What is the Wolf of Old Town About?

This will be the first book of mine to be self-published. It’s funny because it’s the last of the seven manuscripts to be written. Over the next few years, I will be working backwards reviewing all my old manuscripts and rewriting them anew and publishing them in reverse order from their first conception.

The Wolf is my response to the Dream Artist (DA). I started the DA on Christmas day in the house I grew up in, after flicking through the book: ‘Some Call in Kitsch’ an artbook which has stood on my father’s bookcase since God knows when.

After finishing my MBA, I had nothing constructive to do with my time, so I returned after a long absence to one of my greatest loves – creative writing.

I slaved over the Dream Artist (DA) part time for five years, before submitting it to the Manuscript Assessment Agency for an independent assessment in 2018.

Their review was not what I expected. I thought DA was a rough, quirky diamond. Although the report didn’t say it in outright terms, their many criticisms demonstrated to me that the DA was not too a publishable standard and needed extensive rewriting.

I will not lie. My ego was crushed by the criticisms. But on a closer and deeper introspection I realized everything they wrote was spot on. I consider the review the best money I’ve spent on my writing. It’s made me more determined to become a better writer and showed the many flaws in my craft I needed to address, if I would achieve any success.

The reviewer specified three main criticisms of the story. The passiveness of the main character Remi or Rembrandt, the meandering digressive chapters which didn’t build the story, and finally the lack of conflict.

Instead of rewriting I took on board the criticism and launched into writing the Wolf. It was my answer to those criticisms.

One cannot accuse Ingrid the main character of Wolf of being passive or the Wolf lacking in conflict. Every character wants something, and a multitude of obstacles block the path to their goals.

The story for Wolf came to me as I lay in bed sick with the flue listening to a theta wave track and daydreaming about a young man who works as a storeman in a town, grounded in materialism. A town in which the people think of nothing beyond their quotidian existence. The spiritual, the artistic is completely ignored. The town represents a lower realm existence with hate and other base passions never far from the surface and ready to explode with the right provocation.

This male character keeps his head down, does his job and plans his exit to a higher realm. Another town. It is the beginning of Toby. This daydream consumed most of my waking thoughts for months after I finally shook the flue. Like any waking daydream I continually added and subtracted to it, as a young boy may add blocks to a leggo city. I imagined coworkers, forerunners to Doug and Arthur Symes. Then I wondered what could cause chaos in this world. What would be the right provocation?

A beautiful, talented, manipulative, personable, psychopath woman. Ingrid was born.

I really enjoyed writing Ingrid. Although I never approved of her actions, I admire her courage and bravery. I also understood what drove her to be the person she was.

The Wolf is very much a clash of two world views. The Nietzschean ‘I can create my own values’ of Ingrid, (easy to comprehend) versus a worldview nested in a higher reality of Toby, one centred on a supreme being.

This is a spiritual novel, one which relies heavily for reference on the Swedenborgian concept that we are at the mercy of spiritual forces and laws beyond our power and comprehension. How we think and act determines the pull of these forces.