Back from “Vacation”…with a New Book

Hah! That was some vacation from blogging! Naturally, I got the nasty cold that’s been going around, probably once again picked up from sick students turning in germy hard-copy papers on final exam day. Have been sick as a dog the whole time I set aside for R&R. Of course, singing was out for the entire Christmas season, so there’s been pretty much nothing to do but sit in bed or a rocking chair and work.

But that itself has been moderately salubrious. Picked up a new client and have made decent progress through his and the other author’s magnum opuses (opi?).

One of these guys has written a vast saga of a novel. It’s pretty entertaining, but he needs some coaching on how to write fiction, he being by and large an academic sort of fella. As I was racking my brain trying to think of ways to explain how to blend setting, description, narrative, and characterization with the dialogue that he does best, it occurred to me that somewhere in the murky depths of an old hard drive, I had some examples that illustrate exactly those issues, and if I could find that stuff, I would know exactly where to go to find the right examples for the specific issues in question.

A plunge off the dock into the digital lake dredged up…yes! A novel I wrote way to hell and gone back in 2000! And yes, it did have examples of exactly what needed to be explained.

Huh. Think of that.

Out of boredom work-avoidance, I started re-reading the half-forgotten tale…and thought holy sh!t!

Did i write this?

REALLY???

The thing is incredibly good. It was good from the git-go, and right now — fourteen years later — it fits into a genre that’s selling briskly. It’s one of those things that leaves you wondering where these characters came from, where their story came from, and how on earth you ever came up with the skill to tell their story.

Why did I not try to publish when I finished it?

Well, because I got discouraged.

Stupidly — I knew better — I allowed myself to be talked into “workshopping” (yeah) the manuscript with a group of friends who wanted to be Writers with a Capital W. Two of them were taking graduate-level coursework in GDU’s creative writing program, at the time ranked among the top ten such programs in the country. Basically what creative writing programs do is teach people to run their copy past groups of readers who are interested in doing the same thing they’re doing (i.e., fellow authors of unpublishable fiction), subject themselves to criticism by these groups, rewrite, run the copy past…and so on to infinity. It’s an incestuous process that, in my opinion, produces just the kind of narcissistic snoozers that pass for literature these days. It discourages excitement and encourages conformity.

One of these women really did not like what I was writing, which, shall we say, ran to the swashbuckling and highlighted manly enterprise. And it must be said, in her defense, that the novel in question does contain some startling violence and alarming prognistications about the direction humanity will take in a post-post-apocalyptic era. This lady was into postmodern feminist Theory and New Age woo-woo (chakras! :roll:). My hero was the ultimate (male! :shock:) pragmatist in a Dark Age dominated by religious hoo-haw run amok. She hated that.

At one point, she announced that she refused to read any more of it. But she expected me to keep reading her endless naval lint-picking, which may have been wonderful as an exponent of the naval lint-picking genre but which, as it developed, she never had any intention of trying to publish. Because, she said, her feelings would be hurt if some editor rejected it.

Right.

As a result, I became so discouraged that I simply set the manuscript aside, even though it was essentially complete. My co-conspirator had me convinced that it was no good.

Wrong, lady!

When I picked it up again, fourteen years later, I could not believe I could have written anything that good. It is amazing stuff. Right now I’m preparing a proposal for an agent who says she’s looking for new authors (let’s hope this one isn’t into chakras). If she rejects, I may simply self-publish the thing — one of my business associates does Kindle formatting. One way or the other, this thing is going to see some kind of light of day.

So I’ve spent the alleged vacation dividing the days into thirds: half the daylight hours working on the client’s Micheneresque novel; half the day working on the other client’s memoir; and the evening working on the proposal. Let’s hope the index of 460 pages of medieval maritime history doesn’t drift in anytime soon!

As for the experience with the wannabe writer’s group: it pretty much confirmed what I’ve always thought about writer’s groups. It’s the blind leading the blind.

Want to write a book? Sit down and write it.

You don’t write it, jaw about it, and then rewrite, ad nauseam. You write it. You see if it works. You see if it works with professionals, not with a bunch of amateurs. It works or it doesn’t work. Then (and not until then) you move on.