Writing a novel is supposed to be creative and cathartic.  It's the ultimate expression of great stories through your ideas, emotions, and deep thoughts framed with human drama and moments of humor.  But getting from that first blank page to a work of 300 or more pages is intimidating, even if you've done it before.

When I started my first novel,  The Silicon Lathe, I knew I wanted to tell a semi-autobiographical tale of my life as a young entrepreneur starting out in the Silicon Valley.  After a long career filled with my experiences  of  innovation, creativity, and altruism confronting ambition, greed, manipulation, and downright evil, I knew I had more than enough material for a novel, probably several.  Wherever there's money to be made you will find the best and the worst in people. 

And I was lucky.  Since the novel is about the history of the Silicon Valley, I could just start at the beginning of my career and finish at the end.  To bring the proper context to the reader, I took the logical approach of opening each section with the year's global events.  It was easy to put together a simple outline for the book. 

When I wanted to add sections about extreme sports and juxtapose them with the challenges, successes and failures, all I had to do was insert them in the proper places. 

My second novel, Ethics (unpublished), was a cathartic book.  I started by writing the first and last chapters, then worked from back to front to fill in an outline.   I poured my heart into the novel  and often found myself writing long emotional diatribes.  My early readers pointed out that I'd gone a little far with most of these and suggested some trimming or perhaps more accurately, some serious clear cutting.  But with the outline, this clean up was easy to do and Ethics is arguably my best work to date. 

With The Shadow of God, an outline was essential.  This was my first foray into the mystery/psychological thriller genre.  Imagery was a key part to very subtle foreshadowing as were the clues that I dropped in each section.  As the San Francisco Book Reviewer said:

"Jackowski lays out the information in such a way that everything is in place long before you discover it. This is a very smart book, perfect for both readers who like to try to solve the crime before the characters do and readers who love to reread mysteries to see all the hints early on."

The outline enabled me to decide where to put the clues and even to move them around when I made organizational revisions.   Even better, when I was well into the book and wrote something that required corresponding changes earlier on, those places in the book were easier to find using the outline - certainly easier than searching for key words or reading for situations whose locations I couldn't quite remember months later. 

Unfortunately, in my latest novel, I decided to try to write it without an outline.  It hasn't gone well.  I've written sections to introduce each of the main characters, have set up several ominous situations, have laid down hints to start leading the reader astray, but the fact is, since I'm not sure where I'm going, it's kind of hard to bring the reader along.  I find that I have too many options.  I start down a path, then backtrack or second guess myself.  It has taken me far longer to get less than 25% done than it did to write an entire outlined novel.  I'm starting over with an outline and will refine it to a couple of levels before I start continue writing this book. 

What I've learned is that outlining is not just an organizational tool.  It forces you to think through your story and to make decisions so that when you're heads down, you know where you've got to get to.  Even better, when you hit a block on a particular subject or character, you can just decide to write a different section and come back to the difficult one when you're ready.  

Unlike a building, where you need to lay the foundation before getting into the heavy construction, as a writer, if you have an outline as your plan, you have the freedom to construct the story and then to come back to lay that foundation with clues and foreshadowing.  

For me, the outline is my safety net.  I won't write without one again.

Since this chapter is several pages long, I'm just posting enough to give you a bit about this character.  Let me know if you want to see more about his psychological break and his condition and I'll start making short Word documents available.

Mark Johansen made his way slowly up the stairs past the bakery on his way to his first outpatient session with Doctor Samantha Louis since his psychotic break several weeks before.   

God, it smelled good.  Lately he’d had challenges controlling his eating and coming here certainly wasn’t going to help.  Maybe it was the medication. 

It had been a rough year since Janice left him.  He’d been depressed.  He’d started drinking.  Then it was the cocaine.  It seemed to help elevate his mood.  When using, he felt like he was almost back to his normal self, the charismatic CEO of Johatchen Software.

But as he now recognized, what he thought were brilliant new presentations were just rants.  What he believed to be his renewed enthusiasm for his work was perceived by his team as mania.  When he thought he was bringing them closer, he was driving them away.   And then Janice appeared. 

