War in heaven begins

Back in June I mentioned an idea I had for a novel, about the war in heaven. It’s been bubbling around in the back of my head since then, but nothing happened. Until tonight. Two things, actually — first, I made a cover:

Second, I started writing the first chapter. I’m having a devil of a time with it, really, and it took four tries to get something I could even remotely work with. At the moment I’m running into all sorts of questions that I have to answer before I can paint a convincing picture of heaven — where do people live? Do they sleep? Do they eat? What kind of landscape is it? How do people get around? And so on.

Anyway, I’m going to try to write roughly a chapter a week, so we’ll see how things go. (Some of you have already volunteered to read the chapters and give feedback; if any of the rest of you would like to do likewise, just send me an e-mail.)

Wow! I like the looks of that cover just fine. Very nice! :) I am looking forward to seeing how you answer all those questions about heaven. A while back when you said you hoped that the “sea of glass” is a metaphor, I heartily agreed and I don’t recall ever hearing anyone else suggest that possibility, but I for one hope that you’re right! I love grass and trees and mountains. Green is my favorite color and it goes very nicely with blue. :)

I’m not entirely sure yet just how I’m going to answer them all, but my gut feeling is that heaven will end up being surprisingly like earth, but better. Writing this book feels like writing a fantasy novel, honestly — since we don’t have much real information on what the premortal world was like, I’ve got to make it up as if I were writing about Middle Earth or Narnia or something. The difference is that I feel more of a compulsion to get it right. :) But since there’s no real way to know if I have gotten it right, I plan to just do my best and tell a compelling story in a consistent world. We’ll see what happens.

Wow! A young C. S. Lewis in the making…

Well, I don’t know about that, since they’re mighty big shoes to fill. :)

[…] In another vein, a year ago I started writing War in Heaven, my novel about, well, the war in heaven. :) I got about three scenes in and then put it on the back burner since it wasn’t going where I wanted it to. And so it languished for the last I don’t know how many months. But today I felt it kicking around, begging for some attention. And so instead of revising Out of Time, I’m going to focus on War in Heaven instead. (Mainly because I still don’t know how I would revise Out of Time. :)) […]