Category Archives: Operation Lotus Sunday

Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Conflict, Conflict, Conflict

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It’s been more than a week since I’ve written here. So busy, so lazy, so uninspired.

I’m down to the last three chapters in China Tour. This is the point where the action should get fast and furious, the conflict be greatest, the hero become the hero, and then have a quick cool-down to the end of the book.

Randy Ingermansson, a novelist best known for creating a system of novel writing called the Snowflake Method, discusses how to begin a book. In the opening, he says, introduce your main character and plunge him/her into conflict. Then, as the book goes on, raise the stakes in the conflict. Make it harder to achieve aims while at the same time make the consequences of failing to achieve aims more disastrous.

This is what the American reader wants. Whether it’s the same in other countries I don’t know. But books that follow this “formula” seem to be the ones that sell better. In real estate it’s location, location, location. In novel writing it’s conflict, conflict, conflict.

The conflict could be physical danger, emotional turmoil, or just about anything. Frank Peretti’s early and best known novels were about spiritual conflict.

I’ve read some novels, however, that were so full of conflict I was tired of it half way through. One book that struck me this way was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I need to first confess that I haven’t read the full book yet. I read some kind of abridgement to it, and listened to an audio abridgement, and read some of the book. Tolkien’s writing style isn’t my favorite, and I’ve had trouble getting back to it, and back to The Lord of the Ring trilogy, which I also started and didn’t finish.

In the abridgement, Bilbo never seemed to get a breath to just be a hobbit. I was tired for his sake by the time he got to the forest elves (I think I’m remembering that correctly). I would have liked a little more balance between conflict and resting. Oh, well, that may be just me. The popularity of the book indicates millions of readers don’t agree with me.

In China Tour, one of the couples has reached Beijing and the other will in the next chapter. The remaining two aims, not necessarily in agreement with each other, is to see the Bibles delivered to the persecuted Chinese Christian, and to make contact with the Chinese dissident and put him in CIA custody for extraction from the country. That was supposed to have happened in a rural province in the south, over the border to Vietnam, but the tourist couple got in the way of the spy couple, and the plans got blasted to smithereens.

I have the means of extraction figured out, the location, and how the principles will achieve it. I don’t know if the conflict is high enough or not. I’ll know that tomorrow or Sunday when I actually write it. I know for sure that I haven’t raise the stakes of failure sufficiently. Just this morning, however, I thought of a way to do that. It will happen in a chapter already written, and I’ll catch it on the first round of edits.

So, for the next three writing days I will be trying to create conflict. A strange position for a lover of peace to be in. Wish me luck.

Operation Lotus Sunday

Back in the Saddle Again

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After three months of doing almost nothing on China Tour, self-enforced first because of holiday preparation and travel, then because of sickness, then because of busyness, then because of more travels, then because of after-travel busyness, tonight I once again picked it up and added words to it.

 

Wikimedia Commons, photo by Guety, used with Creative Commons license

During the last three months I received comments from one of three beta readers who have seen it in its incomplete state. Well, actually two, for one woman’s husband gave me some general oral feedback. That woman said she would like to see more local references and culture added in, to give a better feel of being in the country. She and her husband have visited China, and been to some of the places mentioned in the book.

I figured that wouldn’t be too difficult to do, given the number of sources I have. And I’m not talking just about Internet sources. I’ve mentioned the trip diary before, which I’ve made good use of. And I think I mentioned the 1983 Fodor’s China, the tour book we used to plan the trip and then during it. Two other sources, in the house, that I haven’t tapped, I will get to this weekend. One is all the letters and postcards we sent home to relatives, which they kept, and which we now have.

The other is all the propaganda materials the Chinese kept giving to us. It seems that at every hotel we received attractive, magazine-type printed matter. I don’t remember too much about them. They have been packed away in a box for close to thirty years, and moved from Saudi to North Carolina to storage to Bella Vista to Bentonville and back to Bella Vista again. But I know right where they are: on a specific shelf in the basement, in a different place than the trip diary was. Friday night I’ll pull that out and see what’s in there, and if any of it can be of use to enhance the reader’s experience.

One other source I have are the tourist books we picked up in a few cities. I didn’t think of them till tonight; not sure why. Again, the point is to drop in short statements here and there to help the reader with the fictional dream, the suspension of reality, and feel like they are in the scene. That doesn’t take a lot of words, but coming up with the right words will be a challenge. I figure that will be part of the editing process.