At first it seemed normal,  he’d see a woman on the street and would mistake her for Janice.  Then she showed up at work.  At least he thought she was there.  Every day he’d see her in the break room sipping coffee. But it wasn’t her and what was really scary was that it wasn’t anyone else either.  No one saw her.  He tried to pass off his questions about the woman at the table as just a joke, but unbeknownst to him at the time, his overly intelligent team saw through him. 

He did his best to ignore her appearances, but then she started following him around.  She’d show up everywhere.  He’d be sitting on the toilet and when he looked up, she’d be there looming over him, shaking her head in disgust. 

She showed up in meetings.  Just when he thought he’d gained some sense of normalcy, she’d show up and give him a dirty, disapproving look.  He’d stop in mid-sentence and would stare, hoping she’d go away.   His team recognized the gaps. 

But it really got bad when she started talking to him.  She wasn't talking to him; she was lecturing him.  And it didn't stop.  He became paranoid, looking around corners, and behind plants and large objects to make sure she wasn't there, plotting to leap out at inappropriate times.  But she did.  He'd cover his ears, but nothing he tried could drown out her criticism.  He'd stop mid-sentence and  run out of a meeting for no apparent reason. 

This is a draft section from The Misogynist.  Keep in mind that these drafts are just that and will likely change or may even be omitted in the final version.
          _____________________________

George Gray printed the two emails then walked past the other cubicles on the 11th floor of 555 Montgomery Street in San Francisco to the corner office occupied by Morris Levinberg, George’s boss at the New York Sentinel.  Morris was heads down, reading glasses hanging precariously from the end of his nose, a red marker in his hand.  
 
“No, No, No!” Morris grumbled, clearly not pleased with what he was reading.

 Morris was in his mid-fifties, with a sweaty balding pate and wiry gray hairs poking out over his ears.  While frumpy wasn’t a term that was generally applied to men, it was the first word that came to mind when George looked at Morris and his middle-aged paunch, five o’clock shadow in the middle of the day, and disheveled clothes.  It was amazing what physical appearances could hide and how easy it was for people to judge others by their bodies.  But one look at Morris’ face with its oversized beak and eagle-like eyes, and you could sense the keen intelligence that had won him a Pulitzer and made him a bestselling author.

 George let Morris finish the page he was reading, then knocked on the open door.  

Morris looked up. “George!  To what do I owe the honor of a visit from one of our most talented young reporters?”

 “God, I sure wish I was talented.  I work my butt off and most of my work still never sees the light of day.  

“But I’m not here to complain.  I have a dilemma and need your advice.  When I got in this morning, I had two somewhat strange emails in my Inbox.  I tried to track down the authors, but the email addresses and the paths the emails took seem to lead nowhere.”

“Learning some tricks from Janey?” Morris asked.

“Yeah.  My high-tech guru wife showed me how to follow email paths through multiple servers.  I’ve been getting pretty good at tracking down ‘anonymous’ emails.  But these two definitely led
nowhere.”

“Are they from the same sender?”

“I can’t tell. The sender names are just a scramble of letters. Here.  Take a look at the  first one.”

Morris took the email and began reading. 
           
______________________________
 From: sqpr93uy4nk  <[email protected]>
 Date: June 29, 20XX 05:31 AM PDT
To: George Gray <[email protected]>
Subject: Exposing Unethical Zillionaires
 
George,
 
I read your article on Michael James, someone I greatly admired, and appreciated your even-handed, honest reporting of the situation he found himself in.  It’s tragic that we lose people like Michael while unscrupulous high tech moguls screw people and make millions or billions doing it.  
 
I’ve managed to collect some very interesting information on several of these scumbags, information which would ruin them personally if it were exposed to the public and to law
enforcement.  
 
I’m not some crackpot.  I only want to see justice done.  
 
Of course I expect you to verify any information I give you, but assuming you do determine that I’m providing factual information, I would like you to publish articles which will expose the crimes these people have committed.  Of course if you can’t verify it, I expect you to tell me to take a flying  leap.
 
I’m untraceable by email and replying to this one won’t work, so if you’re interested in the next step, tweet “sqprwo93uy4nk, I’m interested”.  
 
sqprwo93uy4nk           
______________________________

 “What do you think?  Should I pursue it?  Is this something the paper would approve?”

Morris thought carefully.  “George, I don’t see any reason not to.  See what he or she has to say.  As the email says, if it’s bullshit, all we lose is the time you take to verify the claims.  If not, we might have a great story.”

