One Attaboy Trumps a Hundred Oh Shits

There used to be a saying in air traffic control - I haven't heard it recently, there is a changing of the guard taking place in the FAA as all of us who were hired after the disastrous PATCO strike in 1981 are rapidly approaching the mandated end of our careers and being replaced by a new generation - that went something like this: "One 'Oh shit' trumps a hundred 'Attaboys'."

The implication, and it's an accurate one, especially in a field of endeavor where a single error in judgment could cost hundreds of lives, is that you can do things properly a hundred times in a row, but as soon as you screw the pooch once, that's all anyone is going to remember.

Last week I discovered, just in case I had forgotten, that sometimes the opposite is true. After you've experienced a hundred "Oh shits," that single "Attaboy" that comes along is pretty goddamned sweet. On Wednesday, December 30, 2009, I signed a contract with Medallion Press for publication of my debut novel as a mass-market paperback, an air traffic control thriller titled FINAL VECTOR.

I'm not a huge fan of Woody Allen, but there is a quote attributed to him that says, "Eighty percent of success is just showing up." I'm not sure how true that is, but the implication - that if you go to work every day and keep slogging along, good things will eventually happen - is occasionally true, at least in the competitive field of professional writing.

I went back and looked at my records, and I received exactly fifty rejections from agents and publishers for the FINAL VECTOR manuscript before Medallion's enthusiastic offer of a one-book contract. If you add to that the combined seventy-seven rejections I have picked up over the last two years for my other two completed novels, that's a lot of "Oh shits."

But I'm here to tell ya, the cumulative effect of all those rejections, the combined lows of having people tell you that you're not good enough (They do it very nicely most of the time, but, as we learned in the last presidential election, you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig), is nothing compared to the elation, the pure unadulterated thrill, of having a legitimate, mainstream publisher tell you they want to sell your book.

It's been nearly five days since I became a professional novelist and I still haven't come down off the high. If we could somehow manage to bottle this feeling, we could put every single drug cartel out of business overnight.

I am hard at work completing what Medallion calls their "Pre-Publication Title Sheet," a whole bunch of information they need about my book, where I believe it fits in the marketplace, any suggestions I have regarding the cover art, and a whole bunch of other things I was so busy trying to get my book noticed that I never really thought about. So, needless to say, I'm busy, but it's a great kind of busy.

I can't wait to find out what comes next. February, 2011 seems like a long time from now, but I think it's going to take me at least that long to get used to the idea that my book, my creation, will soon be competing for sales and shelf space with offerings from Barry Eisler, Harlan Coben,Lawrence Block, Lee Child, and so many other fantastic authors working in the genre I love.

I just can't stop shaking my head at my incredible good fortune.

It Sucks to be a Dinosaur

Two items that at first glance seem unrelated, but upon further review, go hand-in-hand, really grabbed my attention this past week.

1) Amazon announced that ebook sales outpaced sales of physical books on Christmas day, and,

2) Publishers' Lunch announced that "Much-admired Canadian indie McNally Robinson Booksellers has entered bankruptcy and will close two of its four stores immediately.

It's not like the closing of two bookstores should really come as much of a surprise to anyone, at least not anyone who has been paying attention. Bookstores all around the world have been closing faster than it seems possible for a couple of years now. The combination of a poor economy and the abundance of competition from the internet, television, movies and music for people's free time has seen book sales take a slow decline for years.

People who love to read will always make/find the time to indulge their hobby, and those are the people who have been served by the bookstores which have remained profitable enough to stay open.

Now, however, many of those hard-core readers, the ones bookstores have always catered to, have begun to make the journey into the brave new world of digital reading. The advantages are many: you can shop for your latest read without ever leaving the comfort of your home, you can carry your entire library with you wherever you go, you can adjust font size instantly to suit your particular needs, just to name a few.

The problem, of course, for bookstores is obvious. If I'm a hard-core reader, and I don't have to come into your store to support my habit, where the hell are your sales going to come from? And how will it be possible to make enough sales to maintain economic viability?

No less a writing giant than Stephen King estimates that by the end of the upcoming decade, electronic books will account for forty percent of fiction sales and twenty-five percent of non-fiction sales. Quibble with his numbers if you wish, but in only a matter of a couple of years the debate has changed from "Will e-books ever be a viable option for readers?" to "Just how much of the market share will e-books gobble up?"

