The Road Can Be (Very) Long

I was asked recently how long had it taken me to get published. When I gave my answer, the person who’d asked me fell over in shock and cracked their egg open.

I started writing fiction back in 2002, after writing screenplays for about seven years (Maybe eight. Can’t remember. Too many wine bottles ago now). So if you start from 2002, then it took me over ten years to get here.

Ten. Years.

You know how many rejections that adds up to? How many failed novels?

Let me talk about "just" the road to publication first. To do that, we have to go back four years, to May 2009 when I finally landed an agent. Before that happy moment, I’d been writing, and writing, and then writing some more for about seven years. Six days a week, averaging forty-eight weeks a year.

You know, whenever I think back to that summer of 2009, I laugh. I was so naïve. I really thought that I’d be published immediately. Or six months, tops.

Um…. Not quite.

It’s a special time for me now. My debut novel, UNTOLD DAMAGE, has finally arrived on bookshelves. Almost exactly sixteen months from the day that my agent emailed me: “Um, dude? Your cell isn’t working. Call me.”

Sixteen months. Woah, right? That’s a pretty unfathomable amount of time.

Let me just say here that I understand that everyone’s road will be different. Some shorter. Some longer. Back in 2002, I really had no idea of just how long that road could be. No idea of how much effort, sweat, and perseverance it would take to go from the road marker of learning the craft of fiction writing, to the road marker of getting an agent, to the road marker of getting published.

And to think that the book that eventually got published wasn’t close to the one that hooked me up with my agent! No, thatbook didn’t sell. Got close, but never made it over the hill.

The book that did get me over the hill, UNTOLD DAMAGE, was written out of pure desperation. Seriously. The earlier version of the book, as I said, hadn’t sold. I needed something else, something new. I eventually (after months and months of sweating) found that “something else”.  I sent this new version of the first Mark Mallen book off to my agent. And wasn’t I floored when she said she loved it! I mean, I’d hoped she would of course but by that point, about 2.5 years down the road after hooking up with her, I wasn’t sure at all whether she would dig it, or dig me a ditch to go die in.

But, she loved it.

And how did I hook up with my agent? The person who is not only my advocate in the industry, but is also a great listener when I’m freaking the F out over something?

Well, the “getting the agent” part of the journey started with a killer query, naturally. Back in the early spring of 2009, I queried the agent who would eventually sign me. And let me just reiterate here what you probably already know about query letters: they’re really SALES letters. A query tells the reader why they should look at your book. I sent the infamous "nudge" email about six or eight weeks later.

My future agent got back to me almost immediately, thanking me for the nudge and asking to see the rest of the manuscript. So I sent it.

And then I waited.

Waited a couple weeks. Sweated every day that went by. I know we shouldn’t sweat those moments, but I did. What can I say? 

 She got back to me at the end of those two weeks saying, “Let’s seal this deal, dude!”

And that was it!

But, it wasn’t.

This current version of the book had to get polished first, off notes that my agent sent me. Then it went out to publishers. We got responses back. No sale, but some very good feedback. And so after a pow-wow with my agent, I rewrote the book again. Then it got sent it out again, and…

… and then after more "close but no cigar" responses, it was over for that version of the book.

Then what happened? Well, that book got completely rewritten. I gutted it. Put in a new foundation. Added new plumbing. Changed where the windows were situated, and also how the light hit the upstairs deck, and…

… and well, you get it.

Then we went back out on submission. And that leads me to here: having UNTOLD DAMAGE out in the world on bookstore shelves. Over three and half years after getting an agent. Or, if you prefer, a bit over ten years later if you start from when I began writing that first novel.

It’s finally come to fruition. All that work.

And like I mentioned earlier, I realize that it won’t take this long for everyone. Hell, it might take even longer. What I’m trying to say here is that you have to be prepared to play THE LONG GAME. From beginning to end. And in order to get there, you never give up on your goal: for every query you get back that’s a pass, you send out another. Every manuscript that bombs, you write another. Every time you feel like you can’t do it one more time, you do it one more time. Every time you get hit in the face with it all, you get up and keep going. If you want to write to be published, then you have to prepare for the long haul. As I’ve said, it may not always be a long process. But nine times out of ten?

