Ya Gotta Have a Process

I just finished the second round of edits/rewrites/revisions on my latest novel-length manuscript, THE LONELY MILE. Reaching that milestone (sorry for the pun, I know it's inexcusable, but I just couldn't help myself) made me think about the process of writing a book - not the "artistic muse," or any of that other happy crap, but the actual X's and O's of sitting down and pounding out 85,000 words of fiction.

I can't say for certain, but my guess is that the process differs, at least slightly, for every single author or aspiring author out there. There may be some who are so talented, so adept at forming paragraph after paragraph of tight, coherent, well-constructed prose that they type THE END at the bottom page of a first draft and are ready to fire the whole thing off to their agent/publisher/editor/proofreader/grandmother with nary a second thought.

If there are, I'd like to know where they are hanging out, because I've never met any of them. Every author I know, and I'm meeting more and more as I continue this journey toward publication, would undoubtedly agree with a conclusion I came to a long time ago: It's hard work making it seem effortless. I've had more occasions than I would like to admit where I have spent a good, solid half hour agonizing over the phrasing of a single sentence in a single paragraph of a 300 page manuscript.

Sometimes a single word.

I know that sounds crazy, but isn't the whole idea of writing on spec crazy anyway? Of spending months of your time in the solitary pursuit of finding someone who believes your work is suitable for publication and will champion it as such? Isn't that kind of crazy?

Anyway, that's a question for another blog. I wanted to talk about the process today, so here is mine, developed over the course of four completed manuscripts, all in the range of between 84,000 and 95,000 words, one of which has been accepted for publication (FINAL VECTOR) and two others of which I have very high hopes for. The fourth we don't talk about, at least not sober.

I begin with the kernel of an idea, a "what-if" proposition. What if a group of home-grown terrorists had the means to steal a weapon capable of shooting down Air Force One, and the ability to take over an air traffic control facility in order to force controllers to put the plane where they needed it to be in order to assassinate the President of the United States? (That's a shameless plug for FINAL VECTOR. Please accept my apology, but it is my blog, after all)

Often the kernel of an idea never progresses beyond that stage. I might decide the concept doesn't support a full-length book, for example, or maybe it's been done to death, or the resulting novel would look too much like something else already out there that's been written by an author with a much bigger platform than mine.

Sometimes the idea germinates for months, years even, before I begin writing a book based upon it. But once I decide to start, I commit myself to a strict word count per day that I want to achieve, usually between 1500 and 2000 words. Then, barring some catastrophic event beyond my control, I make myself reach that goal day after day, whether I have the "inspiration" that day or not.

Not all days are great writing days. Sometimes I think to myself that every single word I type is complete and utter crap, but I write them down anyway. Some days the words and sentences flow with little or no effort, and I feel like they might just be the best things I've ever written. Most of the time, when I go back and read them over, days or weeks later, it's usually somewhere in-between. They're never as bad as I fear or as good as I remember.

This writing pace continues until I have finished the first draft. I don't worry too much about phrasing, or pacing, or character development, or any of the other stuff that writing a readable book requires. I simply write, vomiting the words onto the page.

Once the first draft is complete, I then go back to page one and start the revising process. A lot of the conventional wisdom out there says you should put the manuscript away for six weeks or more to get a fresh perspective on it. I don't do that. It probably works well for others but it doesn't for me. I need to get right back into the book while the story is firmly entrenched in my head.

This first revision is the most difficult part of the entire process, at least for me. Writing the first draft is an often enjoyable bit of work: inventing characters, putting them in harm's way, killing some of them off (I'm a genre writer, don't judge me), and in general tossing all of them onto a page and seeing what happens.

But that first revision is where I have to come to grips with all the problems that vomiting a story onto the page has caused: poor character development, holes in the plot line big enough to drive my truck through, awkward phrasing, inconsistent pacing. That first revision is a tedious and often frustrating process. It takes a while, too, as you might imagine.

Once that has been accomplished more or less to my satisfaction, I go right back to page one and start over again. This time it tends to go more smoothly, but there are still issues I discover where I ask myself, "How the hell did THIS slip through?" Example: In my latest manuscript, one of my characters was named Bob Vincent in the first half of the book, and then suddenly became Bob Mitchell in the second half. It's a miracle! Somehow this glaring inconsistency survived the first draft and the first revision. Oops.

After the second round of revisions/edits/rewrites has been completed, I then plug my laptop into my printer - no wireless printer technology for me, no sirree! - and print the whole thing out, page by page, and then run them all through a three-hole punch and stick the entire masterpiece into a three-ring binder. I carry that binder around everywhere I go and read the novel as if I'm reading the actual book for the first time.