Another question, maybe the most important question, to consider is this: At what point will it become un-feasable for brick-and-mortar bookstores to survive, economically speaking? Will it be when e-book sales are five percent of the total? Ten? Twenty-five?

I wonder if the dinosaurs saw the end coming, and if so, what did they think?

My Top Ten Methods of Procrastination

Considering how little time I have for writing and how much I enjoy doing it, it's kind of surprising how much time I spend doing other things instead of writing. This thought occurred to me out of nowhere as I was busy taking a "Name That Movie Car" Facebook quiz.

I got an 87% on the quiz, by the way.

After a little diligent introspection - and more time spent not writing - I have determined that these are the Top Ten Ways I Spend My Time When I Should Be Writing:

10) Working.
This one comes in at Number Ten even though it is by far the biggest drain on my potential writing time because, well, let's face it, it keeps me and my family from having to surivive under a bridge abutment. If I had to support everyone on my author's income our lifestyle might be a little different. After all, it's hard to buy groceries with a complementary magazine subscription and two free t-shirts.

They are pretty cool shirts though.

9) Doing laundry.
This may not seem like a big deal and if you think that, then you've obviously never raised three teenagers, two of whom are girls. Doing the laundry is a way I can help with the running of the house without doing too much actual damage. Now, if you know me, you know one of my daughters is off at school, which cuts down on the laundry significantly, but we also have a two year old in the house, so it's kind of a wash. Get it, a wash?

8) Watching Sports.
I love sports. I love sports so much that I spend an inordinate amount of time watching them when I should be writing. In the summer I watch the Red Sox and then when that season ends I think about how much extra time I will have to write. Then the Patriots, Bruins and Celtics seasons are in full swing and I end up watching just as much sports as I do in the summer. What's wrong with me?

7) Texting my daughter at college.
I only learned how to text a couple of years ago and now it seems I spend half my life with my thumb up my . . . I mean with my thumb on my phone's keyboard. I'm not as good as my daughter's boyfriend, who can text without looking, but I'm good enough to waste plenty of time doing it.

6) Taking silly quizzes on Facebook.
I think I may have mentioned this one already. Suffice it to say, Movie Cars aren't the only subject I've proven knowledgeable about in quizzes. For example, just tonight I discovered I truly am an '80's kid.

Unfortunately I turned 21 in 1980. Yikes.

5) Checking my email to see if I've gotten any acceptances on short stories and/or novel queries and submissions I have out.
This one is almost the same as writing, since it involves my fledgling writing career. The problem is if I spend too much time doing this and not enough time writing, eventually there won't be anything for me to send out and then wait breathlessly to hear about. I believe this is called irony.

4) Cruising friends' Myspace and Facebook pages.
It's interesting to see how some people seem to update their status all the time - "Going to take a dump now, be back in a few!" - while others seem to have totally forgotten there are those of us who are living vicariously through them. It's interesting in a I-know-I-should-be-writing-so-why-am-I-doing-this kind of way.

3) Blogging.
I suppose technically this could be considered writing, but a novel it ain't. On the other hand, when I hit it big and write that blockbuster bestseller, undoubtedly everyone will flock to my blog to see what I was like before I became famous and turned into a huge asshole. The joke is on them; I already am!

2) Watching Castle on TV.
It's fun to see how a successful author is portrayed, tongue-in-cheek-wise, on this ABC series, and I have to admit it would be pretty cool to be Rick Castle. This is a guy wo knows how to procrastinate - by solving murders! Although I do have to wonder: After running around New York all day catching killers with Beckett, how does he find the time and the energy to write?

1) Playing Scrabble on Facebook.
I'm addicted, okay? I can admit it. My name is Al and I'm an addict. There, I said it.

Now I Know How Sally Field Felt

I'm a winner! I'm a winner!

I'm picturing Sally Field's famous "You like me! You really like me!" line from her Academy Award acceptance speech as I write those words except, well, I'm an unknown male writer and not a world-famous female actress. Plus I didn't really compete against anyone except myself, which is a lot different than winning the votes of influential people in your profession, like Ms Field did.

Now that I think about it, there's really no comparison at all. Forget these first three paragraphs.