It will be.

Bay Area resident Robert K. Lewis has been a painter, printmaker, and a produced screenwriter. He is a contributor to Macmillan's crime fiction fansite, Criminal Element. Lewis is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the International Thriller Writers, and the Crime Writers Association. Untold Damage is his first novel. The second novel in the Mark Mallen series, Critical Damage, will arrive April, 2014. Visit him online at RobertKLewis.comand at needlecity.wordpress.com.

Weighing in on Writing and Publishing

Brenda Bevan Remmes

by Brenda Remmes 

I have had a lifelong fixation on publishing a book.  At the same time I’ve fantasized “skinny” as somewhere in my future. The two ideas co-habitat together in a strange sort of paradigm.

The book writing thing…it ebbs and flows.   I go through moments of brilliance (at least in my thinking) and then suddenly sink into jabberwocky as if I live in Wonderland.  In fact, Wonderland is an ideal place for fleshy authors.

I get up every morning and flip on the computer in one continuous motion as I walk by my writing desk to the bathroom. I live by the rule that extra pounds of dirt and grime have mysteriously weighted down my body during the dark hours of the night and I take a long hot shower to rid myself of what I know will tip the scales unfairly.   Then, unclothed (completely stripped down…. …I’ve stopped even wearing nail polish) I mount the scale and get my first daily dose of  “Whew, it’s not too bad”,  or  “OMG, that can’t be.”

 My husband duplicates this morning adventure on the truth monster in a much more whimsical fashion, fully clothed.  What a show-off!   After forty years repeated morning after morning, the same words always follow.  He climbs on the scale and I mouth with him, “Oh, down another two pounds.  I wondered how I did that after all that ice cream I ate last night?”  I’ve considered divorce over that one morning exchange, but habits are hard to break and dissolving a marriage requires far more time and energy than I  have.  I am much too busy writing jabberwocky. 

My computer is now humming, even if I’m not. I clothe myself in weighty garments that add an additional fifteen pounds and proceed to read the last few pages that I wrote the day before. “P-lee-se, tell me it ain’t so.  Did I really write that?  What was I smoking?”  I start to slash and burn wishing that I could delete excess fat as fast as I can a days’ worth of work on one chapter.

I’m weighing constantly.  Too many words here, not enough description there.  Did I show or tell?  Are the words dank and stale or shimmering with their own individual pearls of imagery or symbolism?  I know I write as well as many commercial writers, and not as well as literary MFAs who annually attend the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. But I’m getting better.  Even Hemingway gets three out of five from some Amazon readers.

Success came fast and easy for me and then vanished overnight one day last October when  my editor broke a two year contract.  It was all too good to be true. Like winning the lottery, and two years later being told your game was rigged.   It hurt, of course, but I’m not as naïve as I once was to the publishing business.  Everyone has to make money and if the numbers don’t work, then neither does the novel…at least not for that publisher. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad novel.  It means the publisher put it on a scale for potential profit and the book didn’t carry enough weight for the long haul.  The irony, of course, is I’ve always looked for a scale that would mitigate weight.   Be careful what you wish for.

Adam Gopnik writes in a recent Talk of the Town in The New Yorker, (3/18/13) “The future of writing in America – or, at least the future of making a living by writing – seems in doubt as rarely before.  Thanks to the Internet, the disproportion between writerly supply and demand, always tricky, has tipped:  anyone can write, and everyone does, and beginners are expected to be the last pure philanthropists, giving it all away for the naches.   It has never been easier to be a writer, and it has never been harder to be a professional writer.”

