I quit TV news in Baghdad on the day before the war began in 2003. Politicians and compliant news organizations were lying the world into war, and I wanted no part of it. I went to a remote corner of Europe and hammered out the first draft of a six hundred page novel in eight weeks. I called it “Saddamistan.” A publisher read it and called it unrealistic. "Everything is going so well in Iraq," he said. Two weeks later Islamic terrorists attacked the UN Mission in Baghdad killing twenty-two people, and the world began its long, bloody decent descent into WWIII.

A few years later that same publisher sent me an note: “Your Iraq story was prophecy.” And commercially speaking, it had missed its sell-by date.

So I shoved “Saddamistan” in a cardboard box under my writing desk, and I turned to writing “The Angelus Trilogy." But I injected the Trilogy with the same concept of never-ending war I had used in the Iraq story. In some ways, "Saddamistan" was the prequel to "The Angelus Trilogy."

As writers do, I took "Saddamistan" out of its box now and again and spent a few weeks redrafting it, keeping the story in line with the continuing fallout from the Iraq War. And each time I did the characters revealed more about who they really were, especially a drunken lost soul called Andrew who mysteriously receives the lost diary of a dead man.

The ongoing work was always done with an eye on the twentieth anniversary of the “Mission Accomplished” in 2023. On that day, whether I am around or not, publisher or not, the story will drop. It is a work I refuse to abandon. I promised the memory of an absent friend I would never give it up.






note: music cleared for public use.