But I am happy to report I won NaNoWriMo 2009, by completing 50,000 words of a novel in the thirty days of November. Now the novel is not finished - if it's anything like my first three manuscripts it will end up somewhere around 85,000 to 90,000 words - and it's only a very rough first draft, but it's there and it's taking shape!

The actual, official number of words completed in November was 51,497 and when I look at that total it still amazes me, even though this is the third time I've managed to win the National Novel Writing Month competition. That's a lot of freaking words and even if only half of them make sense, that's pretty incredible. I mean, I can fix the other half on my rewrites and edits, right?

Hopefully it's not a situation where every other word is the one that makes sense, but I wouldn't be too shocked if that were the case.

Anyway, I'm going to celebrate my big victory by watching Monday Night Football in a few minutes, which is probably pretty much how Sally Field celebrated when she won her Oscar. Oh, and if I was supposed to do something this last month and it slipped through the cracks - okay, if I blew you off - please accept my heartfelt apology. I'll try to do better going forward.

Although I do still have a book to finish, you understand.

Happy Thanksgiving, Now Take a Hike

I miss my dad more at Thanksgiving than at any other holiday. You might think it would be Christmas, or his birthday in July, or maybe the anniversary of the day he died, which was late in the month of January, 1998.

But no.

It's not that I don't think about him at those times of year, or all of the other times of the year, for that matter. I like to think we were pretty close and even though he's almost twelve years gone I still think about him a lot. I believe - or at least hope - I've become someone he would have been proud of, most of the time anyway, and it seems to me most young men (and women too, for that matter) look for the approval of their fathers.

I look back on most holidays from early in my marriage as kind of a blur. My wife and I moved around a lot; we called seven diferent places home in our first eight years as a married couple. Most of the holidays from that time were pretty similar, too - a drive either north or south, depending on where we were living at the moment, to southern Maine, which was where both my parent and my wife's parents lived.

We would hit her parents home and my parents home and maybe one of our siblings' homes for good measure, in kind of a Thanksgiving or Christmas marathon of well-wishes, dinners, desserts, presents and then drives back north or south. Needless to say it was not exactly what you would call particularly restful or festive; mostly it was hurried and harried.

But one thing I actually do remember about Thanksgiving at my parents' house is the walks I used to take with my dad after eating dinner. He was a guy who loved being outdoors, and after enjoying the obligatory cup of coffee following dinner, we would grab the dog and head outside for a walk. Depending on the weather conditions that walk would take place either through the woods behind their house or on the road around the neighborhood.

Sometimes everyone would go, other times it was just me and my dad, but we always did the walk. It might be sunny with temperatures in the mid-fiftes, or it might be spitting snow and in the thirties, but was always went for the walk.

I'm not exactly sure why I miss that so much. It's not like we had any deep philosophical discussions or came up with the cure for cancer or even solved the problems with the Red Sox starting rotation. But it's what I remember, and it's what I miss. Most of the time we took the walks at Christmas too, but then it was usually too cold to enjoy as much as Thanksgiving.

Now that my kids are getting old enough to actually be away and return for Thanksgiving, I think I have a better understanding of how much it meant for my parents and my wife's parents to have us back, even if it was only for a few hours. The idea of everyone gathering in one place to commemorate a holiday is really special.

Happy Thanksgiving, and don't be shy with the hugs for the people you love.

The Cat's Meow

There aren't many things a writer appreciates more than positive feedback. Well, okay, there might be a few I could think of, like say a three-book contract with a half-million dollar advance, or a single-digit number on the New York Times Bestseller List. Maybe a call for advice on a thorny writing issue from Stephen King or Dan Brown. A spot on Oprah's Book Club.

Okay, there are some things better than positive feedback, now that I really think about it. But for most of us who aren't Stephen King or Dan Brown but are just struggling along, writing deep into the night after getting home from work or early in the morning before the kids get up or frantically typing away on our lunch breaks, the prospect of a little positive feedback is pretty cool in itself.

I've been fortunate in that regard, having had my first-ever published story included in Wolfmont Publishing's Ten for Ten, a collection of ten of the top stories culled from the Crime and Suspense Ezine which was published in the summer of 2008. And having two stories simultaneously end up as finalists for the Best Short Story Derringer Award this past spring.

But sometimes you have to wonder whether anyone is really paying attention, especially if you're not particularly adept at marketing yourself in an age when anyone and everyone seems to be screaming "Look at me!" at the top of their lungs.