I have been a convinced Quaker for more than thirty years now.  Quakers have taught me the value of patience.  I didn’t get it right away, but I’ve learned in the presence of weightyQuakers much more humble than I.   When you’re not sure what to say, say nothing. When you’re not sure what to do, step back, seek clearness.  Over the years I’ve found this to be a healthy process every time I begin to doubt myself.  Philip Gulley, one of my favorite Quaker writers, wrote on his web site last week, “The world cares little for our convenience.  It does not care that we expected one thing and were given another.  Reality is no respecter of our expectations and demand. I pray this year, for myself and for each of you, that the gift of flexibility, for that wonderful gift of elasticity, for the ability to deal constructively, bravely and lovingly with the unexpected changes we face in  life.”

Thank you, Philip, for that gentle reminder.  Regardless of the way the scale tilts, I hear your prayer.

Stop Writing!

By Erin Cashman

I am a person who loves making lists. Sometimes I add things to my list that I have already finished, just so I can cross it off. I love finishing things. I love painting rooms in my house, because in the course of a couple of days I can start and finish it. I can walk into the room and see that it was green, and now it is yellow. It is tangible.

While I write, I am not someone who feels terrified by the blank page. Once I have an idea for a book, it takes all of my self-control not to start writing it. I literally have to force myself to wait, take some notes, and let the idea germinate inside my head for a while before I start writing the story. I also never get writer’s block. If I can’t think of what to do next, I write in caps PUT SOMETHING INTERESTING HERE or FIGURE THIS OUT. And then I start a new chapter, or I write another part of the book. I am so eager to finish the book once I start it. I always know generally how it will end, so I want to hurry up and get there!

But as all of you writers know, writing a novel is neither a quick nor an easy process, and when I try to make it one, it shows. During my journey from aspiring published author to published author I have learned so much. For me, the hardest lesson has been this: when you aren’t sure where your story is going, or how to handle a character or a relationship, STOP WRITING. Shut your computer and walk away. Literally. Take a walk, take a nap, go for a long drive, bake cookies. Do something that does not require thinking at all. Don’t go on the internet, read a book or watch television. Let your mind wander. I find my best ideas almost always come when I’m walking my dog. I usually start out thinking about an issue with one of my kids, or a problem with work. But soon into the quiet rhythm of the walk (no ipods!) my mind wanders. Within a few days of NOT thinking about my book, the solution almost always simply comes to me. It may be on the walk, or it may be as I lie in bed somewhere in the never-land between dream and reality, or it may be as I’m driving alone in the car (no radio or cell phones!) In our very busy, hectic lives, we have so few times when we allow our minds to wander freely. And yet -- at least for me -- these are the times when my imagination takes over and inspiration hits me like a lightning bolt.

If you’re like me, and you set goals for yourself like x pages a day, or so many words a week, or a first draft by a certain date, my advice might be hard to take. It will take you longer to finish that first draft -- to cross it off your list. But sometimes the best ideas come not when we are sitting in front of the computer screen, or with a pen perched in our fingers, but when we tune everything out and listen.

Inspiration often whispers softly in our ear, and we may need to tune everything else out to hear her.

Every Writer Should Consider a John Deere

by Brenda Remmes

Five years ago when I retired my husband gave me a very special present.  We had a screened-in sleeping porch off of our upstairs bedroom. He replaced the screens with ceiling to floor windows, extended the vents for air-conditioning and heat, put in electrical outlets and bought me a wrap-around desk.  “Write,” he said.  “Write to your heart’s content.” 

I did.  I do.  I still want to.

Last month my husband retired.  Lord knows the man deserves to retire.  He’s worked almost every day of his life since his first paper route at age eight. At the same time he’s been an attentive son, a devoted father and a loving husband.  But he’s now about to drive me crazy.

I’m an early morning writer.  I wake up, I’m ready to write and go full steam until around 3 p.m.  If I’m on fire, I’ll go into the night.  If I’m stalled, I put my head back and stare out into the forest through those magnificent windows, mired rewrites rambling through my head.  Someone, somewhere, called that the creative process, so I claim the caption when lost in thought.

Normally, my husband would be up and gone by 7 a.m.  Now he wraps his arm around me and whispers, “Stay with me, just a little longer.”

“I’ve got to write,” I say.

“Don’t get up yet,” he pleads. 