For some reason this is extremely helpful to me. You wouldn't think it possible, but I find an inordinate amount of errors, spelling issues, phrasing problems, etc, when I do this. Reading the book on 350 pages of actual paper somehow makes certain issues jump out at me in a way that reading it on a computer screen just doesn't. Tree-huggers everywhere, please accept my sincere apology.

I make pen and ink notations in my notebook for all of the changes I want to make, and sometimes these can be extensive. I've rewritten entire chapters that way, I've added completely new characters to the story that way. It just works for me. Once I have completed the whole book and marked all my changes down in pen and ink, I sit down with my trusty laptop and transcribe those changes into the electronic copy which will form the basis for my submission to agents/publishers, etc.

Finally I then re-read the book one more time on my computer. By now I'm getting a little sick of it, as you might imagine, but usually this step proceeds pretty smoothly, because by this time the thing is about as good as I can make it, at least without professional editorial assistance.

And that's my novel-writing process. Each of my four completed manuscripts has proceeded more or less along the same path, although I continue to tweak the process and I'm sure I always will.

If you're a writer, I'm curious how the process works for you. Does this sound at all familiar, or am I so far off base from how you write that you think I'm crazy? I'd love to hear about it if you have the time and the inclination...

What Do I Do Now?

Okay, so here's the scenario. You're a reasonably successful guy, with a professional career spanning nearly three decades, doing a fairly important job, making pretty good money. But what you always wanted to do was write fiction.

So you do. You start by writing short stories, getting some of them published, garnering a little recognition, which is cool. You're pleased. But what you really really always wanted to do was write novels.

So you do. You write your first full-length manuscript and get zero interest from agents and/or publishers, which is not cool. But you're undeterred, so you write your second full-length manuscript and again get zero interest from agents and/or publishers. Still uncool.

So, not recognizing the wisdom of the definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result - you write a third manuscript. This time, though - Woohoo! - you sell the manuscript, with a publication date for your debut novel of February, 2011.

Here's the question: What do you do next?

That's the situation I find myself in. I'm incredibly blessed to have achieved my dream of selling a novel, with FINAL VECTOR to be published next year by Medallion Press, but now I'm left scratching my head, wondering how to follow it up.

It's a wonderful problem to have, I'll be the first to admit that, and one which I can't deny I thought I might never have to worry about. But my book doesn't come out for almost a year, and although I'm determined to do my level best to promote it and hopefully achieve some decent sales numbers for a first novel, I don't want to wait almost two years before trying to sell a followup.

So there's the dilemma: What do I try to sell? I'm currently nearing the end of my editing/rewriting/polishing phase of a thriller tentatively titled THE LONELY MILE, which I believe is the equivalent in quality to FINAL VECTOR, maybe even better. But it's not an aviation-themed book, and FINAL VECTOR is an air traffic control thriller.

So would my best chance for a followup be to write another aviation book? I intend to do that next, anyway, but I would hate to think of THE LONELY MILE sitting on a shelf (Or, more accurately, sitting in my computer's hard drive) getting . . . well . . . lonely.

Plus, to complicate matters, I have a supernatural thriller titled PASKAGANKEE that I believe is a damned fine book, too, also gathering dust in my hard drive. It's an embarrassment of riches, unless I'm deluding myself, which I can't deny is always a possibility.

Any thoughts?

The only thing I certain of is that I'm going to keep writing while I try to decide. My goal every day is to write something that is better than what I wrote yesterday. I don't expect that to change any time soon.

How Many Trees Must Die?

Bring up "The Ice Storm" to anyone who lives in this area and they immediately know what you mean. In December, 2008 we were hit with an unbelievable ice storm which left a clear coating on every surface, thick and heavy. The damage from this storm was extensive, with some people going as long as two weeks before having their power restored.

In that storm, I lost a nearly quarter-century old tree in my front yard, split in half from the weight of the ice. It looked like a giant had cleaved it with an axe. Half the tree fell in one direction and half in the other. This was a full-grown, mature, healthy hardwood tree that simply couldn't stand up to the punishment it had received from mother nature.

It was disappointing to lose the tree, especially since without it, an entire section of my front yard now looked like the fourth fairway at your local municipal golf links. I coped with the loss by telling myself it was just horrible bad luck - sort of like the reasoning used by Robin Williams when he buys a house immediately after an airplane crashes into its' roof in The World According to Garp. His logic is unassailable: What are the odds against an airplane crashing into the house again?

