I have been working on The Descent of the Gods for twenty years.
There are completed drafts on my computer. Scenes have survived moves across countries, career changes, five children, and entire seasons of my life. Some dialogue has been rewritten so many times that I know its rhythm before I open the document.
And now, with draft six, I am rewriting large parts of the novel again.
Not because the story has failed.
Because I finally understand how ambitious it needs to be.
Four Verses and One Difficult Question
The Descent of the Gods grows out of one of the strangest passages in the Bible.
Genesis 6 says that the “sons of God” saw the daughters of men, took them as wives, and produced the Nephilim, the mighty men of ancient renown.
Then the account moves on.
Four verses.
Those verses inspired centuries of Jewish interpretation, early Christian writing, mythology, speculation and debate. Most retellings naturally ask what happened.
Who were the sons of God?
Who were the Nephilim?
What did these beings do before the Flood?
I have spent years researching those questions. That research eventually became Chasing the Giants, where I collect ancient sources, scholarship, interpretations and some of the more sensational claims surrounding Genesis 6.
But the novel began with a different question.
Why?
Why would beings who had stood in the presence of God abandon heaven for mortal lives?
Why would they cross a boundary they knew they could not easily uncross?
“Because they saw beautiful women” may describe the temptation. It does not explain how they reached the point where that temptation could outweigh everything they knew.
I did not want the Watchers to begin as obvious villains waiting for permission to become worse.
What if they descended because they believed humanity needed saving?
What if they looked at violence, suffering and generations of divine silence and decided that someone had to intervene?
What if every step away from obedience contained enough truth to feel righteous?
That became the heart of the story.
Not evil announcing itself as evil.
Evil arriving through compassion, injury, impatience, pride and the belief that God has failed to act.
The Story Grew Beyond Its Original Shape
The premise is still about angels descending to earth and becoming the beings later remembered as gods.
But the story became much larger.
It became a story about humanity living only a few generations beyond Eden, carrying memories of God without fully understanding Him.
People still make sacrifices, but why?
They repeat stories handed down from Adam, but how much does the sixth generation truly understand about the God who once walked in the garden?
They live near sacred history, but nearness does not guarantee faith.
The story also became about Cain after the murder.
Not Cain as a symbol, but Cain as a man who survived judgment, built a city, raised descendants and spent centuries interpreting mercy as cruelty.
It became about Enoch before he was remembered as a prophet.
It became about Naamah trying to survive a city she loves while seeing more clearly than most what it is becoming.
And it became about the Watchers as individuals.
They are not one group of interchangeable fallen angels. They have different responsibilities, wounds, loyalties and ideas about humanity. Some love mankind. Some pity it. Some resent it. Some believe heaven has abandoned it.
They look at the same world and reach different conclusions.
Their fall does not begin when they agree to become evil.
It begins when they decide obedience is no longer enough.
Why Rewrite It Now?
Earlier drafts found important parts of the story.
One discovered the world. Another found the central conflict. Others made the characters more human and connected the angelic rebellion to the struggles of Cain, Enoch, Naamah and the people around them.
None of that work was wasted.
But finishing a draft only proves that a story can reach its ending. It does not prove that it has become everything it could be.
There are scenes in the earlier version that I still love. Some will survive almost unchanged. Others will return in different forms. Some have to go, even if they took weeks to write.
That is the difficult part.
Starting again would be easier if the previous draft were terrible.
It is not.
It contains good scenes, strong ideas and years of work. But a story can contain good parts and still need a stronger structure beneath them.
So I am returning to the plot.
I am rebuilding character arcs and rewriting large sections. I am asking what every major character believes about God, justice, freedom and purpose, and what those beliefs will cost them.
I am also preparing the story to work as the foundation for a premium television adaptation.
That does not mean turning the novel into a screenplay. I still want to use everything prose does best: thought, memory, motive, spiritual doubt and the private reasoning people use to justify terrible choices.
But I am also asking whether the conflict can be felt and seen.
Can readers picture Nod rising from the Euphrates?
Can they feel the rope bridges moving above the black water?
Can they understand why people would worship beings who fell from the sky to save them?
And can they understand why that worship might disappear the first time one of those beings bleeds?
The spectacle matters, but only when it carries emotional and moral weight.
Why Share the Journey?
For most of its life, this story has existed privately.
I have worked on it intensely, put it aside when family or business required more of me, and returned later to find that the world had kept developing somewhere in the back of my mind.
There have been times when I was certain I would finish it.
There have also been times when its scale felt ridiculous.
But the story has never left me.
Over the next year, I want to share parts of the world, the characters, the research and the decisions involved in turning four ancient verses into a trilogy.
I will talk about the world before the Flood.
I will talk about Cain, Enoch, Naamah, sacrifice, Eden and the Watchers.
I will talk about why angels might fall for women, but also about everything that had to happen inside them before that temptation could become possible.
I will not reveal the major twists. Some doors should remain closed until the reader reaches them.
But I can show you the road leading toward them.
The goal is to release The Descent of the Gods in June 2027.
It is an unapologetically Christian story, but it is built around questions that reach beyond one audience.
What do we do when God, justice or the shape of our lives does not make sense?
Do we trust?
Do we wait?
Or do we take control and call it righteousness?
That question has kept me with this story for twenty years.
Now I want to finish it in a way that justifies the time it has asked of me.
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