I untangle myself around 7:30 to get to my computer.  He talks to me from the next room.  “What are your plans for the day?  Going into town?  Need anything?  Shall I fix you breakfast?” 

I’m already starting to get agitated.  Once he goes downstairs I’m sure things will be better.  I hear him bang through the pots in the kitchen. Then he turns on NPR.  Since we both have some hearing loss, he turns it up loud enough for me to start to catch tidbits of disturbing media excerpts.  I close all the doors between him and me with unnecessary force. 

If it’s good weather, I’m blessed by the fact that he’ll then go outside and straddle his John Deere tractor for a couple of hours, regardless of whether or not the front forty needs mowing.  All I hear is the rumble of the tractor going back and forth.  I can deal with that.   In reality, John Deeres are every man’s sedative.    When in doubt, in lieu of marriage counseling, get a John Deere.  It’s a better long term investment.

By noon he’s back upstairs.  “Planning to break for lunch?”

“Not yet.”

“Should I fix you something?” 

“Don’t bother.”

“Okay, well, then…”  back downstairs, more banging of pots and pans, NPR back on for unsettling noon news  which requires me to go on-line to find out what the heck is going on in the world now.  Then I go and close the doors he left open on the way down.

Forty-five minutes later he’s back upstairs.  “Whatchadoing?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Can I help with anything?”

“Not yet, maybe later.”

“I’ll  just read some,” he says as he settles into the chair across from my desk.  “I’ll be quiet, I promise.”

I don’t know about you, but having someone seated across from me while I’m “thinking”…even a quiet someone…is somewhat distracting.  But it is a beautiful spot in the house and on hot or cold days when the back porch won’t do, I try to be mindful of his needs, too.

“Listen to this,” he says.  “It’s really good.”

“I’ve already read the book,” I say a bit too spitsy.  “Remember, I recommended it to you.”

“Oh, right,” he concedes, “but I really like this particular part.”

I give in.  “Read it to me.”  He does.  I agree it’s good.

“Thought I’d go into town.  You wanna come?”

“Did you finish the lawn?”

“Will do the rest tomorrow.”

“Need anything?”

“No,” I say, but I’m thinking fast in hopes of coming up with something that requires his departure.

By 4 p.m. the car pulls back in the drive from town and my creative juices have ceased altogether.  My husband unloads the car with pretty much the same groceries he bought the day before and today chicken legs were on sell for .49 a pound.  The fact that we already have about twenty pounds of chicken legs doesn’t deter him.  I try to find a place to cram them into our already stuffed freezer.  I’m feeling pretty guilty by now. Who could ever begrudge such a goodhearted soul and I know that one day in my life I may yearn to hear him whisper, “Stay with me just a little bit longer,” and wish that I had made a different choice.  Time gives life such better perspectives on what’s really important.  I succumb to figuring out what to cook for dinner and being a bit more commutative.  After all, we’ve made it forty years, and this, too, will eventually find some natural flow.  But, it is a new and different challenge in our lives.

What Inspires?

by Brenda Remmes

                   Old poker table  from early 1900s still resides in the back room of the small town pharmacy.

Repeatedly, other writers tell me “get to know your character, put them in the proper place and your story will emerge.”  I don’t think I appreciated this fully until I was working on about the fifth draft of my novel and while there were multiple chapters I had written and discarded, it was in these discarded pages that we became friends.  There was too much background material to include in the novel, but enough for me to get a clear picture of the people I had created and where they lived.  They become real in my mind as I began to place them with their everyday families and jobs.  I have to remind myself that, like Lake Wobegon, they are all fictional.

In developing a character and the place, there is usually something that starts my juices flowing…someone who always wears pink, or a particular meeting place where the locals all go.  Once you notice a quirk, it’s a lot easier to embellish and move forward. How did that quirk evolve?  How do other people respond to it?  It’s kind of fun watching people and places shape up.  I spend a lot of time doing research, although I pale next to the likes of Anne Clinard Barnhill, Nancy Bilyeau, and Sophie Perinot who have taken on topics in foreign countries centuries ago. The extent of their research is impressive. My research has been focused on more mundane things like flying an airplane, sitting around a fire house discussing fires(if there had been an alarm, they would have taken me with them), learning how to shoot a Colt 45, or going to a free range turkey farm to watch them slaughter turkeys.  My research is focused on a small town in Eastern North Carolina eighty years ago, and the most fun I’ve had is talking to older folks about the way it was when they were kids.

