And In The Darkness Bind Them

Early Sunday morning I finished writing a book. It is the eighth book I've finished. It's kind of a sad number, but I'm not going to dwell on that because I'm really happy with this book.

I don't put much in the concepts of destiny or fate, but something pointed out to me about today has me a little weirded out. Today is March 25th. So what, right? The 107th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Palm Sunday to us Catholics. It's also Tolkien Reading Day. I never knew why it was Tolkien Reading Day until I woke up this morning.

I'll confess my knowledge of the Tolkien Legendarium isn't as encyclopedic as some and I was informed that March 25th is the day that (SPOILER ALERT) Frodo completed his quest to destroy the One Ring. Well, he didn't really complete it did he? Gollum bit his finger off and in his ecstasy fell into the Crack of Doom, destroying not only the One Ring but ending Sauron.

LORD OF THE RINGS are a formative part of my life as a writer and person. Without the adventures of a couple of hobbits, I might have become a different writer, heck, a different person. And it shows up in the weirdest places.

When I started GIRL IN THE PICTURE in last May, it started as a creepyish procedural thriller like MYSTIC RIVER or the movie SEVEN. I decided to do some things differently and it did things I wasn't expecting. A manuscript is a living, breathing thing and it grew in ways I wasn't expecting. I also pantsed the book. For the uninitiated, pantsing is writing without a plan. Usually, I am an ardent outliner, but I decided to try something new. Writing a procedural without a plan proved to be difficult, as I discovered when I temporarily shelved the project in August. Things were happening in the story that I didn't expect and it ground me to a halt. Normally this doesn't happen. I expect to deviate from an outline, but it wasn't working for me. It required a plan as the story went from a procedural to a monster story.

I cleverly called it the make out monster because it only showed up when my main character was kissing a girl and it is described as looking both like Sauron's red eye and the Balrog. THE LORD OF THE RINGS allusions then just began to flow (along with Harry Potter, Scooby Doo and Indiana Jones references). The characters even noticed, chiding me for the references as they work their way through the double mystery of the identity of the girl in the picture and how to stop the monster. I won't spoil my own movie, just in case I clean it up enough for you to read it someday, but this brings me back to my original point.

Early Sunday morning I was finishing up the final chapters of GIRL IN THE PICTURE. The scenes are meant to parrot the destruction of the One Ring. I was too bleary eyed and tired to notice the date or the significance of that date. I was wrapping up the destruction of my One Ring analogue on the same day that the same thing was happening in the original book. That made me kind of creeped out but excited.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. But, maybe, y'know, fate.