Getting Rid of Cain

“Cain flying before Jehovah’s Curse,”  Fernand-Anne Piestre Cormonc. 1880, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

I’m happy to announce a republishing of Gold in Havilah: A Novel of Cain’s Wife through Westbow Press, a division of Thomas Nelson and Zondervan. The challenge of editing to Westbow’s specifications was a great learning experience; I’m glad I made the effort and am satisfied with the results. Click on any of the Buy buttons here on my site and the little publisher’s helper out there in cyberspace will patch you through to Amazon or Westbow. The prices are the same both places.

Meanwhile, I’m smitten, dizzy-in-love with the plot and characters in my second book in this series of ancient fiction stories centered around the early chapters of Genesis. The working title is, for the moment, Zyla: A Seer’s Tale. I’ll do a couple of things in this book, the first being to introduce an amazing new female lead, Zyla, one of the wives of the infamous Lamech, sixth from Cain and the first bigamist mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 4:19). Zyla is a cerebral, willful woman with a prophetic gift who must learn to use her gifting wisely. Being a book character, that’s going to be harder for her than it should, because that is how book characters are. Just like in the movies, these guys always, always go into the dark, creepy house while you pull at your hair and scream, “DON’T GO IN!”

I’ll also satisfy the curiosity of some of my readers who have been asking, “So what happened to Cain?” They’re right, for after all, I did leave Cain’s miserable self pretty stranded at the end of Gold, without a resolution to his story. Readers’ interest in Cain’s outcome made me realize I hadn’t yet exhausted my treatment of this annoying villain, the world’s first murderer. I promise I’ll sate people’s appetite for more about Cain, and his measly seven generations of progeny as well.

So get ready for Cain on steroids, with his scabs and scars and bad attitude and all the rest, just as you enjoyed him in Gold. And get ready to like Zyla, even if she does have to learn everything the hard way, which shouldn’t sound too unfamiliar to most of us.