Novel Ways of Doing Things

On March 31^st of t of this year, I finished my third novel.

Okay. That’s not exactly right. To be completely truthful, it’s the third novel I’ve written in my lifetime. But it’s the first one that a) I’ve fully completed, and b) I am allowing others to see because it might not be crap. If we’re sticking to those criteria, it’s the very first ever.

Let me elaborate.

In the relatively mild summer of 2005, I got to page three-hundred and change of a horror novel set during the American Revolution. It really excited me, because for months, I got up at five-thirty in the morning and wrote three pages or so on the thing every day. But July neared, my life got busy. I made it to within about fifty pages of the end and stopped. To this day, I’m unsure whether I really didn’t have time to work on it or whether I utterly chickened out. It’s been taking up space on the flash drive I carry around with me since then. Four years now.

Now, to address the other novel, a flashback (or a slide, as S.P. Somtow calls them):

On New Year’s Day of 1979, I kissed a girl. She was not my first, but she was certainly among the memorable. Her name was Marla name-not-to-be-repeated-on-the-internet, and she wore a pretty black and whilte floral dress, low-cut to show off her long neck. As one might guess, the kiss occurred as the clock struck midnight, and it happened at a place called Tyson’s Corner Mall. They later rechristened it Tyson’s Corner I because the builders of Tyson’s Corner II apparently could not think of a more original name. Our church rented the whole place for the evening, putting a jazz band at one end, a rock band at the other, and a chamber orchestra in the middle. Pretty cool.

The bands stopped playing shortly after midnight, and Marla and I sat down to decide if the kiss meant anything or if it was just laughs. We decided to see where it led us. We took it slow, and we lasted for quite a while, by high school standards. After it ended, formally, we stayed friends. She married another guy a few years later, and I lost track of her about halfway through college.

When I got home that first night, the early morning of that initial day of the new year, I was far too excited to sleep. The clock read one and change, and I thought about a lot of different things, including the plot twist my life just passed through. So I hung up my suit and tie and pulled on a pair of pj pants, and sat down at my little desk and started to write by the light of my desklamp the beginnings of a novel idea I’d been turning over for a few weeks. I wrote quickly, using a ballpoint pen on wide-ruled notebook paper.

Some of you might compare that to Abraham Lincoln, studying books by candlelight after dark. I suppose longhand was a hard way to do things. Apple had just released their computer a year or two before, and I couldn’t afford one. My only alternative sat in the closet: a noisy electric typewriter that hummed and clacked and sounded like a shock and awe attack on Baghdad. My folks slept in the next room, after all. And I would not learn to touch type for another fifteen years or so.

So pen and paper it was.

After about two-and-a-half hours, I stopped because I could no longer stay awake. But each evening, after I said good night to my parents, I’d go and write until I felt too sleepy to continue. I worked at this story for weeks, and the weeks became months. I don’t remember how long it took, but it seems that I wrote THE END at the bottom sometime around July of that year. The manuscript totaled about 100 written pages, and I titled it City of Death. I guess I was into horror designations even then, though the novel was supposed to be science fiction.

Of course I felt very proud of myself and still do that I wrote for consistently almost every night until it was finished.

So what did I do with it?

I was a kid of seventeen when I finished. I had no idea what to do with it, so it sat in the bottom drawer. It belonged there, actually, because the thing was terrible, on the order of The Eye of Argon kind of terrible. So I’m embarrassed to show it in public. And I lost track of it many, many years ago, thank God.

Though I suspect it’s in a file cabinet in my storage unit.

So, zipping back to the modern era, given that City of Death in its current state, is not something for the public, and the unfinished state of the American Revolution story, I have, I suppose, more properly finished my first novel. The title is still up in the air right now. It is a Nick and Lysette story. More properly, the Nick and Lysette story. There are five short stories and novellas that precede the book, but you need none of those to read and enjoy and understand the book. It will be the first in the series of books, assuming the publisher I’ve been talking to actually wants it and then asks for more.

As a side note for those of you who have been following Nick and Lysette’s adventures, this book documents some self-discovery on Nick’s part. As you may have suspected, there’s more to Nick than meets the eye. And for those of you who have been asking me to have Lys let loose on some bad guys, you get a very small taste of what she’s capable of in this book. It’s not pretty.

I finished the rough draft on March 31^st and ignored it until towards the end of May, letting it grow cold. Then I revised it as deep and hard as I could and gave it to my agent. Agent recommended changes, and made a few of her own. The completed manuscript goes to the editor this week.

And I couldn’t be more energized.

She has also challenged me to a next project. In the mornings I’m to continue two pages a day on the next Nick project.  I’m outlining it now, and have a draft of chapter one, both of which accompany the full manuscript of book one to the editor. But for the rest of the summer, I’ll be writing in the morning and editing the Revolutionary War project in the evening. Since I learned I’mm one of those who can compartmentalize, I’ll put those skills to work so I can work on these two projects at once.

The goal? I have committed to have them both done by New Year’s Day 2010, the 32^nd anniversary of my beginning. I’d like to finish the historical piece long before that, because I have an editor (a different one) interested. I’d like to get that done by the end of the summer. Then I can do a screenplay or two in the fall while finishing up the sophomore Nick and Lysette effort.

Can I do it? I’d like to think so. I’ve got lots of book-length stories crying to get out.

So watch this space. I’ll keep you updated.

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