has written a little something for our blog. is the author of Bedtime Story which follow up his bestselling, Before I Wake and The World More Full of Weeping.
I woke up this morning to the sound of rain. A hard November rain. Really, there are few sounds quite as comforting, especially when you're snuggled deep into flannel sheets. So long as the rain stays outside, that is. That might seem a given, what with rain being an outside thing, but it's not. Especially living in a house initially built in 1910, and roughly added to and further cobbled together over the next twenty years. There have been times when it was as rainy in the living room as it was outside. Almost.
Continued after the jump.
The worst time was quite a few Novembers ago. It was like we were being smote by nature. When the rains hit, the basement flooded. The roofs leaked. Our lives were a symphony of drips in buckets and pans. We got the basement repaired, and it flooded again. The rains kept coming. Everything peaked one weekend, late in the month. It had been raining for days. Cori, my wife, and Xander, my son, who was then a few years old, fled for her parents' place, eager to escape the deluge. I valiantly stayed behind to hold back the flood.
I didn?t sleep much that weekend. I spent most of the time emptying buckets, checking downspouts, pumping the basement, the sort of homeowner stuff that makes you miss renting.
When I wasn't actively getting soaked to the skin, though, I was reading. Naturally. I was reading. And as I was reading, it occurred to me that there weren't a lot of books about fathers and sons that I could really relate to. I was missing Xander, and it seemed that while there were a lot of books about the father/son bond, from Hemingway and Jim Harrison to Pat Conroy, there didn't seem to be anything that spoke to my geeky, bookish, unable-to-deal-with-being-a-homeowner, not-really-sure-how-to-be-a-father self.
Almost without realizing it, I started jotting things down in my notebook. That?s what happens, for me: the mind and the hand work in tandem. The first three words on the page were ?Father. Son. Book.?
Fifteen minutes later, I had a page of notes, about a father who gives his son a book, a book which swallows him whole. And I knew, that first night, that the book would have two separate strands: the father trying to save his son, and the son trying to save himself.
I had no idea that it would take more than five years to get from the notebook page to the hardcover, but that?s just the way things work sometimes.
That's where Bedtime Story came from. Literally a dark and stormy night.
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Novelist Christopher Knox began his writing career with a bang. The echo of that success still rings in his ears as he sets to work every morning on his second novel, ten years later, inc...
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