I’ve lived in small towns most of my life, so I’m familiar with the rhythm.  They’ve changed a lot, just in the past twenty years.  The economy has taken its toll on once thriving little businesses.  Every town had a handful of stores you could depend on. One of those stores used to be a pharmacy.  Another was a local restaurant.  Both of these places are where much of the action occurs in my novel.  While the local mom and pop diners haven’t yet become extinct, the small town pharmacies are getting hit pretty hard.  When you take into account the chain-drug outlets and recognize anyone can get their prescriptions filled at most grocery stores and then add the online Medcos and Express Scripts  there’s not much room left for Shuckers Local Pharmacy on the corner.  Pharmacists now stand behind mega counters shuffling pills and plugging in insurance codes while supervising a half dozen pharm techs.

When I started writing about a small town pharmacy operating in 1992, I remembered a place where people helped themselves to a cup of coffee out of the pot that sat on the counter and you spent the first ten minutes catching up on the family before the pharmacist got up to fill your prescription.  Twenty years isn’t that long ago.  Seems like yesterday to me, and yet when I realize how much has changed since then, I am astonished at what no longer is.  When I wanted to find out how it was in 1932, I talked to Billy.

Billy walked me through the years he worked as a soda jerk when he was in high school. The soda counter sat at the front of the pharmacy. Ice cream and milk shakes were the order for the after-school crowd.  Seltzer water with a spurt of cola syrup or lemonade made from a jug of sugar water and two or three squirts of hand squeezed lemon juice were other favorites. In the morning there was a checker game going in the front room.   Billy was responsible for having all the orders off the table in the back by 3 pm in preparation for the daily poker game.  The poker table (pictured above) had ash trays set in each corner of the table for the cigarettes which kept the back room in a smoky haze that wafted into the front area of the store. A lot of those cigarettes didn’t make it into the ash trays as the game got hot, as evidenced by the circles of wood burns.

Certain customers were known to have their favorite drinks waiting.  A teaspoon of bromine in a coke could settle-your-nerves, and a squirt of ammonia in a coke was used for a pick-me-up.  The first sales of Coca-Cola began in a pharmacy, Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, on May 8, 1886, with an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass.  It was claimed to cure everything from headaches, heartburn, and depression to impotence.  The cocaine was removed in 1903 when the Stephan Company in Maywood, NJ, started using a cocaine-free coca leaf extract.  To this day it remains the only manufacturing company authorized by the Federal Government to import and process the coca plant.  

The particular pharmacy I knew in 1992 isn’t there anymore.  The owner died.  People either mail order their prescriptions or pick them up at a Wal-Mart thirty miles away.  A couple of independent pharmacies still hang-on in adjacent towns, and yet Americans are buying more drugs than ever before in our history.  Still, I write about how things were, (not so very long ago, really) not so much because I want to return to those days, but because some things are worth remembering.  The local pharmacy “where everyone knew your name,” is one of them.  As one grandchild asked, “Grandma, how did you get on the internet before computers?”  Come sit down, child, and let me read you a book.  Let the book tell the story.

Inspiration: The Twinkle In My Eye

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Growing up, there was nothing I wanted more than to become a mother. My children were the twinkle in my eye as far back as I can remember, from swaddling my favorite baby doll to picking out my firstborn’s name way back in junior high. What I didn’t know then was that after twenty-plus wonderful, terrifying years of working to turn two human babies into two kind, responsible adults, I was going to have another baby. A book baby.

