If you are a friend on Facebook, you know I’ve been focused on writing screenplays of late, but a series of events led me to dust off a novel I had worked on and had thought was finished, but I now realize I needed to rethink it.
Part of the rethinking was due to a decision to repackage the novel Thine Is the Kingdom as a TV series. So I wrote a pilot script (and renamed the series “Age of the Kingdom”), which has subsequently been well received by several film festivals.
Writing a script is a very different process than writing a novel, however, and the process of of writing a pilot for a TV series based on the same characters as the book, led me down some unexpected trails, so the stories changed quite a bit.
Therefore, when I decided to revisit the novel, I realized it would need to change quite a bit. I believe those changes make it much better, but it also changed the shape of the book series, which I’m now calling “Age of the Kingdom.” The “Thine Is the Kingdom” series was originally envisioned as three books, but I realized they would be too long, so my plan is now to write five, or maybe six novels. We’ll see…
The impetus for returning to the novel was being asked by the curator of a film festival to talk about my novels at an upcoming festival. Since I only have the two published (Backlash and Backlash 2: Justice Denied), I decided to repackage “Thine is the Kingdom” as Quest for a King.
Also coming soon…
In the process of researching the novels and the TV series, I’ve accumulated a lot of background information, which in the original “Thine Is the Kingdom” book, I included as a Preface, footnotes and two appendices, plus a bibliography. These are features that usually accompany non-fiction books, not novels, and I was advised against including them. However, it’s so much good information, I decided to write a series of posts about the research for anyone as nerdy as I.
So the posts that follow will be devoted to this research. It won’t be for everyone, but if you would like to get into the weeds about what we know about life in the Middle East 3,000 years ago, here’s your chance.
