The Slump

            November got off to a good start in terms of book sales. The first two days of the month were well above average, and I had high hopes that things would continue in that fashion the rest of the way.

            But, as they say in the financial services industry, past performance is no guarantee of future results. On the third day of the month, sales dropped to below average, and on the fourth day, I sold no books at all.

            A day without sales is not unheard of. I’m in the early stages of self-publishing my mystery novels, and while I haven’t been at it long, I’ve been doing it long enough to know that sales are random and fluctuate wildly. The day with no sales simply offset one of the two good days at the beginning, and there was nothing to worry about.

            Until, that is, the day of bupkis was followed by another (not unusual), then another (more unusual), then another (quite unusual).

The Skunk on the Couch

            Athletes are familiar with slumps. Sports fans can readily call to mind a ball player who suddenly couldn’t hit or a basketball hotshot who suddenly couldn’t make a wide-open shot. It’s in the nature of the game. The athletes, however, can at least practice more, work on their technique, and try to pull themselves out of it.

            My book sales, however, are entirely outside my control. People buy when they do for all sorts of reasons, and with no apparent pattern. My wife thinks it’s all random; I think there’s an algorithm somewhere and I just haven’t found it. But no matter what the reason, I can’t control it.

            I tried to influence the sales with tweets and other social media. No luck. I had an ad running on television. El Zippo.  After days of being skunked, I began to think of the skunk as a personal entity. In my mind, the sales chart was a once-pristine retail outlet purveying my books, now transformed by a skunk on the couch, scaring the customers away.

Beer and Potato Chips

            As sale-less day followed sale-less day, and my morale began to droop like a mustache in a Georgia summer, I found myself elaborating on the skunk fantasy. I pictured Skunk lying back on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, watching daytime soaps while swilling beer and eating countless sacks of potato chips. Then I began to envision him inviting his no-account relations over and trashing the room altogether.

            Even my wife was saying I needed to sell a book and get this thing over with.

            It was getting so bad I asked someone I know to buy a book, just to see if my sales were being properly recorded by Amazon. The sale showed up promptly and told me that Amazon wasn’t the problem.

            The slump lasted eight wretched, nerve-wracking days, and then, like a heat wave broken by a rainstorm, it was over. On the ninth day, I returned home after my Rotary Club meeting, went to my sales report, and found that in the time I’d been gone, I’d sold two and a half times the normal daily volume of books. Just like that!

            This slump was at the far edge of the bell-shaped curve (if not off it altogether), and I’ll probably have no idea why it happened. That’s all right; I don’t have to know. I just don’t want to go through it again any time soon.

The Writer's Intuition

            I probably could never have been a doctor, and if, somehow, I had made it into that position, I most likely would have done a lousy job of it. Although I have a rational, logical mind, it doesn’t wrap itself around the details of science particularly well, and spending every day with complaining sick people is not my idea of a good time.

            If I’d gone into that line of work, I would have been the doctor who threw it up at the age of 40 and bought a vineyard.

            On the other hand, I most likely would have made a good lawyer had I pursued that career. My logical mind applies itself to legal problems far more readily than it does to medical problems, and the courtroom holds far more instinctive appeal for me than the operating room.

            Actually, knowing how journalism turned out, there’s a part of me that wishes from time to time that I had gone into law.

Oh No, You Can’t

            One of the most pernicious mantras of our time — one that will be spoken at many a commencement ceremony over the next several weeks — is, “You can be anything you want to be.” Horse hockey. Not one person in a hundred will ever acquire the political skills or the desire to get elected dog catcher, never mind President of the United States.

            A more accurate appraisal would be, “If you find a pursuit that your intellect, temperament and talent suit you for; and if you work at that pursuit for a considerable length of time, until you sharpen your skills to the point where they become intuitive, you can, with a bit of luck, be successful in that endeavor.”

            The trick is knowing yourself somewhat realistically. Don’t we all remember kids in high school who thought they were going to be professional ball players when they could barely play catch? Or who wanted to be movie stars when they had no expressive ability whatsoever?

So You Want to Write a Book

            Amazon has now made it possible for anyone who has written a book to put it out in front of the world. This has allowed a few people who have written good books to self-publish them. It has allowed far more people who have written terrible books to embarrass themselves in front of a worldwide audience. I’ve published two mystery novels this way myself and am not entirely sure which class I belong in.

            I do know that writing a mystery isn’t easy. Almost anyone who succeeds at it will have read hundreds of mysteries to absorb how it’s done; will have been developing his or her writing skills over the years; and will have developed the writer’s mentality that sees the world, always, as material to be mined for fiction.

            Without the mentality, and without the intuitive understanding of writing that comes from having done it a lot, almost no one is going to come up with anything passable, no matter how many creative writing classes they take. My old managing editor Ward Bushee used to say, “You can’t teach judgment. A person either has it or they don’t, and the best you can do is help develop it a bit in someone who already has it.”

            The same could be said of writing.