George thought back to his last ‘great story’.  He and Janey were driving up the coast on their way to a brief honeymoon in the City when they saw a gray Audi go soaring off the cliff.  The
driver was killed.  Starting work at the Sentinel the following Monday, George was asked to do a story on a  successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur.  By some weird coincidence, they were the same person.  He and Janey had watched Michael James commit suicide. His months of chasing the story had left him frustrated.  Initially thinking Michael James was a scumbag like sqprw – whatever - described, he found out he was wrong.  He searched for why someone like Michael James would kill himself.  It seemed to be about a divorce, but at the end of the day, he didn’t really understand why this gifted, apparently ethical man, had died.  
 
“Since your fan brought up Michael James, I have to ask, any progress on that novel you’re writing based on the Michael James story?” Morris asked.

 “No Morris. I keep coming back to the facts which didn’t lead to answers.  The story haunts me and though I can write about it, I can’t get past the unknowns.”

“George, take it from a fiction writer.  If you base a novel on facts, you need to give the facts some time and distance. They need to become a bit hazy.  Then, as ludicrous as it may sound, you just need to make shit up.  Remember, it’s  fiction!

“But back to the reason you came in, what about the second email?”

George handed the next email to Morris. 
           
______________________________ 
From: x63qxr8k4mu5 <  x63qxr8k4mu5@ x63qxr8k4mu5.com>
Date: June 29, 20XX 06:41  AM PDT
To: George Gray  <[email protected]>
Subject: A woman will die
 
George,
 
The former wife of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur will die this week.  I will tell you why after she’s
dead.
 
Don’t bother trying to trace this email.  It’s untraceable.  I will contact you.

 x63qxr8k4mu5           
______________________________

Morris looked up at George.   “This probably is from a crackpot.  But we need to hand it over to legal.  They can decide if they want to give it to the police.  If you get more like this, forward them to legal immediately and cc me.”

“But do you think they’re from the same person?”

Morris laid the two emails side by side and examined them closely.  After about a minute, he circled the From name, the email address, and the signature, then the word ‘untraceable’ in both.  

“Well, we have the word ‘untraceable’ and I see that each of the senders’ names has 13  characters.  The tones are different but I’ve seen some very disturbed people change their tones
dramatically in seconds.  And, we have two emails on the same day, just a bit over an hour apart, both sent to you.  It may be just coincidence, and as we discussed before, unlike many of my police buddies, I do believe in coincidence,  but just to be safe, forward the first one to legal too.”

George thanked Morris and left his office, more than a little worried about what he was about to get himself into.

Here's a draft Preface from the Misogynist.  It will be up to the reader (and the main characters) to figure out who wrote this...

I hate people. 

People are the reason this world is such a mess.  They’re gullible.  They believe what they’re told.  They’ll follow charismatic leaders into self-destruction and destruction of others. Give them a political or religious cause and they can justify any action no matter how immoral, no matter how many others suffer from their actions.  People lie.  They cheat at almost any opportunity.  They protect themselves at the expense of those around them.  

Tell them a lie and bury it in half-truths or truths taken out of context and you can create true-believers.  With the advent of the Internet and Social Media, people with crazy ideas have the means to convince others of their righteousness.  Say something sensational, get a following, go viral.  More and more will believe you. You can be famous.  You can have influence.  You can be
rich.  

And the rich. Don’t get me started.  I don’t mean people who are well off.  I mean the truly rich, people who have more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes.  They have walled estates around the world, cars whose cost would feed a hundred families for ten years, clothes that cost more than many people’s homes.  And what do they do with this money?  They protect it.  They get richer.  And they get richer at the expense of others.  Their money and the power that comes with it allows them to buy politicians who can convince their constituencies to vote for things that are bad for them but that will benefit their wealthy partners.  

The rich get richer and richer, the poor get poorer and poorer as they’re promised that there’s a way to have the American Dream.  And the middle class, they don’t even see it coming.  They’re
so damned complacent that they work their jobs, come home and watch television, and repeat.  They’re getting poorer too and when they lose their homes to failed economies, they join the poor as the rich get richer.  

I can’t fault the poor.  There is too much stacked against them.  The few that succeed, never look back.  Why would they want to return to desperation when they worked so hard to climb out? Those that don’t get out fall into hopelessness, petty crime, drugs, and violence that gets propagated to their next generations.