So what did I get done tonight? The scene that is part of Plot Point 1, the inciting incident that causes the hero to take up the quest, had a serious flaw in it. Maybe not a flaw as much as a glaring omission. About two weeks ago, while going about my business at the office and making a casual observation, I realized this omission. It took me a while to ponder it and figure out how to correct the scene. That figured out a few days ago, I just needed to jump in and write.

But that jumping in a writing isn’t so easy when you haven’t been writing for a while. For several nights I reported on my Facebook author’s page that that would be the day when I’d fix that scene. But I didn’t.

Finally tonight I did. It took only twenty minutes or so to read the scene, figure out where the insertions should go, and write out the insertions in long hand. I won’t type them till this weekend.

Then, I took the rest of an hour to read more in the chapter and make a number of edits. None of it was major. Things like using “a bit” too often, if at all. Or using “immediately” three times in close proximity. Or failing to close quotes or use a period where needed. Things like that.

Work on the book will begin in earnest this weekend, and continue until done. I hope that will be just two weeks. I do have my income taxes to work on, but that should be easier than the last couple of years. My spreadsheets are already made, needing only any tweaking based on this year’s IRS forms. And all my forms and statements are in place.

Let the novel writing resume.

Carlyle, Harmony of the gospels, Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Three-part Writing Problem

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Or four parts if you include my two blogs as another part, or if you count them as two then actually five parts.

I continue to read in Carlyle’s works, even going so far as to prepare my own bibliography of his works, and to purchase a printed bibliography. I found the ones on-line to be very inadequate. Even the one I downloaded from Google books, published in 1881, had a lot of gaps, as did the 1919 one I also downloaded. The 1989 one I ordered came, and it seems to be quite complete. From it I’m completing my bibliography, trying at the same time to figure out how to structure it. Each evening I try to read a few pages in Correspondence Between Goethe and Carlyle. This is going well, despite many formatting problems with the e-book. I should finish this by this coming weekend.

I need to resume my work on China Tour, and bring that to completion. As I think I said previously I have only 3.7 chapters to go, and I know pretty much what I want to write. Scenes from these chapters dance in my head. I believe I have the method worked out whereby the goals of both the CIA couple and the Bible smuggling couple are achieved. Even the denouement is clear to me. About ten days ago I realized I had a major omission in an early chapter, dealing with when the two couples meet and how they resolve a particular problem. The additions to a specific scene have at last come to me, and now I need to write it.

Then today, in my before work hours, I resumed work on my Harmony of the Gospels. It’s been a while since I wrote about that on the blog, and I haven’t touched it since last June. This is more a labor of love and a self-study aid. I’m down to having one appendix to write, that of the crucifixion. Today I wrote a few words in it, and pulled up a reference I downloaded many months ago and began reading it. I refreshed my memory of what needs to go into this appendix. I basically have about 30 minutes a day to work on this. I suspect it will take me two weeks, at that rate, to write this appendix.

I’d really like to add a couple of essays to the Harmony, not necessarily tied to specific chapters or times in Jesus’ life, but to some general topic, such as why try to harmonize the gospels at all. I started one of those over a year ago, and must see where it stands.

Then my blogs demand to be worked in. I’m trying to post at a six-per-week frequency: three to each blog, with one day off. I haven’t arrived there yet, generally achieving four per week, sometimes even three. I want to keep working on that schedule.

But for right now, here is how I plan on dividing my writing time.

  • Spend 30 minutes a day before work on the appendices and essays of the Harmony.
  • Spend 30 minutes a day (max) during the lunch hour on my Carlyle research, though toward what end I’m still not sure. This will never end until I make an end of it.
  • Spend the rest of my writing time, which is whatever minutes I can carve out of the evening and weekend monoliths, on China Tour until it is finished.
  • In whatever moments I can further find, perhaps in the pieces chipped away from the monoliths, to write six blog posts a week.

This is a worthy goal, one which I will work hard to make into a reality.

Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Back after a break

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On February 7, Lynda and I began a long road trip to San Diego. The main purpose was to attend the Environmental Connection 13 conference, the annual conference of the International Erosion Control Association. I moderated a panel discussion on low impact development, and presented a half-day course in specification writing for erosion and sediment control works. We included three vacation days, plus the weekends, and so were gone for 12 days.