Murderous Corporations

            A while back I was reading a mystery novel (a reasonably good one, actually) that left me feeling at the end that something wasn’t right about the story. It had to do with several mysterious deaths that turned out to be related to a large corporation trying to cover up pollution for which it was responsible. At the end, the case was cracked and the CEO of the company was frog-marched in front of the TV cameras after being arrested for murder.

            And I found myself saying, “I don’t think so.”

            I don’t think so, not because I believe in the wonderfulness of large companies and the free market. I concede they do some things well and provide some value, but on the whole I think they need to be encouraged less and tamed more. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about big corporations during my time on the planet, it’s this:

            They are incredibly conservative and risk-averse.

Lawyer Them to Death

            Few things, really, are riskier than committing a murder. When a body is found or someone mysteriously and inexplicably disappears, the police tend to take it seriously. Once experienced detectives start poking around in something like that, there’s no telling what they’ll find and where their inquiries will lead. If you kill somebody, one oversight, one person talking out of turn could lead to your being in a position where you have far worse problems than worrying about your retirement plan.

            So why take the chance when there’s a safer alternative? In the case of a corporation, that would be to keep up the illegal activity until caught, pin it on some mid-to-low level flunky, and have your lawyers negotiate the best deal possible with whatever regulatory agency is overseeing the activity in question.

            Once that’s done, you calculate the costs to the decimal and decide whether it makes more sense to stop the illegal activity or keep doing it and pay any future fines and legal costs if caught again. Then you make that decision and move on. Viewed from that perspective, it makes a lot more sense to lawyer your tormentors to death than to actually kill them.

But It Happens on TV

            Nevertheless, on TV, in the movies, and in popular novels, corporations are frequently depicted killing people who threaten them. Yet stop and think about it. How many real-life cases can you name of corporations having someone killed? And don’t mention Karen Silkwood, because suspicious as her death appears, there’s no hard evidence to connect Kerr-McGee to it.

            Which raises another question: Can it be that corporations are bumping people off wholesale and doing it so well they get away with it? Again, I have my doubts. From my observation and experience, most big companies are at least somewhat inefficient, and it’s hard for me to believe that large numbers of them suddenly become deadly effective if they decide to kill someone.

            Unless we’re talking about an outright criminal enterprise, murder is not going to be a standard business practice. Nearly all murders are committed by individuals acting on emotions and impulses they can’t control. Corporations are more systematic and have far more options than individuals. The Supreme Court may have ruled that corporations are people, but when it comes to murder, that’s seldom the case.

When Book Revisions Get Out of Control

            The other day I was having coffee with a photographer friend. We meet from time to time to discuss our respective crafts, and this particular day, we were talking about mine. And he asked a very good and very interesting question.

            He prefaced it by saying that it seemed to him that there are often a number of different ways of saying something clearly and effectively. So how much, he continued, does it matter, whether a writer gets a sentence or a paragraph perfect? If it was all right on the first draft, how important is it to keep re-doing it; and, in the course of re-doing it, isn’t it possible that something that was good in the first draft gets lost in the course of constant revisions?

            My answer was yes.

Genre Fiction vs. “Literature”

            Then again, I write genre fiction — mystery novels, to be precise. That no doubt affects my opinion on the issue. I know I’m producing disposable items, not heirlooms. My books should be done well enough to keep readers entertained during a long plane flight, but I’m under no illusions that anyone will be reading them a hundred years from now.

            In that case, the standard isn’t getting it perfect (which a writer almost never does, anyway), but rather getting it pretty good within a reasonable amount of time. Once the first draft is written, it goes through three revisions, the last of which involves reviewing and addressing my editor’s changes. After that, it’s caveat emptor for prospective readers.

            I do a great deal of planning and outlining before I begin writing, and with years of journalism experience at my tail, I fancy myself pretty good at writing competent prose on the first go-around. Because of that, and because of the standards of the genre, my first drafts are generally 90 percent of the way to what I want, and revisions are mostly housekeeping affairs, rather than major conceptual rewrites.

Buy a Book at the Airport

            Now obviously, if something just isn’t right, the author should keep working on that something until it gets to at least some semblance of rightness. You don’t want to put your book out there with something in it that you know is wrong. I mean, we have to have some standards.

            Nevertheless, I keep reading posts in author groups and other such places in which people are agonizing over how to get something perfect. A lot of times, it’s the title and/or first sentence of their book. Other times, it’s just the question of revisions in general. The problem with that is that when you look at anything — a manuscript, a house, a marriage — too long and too hard, all you see are the problems, and the good qualities fade into the background. It’s a path to madness, and writers are singularly prone to traveling it.

            If anyone really believes their book has to be revised to the point of perfection, my advice would be to go into any airport bookstore, purchase any bestselling novel, and read it. None of them are perfect, and some aren’t even very well written, but they had something — a story, an idea, a strong central character — that made people like them. And that was enough.

            As one of my editors at the newspaper used to say, “Just tell the damn story and give me clean copy.”