In between child-tending, clothes-washing, vegetable-growing, house-cleaning, toy-organizing, meal-preparing, party-throwing, kid-schlepping, and teenager-wrangling, I wrote for fun and I have a drawer full of half-started novels to show for it. Of course I dreamt of finishing a book, of being published, of living the “dream”. But writing was just a relaxing hobby, a luxury I afforded myself when I had time. Then, suddenly, the story I knew I had to write came to me--another twinkle in my eye, if you will. 

First, a little back-story. 

My mother came to America alone, by ship, at twenty-one, to marry an American soldier she met while working at the PX outside her village. Just over a decade had passed since WWII, and Germany was still rebuilding. Her family was dirt poor, and the lure of an ideal American life was powerful enough to make her leave her family and marry a man she barely knew. Alas, her American dream was no fairy tale. The American soldier turned out to be dishonest and cruel, and my mother had nowhere to go for help, living on an isolated farm twenty minutes from the nearest town with no car and no driver’s license. Somehow she persevered, giving birth in quick succession to my sister, my brother, and me. Eventually, my parents divorced, and my mother took us back to Germany, hoping to start over. But it wasn’t meant to be. My father insisted she return to the States, even though he had no interest in being part of our lives. Luckily, my mother met and married a caring man who took us in as his own. I grew up traveling to Germany to see my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, longing to live in their beautiful world full of tradition and culture. 

Then, when I was a sophomore in high school, I learned about the Holocaust. To say it was difficult to wrap my head about those atrocities happening in my amazing, beautiful dream-world would be an understatement. WWII was our history teacher’s favorite subject, and he was obsessed with teaching us as much as possible about what happened to the Jews. It didn’t take long for some of my classmates to start calling me a Nazi, saluting and shouting “Heil Hitler” in the halls. That was when I began to understand the concept of collective guilt. I asked my mother questions about what it was like during the war, about Opa’s role, and about the Jews. I soon realized that in her own quiet way, Oma had tried to help, risking her life to set out food for the passing Jewish prisoners, even though she could barely feed her own children. Opa was drafted, fought on the Russian front, and escaped two POW camps. For over two years my mother and her family had no idea if he was dead or alive until he showed up on their doorstep one day. He was a foot soldier, not SS or a Nazi. But I was too young to understand or explain to my peers that being German doesn’t make you a Nazi, that protesting something in America is easy compared to protesting something in The Third Reich, or to ask them what they would have done if they had to choose between someone else’s life and their own. My American father had taught me that evil has the ability to reside in the heart of any man, regardless of race, nationality, or religion, but I didn’t know how to make those points. I didn’t know how to tell my friends that collective guilt as opposed to individual guilt is senseless; that retrospective condemnation is easy. 

Then, over twenty years later, after another conversation with a close friend (ironically one of my former high school teasers) about how much responsibility the average German held for bringing Hitler into power, inspiration struck. I needed to write a novel about what it was like for an average German during the war, while still being sensitive to what the Nazis did to the Jews. But I also knew my book needed a twist if I wanted to sell it. Then I remembered how James Cameron used a love story to tell the bigger story of the ill-fated Titanic. And so the romance between a young German woman and a Jewish man was born. Together with stories from my mother’s life in Nazi Germany, I knew the entire novel, from beginning to end.  

Writing the first draft was a lot like the night my husband and I made the decision to get pregnant, exciting and fun. How long would it take to conceive? Would pregnancy be easy or hard? Who would the baby look like? I finished the first dreadful draft of my novel in three days, in longhand, on a legal pad. The Plum Tree had gone from being a twinkle in my eye to a plus sign on a pregnancy test. 

Then the realities of gestation kicked in. Just like growing a baby, growing a novel takes time. After years of rewrites and research, nausea and fatigue, I heard a heartbeat. At long last, the twinkle in my eye had developed into something viable and real. Now it won’t be long before the big delivery day arrives, when I’ll be able to hold my novel in my hands, to admire and caress it, all dressed up in its newborn cover. Just like putting my son on the bus for his first day of kindergarten, or dropping my daughter off at her first college dorm room, I’m going to be a proud, nervous mother, hoping my book baby will be welcomed into the world with kind words and open arms.