Hello everyone, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? When it came to social media in most aspects, I washed my hands of them and spat the ground on the way out. Social media has never been ‘social’ and the levels of hate on them is simply suffocating.
“Yeah? But why did you get rid of your old blog then?!”
*Shrugs* Life Interruptus, really.
I moved (again), got married, worked and wrote a lot, but the latter one, let’s focus on that since this is an author’s blog. In the last few years my writing found a publishing home, Belen Books, and well, me being a mystery to some, often confused with an Australian evangelist to many, slowly began to evaporate.
Bedtimes Stories: Michael Frost Presents was released in 2022, pulled from the shelves due to an incorrect interior file, rebranded with a sexier cover and rereleased in January of ’26. During that time, Eleanor’s Creek, which was ten years in the making [*See ‘Life Interruptus’] came out in 2023, then a 2nd edition was released earlier this year. Once again, sexier cover, but the core was nice and solid.
Now, as I write this, I am just two days away from the release of Ïmu (release date 7/21/26), a novel I started in March of 2024, and to this day it’s the hardest story I have ever told. I won’t give any spoilers, but the level of research for a fiction story was extraordinary. I mean, seriously, as if I was writing a deep historical fiction piece or dare, I say non-fiction?
Yeah, THAT level of research.
"But! As writers we have to, mustn’t we?”
Yes.
The one fact I have told hundreds of writers, new and old, is that there’s more truth in fiction than non because we have to make the reader believe the bullshit we are making up. Seriously. When you read a non-fiction, you walk away assuming the facts are real, but that’s not the case with fiction. If the reader can’t believe, or they trip up along the way, we’ve lost them and plates of crow are what we’ll eat. In this age of countless internet sleuths and fact-checkers, if you put something in your story based on facts and you are wrong? Man, they will serve up your guts for dinner, mark my words on that.
Ïmu is that story, and more so, it is a story that I felt and breathed through every single word, sentence, write completion and countless edits. BTW, would-be writers: You are EDITING not REWRITING your story. To rewrite your story, one would have to take a match and lighter fluid to the only existing copy and start fresh from word one. No one does this. You are editing [Which does include hacking away pages, maybe even chapters, etc.]. Do some people actually rewrite from scratch? Sigh, well to counter my previous statement that 'no one does this' I am sure some do. Of course they do, but you destroy the magic that was within the words that you'll never get back. For that comment, we will address in a later post.
Anyway, before it gets away from me, AGAIN, Ïmu is that story that wouldn’t let me live without it, often whispering while I lay awake in bed in the darkness. I cannot tell you how many times I left that bedded comfort and trudge to the other side of my home to my office, turning on my monitor in the black so my fingers can beat up keys 'til dawn. For this, I am sure we have all been there or at least some variation of, and we all know this level of passion / obsession / possession all too well.
It’s painful, really. Not a bad-tooth level of pain or getting certain 'precious things' snagged up in your jean’s zipper, no, but it does hurt. We long for it and miss it when we are not speaking to the story as much as one might long for the voice of a loved one. The similarities between the two are so uncanny that if you stop to think about it, either means that us writers are deeply passionate, or borderline Hatter-level insane. For this I would hope it to be the former, albeit the latter doesn’t seem far off in the end either.
Le Sigh…
Ïmu was / is THE story for me and one which came by pure accident as most good stories should and do. What started out as a thriller turned dark once Mikey woke up at an impasse and began doing what he does so well. TBH, I wasn’t even going to publish it under my name and use one of my many pseudonyms (none of which are Rumpelstiltskin if you are the guessing type), but no, once Old Mikey came to talk, Mikey-horror it quickly became.
“What is wrong with this guy?”
Hmm, not sure, so, with a little shrug, I will do my best to finish this up.
Ïmu is that little girl/boy inside of all of us; terrified and full of love, but angry at the world for the injustices of loss and loneliness. The multilayers that book holds honestly surprised me at the end of the first draft, and by the time draft two was ready, I found myself nodding in agreement that I had something NEW. A trauma-induced mute child who only communicates through ASL and her drawings yet had witnessed something horrific through the lens of a telescope, well… it was different. Slap that together with a mimic that had been with her since early childhood which entered this world when her parents died before her, and My oh My have we opened many doors. Yet, it wasn’t all the scenery of the story, no. That folderol makes the cookies taste good with the milk of the story. It was her, Ïmu, the essence of the story that bound me to it in ways I am still trying to understand.
So, as I finish this nonsense up, I hope you have read to this point. It is nearing my bedtime, so I’ll shower and watch a little TV with the wife, say my goodnights and hope for sleep. Until then, my heart aches for that little girl and what I witnessed [put] her through. I believe she forgives me since my only job was to listen and to tell her tale without impeding.
I hope so.
Anywho, thank you for reading my first blog post in a very long while and in the end, just writing this out has helped me understand a little more to why I am bound to that story.
You have my heart,
Michael
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