Apparently the odds aren't as long as you might think. This past Thursday we were hit with a different type of storm, one with extremely high, swirling winds of hurricane force. You probably know what's coming next. Another tree was destroyed, in much the same manner!

This tree was located right next to my house, and about a third of it came crashing down, somehow missing my house when it could just as easily have smashed through the roof. It passed so close to the house, however, that it ripped a portion of the gutter away from the roof as it was falling and came to rest directly across my front stoop, blocking the front door. Incredible.

Even worse than that, the entire tree is a lost cause. It's been split down the middle just like the one last year and if we get more high winds or a very heavy, wet snow, the rest of the tree will undoubtedly fall. I'm going to have to hire someone to come and remove it before that happens, obviously.

At this rate, I figure by about 2013 my front yard will be totally barren. It's going to look like a moonscape. I'm considering making the whole thing into a miniature golf course, but I'm not sure how my wife will react to that. The whole thing is very strange.

I wonder if Robin Williams is in the market for a house?

Some Scary Numbers

I'm getting close to finishing the first draft of my new thriller, tentatively titled THE LONELY MILE. I'm not going to get into plot specifics, partly because the manuscript is unsold and partly because if I'm fortunate enough to get this book published it will be a couple of years at the earliest before it sees the light of day.

But in writing THE LONELY MILE I have had occasion to do some research into the subject of human trafficking, and what I discovered shocked me. If you're like me, hearing the word "slavery" brings back memories of fifth grade civics class and basic U.S. history, and the fact that we fought a Civil War nearly one hundred fifty years ago to end slavery in this country.

But slavery still exists, both in the Unites States and the world as a whole. In fact, according to the U.S. State Department, between 600,000 and 800,000 men, women and children are trafficked across international borders every year. Of these, seventy percent are female and fifty percent children, the majority of which are forced into commercial sex trade.

Human trafficking is the third most profitable criminal activity in the world, behind only drugs and arms trafficking. Within the United States alone, the State Department estimates between 14,000 and 18,000 people are trafficked annually. The report is careful to state that this figure does not include data on sexual exploitation alone, but rather the numbers include trafficking for any sort of forced labor.

Each year since 2001, the State Department has ranked the world's countries into three tiers, based on their efforts to eliminate human trafficking. In the 2009 report, the most recent available, seventeen countries have been identified as "Tier Three" nations, meaning they "do not comply with the minimum standards [of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000] and are not making significant efforts to do so."

Among those seventeen nations considered "Tier Three," - up from fourteen such nations identified in the 2005 report, by the way - are Cuba, Fiji, Iran, North Korea, and two countries American soldiers have fought and died trying to protect: Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Disturbing stuff. Hold on tight to your children and when they do things to try your patience, it might not be a bad idea to take a moment and give thanks they are around to do so.

Extreme Makeover, Web Edition

I launched my website, www.allanleverone.com, in July, 2008 to near-universal cheers and acclaim.Okay, you're right, pretty much nobody noticed. But I wanted to begin establishing a web presence for that happy moment that I considered inevitable, when I signed my first book contract and released my first novel.

A lot has happened since then, but now that I have a contract for the release of my first novel, FINAL VECTOR, scheduled for release February 2011 from Medallion Press, one thing I am thankful for is that I did begin establishing that web presence two years ago.

However, one thing I'm not is a web designer, or any kind of IT specialist. You could take what I know about web design and computer graphics and coding and all that other mysterious stuff and stick it in your eye and not feel the least bit uncomfortable, although why you would want to do that is beyond me. The point is, though, that you could.

I worked nearly two full weeks back in July of 2008 to get that website online and when I was done, I felt proud of what I had accomplished, mostly because I had done something I didn't really believe possible in actually getting a website up and running.

However, in the time since then, I have had more and more trouble with the damned thing, until I reached the point where, when I signed the contract with Medallion, I wasn't even able to put the exciting news on my home page! I couldn't get anything on there, or on the Bio page either, for that matter.

Sometimes, it is best simply to admit defeat. I'm no web guru and never will be. The stuff just doesn't interest me enough to learn about it, plus I'm so busy writing and doing my day job as an air traffic controller that I don't have time to devote to maintaining a website.

The point is this, and sorry it took me seven paragraphs to get here: I needed help with my website. So I went and got some. My full redesigned site should be online sometime in April or early May, but for now, my web designer - www.xuni.com - has come up with a fantastic holding page for allanleverone.com, featuring the cover to my upcoming novel.

I'm really excited, because Maddee James from Xuni is everything I'm not when it comes to the Internet and web design. Specifically, talented.