A Week in the Country

            Back in the days when giants like Harold Ross, E.B. White and James Thurber roamed the hallways of The New Yorker, that magazine regularly ran fillers  consisting of mistakes made in other publications with a wry comment added.

            One of the regular headings was “Our Forgetful Authors,” which appeared over excerpts from a book, usually fiction, in which several passages on different pages stated a fact differently. For example, a female character’s hair might be described as light brown on page 32, auburn on page 68 and reddish-blonde on page 131. When I was in college, I always thought it was hysterically funny.

            Now that I’ve written a mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, and have a second coming out in a couple of months, I’m not as inclined to laugh. Truth is, that hits a bit close to home, and having walked that mile in an author’s shoes, I can see all too easily how mistakes like that happen. It’s a miracle there aren’t twice as many.

Time Dims the Memory

            Implicit in writing an inventive work is that there are no pre-existing facts. The author is sole custodian of the information and has to catalogue it as the writing of the book proceeds. That sounds a lot easier than it actually is.

            Part of the problem is that a book is typically written over an extended period of time — six months to two years is a normal range. By the time you’re two-thirds of the way through, it’s easy to forget what you wrote in the first 30 pages months ago. And if you write the way I do, you’re focusing relentlessly on getting the prose right as you go, and not necessarily on noting those finer details for future reference.

            Working from a good outline helps, but is no guarantee. In my second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, I did a thorough outline, setting forth what would happen in each chapter, and also outlining the various aspects and personality quirks of the characters in the book.

            Then, in the course of writing it, I decided that an important scene planned for Chapter Two should be moved to Chapter Three. A couple of months passed between the time I made that decision and reached the point in Chapter Three where the scene should appear, and by then I’d forgotten all about it and left it out of the first draft altogether.

The Total-Immersion Revision

            I’m happy to report that I was able to catch that mistake, and several others, by taking a different approach to editing the first draft. I decided that I needed to get away and focus on that task to the exclusion of all else. So through the magic of the internet, I found a cottage in a secluded rural area north of San Francisco, booked it for six nights, and spent the past week there, fixing the book.

            It took about 13 months to write the first draft, so as I say, there were plenty of inconsistencies to be cleared up, in addition to the ordinary polishing and revising. But the benefit of being able to do the revisions in a short time frame (which would have been impossible at home, with all its myriad distractions) was incalculable. I’m doing it this way from now on.

            The other piece of good news is that even after spending a week with the book in close quarters, I still like it and think it’s a step forward from the first one. In a couple of months it’ll be up on Amazon, and we’ll see if the readers agree. 

The Race to the Finish

            One of the things about reading a mystery novel is that the closer to the end you get, the faster it goes. It might take two hours to read the first hundred pages, but only one hour to read the last seventy-five.

            That has a lot to do with the inherent nature of storytelling. In the first hundred pages of the book, the reader is still getting the lay of the land. That involves processing a lot of stuff, from understanding the physical setting of the book to getting the characters sorted out. There have been some mysteries where even after two hundred pages, I was still scratching my head over whether Neville was the duke’s brother or prospective son-in-law.

            The closer the reader gets to the last page, the less of an issue that is. By then the reader knows who’s who and what’s what, and the story is galloping to a finish. If the reader has made it that far, almost every mystery is a page-turner at that point.

The Author Feels the Pain

            Much of what the reader goes through in reading the book, the author experiences as well in the writing of it. From my own experience, I would say that writing a novel is like running a marathon. There’s the rush of excitement at getting started, the long slog through a seemingly interminable middle, and the final burst of adrenalin at the race to the finish.

            When I wrote my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, I felt those three phases acutely. When I began writing, I had a deadline for finishing the first draft in my mind, and after the first two chapters, I figured I’d beat that deadline with no worries.

            Not so fast. The middle of the book proved to be rough, even excruciating, sledding. I began to see previously unplanned things I had to do to both build on what I’d already written and to set up what I had in mind for the finale. Halfway through the first draft, I was bogged down and realized there was no way I’d hit the deadline.

            Then a funny thing happened. As I got back to the last three chapters, the confidence returned, the fingers began flying over the keyboard, and I made up lost time, finishing at around five o’clock Christmas Eve, a week ahead of schedule.

Round Up the Usual Suspects

            I’m currently wrapping up the first draft of my next Quill Gordon mystery, and the pattern has repeated itself somewhat. Learning from past experience, I plotted out the book and the characters better this time, with the result that writing the middle was less of a quagmire.

            At the same time I was writing the middle of the mystery, I was finishing work on a nonfiction book of local history, on which there was considerable time pressure to publish this year. That slowed down the writing of the mystery, but once the history book was off to the printers in early October, I was able to devote my attention to the mystery, with gratifying results. The penultimate chapter was completed last night, a week and a half ahead of schedule.

            With the holidays coming and my business workload easing, I’ll be writing fast and furious the rest of the year. Allowing for revisions, formatting, and all the other minutiae of finishing a book, I’m hoping to have it published in the spring of 2014. The race to the finish is on, and it’s every bit as much fun as it was the last time around.