When the News is Bad, Writing is Sometimes Good

One of Denise’s family members recently got hit with a terrible medical diagnosis, which has thrown our lives into turmoil only weeks into the new year, and has ensured that Denise and I will be acting as caregivers in the coming weeks or months. I don’t mean to be coy but I hope to be able to share more soon. I can, however, share with you an interesting book-related thing that happened to me that is tied to this family news.

I had been struggling for weeks to finish Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and not really loving it. I had enjoyed The Secret History, which I’d read years ago in paperback. Since Goldfinch was on so many peoples’ Best Of lists for 2013, I figured I had to bite the bullet and dig into this 775-page monster. But I was disappointed. I like a lot of books I read, probably because I’m so selective. But there’s a certain subspecies of bestseller—the big book everyone’s talking about—that always disappoints me. I liked some of Tartt’s new book. I admired her obvious research and the finely drawn characters, but it was not the life-changer so many people claimed it to be.

And then one Monday a few weeks ago, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room after just hearing the bad news from the doctor. Denise and I were waiting for our loved one to wake after surgery so we could go in and break the news to her. To clear my head, I thought I’d finish the last few pages of Tartt’s book. And I hit this passage, which spoke to me. That’s the cool thing about fiction. It helps you grapple with the real world. I still don’t love Goldfinch, but I’m never going to forget the day I hit this passage, spoken by Tartt’s first-person narrator:

And I feel that I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel that I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

Look for my short story "Nighthawks" in Hitchcock’s Mystery Mag!

Look for my short story in Hitchcock’s Mystery Mag!

Almost forgot. One of those short stories I was telling you about appears in the April 2014 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM), on newsstands now.

The story is called “Nighthawks,” after Edward Hopper’s famous 1942 painting of the same name. It’s probably the most parodied painting on the planet after the Mona Lisa. Four people sit in an oddly shaped diner in the middle of the night. What’s going on there? Well, my story offers just one scenario.

The artist Hopper said the painting was inspired by a diner on Greenwich Avenue in New York, but no one has ever located the original site. Some years ago, blogger Jeremiah Moss investigated the mystery, and has written about his search in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and on his blog. Great reading, if you’re fascinated by the painting.

You can find a hard-copy version of AHMM wherever magazines are sold. (My local B&N tends to carry it.) Failing that, in a few days you can download a single digital issue via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Zinio, Magzter, Sony, and Google Play. Just make sure you are downloading the April 2014 issue shown above.

What I did in 2013

Every year at this time I take a look back at my productivity and try to make sense of it. I’ve done this for two years running (see 2012 & 2011). Typically I flip through my daily calendar to capture some of the highlights but I’m on the road for a few days and don’t have that book with me. Kind of don’t need it.

NOVELS: This year was all about writing TIMoNY, a historical fantasy that’s been in my head for a while. It’s a big book, clocking in at 120K+ words, involving a lot of research. In hindsight, this was not the right year for me to tackle such a thing, but when do we ever get to choose what life slings at us? The first draft took only two months, but those weren’t consecutive days. I lost a lot of time accompanying Denise, my wife, on her book tour in spring and summer. I’m tweaking and polishing the book this month, and intend to share with my agent first. If she thinks it’s worth submitting to publishers, I’ll go that route before self-pubbing. I completed another novel, The Marshal of the Borgo, in January 2013, but didn’t do much with it all year because I was too consumed by TIMoNY to do anything about Borgo. I hope to do those edits and have Borgo proofed and pubbed by spring. I also started a second book in the Mesmerist series. This year I hope to write two novellas featuring those characters. If nothing else, TIMoNY convinced me I should be writing shorter books.

PRINT EDITIONS: In 2013 I taught myself how to do interior book design, and hope to issue paperbacks of all my current self-pub books by spring. I should be issuing paperbacks when I pub the ebooks to eliminate the hassle, but for a long time I feared the learning curve associated with doing print books.

SHORT STORIES: Check me. Last year I said I would not devote so much time to short stories, but I broke that rule in 2013. Granted, the four stories which appeared this year—one in Plots With Guns, and three in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine—were all submitted in 2012. In 2013 AHMM bought two more of my shorts as well; they’ll be pubbed in 2014. Writing shorts is a great break from travel, writing big books, and family responsibilities. But if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that I’m flattered to be paid something for my fiction. And right now, when so little of my self-pubbed fiction is selling, I crave that validation as a sign that I’m doing something right. So if yeah, there will be more shorts this year, if only to serve as an ego-boost. I plan to release the AHMM shorts as ebooks when the terms of their contract expire.

SELF-PUB: Speaking of which, this year I earned a little less from my self-pubbed books than I did last year. About $315 total, as compared with $330 last year. Most of that was from sales of my nonfiction book, The Scientist and the Sociopath. That means I still have not broken even on this three-years-running experiment, but I don’t care. I know the market has changed substantially but I remain optimistic about self-pubbing. In 2013 I continued to resist the idea of serious marketing, and I think I’m justified in holding back. My feeling is that I should have at least two or three books in a series up before I make a move to promote beyond announcing my releases here and in my Twitter feed. If only I could figure out why I keep writing the first books of various new series over and over again.

GHOSTWRITING: This is how I really earn my living, so I can’t walk away from this. (Yet.) Two of my ghosted books came out in 2013: Blind Spot, a nonfiction science book written with Dr. Gordon Rugg, and another deep-ghost title written for a guy in the sports-entertainment field. The sports figure dude’s fans are not traditional book buyers. They don’t walk into bookstores often, if ever. They don’t shop on Amazon either. But they do buy his hardcover at full price at sporting events because they perceive it as a collectible. Dr. Rugg’s book is doing well among academic libraries and ebook buyers who snag anything dealing with the realm of computer science. A book Denise ghosted for a veteran actress also pubbed in 2013. I’ve already lined up one paying project for 2014. Won’t know if I can talk about it until I see the contract.

ATOMIC: The big story in our household in 2013 was the success of Denise’s book, The Girls of Atomic City. It hit the NYT Bestseller list multiple times. Denise is gearing up for another tour in March when the ebook and audiobook pub. I won’t be going on as many trips with her this time around, and thus hope to maintain a fairly steady workflow.

FRIENDS & FAMILY: When Denise’s book hit the bestseller list, some friends here in town threw her a party. “It feels good to know that it can happen to someone you know,” one of them said. I feel the same way, and 2013 saw two friends hit lists. Robert Swartwood became a USA Today bestseller with his book The Serial-Killer’s Wife. Susan Kushner Resnick, a friend from my college days, hit the New York Times Bestseller list for her nonfiction book, You Saved Me, Too.

In 2013 my parents sold their home in New Jersey and moved west to California, leaving me a Jersey orphan. I no longer have a place to crash when I’m in the New York City area, but they will be happier living among their grandkids in warmer climes.

In 2013, we lost more friends. One was Bill Wilcox, a nonagenarian historian Denise befriended during the writing of Atomic. He was a good man with a fine mind, and I’ll miss him.

So yeah, 2013: good things, sad things. Like every year that ever was. As I said earlier: When do we ever get to choose what life slings at us?