During this time I did very little with writing. I brought the printed manuscript of China Tour with me, intending to edit it, or thinking that possibly Lynda would read some more in it. All I did was read and handwrite some edits on the first chapter. I also kept up with a couple of writing blogs, though not rigorously every day. I worked on re-formatting a Thomas Carlyle book that I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. That’s actually quite enjoyable and relaxing.

But we’re back now. It’s time to get back in the saddle and get to writing. China Tour lacks only three chapters and maybe 8,000 words from being finished. Then of course will be comprehensive editing. My cover designer is lined up, and we’ve had conversations about the cover. A marketing plan is rolling around in my brain. Right now I’m hoping for a book launch in May, though whether that’s early or late will depend on a number of circumstances, most importantly the birth of grandchild #3, granddaughter #1, currently “scheduled” for mid-May but anticipated earlier just like her next older brother.

Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Four Points of View

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Last night I finished a chapter in China Tour (or, as I might rename it, Smugglers and Spies). It’s the chapter for September 23, 1983, when both couples are in Xian, China, but don’t run into each other.

I don’t want to give away the plot—not that anyone thinking about picking up the book in the future is likely to come here and read a spoiler—so I won’t say too much. The tourist couple and the CIA agent couple find themselves in places of extreme tension, sexual temptation. They are supposed to be working on a plan to get the dissident out through Beijing three days hence, rescuing a botched operation. But instead of sticking fully to business, they are thrust into the sexual temptation.

I’m writing the book in multiple third-person point of view. That is, the narrator is inside one person’s head at a time, one of the four main characters. In one chapter I have one other POV, a Chinese agent’s. Writing in this manner you have to keep track of whose POV you’re in, and limit observations to what they sense and think.

The alternative to this is to write it in third-person omniscient. This is when the narrator has a God-level view. He can be in anyone’s head, see what anyone sees, tell the reader what anyone is thinking. Herman Wouk used this POV in his classics The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, as did James Michener in Centennial.

I like the omniscient POV, but publishing industry insiders say it is less favored by the average reader nowadays. So, I decided for simple third person for China Tour.

The scenes I wrote last night and over this past weekend required careful attention to make sure I didn’t “head hop”—that is, begin a scene in one person’s head and end it in another’s without a good reason to do so and a logical transition. The scenes from last night weren’t that hard. The four main characters were all in different places. But the ones from the weekend were difficult. The two couples were together, and the scenes were short. I was in the agent-husband’s head, then the tourist husband’s, then maybe the agent wife’s, then the tourist wife’s. Back and forth from scene to scene.

I don’t really know if I got it all right. I’ll be re-reading them over the next two weeks and seeing if I kept the POVs pure. It will be an interesting exercise, and the most complicated use of POV I’ve used up to this point in my writing career.

The book is now 61,000 words. I have four days of it yet to write (Sept 24, 25, 26, and 27, 1983). The last day will be the denouement and should be short. The 26th will be the longest. Right now I don’t have a clue what I will write for the 24th and 25th. I think they might be short as well, maybe 1000 words each. So right now it looks as if the book will be close to 70,000 words. I think that’s a good length for a spy novel.

I don’t expect to be writing much new material over the next two to two and a half weeks, and business and pleasure will have a hold on me. But I will have a lot of time to think through these last four days of the book, and plan what to do next.

The book launch? Right now I’m guessing around April 1, 2013, but there’s the finishing and the editing and finding and replying to beta readers and final corrections and formatting and working with a cover designer and uploading. So we’ll see if I can keep to that schedule.

Daddy Daughter Day, Operation Lotus Sunday

Progress on two books

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As reported in other posts, my main writing work at present is China Tour, a novel of events in Communist China in 1983. I had planned for this to be about 75,000 words. However, as I worked through it, it seemed to be running shorter than that. After a week adding 10,000 words, the book is at 53,600 words. At this point I think it will be completed at between 60,000 and 65,000 words.

As I say, that’s shorter than I thought it would be. Is it too short for a spy novel? A typical romance is around 50,000 words; a general novel might be 75,000 words. A sci-fi or fantasy is typically 90,000. An epic is 125,000 or much more. So I’m not sure what I have here. I do not that there’s no point in “padding” the novel with useless stuff that doesn’t advance the story or enlighten the reader concerning the characters.