That's why it was gratifying to find out this past weekend that my story, "PussyKat," which was featured in the premier issue of the online magazine House of Horror, has been selected to appear in a three hundred page anthology titled House of Horror Best of 2009. This book will be packed full of stories from some of the top up-and-coming horror authors and I am pleased and gratified that Sam Cox from House of Horror has chosen to include my little tale of an extramarital dalliance gone wrong.

My understanding is that this book will be available shortly, and although I have some other short stories out on submission to venues that I am awaiting decisions on, this news is a very pleasing way to end what has been an exciting and productive 2009 for me. I hope to continue the progress I have made over the last couple of years in 2010, and would be humbed and thrilled if you wanted to come along for the ride.

Thanks for checking out this post, and if you have taken the time out of your busy life to read even one story of mine, I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart. You rock!

If It's November, I Must Be Writing a Novel

A few years ago, I started a little sports blog at Foxsports.com, mostly as a way to combine my dual passions for writing and sports than out of any real notion that anybody might be interested in what I had to say.


It took a while, but eventually I built up a fairly decent following, not to mention discovering a number of very talented writers whose work I enjoyed reading. In October, 2006, one of those writers made an offhand comment on one of my blogs about something called "NaNoWriMo," telling me she was going to participate for the second year in a row and inviting me to join in as well.


I was pretty sure "NaNoWriMo" had nothing to do with sports, since I had never heard of it, but I had no earthly idea what it was. Honestly, it sounded vaguely menacing, in a science-fiction, aliens-taking-over-the-world sort of way.


When I asked this blogger what the hell she was talking about, she explained that "NaNoWriMo" was short for "National Novel Writing Month," where participants commit to writing a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Just November. Seriously.


The concept sounded just crazy enough to be appealing and although I now knew it didn't involve aliens taking over the earth (Unless that's what I chose to write a novel about), it was damned scary in it's own way. Naturally, I decided to try.


I had been itching to try writing a book for a while - blogging about sports was a blast but writing fiction has really been what I wanted to do since I was a little kid. I was hooked when I discovered the Hardy Boys and Sherlock Holmes.


So on November 1, 2006 I began writing a tale about a professional assassin who really wants out of the life but isn't quite able to escape it. His downfall is that he's simply a sucker for anyone who has been wronged and requires his special talents in order to right that wrong.


To my utter amazement, by November 30 I had written the required 50,000 words, and was thus a winner in my first-ever NaNoWriMo attempt! The story wasn't finished, however, so I kept going, and by the time I wrote "The End", I was the proud owner of the first draft for a 95,000 word novel titled The Fixer.


I have participated in NaNoWriMo every year since. I won again in 2007 with what ended up being an 89,000 word horror novel titled Paskagankee, and in 2008 I completed an 88,000 word thriller titled Final Vector. I didn't win last year because I had already started the novel, and when I finished writing it in mid-November, I had nothing left to write.


I won't make that mistake again, though. This year I am planning a thriller about a regular guy who happens onto the attempted kidnapping of a teenage girl. He breaks up the crime and saves the girl, but in doing so, puts his own family squarely in the sights of the unhinged criminal.


If you're a writer, and maybe even if you're a reader, you have probably by now heard of National Novel Writing Month. If not, think of it as the Olympics for writer-nerds. As they freely admit on the NaNoWriMo website, "The ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly."


When I completed my three previous novels, two of which I started during NaNoWriMo and the third of which I finished during it, all I had were very rough first drafts. All of them required extensive editing and rewriting before they ever reached the point where I would be comfortable having anyone else look at them.


But they all eventually reached that point and while I remain unpublished - at least as far as novels are concerned - I have received constructive criticism as well as encouragement from agents and independent publishers and remain convinced it is only a matter of time before I join the ranks of professional novelists.

If you're a writer and you are participating in NaNoWriMo 2009, feel free to add me as a writing buddy. If you're not a writer but have a morbid curiosity as to why anyone in their right mind would attempt to write 50,000 words in thirty days, you are welcome to use this link and follow my progress.

I fully expect to pop up from under my rock and post the occasional blog, but just in case our paths don't cross for the next month, enjoy November! I'll have my nose to the grindstone, or at least my fingers on the keyboard, composing fiction and wreaking havoc on the poor people who populate my new novel . . . I can't wait!