 There was a time years ago when the poor had a chance.  Stay in school, get an education, go to college, and succeed.  Those days are long gone, but the rich keep selling them this ideal and
after they give everything they’ve got and fail to succeed multiple times, despair sets in.  

Desperate people do desperate things.  They want to believe in some salvation, be it religion, drugs, revolution.  Crowds become mobs and mobs destroy without thinking. For God’s sake, if people can’t even watch a soccer game without rioting and killing fellow spectators, what hope is there?

 I went into high tech thinking I could make a difference.  I honestly believed that information would set the world free.  If even the most downtrodden had access to knowledge and experience from around the world,  they could educate themselves.  They could recognize that their situation was not normal.  They could rise up and demand change. Information seemed like the great equalizer. 

I invented technologies that made the Web real.  Other technologies made it accessible in the most remote places on earth. Together, we should have made a difference.  We patted ourselves on the back when the Berlin Wall fell.  Many thought Reagan’s arm race with the Soviets brought it down, but those of us in tech knew that without the information about the West that so many received through the Internet, it might never have happened. We enabled
communication like it had never existed before.  Radio Free Europe?  Nice idea, but it didn’t have the reach, allure, or the wealth of information we provided via the Web.  And it certainly didn’t allow anyone to connect to anyone else anywhere, any time. 
 
Yes, we thought the World-Wide-Web meant World-Wide-Change.  But commercialism trumped us.  It’s all about advertising and popularity now.  Like it, retweet, vote, give a thumbs up.  Hire a social media consultant and flood the web. Distract people with sensational products, games, or videos.  Hide the substance.  Or, if you’re one of the big oppressors out there, capitalize on this propaganda machine that Hitler never dreamed could exist.  Think what he did with propaganda.  You ain’t seen nothing yet.  

We have the rich who feel entitled to get richer,  we have the complacent middle class, and we have the poor who are lured into making choices against their own interests. We have mobs, extremists, suicide bombers, amoral leaders.  We thought information would change all that.  
 
We gave a gift to mankind and they perverted it.   If it sounds like the story from the Garden of Eden, maybe it is.  

I’m tired of seeing our technologies perverted to make the rich richer at the expense of others.
Something needs to be done.   No, I need to do something. 
_____________________________________

 I hate women.

 The ‘fairer sex’ isn’t so fair once you get to know them.  They’re jealous of each other and will stab other people in the back faster than any sleazy businessmen I’ve ever met if it helps them look better among their peers.  They use love and sex to lure men in to get what they want and then move on when they have it.  Men are such suckers.  We believe from an early age that we will find a kind, caring, loving, supportive woman, a life partner.  Advertisements promise sex. 
Movies and novels promise true love.  But women are calculating.  The Serpent chose one of his own to destroy Paradise.

Like my wife Janice.  We married young.  She was beautiful and intelligent with a goal of making a real difference in the world. After law school, she worked in legal aid, helping the poor and unprotected.  I believed in her and what she  did.  

But then I got rich.   Not just comfortable, not just well off, RICH.  

Janice changed. She quit her practice and became a socialite.  I never imagined this was possible.  She always seemed so grounded.  Suddenly, life became about being seen.  People needed to know who we were and how wealthy we were.  No, not in dollars, but in what we could afford to do or buy. She needed the biggest house with the best view, expensive clothes, homes
in exotic places.  We had to throw regular parties for the elite of the San Francisco Bay Area.  

I set up charities so that we could ‘pay-back’,  and asked her to manage them, thinking that would bring back some of the ‘make-the-world-a-better-place’ Janice, But these too became vehicles for her social climbing.

When I started giving away our fortune, she filed for divorce.  She wanted to make sure she got her half before it became too small to support her new lifestyle.  Truth be told, I was  glad to see her go.  

But I started looking around.  Other high tech founders were going through the same fate.   Sure, there were many who reveled in their new-found wealth and the social doors their wives opened.  But others, those with a conscience, those true believers, often found themselves in my place – stunned at what their wives had become.  

I think it’s even worse for the entrepreneurs who haven’t made it yet, who risked it all to be successful in bringing their visions to the world.  Their wives hung around for one or two startups, but at some point, they decided that their husbands were losers.  And for them too, it was time to move on to greener pastures, leaving in their wakes visionaries who were already suffering after their exhausting efforts led to failure, now emotionally devastated too.  

