I’ve never been good at focusing. The smallest sound can break my concentration, but absolute silence can lull me into a daydream—which is cool, but not so great if I actually want to get anything done. But if I listen to the right sound, it can provide a shield against distractions, while keeping me from spacing out.

Most days the sound is the sound of rain. It’s the white noise of nature, an audio curtain you can draw around yourself to block out the world. Rainymood.com plays a looping track that is about 30 minutes long. At one point, a dog barks twice in the distance. Later, a train goes by. Then it all hushes, just for a moment, before starting over.

Carry me back

Day after day, the rainstorm brought me back to the world of the novel. It’s a kind of anaphora, which comes from the Greek term of anapherein, meaning to carry back. The writing process is another kind of anaphora: you revisit the same story or poem or essay over and over, again and again, with patience and focus and persistence.

The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson took about eight years to write, or approximately 8,000 rainstorms. The book’s about a precocious and dreamy boy who’s decided that he’s the second coming of Christ. His mother, an inventive storyteller, likes to tell him made-up Bible stories, which she claims are ‘lost episodes’, or outtakes from the King James version. Wild as prophecy and seemingly just as coded, these charming and dangerous tales feature steel mills, cars, and transistor radios, among other artifacts not generally associated with life at the beginning of Anno Domini. Faith can be fickle, though, and Revie’s belief in God and his family is shaken when his mother leaves home to pursue her dreams of stardom in Hollywood. Over the course of a year, one family and one boy must learn to sacrifice and forgive in order to be born again.

Come back

The book has no storms, but there it is again: anaphora. Second comings, resurrections, homecomings, retrospective narration, and listening to the same storm over and over are all built on the same pattern, the one called carry me back.

Maybe that’s the obsession that underpins all my other obsessions. I’m thinking now about a scene from the middle of the book, when a character named Pastor Mike tells Revie that God built the universe on a circular track. ‘Everything orbits,’ he tells the boy. ‘Including you.’

Including me, too. Including all of us.

Bryan Furuness is the author of the novel, The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson. His fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, Southeast Review, Hobart, and elsewhere, including New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches at Butler University, where he serves as the Editor in Chief for the small press, Pressgang. Find him on Facebook and on Twitter as @furunati

GIVEAWAY Bryan is giving away 2 paperback copies of The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson to commenters here. Extra entries if you share the post on Twitter, Facebook or other platforms – but remember to note in your comment here that you have! He also asks that if you happen to win, he’d be extremely grateful for a review on Amazon or Goodreads – favourable or otherwise.

Also, don’t forget that there’s a giveaway on the Nail Your Novel site as well… to celebrate a new cover.