Between
1999 and 2009, I wrote seventeen novels.
Seventeen novels in a decade. No
matter how you look at it, that’s pretty impressive. And it’s not like all of those books were
tiny little tossed off manuscripts, either.
I did a few for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, in which the
goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. I’ve completed that task three times, but
only one novel was completely finished in that time; the others were completed
long after NaNo was over.) Most took
between four and eight months to write, with the exception of what is still my magnum opus, The Legend of Jenny McCabe,
which took nine months and topped out at just over 1,000 pages.
I’m not
just dicking around here.
Between
2009 and 2013, I wrote no novels. Oh,
don’t get me wrong. I kept busy. In 2009, I lost my job and slipped into a
profound depression for a little while.
What saved me was an offer to work on a nonfiction book about Stephen
King, called The Illustrated
Stephen King Movie Trivia Book.
Research and writing absorbed me; four months later, I emerged with a
whole bunch of pages and a deeply thorough knowledge of the Children of the Corn films.
More
nonfiction books followed: I worked on a series of chapbooks about Stephen King
– 80-page works that focused on specific facets of King’s career. In 2010, I compiled those into a single
volume, along with all my critical reviews of King’s books. The result, A Good Story and Good Words, is awaiting
publication. I also wrote Stephen King Limited
in a chapbook two-pack; I’ve since expanded that,
and publication looks to be imminent.
I’ve also
gotten a short story published in a real-life anthology. Compiled my own anthology of short stories (This Terrestrial Hell,
out in paperback soon). Got a couple of
volumes of poetry published (Foggy
at Night in the City and Surf’s
Up, both available as ebooks).
And tried, really hard, to write new novels.
And
failed.
It’s not
easy, writing a book. It takes time,
will, energy, and drive. And
caffeine. It also takes the ability to
know you’re writing a first draft, and that while things like theme and tone
and character and motivation are important, they can always be tightened up in
second and third drafts. Still, it’s work. It’s hard work, and you advance
incrementally, like working out. Even on
those days you somehow churn out 7,000 words, that’s only about twenty-five
pages in a book that should contain hundreds.
I’m not
sure what happened to those two books I tried to write in those “dead”
years. American Storm was intended as another of my
multi-character explorations of people my age living in Boston; largely
plotless and reliant on situation. Most
of my books are like that. Tangerine was
positioned as a new horror novel about a writer possessed by the ghost of a
dead writer from the 1940s, and the havoc he creates. That one had a plot, but I never fleshed it
out entirely past the second part, and my characters were just a little too
similar to those in Stephen King’s Duma
Key, and I gave up halfway through.
Both of
those ideas are still viable, by the way.
I’m still interested in going back and writing them. But they need massive tweaks to get them to
where I want to get them, so they remain in the future.
What else
did I do in the dead years? I
edited. I had two rules when I started
writing: a book needed to be at least
40,000 words (about 165 pages) to be considered a novel, and I would Never Look
Back. That meant when I finished one
book, I would put it aside, wait two weeks, then start on another. No second draft. No third draft. No polish.
I never edited
my books. I never thought it was
necessary, because I’d go through and edit while I was writing it, so my first
draft was super clean. The 40,000 word
rule still stands (though I’ve never written a book fewer than 52k words), but
oh my God, what hubris on that editing thing.
In my
fallow time, I decided to look at books I’d written in the past and try to make
them publication-ready. I turned to
Kickstarter for that. My first
Kickstarter project, I’m On Fire,
was a book I wrote in 1999 and needed a complete overhaul. I basically kept all the characters and most
of the motivations and rewrote everything else.
When that turned out successful, I turned to Kickstarter again with my
book Roller Disco Saturday Night,
which started off as a NaNoWriMo novel but didn’t end that way (for that
reason, the first half was written very fast and the second half was written
very slowly, and it read that way). All
the main characters were interesting, sort of, but my main main character lacked agency and
motivation. Which sucked, because I’ve
made a little cottage industry about casting high school girls as my main
characters, and usually they’re cooler than that. Kickstarter allowed me to rewrite Roller Disco from the
ground up and give Ruth Geary a reason to be, and I will be forever grateful
for that.
When I
finished Roller Disco,
I decided to try my hand at something new.
Something small. A novella I
called My Agent of Chaos. It was going to be a roommate-from-hell
scenario, short and punchy and nasty. It
turned out to be a little more interesting than that, with a main character who
can’t remember his past – a detriment when the past comes back to meet
him. It’s about love and sex and memory
and while it’s not perfect, it brought me back to writing longform fiction
(145,000 words, about 600 pages) for the first time in four years. It wasn’t an easy book to write. Sometimes it was like dragging words out of
me with a chain and a winch. But it
came. It happened.
In those
dead years, I tried to start the fifth book in my Wayne Corbin crime novel
series three or four times. The title Panic Town came to me
in 2010, actually, and I knew it was going to be about a book that my main guy
had to find. I also knew I had to deal
with the events of the last book, in which a number of tragedies occurred. The other issue was that the last Wayne
Corbin book was written in 2004, a decade ago.
I wanted the events of this
book to occur fairly soon after that.
Because of the time jump in real life, I decided to adhere to the Robert
B. Parker/ Spenser way of time, in which time does pass and characters do grow older, but not at the same rate as the author
or the outside world. For example, the
second book in the series, The
Color of Blood and Rust, was written in 2000, and I talk all
about how AOL is a big deal. In Panic Town, they’re
all using iPhones, and it’s not
a big deal. There are ten years between
books, but for Wayne Corbin, only seven months have passed. That’s the magic of fiction.
Here’s the
magic of reality: I was twenty-four when I first launched into the world of
Wayne Corbin. I’m knocking on forty’s
door right now, and while it took me a few days to get the rhythm of Wayne’s
world, I took to it with aplomb.
Kickstarter likely had something to do with that. The way Kickstarter has worked for me is as a
book advance, which a traditional publisher will do to give the writer time and
space to work on his novel until the next one.
In his most popular days, Stephen King would often get tens of millions
for a three or four contract. I got
about $4,000 to spend four months writing Panic
Town, and I worked like a mad bastard earning that money.
But it was
also that I fell in love with writing fiction again, exploring worlds I created
and making them live. I sent out the
book yesterday and I’m waiting to hear back from my readers. I hope they love reading it as much as I
loved writing it.
The
what-now: I have a score of poems to write for people who donated $75 or
more. I am going to start editing My Agent of Chaos; it
really needs a second draft. And working
on an outline for the NaNoWriMo novel I’m tackling for November, what aims to
be a short, bittersweet novel called Things
Have Changed. If I can
finish it, it will be my twentieth novel.
Twentieth. Wow.
Okay, thank
you for reading. It’s time for me to get to work.
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