Ken Kuhlken’s stories have appeared in Esquire and dozens of other magazines and anthologies, been honorably mentioned in Best American Short Stories, and earned a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He has been a frequent contributor and a columnist for the San Diego Reader.

His novels are Midheaven, a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel, The Loud Adios (Private Eye Writers of America Best First Mystery Novel, 1989), The Venus Deal, The Angel Gang, The Do-Re-Mi (a January Magazine best book of 2006 and a finalist for the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel), and The Vagabond Virgins (February, 2008).

For years, I’ve thought the chronologically first of my Hickey family novels would happen around Hollywood during the mid-1920s, when Tom Hickey would be around twenty.

Only the day before yesterday, I decided this 1920s book was the one to write next. I dashed out a basic summary, emailed it to my editor. She replied in record time, with an enthusiastic okay.

I’m not the most regular blog writer. So yesterday I decided to give myself the task of reporting each week on the progress of the novel, for the benefit of my students at Perelandra College, and in case anyone else might find it of value or fun to read.

The novel’s primary antagonist is Tom Hickey’s mother, a wicked follower of various cults, most of them Christian. So, after I wrote this week’s report, I checked out two library books, one on the Azusa Street revival, which was a big deal in the rise of the Pentecostal movement, and one on Aimee Semple McPherson, whose charisma and antics fascinate me.

Last night, I started reading and discovering connections. Such as, the Assemblies of God church grew out of the Azusa Street movement, and Sister Aimee’s Foursquare Gospel splintered off the Assemblies of God. And because I envisioned my novel opening with a fellow hanging from a tree in a park, and the wheels of Sister Aimee’s Angeles Temple trying to suppress an investigation, I was delighted to learn that Angeles Temple is in Echo Park, and that members of the church persuaded William Randolph Hearst to use his influence to derail the inquiry into Sister Aimee’s disappearance of 1926, which portrayed as an abduction and heroic escape.

I fell asleep and dreamt myself back to those days, to a meeting with Sister Aimee. And this morning, a title came to me. Yesterday I had the idea and the outline but hadn’t yet found the gumption to start a new novel. But after dreaming and finding cool details and a title, I’m ready to go. Which gives me an answer for the next person who asks if writing is fun. I’ll writing can be hard and sometimes tedious. But discovering, I’ll say, is pure delight, what it’s all about.