!”

I would not call Doctor Luke’s Assistant a page turner. At times I struggled to put a little action in it. After two or three chapters of Luke and Augustus interviewing people, I knew I had to mix things up or the book would get boring real fast. But having done that, I wouldn’t call it a page turner.

As part of the five-day free promotion at the Kindle Store, I posted notices about the promo to all the Facebook pages I’m a member of. One of those is for former and present Suite101.com writers. One woman in that group, a woman I’ve interacted with some, had downloaded the book. Today she posted this about it. 

I cannot put this book down. How you have managed to turn what is basically a fictionalized account of historiography into something that is keeping me up so late, I do not know, but I think you should put up the first few chapters (not the… whole book) on Kindle free — I’ll bet your conversion to sales rate would be HUGE. I am going to pass this book on to my former spouse, who is a historian who teaches historiography, because I think it really captures the nature of research and reportage so well in so many different subtle ways. And also to my best friend, who is an Episcopal priest. I’m sure a prime market for this is religious folks — so you might find it interesting that I’m not especially religious. I just think this is really well done — and fascinating. I can’t believe you’ve taken a plot that is basically “first we interviewed this guy, and here’s what he said, and then we wrote up a list of other people to ask, and no one knew anything, and then we ran into a dead end, and then we sat around talking about how to proceed” and turned it into something that is a real page turner.Bravo!

That’s the highest praise a novelist can receive. Hopefully she’s correct that sales will follow this promotional period.

When I first published Doctor Luke’s Assistant at Amazon Kindle, I enrolled it in the Kindle Select program. This means it is available electronically only at Kindle for a 90 day period. Kindle premium members can have it for free. And, for 5 days each month I can offer it for free to everyone, not just Kindle premium member.

So far I haven’t taken advantage of the free give away, and my 90 days are running out. So, beginning today, June 13, running through Sunday June 17 (father’s day), Doctor Luke’s Assistant is available as a free download to your Kindle, or to any device to which you can also download the Kindle app.

Maybe this will jump-start sales, or even spur sales of my other items.