Don Veazie: Evolution of a Character - 1.1.2023

In 2018 I was proofreading Chad in Accounting, which I'd started in 2009, but had let fall dormant between 2014 and 2018 and really wasn't working on writing at all in that time. As I was getting back into the process on Chad in Accounting, I went back to some ideas I'd had in the past, two of which were a novel called Four Women, about a writer and the women he's involved with; and another novel called A Girl and a Gun, about a girl who goes on a crime spree in the American Southwest and the detective tracking her. I took out a notepad and started filling it with ideas, and realized neither project had enough material for its own novel, but together they'd be big enough--I could have the main character from Four Women write A Girl and a Gun. That summer I wrote the rough draft of what would be A Girl and a Gun, my first new rough draft since Chad in Accounting in 2009, and from there made a commitment to myself that I would never have a dormant period like that again, that I would write at least one rough draft a year from there on--and I've stuck to it. In March of 2020, with rough drafts for A Girl and a Gun and Holtman Arms now in the can, I decided that Chad in Accounting was in a place that I could self-publish it, making it my first ever self-published novel. 

The year before I'd filled out a notepad with what I was then calling With a Bullet, the third novel in what was now my author's cycle following A Girl and a Gun and Holtman Arms. I had come up with the idea of Don Veazie when I was thinking of character names, and used the theme of cities and towns near Bangor, Maine, which is near where I went to school at the University of Maine. Veazie is a small town between Orono, where UMaine is, and Bangor, a place you'd breeze through riding along Rt. 2. The only notable thing about it was freshman year there was a great Chinese restaurant there called The Oriental Dang that my friends and I went to, but that closed the same year, and beyond that Veazie was more the butt of jokes than anything due to its name and size. Like if someone didn't have anywhere cool to go to for Spring Break, someone might say "why don't you go to Veazie?" I remember my German professor thought the whole concept of Veazie was ridiculous--"why isn't it just Bangor?" he said. 

With Veazie being the first town name in my mind, "Don Veazie" seemed like the perfect fit, and then it was a matter of who Don Veazie would be. Older, maybe late 40s/early 50s, gray hair, glasses, married with a daughter? From there, as I was making this my third book for what had become my author's cycle, I made him an author who'd been writing for years, then suddenly became rich and famous. What if the wife divorces him? Maybe he moves to a nice house somewhere. I used to go to the White Mountains of New Hampshire often to hike and ice climb before I moved down to Philadelphia, so that seemed like the perfect place for him. The name "With a Bullet" was supposed to represent a meteoric rise to success, "number one with a bullet." There was also a natural influence from The Tempest with the isolated setting, and I leaned into that, the plan being that he never leaves that area; and then I'd also read Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, and that influenced a lot of where I was going with it in putting it into a modern setting. 

So I put everything in my notepad and started outlining what the chapters would be, and as I did Don evolved into roughly what he ended up being in the finished product: unassuming on the surface, but someone who could take charge if he needed to; still getting used to his new fame and money, still not over his wife leaving him, still trying to make sense of his 20-year-old daughter's career as an influencer. I was still not over the loss of our dog Dakota in 2018 myself, so giving Don a dog inspired by Dakota was another addition that rounded Don out, but was also a nice tribute to our late family member. My wife had told me about the process of adopting Dakota before I met her, how the shelter representatives had inspected her and her friend's apartment and given them a hard time about things, so I thought that would be something I could incorporate, and add in my own Maine sensibilities to guide how Don would react to an overbearing shelter staff member.

I planned to write it at some point in 2020, but after self-publishing Chad in Accounting I thought I might take a break first. The world had other ideas, and with us all under lockdown, I decided to challenge myself: can I write 4000 words a day for the entire month of April? If I pulled it off, I'd have a 120,000 word novel at the end of the month. I did meet the challenge, but I wasn't finished on April 30th--"With a Bullet" ended up being 150,000+ words. Somewhere in the early stages of writing, my wife and I watched The Big Chill, which gave me the idea to do my own Gen X version of The Big Chill with Don and his friends from college--UMaine like myself. That added an entire additional chapter, and among other characters, Gretchen, whom Don starts a relationship with, and gave me a dilemma as the novel went on: would I put them together at the end, or bring Don back together with his ex-wife Lois? I won't tell you what I decided, you'll have to read it for yourself!

Over the next three years, between May of 2020 and November of 2023 when I published it, "With a Bullet" went through some changes, the biggest perhaps being the name. I decided Don's House in the Mountains worked better because, one, I already had one firearm themed name in the author's cycle with A Girl and a Gun, and two, I wanted to focus more on the isolated location than the sudden rise to fame. Don himself also underwent some changes. I made him a little less unassuming, and also a little less self-aware, so as a reader you can pick out where maybe he's full of it. He betrays the humble origins of his town's namesake a bit.

It's always interesting to think about a character's progression from the initial idea in my mind, to the outline in my notepad, to the rough draft, and then the many revisions. It's one of the things I love about writing, the process, and then when the novel is complete and in the can, to go back and reflect on it. It can be a slippery slope of course, because sometimes I think of something I could've added after it was already published.

To buy Don's House in the Mountains, you can go here.