The Keeper is another idea I had years ago. I was watching a superhero movie on television and wondered what would happen if a regular person started acting like a superhero—not believing he had superpowers, just intervening to stop crime. But what do you do with the criminals once you stop them? The idea bounced around in my head for a long time. I made notes on it at various times and even made some abortive attempts to start in the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2016. But the story, although interesting to me, had problems. I tried to set it in America, but I realized I did not know the vernacular of an inner city (the south side of Chicago, where I lived nearly forty years ago). Then I thought about setting it in a small town out west (Springerville, AZ, my wife’s hometown), but the setting would not have had enough crime to drive the story.

As with many of my ideas, it sat and waited. I considered it for National Novel Writing Month in November 2018, but went with a new idea instead, Vision More Glorious. I made more detailed notes for The Keeper the next spring, though, and was ready to write when NaNoWriMo rolled around again in November 2019. The first draft took only thirty days.

The novel bears little resemblance to the superhero idea that I began with. A foreigner living in Tokyo becomes depressed but does not want his daughters to have to live with the pain of their father’s suicide. So he decides to get himself murdered. That’s not a simple thing to do in Tokyo.

The Keeper has been through a major revision and two rounds of editing by my wife and me. It is six months away from being ready to give to readers to get some feedback before sending it out for a professional edit. I hope to go to market with it in two to three years. It could happen faster if there were not so many other projects ahead of it in line.