The manuscript for The Behemoth (the working title I’ve given to my current WIP that is as of yet unnamed) is done. It’s messy. It doesn’t always make sense. There’s lots of nonsequiturs where I decided to change something halfway through. But it’s done.

The concept for this novel first started coming to me in little snippets and flashes of scenes back in 2019. I had some key moments in character building for an MC, but no plot, no world, nothing else. So I let it stew.

Around that same time, I started getting really into the history and modern practice of witchcraft and how it relates to older pagan religions and cultural practices. I also started learning about native plants and what they can be used for both in food and medicinally. These would all end up being huge sources of information and inspiration for this story, though at the time I didn’t know that. I just find that type of stuff fascinating.

In late 2019, I applied to a master’s program and got in, then set fall of 2020 as my start date, having no idea how much things would change in such a small amount of time. By the time I started the program, the world looked starkly different to the one I was in when I made the decision, and it was all I could do to keep up with the school work. So writing got put more or less on hold. The Behemoth continued to stew.

Every once in a while, I would get a new flash of inspiration. A character, maybe. Or a setting. I started studying geological maps of the area I grew up on USGS.gov in my spare time — what little there was of it. Don’t ask me why. Again, I just find it fascinating.

Looking at those maps, I loved stumbling upon the name for a place I’ve been to countless times since my childhood that I never knew had a name. Or seeing the long-standing family names for the area that pop up from time to time in a place name. Sometime I found out what I thought was just a colloquial name my family used for a place was the official name all along.

And then I started looking at elevation. See, I grew up right on the edge of what they call the “driftless” area of the Mississippi river valley. The area is characterized by plains that drop off into beautiful bluffs along the river. I grew up what we might call “on top of the hill” in the plains area, but the bluffs were still a staple feature throughout my life.

The reason that the driftless area looks the way it does, is because it was an area untouched by the glaciers that formed the plains. The area was instead formed by erosion thanks to the abundance of water both above and below ground in the area. And all that erosion left deep scars across the land, twisting snakelike around these towering bluffs, all leading to that singular source of life that the Mississippi has been to the region for thousands of years.

And that’s how they always seem in my mind. Towering. As I looked more closely at the elevations across these geological survey maps though, it struck me that with a difference of just a few hundred feet, everything I’ve ever known, everywhere I’ve called home throughout my life, would be well underwater.

It probably seems a little weird that that’s the sort of thought my brain jumped to. But it wasn’t entirely unfounded. See, the bluffs here are made of limestone. And in that limestone, there’s a whole lot of fossils. And every science teacher I had in elementary and high school drilled it into our heads that the reason we have this limestone and these fossils, is because once upon a time, there was an ocean here. The late-Cretaceous period, if the Google search serves me right. But go on a hike to the top of any of our bluffs on state land, and you’ll likely find a plaque telling you the same thing. And for that reason, I whenever I think of the bluffs, I can’t help but think about oceans.

All of this came together in my novel planning for The Behemoth in late 2022, when I was anticipating graduation and finally having time to write again. And weirdly, everything just sort of came together with it. In many ways, the plot line I’ve created and the ties I’ve found to my own life, my own home, and the history of this land, all feel like they’ve come together into the sort of book I always wanted when I was a kid. The sort of book that can take boring farmland Minnesota and turn it into a fantasy world.

And that’s probably why it’s becoming so unwieldy. There are little snippets of information and dreams that I’ve been carrying around since my childhood being pieced into this story. And as great a feeling as that is, it’s also incredibly overwhelming. The storyline I just finished writing is just one of several that I want to track with this series. Originally, I planned on the novel being dual storylines in one book, but this storyline is over 100k by itself. And there are sequels in the works as well, if everything goes according to plan.

For now though, it’s time for a break. I had hoped to knock out this storyline back in April during Camp NaNoWriMo, only to realized that it was much, much longer than I anticipated. And then I kept trying to push through to finish it up even as things in other areas of my life got stressful. And, of course, I kept pushing myself against my better judgment to the detriment of my own health.

But now the rough draft is done, and I can take a little break before I dive into the edits on that and start trying to tie up all the loose ends I left hanging around. Besides, late summer, when it’s god-awful hot out is the best time to take a break. At least I think so.