Straight Arrow Heart: A Reflection of My First Book

This is a blog post I wrote up on Goodreads on the one year anniversary of my first novel, 'Straight Arrow Heart'. In it, I went through some of the story choices I made and why I made, and what influenced the overall tone of the story. As previously stated, this post is on Goodreads, and has been for a few months. So... enjoy!

It's hard to imagine that a year ago I was gearing up to publish my first novel. However, that's precisely what I was doing, and on July 3rd Straight Arrow Heart hit the digital shelves of Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Boooks-A-Million, along with others in paper-back and Kindle formats.

Writing that book was one of the hardest things I'd done, and the funny thing is, I never meant for it to be published. Hell, I didn't even mean for it to be a novel. It was a short story I was going to work on until I figured out what I was going to write for my first novel. I'd made several failed starts before (one of which involves a TERRIBLE version of John Becmane), but I couldn't get anything going. At the time, I was watching a man on YouTube named 'The Phantom Reviewer' who reviewed the various film, stage and novel adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera. Finding comedy in just how far away almost every adaptation strayed (save for the Lon Chaney silent film and an episode of the PBS show Wishbone), I thought it'd be fun to write my own version of Leroux's classic tale.

I intended it to be a short story, written and forgotten about, but wanted to take it as seriously as possible. If I was going to write something, I was going to put all my effort into it, and every decision about the book was over-analyzed before being written in, and, funnily enough, most of the story was plotted out in my head before I even finished the prologue; before I even started writing Sebastian Leroux's history.

Modern-day setting? Typical choice, but seldom done. A dinner theater instead of an Opera house? Now we're getting clever. The main entryway of the dinner theater I had loosely based on the lobby of the Fabulous Fox Theater in St. Louis, MO; the theater I first saw Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical at. Everything else about the dinner theater, I drew inspiration from a dinner-theater my JROTC corps visited the summer between Freshman and Sophomore year in Dayton, Ohio, at which I saw 'West Side Story' for the first time.

Gender-swapping the roles of 'Christine' and 'the Phantom' seemed like a good way to do a take on the story that no one else had tried yet. But, why not push it further? Why not have it be a triangle between a boy, his adopted mother, and a spectress who believes herself to be the boy's biological mother?

No one had done that before.

I wanted my 'Phantom' to possess some sort of paranormal powers, and not be confined to the dinner theater - an idea which had spawned out of the Robert Englund film.

At one point, I had thought of having Ramona reveal to the narrator at their first date together that she didn't know who Erik's father was because he was the result of a rap. The narrator would ask why she hadn't aborted the pregnancy, which would have resulted in a monologue from Ramona about life. There were two reasons why this was cut: 1, I didn't want to get political. and 2, there had to be the possibility that the Phantom WAS his actual mother. If Ramona had carried Erik through a pregnancy, there was no way Christine could really have been his mother.

Probably one of the things that drove me craziest was trying to title the damn thing. The line in the beginning of the book about the staff being, 'ready to tell the tale of 'Straight Arrow Heart' was something I wrote as a placeholder name. I never intended to use that name, but... I could never think of anything I didn't think was terribly corny. And then I found a way to make 'Straight Arrow Heart' be something that played a part in the story; not only the play Christine writes, but a description Clarissa Rader uses to describe Christine's character. Was it the best way to use a title I otherwise intended to change? No. But it worked.

A few things from other stories I had written or wanted to write made their way into this book. The idea of spirits moving through the 4th dimension came from a story I tried writing once about a group of paranormal investigators encountering their own ghosts in a house. By the end of the story, they were all going to die, becoming the ghosts they were experiencing.

The narrator was a character I was going to write alongside John Becmane. He was going to be a demonologist and a member of an ancient, Biblical group who fought to protect the world and carry out God's will. There was a reference he made to a piece of advice he gave a kid a when he first landed in the states that he regrets; that was going to be a reference to another novel I thought I was going to write.

Organizing all of those things, and getting them onto paper, then onto computer, and then into print... It was a daunting task. I had actually finished the last draft of it about a year before I published the book, but I wanted to have a lead on another novel before THAT one came out. Am I proud of Straight Arrow Heart? Not entirely. Am I glad I published it? Oh yes.

Straight Arrow Heart changed my life in a good way. I had confidence in my writing, and got the ball rolling on the book that eventually became known as 'End Turn'. It's still weird to have a book with my name and picture on it; words I wrote, weaving them together into a tale of my own... But that's the writer's life. My question for anyone out there reading this is; do you have a story you're wanting to tell? You don't have to have something to say; just something you want to share.