If I’m right, then I’m near the end of the novel. Next I have what I call the temptation scenes. After that it’s the culmination of the book as the CIA operation takes place in Beijing. Then will be the denouement chapter to close out. I see all of this as being about 10,000 words, unless the operation itself takes more than that.

So I’m on the downhill part of the novel. My experience with my first two novels is that the writing goes faster at this point. Maybe that’s because the motivation is there to stick to business and get it done. Maybe it’s because the story is so familiar at this point, as are the characters, that writing scenes is easier at this point.

Whatever the reason, I may be a week away from finishing. That’s exciting. I would like to finish it before February 7, when Lynda and I take off for a road trip. I’d like to have it with me and use some evenings on that trip for editing. That seems like a better vacation/business trip activity than new writing.

The news on another book is also exciting. This isn’t even on my list of publication goals for the year. It’s my poetry book, Father Daughter Day. This has been essentially done since 2006. I’ve made minor tweaks in the years since. The delay in publishing it has been illustrations. I don’t think the book will sell as well if it’s text only as it will if it is generously illustrated.

But how to get an illustrator when you have no money to pay one and when hopes of sales are just that: hopes? I tried to get some art teachers at the high school and university level interested as a practicum project for their class, to no avail. I checked with a couple of amateur artists I know, and couldn’t get them to do it. So I let it sit. I should also say that I never made finding an illustrator a priority. When I had a free moment and this book came to mind, I did something about an illustrator. Otherwise the book sat dormant. I have one more poem I’d like to add to it, but it’s not essential.

So back in October 2012 one of those times came, when thinking of the book and having the name of an artist I know both came together at the same time. I asked her about it and she sounded interested. Then I didn’t hear anything, leading me to believe she wasn’t interested.

Then yesterday she contacted me. She had computer troubles as well as family and life issues. Yes, she said, she was interested, and was anxious to get started. So I recent the book and some sample illustrations. She’s going over it now. We will have to have a conversation about deadlines, speculative compensation, etc. Depending on her schedule we might not be able to get it done this year. Then again, if she works fast and we keep most of the illustrations simple, it may be done this year.

This also is exciting. I’m trying not to get too excited, actually, in case it falls through. China Tour will be published, probably before April 1. I’d love to have Father Daughter Day available on Amazon before Fathers’ Day, though that’s probably not possible. All in all, however, I see my publishing much farther down the road now than it seemed to be a week ago.

Operation Lotus Sunday

Editing “China Tour”

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On Saturday I found myself with some time, so I decided to edit China Tour. I started from the beginning, and got all the way to page 48 in the couple of hours of quiet time I had. I enjoyed this time. Editing doesn’t bother me.

What concerns me, however, is how few changes I have. Granted that I’ve been over some of this before, when I read the last five pages before going on to new material. But I’ve found in past novels that I always have some things to change in the early chapters based on what I write in the later chapters.

Perhaps it will be the need to foreshadow a plot element that I added, which I didn’t anticipate early on. Perhaps it was foreshadowing of something I later decided not to put in the book, so I have to take something out. For whatever reason, I’ve always found the edits to be necessary.

This time, not so much. I’m editing at the point in the story where the mistaken identity has happened, but the CIA agents haven’t figured it all out yet. They are about to meet the tourist couple, and learn the extent of the problem.

Perhaps I’ll find more to edit as I get into it more. I might find some time tomorrow, Christmas day, to edit twenty to thirty pages. We’ll see how that goes. I’m anxious to get back to the writing, to adding new material and completing the story. Right now I’ve fallen behind the pace needed to have it done by early February, but there’s still time to catch up.

Stay tuned. And Merry Christmas.

Christmas, Operation Lotus Sunday

The Christmas Writing Slump

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Last night I found many reasons to be upstairs and not writing. Finally around 9:15 p.m., with all necessaries and unnecessaries completed, I went to The Dungeon and began writing on China Tour.

These were scenes interspersed with scenes I had already written. I decided to follow one couple through an intense 24 hour period and write all those scenes consecutively, even though they wouldn’t appear in the book that way. By doing so, I think I wrote more efficiently, not having to go back and think about what I had written before tracking the other couple. I took that couple through that critical period, to a point where they were apart from each other. Their next scene will be when they join each other again.

Sunday I began working on the scenes for the other couple. Their time is not all that intense, at least not physical danger like the first couple. They have a different kind of relationship crisis going on, with kids in the middle. I found it somewhat difficult to write these scenes, and on Sunday only wrote around 1,000 words in three hours. I couldn’t concentrate.

