HLP

HLP. That’s the name of the novel I’ll begin on Monday.

This story’s root began about five years ago as a business idea, but not one I could pursue myself and I don’t know anyone who would want to pursue it, even though I still think it is a great idea, a way-of-life idea.

Toward the end of writing Ordinary Life, I got an inkling that a novel about the common good could be something. And later came the notion that HLP could be the vehicle for that.

Consequently, I researched the concept of the common good, which I’ve been interested in for a long time, despite the fact that the way the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines it has not made any sense to me. To get a better understanding of the common good, I’ve been reading Jacques Maritain’s “The Person and the Common Good.” I’ve found it invaluable both for the novel and for my own brain.

For the past week, I’ve also thought about the structure the novel could take (a scaffold inherent to the business idea) and the characters who could inhabit it, 27 index cards full of notes, to be precise (which tells me the idea is fertile).

I will take the same daily approach to HLP as I did with Ordinary Life: no outline and highly undetermined characters. There are ideas I hope to incorporate but they must be incarnated in the story, never explicitly mentioned.

I don’t know how the novel will even begin. I’ll find out Monday.