THE UNIVERSE IS TAPPING ME ON THE SHOULDER, AND I’M LISTENING
Wow. Four-plus years since I last posted here. A lot has happened, to say the least. Here’s a breakdown of what’s relevant to this blog:
1. I still do manuscript editing, but it is no longer how I make my living, or propose to make it going forward; I’ll do such work when it personally appeals to me, such as with previous clients with whom I’ve had consistently great experiences, and refer out the rest. Right now I work full-time for Amazon as an (internal) book reviewer for Kindle Vella. I enjoy the work and hope it keeps going. As things stand now, I work from one six-month contract to the next, at least in twelve-month increments. Which leads to ….
2. The year 2022 is the year I complete my first crime novel. I’ve said and thought this almost every year of my adult life, but here’s a few reasons to believe I’m neither bullshitting myself or the universe this time:
a) I’m fifty-six years old, with some of the health problems you associate with men of that age, and I just can’t keep kicking that dream down the road anymore. Because … well, not to be morbid, but how much longer is that road?
b) I’ll have unfettered time to write. The big problem for me was that, as someone who makes his living working intimately with other people’s words, I found it difficult to flip a cerebral switch and find my own voice, and my attempts to push through that resulted in a schizophrenic quality to each day’s output because the voices of others, still fresh in my mind, were bleeding into mine. And I could never get free of that because I’ve had to hustle nonstop to keep food on my table and a roof over my head.
But, thanks to getting a guaranteed and regular contractor’s paycheck for the first time in more than a decade since I left newspapering, I’ve been able to not only plan for a writing sabbatical but plan to finance it. By law, Amazon cannot rehire me after twelve consecutive months of work for three months minimum, and that means that I’ll have three months minimum to pursue other things. And those other things need not involve work if I save scrupulously enough. I’m on target and then some.
c) My amazing fiancée is supportive of my plan and will give me the space I need to make it work. And speaking of space, in the last several months two friends have come through for me with open-ended offers to use their seldom-occupied second homes when available for use as a quiet writer’s garret. And, by exceptionally happy coincidence, these homes are located in towns — Port Angeles and Port Townsend, in Washington state — that I’m appropriating in parts for my novel’s setting. In fact, I’m going to spend a good chunk of this coming week up in Port Angeles — which I fondly refer to as the Shitty of Angels —doing prewriting and walking around this beautifully sepulchral town for ongoing inspiration.
d) Right now, it’s the Wild West in book publishing for promising debut authors, who sometimes get outrageously amazing multi-book deals on the basis of a) having a fresh voice; b) a commercially promising idea; and c) no bad-selling-backlist issues bogging them down. Aaaand, despite having worked on the edges of book publishing for more than a decade and publishing a handful of short stories, I still have my Debut Author Card to play. I never wanted to waste that card on a weak hand — aka, a book that likely had limited commercial appeal; aka, the kind of book I’ve been trying to write for decades — and now I finally have an idea for a novel that I think is equal to the value of the Debut Author Card — something Big and Bold and full of Original Ideas About Today’s World.
I figure, go big … or don’t go home.
(I won’t say too much, but the story as I’ve conceived of it at this point is a) a crime novel; b) a contemporary crime novel; and c) will be full of red meat for fans of the 1970s, which is by far my favorite time in history.)
e) I almost forgot the most important part: I pretty much know HOW to write a novel now. Editing them by the hundreds over the last decade, and reading them for several decades more than that, has finally helped me understand plot, story and character arcs and structure in way that never really clicked for me before. I know how to, as Elmore Leonard posited, leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. I know how to do more than turn a deft phrase here and there. I think I can do this without losing my way … or losing my faith in myself.
If all of the above doesn’t represent the universe tapping me on the shoulder and telling me that this is my time, I don’t know what is.
And that guy in the 2017 blog post? He’s as gone as a Gone Girl.