If you have a free second, check out the holding page at www.allanleverone.com and let me know what you think.

Close Encounters of the Wild Kind - Or, I Wonder if This is How Steve Irwin Got His Start

I don't exactly live in the middle of nowhere. The New Hampshire town I live in is populated by roughly twenty-five thousand people and if you feel the need for glitz and sophistication you can be in Boston in about forty-five minutes, give or take. Okay, maybe "glitz and sophistication" is overstating it a little, Boston's not exactly New York or L.A., but you get the idea.

But there is plenty of wildlife in our little corner of the universe. I have come very close to having up-close and personal encounters with deer more times than I can count in my vehicle and even came relatively close to a moose on one memorable occasion.

This past week, though, on my way to work, also known as the Evil Day Job, or How I Keep My Creditors Happy While Waiting For That Big Bestseller, I had something happen that was completely new to me - I almost ran over a wild turkey. Not a bottle of Wild Turkey, although that certainly would be tragic, but a real, honest-to-goodness, big-ass wild turkey! With feathers and everything!

This crazy bastard came stumbling and bumbling out of the woods - One thing about turkeys, they're really not very graceful creatures, especially when you consider their avian heritage - right in front of my truck as I rounded a corner about two miles from my house. I slammed on the brakes and this bird with ice-water running through his veins just kept right on going like I wasn't even there.

I figure he must have been like Riggs in Lethal Weapon. He's suffered some kind of horrible tragedy in his life, maybe his woman got beheaded at Thanksgiving or something, and he's pissed at the world and figures he's got nothing left to live for.

Anyway, I slammed on my brakes - Thank God there was nobody right behind me - and my truck screeched along the road, the suicidal bird disappeared from view, that's how close he came to my front bumper, and then he came out the other side, sort of half-flying and half-running, looking back over his shoulder at me in annoyance as he went.

I'm pretty sure he was studying my face in case we ever meet again.

Then, believe it or not, another turkey did the same thing when I was almost at work. Of course this turkey was driving an old rusty Buick with Massachusetts plates, but he pulled right out in front of me just like the other one. I almost hit him, too, although I wouldn't have felt half as bad about it.

Is It April Fools Day Already?

So I was checking my email back in December when I opened up the magical one; the one every aspiring novelist dreams about, sometimes even when they're asleep - the acceptance. This was the letter stating a publisher was interested in producing my novel. So interested, in fact, that they were offering a contract to seal the deal, with a projected publication date of February, 2011 for the mass-market paperback version of FINAL VECTOR.

What did I do, you ask? Well, I did what anyone would do in that circumstance - I began hyperventilating. That reaction doesn't last long, though, and within hours I was back to breathing normally.

Just kidding. I'm sure it didn't take hours. My memory of that precise moment is etched vividly in my mind, as I hope it will be forever, and I can virtually guarantee it was only minutes. And I didn't hyperventilate, exactly, it was more like I forgot to breathe for a little while. Like twenty minutes, max.

Anyway, once I got that little glitch under control, you can probably guess what my next move was; of course you can, you would have done it, too: I checked the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1. It wasn't.

Then, of course, I had to triple-check the email address of the sender to ensure it wasn't a practical joke being played on me by one of the many comedians I work with. It wasn't that, either.

By this time I had pretty much decided, yes, this is the real thing. I am actually going to be a professional novelist. My book will be competing for readership with people like Barry Eisler, Lee Child, Tom Piccirilli, Lawrence Block, and so many other authors whose work I have admired for so long. It won't be much of a competition, maybe, but you get the point.

In addition to being scared to death, I realized pretty much right off the bat that I needed two things: 1) Validation, and 2) Guidance.

Happily, I knew just where to get both - the International Thriller Writers, an organization which is, well, exactly what it says it is in the name. Most, if not all, of the writers I have loved for so long are members, and as a pending professional novelist I realized I was now eligible for membership as well.

I applied and my membership was approved within a matter of days, so I guess Medallion Press really wasn't kidding about publishing my novel. In the ITW I have found a group of writers with a combined total - literally - of centuries of publishing experience, from long-time pros like David Morrell, who has been churning out books for nearly forty years, to other publishing newbies like myself.

In fact, one of the things I like best about the ITW is what they call their Debut Authors Program, where people like me, whose first publication is scheduled, can learn from the experience of the others, who have all gone through exactly the same experiences and are in a position to pass along some of the wisdom they have gained.

Hopefully I won't be too dense to absorb it; after all, February, 2011 is right around the corner.