I lost two of these friends to suicide.  They could have made a difference but now they’re gone. And the wives moved on, their exes’ deaths just confirming their decisions.

Yes.   I hate women.  I’m tired of seeing women destroy the vulnerable.  Something needs to be done.   No, I need to do something.  
 
_____________________________________

I'm working on ideas for my next novel, The Misogynist, and have started describing one of the main characters, Samantha Louis, Psychiatrist.     If you read The Shadow of God, you'll recognize her and the case that this section refers to. 

A blog may not be the best place to put these excerpts.  But I'd appreciate any thoughts as blog comments for now.  I'll see if I can create a space on my website for work in progress for future excerpts.  Here's the first:

Samantha Louis looked out her second story office window above Haight Street in San Francisco and watched Liz Leahy drive away.   It was over.  They’d had their last session together. Sam knew it was coming.   Liz had made fantastic progress and now seemed to be ‘normal’.  By any standard, she was cured of her mental illness – a condition that had threatened her relationships and quite frankly the lives of others.  Liz had been dangerous.  
 
Sam should  be proud of her success.  It was rare that you could point to a seriously ill psychiatric patient who was actually cured.  Most were ‘managed’ – either through therapy, behavior modification, drugs, or a combination of the three.  Far too often it was drugs, but after her years of experience in residency and her work in inpatient facilities, Sam knew that for many, drugs were the only way to bring some sense of normalcy into their lives.  
 
This wasn’t the case with Liz Leahy.  Yes, some drugs were involved at the outset, but that was just to help manage behavior. As therapy had its desired effect, the drugs were withdrawn and now Liz had a solid relationship, a good job, and was actually happy.  In Sam’s opinion, there was zero chance that Liz would relapse or that she’d present with other issues.   Liz was actually cured.  
 
As much as she kept repeating it to herself, Sam couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss.  This was the case of a lifetime.  Her mentor, Dr. Ken Karmere hadn’t seen anything like it in his entire thirty-plus year career.  What were the chances Sam would ever see a case like this again?  
 
So here she was, thirty-seven years old, almost two years into her private practice, and not making enough money to quit her part-time job at the inpatient facility of San Francisco Community Hospital.  At least that paid well.

Med School, fellowships, a long residency, and Liz Leahy’s case had consumed her life.  Like many of her counterparts, she had few really close friends.  They were all far too focused on  getting through their training so that they could make a difference in the world as psychiatrists. 

But aside from Liz Leahy, who was now gone, her patients consisted of a few couples that she counseled, and several teens with eating disorders.  Nothing exciting and not enough to pay the bills, certainly not enough to repay her student loans.    

As for her personal life, Sam didn’t even have a pet.  She couldn’t image subjecting an animal to the absences demanded by her psychiatric training.  And while she’d had a few relationships with men in Med School, none lasted.  Maybe it was her intensity.  Maybe, like with a pet, it was her unavailability.  She was too often doing night shifts or on Call.  Or maybe it was the fact that once her psychiatric training began, she couldn’t stop analyzing her dates.  It was like the Med-Student Syndrome. Virtually all med students imagine they have every possible illness as they begin studying medicine. She went through it herself in Med School but she got over it.  And then, after she entered her psych residency,  it seemed like her dates presented with every possible psychiatric disorder.  
 
 Sam stepped into the small shared bathroom outside her office and examined herself in the mirror. She was still attractive.  There were a few strands of gray starting to show if you looked closely, but her blond hair concealed them well.  Small lines were beginning to show on her face. 
Worry lines?  No, nothing too bad.  And since she’d finished her residency two years ago, her more flexible schedule had permitted her to take yoga classes three days a week and Pilates two days a week, with a couple of jogging sessions added in.   She’d dropped most of the weight she’d put on during Med School and Residency.

 Looking at herself objectively, Sam decided that it was time to work on the personal side of her life.  It had been put off far too long.  She needed to find some group activities.  She could make friends.  Maybe she could even meet someone.  

Sam  returned to her desk to review her notes before her next patients arrived.  She couldn’t help seeing the irony that she was providing couples therapy but had never had a long term relationship herself.  That would have to change.