El Dorado is finished (the final word)

The Amazon Kindle version is live and the paperback version should follow in a day or two.

You can ORDER it here.

This project was not a long time coming.

Unlike the Arthur books, which had existed in some form or another in my head for almost a decade before being written, or the Zombie trilogy I just completed, which I developed and worked on over the course of half a year, this book was an idea that hit me so strongly and so suddenly I had to finish it as soon as possible.

I get ideas all the time. Right now I have about fifty that have yet to be written. They are arranged, not by when I conceived them, but according to how much of an idea I already have in mind. With some, I have little more than a title and a basic plot (mostly the inciting incident of act one). With others I have a rough idea of where the story will go from beginning to ending. Others are more detailed, with outlines of chapters, notes featuring key dialogue moments or scenes to feature. These ideas come to me at random times and I’m always careful to write them down and add them to the pile lest I forget.

When you have fifty (and counting) ideas, the fact is some of them aren’t going to be touched for years. Just yesterday I had a great idea to add to a story that I currently don’t have scheduled to write until 2022! Lord willing, I know exactly what I’m writing in 2020. I have three books in mind, a huge sci-fi story, a light-hearted western, and a middle school-level children’s book. Those three are up next because I have the most-amount of preliminary work done for them. They’re ready to write, right now.

El Dorado was not on my list until it came to me one sunny June day. The idea hit me like a bolt of lightning and quickly I started writing what I was thinking; the entire four-act structure came to me right then and there and within five minutes of writing, I had 80% of the story mapped out. It was so clear in my head that I knew I could not put it aside; I had to write it immediately lest the inspiration leave me.

I was just finishing up Geriatric Zombie Apocalypse and was already doing prelim work on the follow-up, Titanic Panic, so there was no way to set that aside. Instead I doubled-up, writing both the last two zombie books and El Dorado over the summer and early fall. I finished the last book in the zombie trilogy at the beginning of October, and finished El Dorado this week, barely four months after conceiving the idea.

The book is inspired by the Count of Monte Cristo, though the similarities are really only found in the first and fourth acts of the book. The middle of the story is all me. That being said, the connections to Dumas’ tremendous novel are only in the superficial details; El Dorado is markedly different in tone, in plot, and especially in theme.

Act One is a social parable on race and racist presumption in Southern America during the Civil War. Act Two is a pirate-themed adventure story. Act Three is a commentary on how wealth and power do not corrupt but rather reveal whatever corruption was already present in a man. Act Four is a cold reminder that the people who cast themselves as heroes in their own minds might actually be villains in someone else’s.

At a little over 100k words, it’s the largest novel I’ve written thus far, (though the sci-fi story I’m preparing for 2020 promises to be even bigger), and overall I think I am very satisfied with how it turned out.

Not counting my commentary on Matthew-Luke, I have one more book to write in 2019, Lord willing. It’s smaller, lighter, and more playful than this, but I’m very excited about it. More details on that very soon!