(Parenthetically Speaking...)

What inspires you to write your next story, article, or column? If you're a poet or a raconteur, what so takes your breath away that you must set pen to paper and capture the essence of it?

One can see a moment of such pathos on the street, something so nearly mind-numbing in its very mundaneness, that it begs to be written down for posterity.

One sees bathos everywhere, but it's that one inexplicably unique moment that compels you to chronicle it.

Ethos is all around us and, when we see that one instant of it that is somehow set apart from all the rest, we know it. And we must write about it.

The novel I'm currently shopping out has all of those elements, I suppose. It's a fictionalized account of an abduction and triple homicide which happened a few years ago not so far from where I live. One of the homicide victims (and the one kidnapped) was a 9-year-old child. The case remains unsolved, but a lot of people who've been involved from Day One in various aspects of the investigation have a theory. That theory includes the ugly specter of child exploitation, and my novel plays out my own personal theory of what happened and why.

Unfortunately, I'm finding it a little difficult to place it with a good agent or small publisher. (The "big boys" won't even talk to me without an agent, of course.) The reason? The child exploitation angle seems to be something of a hot potato; i.e., nobody wants to touch it. It's not at all graphically depicted; nonetheless, I'm being told that while the novel is well written and intriguing, no can do.

To be honest, I haven't sent out that many queries. I really need to buckle down and get more industrious with that.