Every once in a while, you do something sneaky. Not illegal-sneaky, not “hide the body” sneaky — more like the creative version of quietly rearranging the living room and hoping nobody notices until they sit down and go, “Huh… this actually works better.”
That’s basically what I just did with one of my old book.
- The Journey Of A Hopeful Writer
If you’ve been following my journey from hammer-swinging construction worker to Hollywood-hopeful, you know I’ve written a lot of things over the years. Some good. Some… let’s call them “necessary practice swings.” One of those early practice swings was a little novel I wrote under the pen name B.C. Crow. Back then, I had more enthusiasm than craft, more ideas than structure, and absolutely no business pretending I was a pantser.
But I tried anyway. My series previous to that had been so structured and planned, and I’d heard by great authors like Stephen King, that pantsing, or writing by the seat of your pants, was a fun way to go.
Turns out, it wasn’t as fun or productive for me. I needed a little more outlining, with maybe a little room for veering off the path.
What happened, after a lot of banging my head into the keyboard, was a book people genuinely loved — right up until the ending, where the wheels fell off, the engine caught fire, and the whole thing skidded into a ditch.
Everyone told me the same thing: “Great story… but that ending? What happened?”
And honestly? I didn’t know. I thought I’d foreshadowed it well. I thought it made sense. I thought readers would nod thoughtfully and say, “Ah yes, I see how that happened now!”
They did not.
So I did what any overwhelmed, under-experienced writer does when faced with a problem they don’t know how to fix: I ignored it. I let the book sit out there with its hand-drawn cover (yes, I drew it myself; no, I am not that kind of artist), and I moved on.
But stories have a way of tapping you on the shoulder years later.
As I kept learning, writing, outlining — because let’s be honest, I am not a pantser — I found myself thinking back to that book. And one day, out of nowhere, the ending snapped into focus. Not the ending I had written, but the ending the story should have had all along.
It wasn’t that the original ending was “bad.” It was that it didn’t fit the genre. I’d written a coming-of-age story and then tried to wrap it up like something else entirely. Once I understood the genre expectations, the emotional beats, the arc the protagonist needed to complete… everything clicked.
So I went back.
I didn’t rewrite the whole book — the bones were good — but I rewrote the foreshadowing, the emotional cues, the setup. I aligned the story with the ending it deserved. And suddenly, the book felt right. Clean. Natural. Like it had finally grown into itself.
- And that’s when I decided: This one deserves a second chance.
So I re-released it. Quietly. No big marketing push. No dramatic countdown. Just a simple, “Hey, this thing exists again, and it’s better now.”
The book is called Swing Low: The Hangman of the Woods, and it’s a coming-of-age story wrapped in a myth, wrapped in a journey, wrapped in a little bit of fear and a whole lot of heart. It follows a young man named Iddo — a soft-hearted journalism student who really wants to go into medicine — as he crosses a haunted forest to reach the medical school on the other side. Along the way, he meets witches, legends, and of course, the Hangman himself.
But the real story isn’t about monsters in the woods.
It’s about the monsters inside us — fear, doubt, hunger, hope — and what it takes to walk through them.
Revisiting this book reminded me of something every creative eventually learns:
- Your old work isn’t a failure.
And sometimes, when you’ve grown enough, you get the rare chance to go back and finish the sentence you didn’t know how to write the first time.
This is what happened with this novel. Who knows, maybe one day, I’ll even revisit my Nephilim Series and put a little more of my learned craft back into those books also. But I’ll wait for that inspiration to hit later, if at all.
So if you want to see what that journey looks like — for Iddo, and maybe a little bit for me — check out the new edition. And if you do, leave a review. It helps more than you know.
And stay tuned. Because in March, the first novel in my Gearlock series, Hard-Boiled Cabbage, is coming. And that one? Oh, I’m ready for you to read it.
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