But by the time I got to the computer last night, I had been over these scenes in my mind. I opened the file, went straight to work, and in just 90 minutes pounded out about 1,900 words, bringing the total to 38,700. After I left The Dungeon and went upstairs to do a few things before going to bed, I realized I had left a critical part of dialog out. I’ll try to insert that tonight.

All of these scenes were basically unknown to me two weeks ago. Even as recently as three weeks ago I hadn’t figured out how to put the first couple in physical danger, and I had no idea how to put the second couple in the relationship problem. But as I write one scene, the next one comes to me. Then another and another.

I’m writing the action that happened on September 18, 1983. My intention was to go day-to-day all the way up to September 27, with the two climax scenes happening on September 26. If I do that, however, I run the risk of a couple of things. One, it might get boring, because I don’t know that much is going on of interest to the average reader. Second, it might run too long. That’s a surprising statement as just a couple of weeks ago I was lamenting that the book seemed to be trending shorter than I had first expected. I’ve now come full circle and think maybe the length will be just right.

I think what I’m going to do is skip some days. I’ll finish September 18th, right up to lights out (a long, long chapter). Then I may skip ahead to Sept 21, and figure out some action in Chengdu. then I may skip ahead to Sept 23 and a scene I’ve planned all along for Xian. Then it will be on to Beijing for planning on Sept 25 and the culmination of the two quests on Sept 26, and the denouement on the 27th.

BUT, for the next week or two I don’t know that I’ll get much writing done. We’ll be traveling for Christmas. I don’t write well on the laptop, and I don’t know how much time I would be able to devote to it. So I’m going to print out the manuscript as it now stands and edit it on the trip. If Lynda is interested, I’ll have her read it and make sure some of the, shall I say, edgier scenes in it get the spousal blessing.

Hopefully I’ll check in here a few more times before the end of the year.

 

expatriate life, family, Operation Lotus Sunday

More on the Genesis of “China Tour”

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So I’m at the Write to Publish Conference in Wheaton, Illinois, in May 2004. I learn that publishers don’t want to publish someone who has written a story, but someone who has written a good story and has the potential for a long career with them. At that point in my career I had written one novel that I was figuring out how to get published, plus some poetry.

During the conference I began to think about what else I could publish. Very quickly the idea for a baseball novel came to me. I committed it to some notes. More slowly came the idea for a different novel, one that happened from an experience our family had overseas.

When we lived in Saudi Arabia we had the good fortune to do some traveling. In 1982 we did Europe for 28 days; also in ’82 we went to Cairo for Christmas. In 1983 we decided to do Asia, and planned for 30 days there. At the time of the trip, Sept-Oct, Charles was 4 1/2 and Sara was just under 2 1/2. They were with us on the trip, of course, since we didn’t do what some couples did, taking the kids home to be with grandparents then going on a trip by ourselves.

Our itinerary was Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, and Thailand. Two weeks in China was the biggest part of that. It had just opened to Western tourism a couple of years before that, and it seemed exciting to go there. At our stop in Hong Kong we visited with our church’s missionaries there, who asked us to carry Chinese language Bibles in and make contact with a man of our church in Beijing. Of course we said yes, not thinking much about what that meant.

A day or two later it hit us when we received the small suitcase with the materials: Bibles, cassette tapes, tracts, and who knows what in that bag. We thought about getting them through customs, as well has how to reach our contact in Beijing with just a name and phone number—and that of the location where his wife worked.

The short story is we got the Bibles through customs, to Beijing, and with the help of our tour guide were able to make contact with Alan. He had spent over two decades in a prison camp because he wouldn’t deny the name of Christ when asked to by Chairman Mao’s goons. Meeting him and his wife in that restaurant in Beijing was one of the great events of our lives.

Back to Wheaton in 2004. I wondered if I could make a novel out of a Bible-smuggling American tourist couple who were expats. What kind of trouble could I put them in? Would I put that in the current era or in 1983? On that trip I kept a very good trip diary, which had not been lost in the moves we made over the years. I also kept a lot of the literature they gave us at hotels and other tourist stops, as well as souvenir books we bought. So I had data to put it in 1983. That seemed like the better option, but what to do to make a full novel out of this story?

1983 was still Cold War times. President Reagan was working on arms deals and the Strategic Defense Initiative, meeting with world leaders. We all assumed that the CIA had our back, infiltrating countries, gathering intelligence, helping our government get the upper hand on our enemies without going to war. The first of Tom Clancy’s novels were a year away, but spy novels abounded. What if, I thought, I put this American couple into the middle of a CIA operation in China? A major plot twist came to mind fairly quickly.

By the last day of the conference this idea had come together. I hadn’t yet put anything on paper, but I had the idea. At the last lunch I wound up sitting at the same table as James Scott Bell. He was the keynote speaker for the evening sessions, and thought I hadn’t heard of him till that conference he seemed to be a rock star at this Christian writing conference.

We all talked about our works-in-progress, or planned. I said what I was thinking of for a novel. Someone asked how I could pull that off, i.e. China in 1983. I told of our trip there and of the trip diary and other literature I had. James Scott Bell nodded approvingly, though I don’t remember him saying much.

So that’s it. May 2004 was when I first thought of the book. Through the years I’ve worked on the tag line, a summary, and thought through scenes. But it wasn’t until October 2012 that I actually committed a word of it to paper or pixel. It’s now sitting at 34,300 words, looking at a February 2013 finish, maybe earlier if life aligns right. Figuring a month cooling off and a month to do final edits and publishing tasks, I’m looking at an April 2013 book launch.

Stay tuned.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Operation Lotus Sunday

The Genesis of “China Tour”

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I now have about eight posts on this blog in which I’ve mentioned my novel-in-progress, China Tour. I see, however, that I haven’t really said much about how it is I came to write this, when I first thought of it, what I’ve done about that over the years. On the odd chance that this becomes a bestseller, and hoards of fans of it want to know why I wrote it, I’ll go into that here. I don’t know if I’ll fit it all in one post or not.

In January 2003 I finished the first draft of my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I wrote that in a creative slow rush, over two or three years. At the time I had no intentions of becoming a writer. The only other creative writing I was doing was some poetry. DLA was simply a story I wanted to tell.

Knowing nothing about how to be published, or how to write a novel, I set the book aside and began studying the market. Some people would say that was backwards. You should first learn how to write a novel, and study the market extensively, before actually writing the novel. Perhaps so, but in my creative rush I did it the other way. As I would learn later, letting a book sit for a time after completing the first draft and getting into the editing is a good thing. Who knew? I just did it.

Since I attend professional and technical conferences for my engineering profession, I figured I’d have to do the same. So I signed up for a regional writers conference in Oklahoma City, and meanwhile began using the internet to study novel writing and the market. By March 2003, at that conference, I still didn’t know much. I learned a lot at the conference. One of the best parts was a one-on-one appointment with Rene Gutteridge. She told me how my dialog was not what was needed, and in those short fifteen minutes gave me some good pointers. These were reinforced in a class I attended the second day of the conference.

From that I began the long editing process of my long novel, while at the same time beginning the querying process to editors. By the end of 2003 I had made three passes through DLA, and had received some rejections. I learned of a national Christian writing conference in Wheaton, Illinois in May, and signed up to attend. Our son living in nearby Chicago made selecting that conference a no brainer.

The biggest piece of eye-opening information I learned at WTP was that publishers don’t want to publish the book of a writer who has a story to tell. They want to publish the book of a writer who wants to have a writing career. Not one book, but many. Not a book and a sequel. Not a trilogy. No, someone who has the chance to have success with the book under consideration and then be able to produce more better books. [Ah, it does my writing heart good to write that in a grammatically and contextually correct way.]

This was a shocker. I think it was on the first day of the conference I heard that. No one would want to publish DLA unless I had other books coming, but I didn’t have other books coming. I just wanted to get DLA published. But I couldn’t under those circumstances. Self-publish it? No, too much negative stigma attached to self-publishing. I was stuck in author no-man’s-land, unless I could think of other books.

So for the rest of the conference, I sat in classes, workshops and sessions, thinking about what other books I could write. Poetry wasn’t an option, though even then I was thinking about something that eventually would become a book. Two novels came to mind. One came immediately: a baseball novel that eventually became In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People“. The other came to me more slowly, over the three days of the conference. That one is what I’m now writing.

So it took from May 2004 to October 2012 for the idea to actually become words on paper. If it was that long, I sure you all won’t mind waiting another day for a second post for me to tell more of the circumstances of the genesis of that idea.

Stay tuned.