This is the fifth in my series of posts about how it came about that I decided to write Operation Lotus Sunday. Here are links to the other posts: The Story Behind Operation Lotus Sunday – Where I Was.

It was the last day of the 2004 Write To Publish Conference in Wheaton, IL. As I said in past posts, I was trying to answer the question: Am I a writer, or did I write a novel? Meaning, I had one novel written that I was shopping around. Was that the sum total of my book-length writing, or was I going to try to make a career out of writing? Career might be too strong of a word at this time. Did I intend to write multiple books with the idea of making money from that writing?

I think the answer to that question had always been yes, otherwise I would have just gone ahead an self-published Doctor Luke’s Assistant. But my writing ideas, as far as fiction was concerned, were limited. I had the idea for the baseball novel, but hadn’t done much with it. So I was trying to decide.

One other idea that had been running through my head also came to gel about this time, but for a non-fiction book. I had written, a couple of years before, four newspaper guest op-ed pieces. I called them Documenting America. In these I took an American historical document, quoted it, commented on it, and tied it to a current issue. The local newspaper ran them, and I received some good compliments from people who read them. I had thought about making them into a newspaper column that I would self-syndicate, but at this conference another idea came to me: turn them into a book.

I don’t know that the book idea completely gelled this week, but it came close. I had already written more than the first four, maybe up to about twelve, just to show myself that the idea was viable. If I turned them into a book, however, I could flesh out the chapters. The op-eds were limited to 500-750 words, but the material, as I saw it, would be better with chapters in the 1250-1750 range. If I did a book of this, I could do a better job with it.

So suddenly, I had the completed novel, the fledgling baseball novel I’d been thinking about for a year or so, and the new novel based in China. Plus I now had the non-fiction book to write. This was enough ideas for me to realize this was a writing career, not just a one novel wonder.

The last day of the conference I found myself at the same table as James Scott Bell. I had attended his daily class on fiction writing and learned much from it. As we shared what we were writing, I told about the book that had come to mind during the conference. Titled China Tour, it would follow the trip we had made in China in 1983. I would base the itinerary on our trip and the sites on our trip diary. The conflict would come from the American couple whose marriage is in danger, and who become embroiled in a CIA operation while there due to a case of mistaken identity. Their marriage would be under greater strain due to the extraordinary measures they would have to take as a result of the CIA operation.

Everyone at the table said it sounded good. Jim Bell didn’t say much, but he nodded his head as I told the plot, especially when I said I had the trip diary an 1983 tour books as source material. He definitely approved of that.

So, that’s my story of how I came to write the book. China Tour, which was always a placeholder title, became Operation Lotus Sunday just before publication. Sales are slow, but it’s out there. It’s my fourth self-published novel, and I guess I’m a writer.

We returned to the United States in December 1983, our time in Saudi cut short by a growing shortage of work. This was just two months after we returned from our Asia trip. Into a box went our trip diary, our tour books, our photos, along with everything else we shipped home, and we left Saudi on December 2, 1983, planning to spend almost four weeks in Austria. It was so cold, however, we cut our trip to about ten days and headed home to Rhode Island. We left the kids with my dad and flew to North Carolina to house hunt, returning to RI just before Christmas.

Eventually our shipment caught up with us in North Carolina. The box (or boxes) with our tour souvenirs arrived. Those boxes went in storage in the basement. A few years later they went into storage when we went to Kuwait. Then they came out of storage when we returned to the States again in 1990 and moved to Arkansas in 1991. Those boxes moved from storage warehouse to outside shed to garage and eventually to the basement of the house we moved to in 2002, where we still live.

At some point I opened the box, found the day timer and tour books, and put them on shelves somewhere in the house. I think I took a quick look through the diary, but didn’t yet read it in detail.

So now it’s June 2004. I’m in Wheaton, IL at the Write To Publish Conference, having down time in the evenings and trying to decide if I was a writer or if I had just written a novel. Also I was thinking about the grand tour I had taken more than a decade before writing ever crossed my mind, and if my experiences from that could feed into writing. I realized that China was the most exotic place in our travels, and wondered if I could work up a book plot from it.

At some point during the four days of the conference it hit me: the trip diary from our Asia trip was somewhere on a shelf back in Arkansas. So was our 1983 Fodor’s Guide. So were the tour books we picked up on the trip. So was the propaganda that we kept receiving in our hotels in China. Could I build all of this into a novel?

James Scott Bell’s advice on conflict came to mind. He didn’t say it this exact way, but basically a novel must be built on conflict. Introduce your protagonist, plunge him/her into conflict, keep the conflict and stakes rising, and eventually have him/her rise above it all. How could I work conflict into our China trip?

Over two to three days a plot gelled. All conflict doesn’t have to be physical danger. You can have emotional conflict, marital conflict, parents vs. children conflict, financial conflict. Conflict comes in lots of forms. How about, I thought, having an American couple touring China who are in the midst of marital conflict? Then, how about if they become involved in a CIA operation while there? Double conflict.

By the last day of the conflict I had it fairly well worked out. Not all the details, not the name of the main characters, not the number of minor characters, but the basic plot with its lines of conflict were there—and I’ll relate them in the next installment.

So I’m on the Wheaton Campus, attending the Write To Publish Conference in June 2004, trying to decide if I was a writer or if I had written a novel.

I took the continuing class on fiction writing taught by James Scott Bell. I took good notes. I still remember a lot of what Bell said, especially his thoughts on dialog. Sitting in that class, as well as in some others, ideas began to come to me for other writing projects.

The first was some more ideas for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. The second editor I met with was not interested in Doctor Luke’s Assistant. Bible-era novels don’t sell very well, he said, with there being a limited audience for the genre. His publishing house already had its “stable” of writers for the genre, with no openings for new ones. He asked, “What else do you have?” I told him about a political novel that had crossed through my mind, but which wasn’t well developed. He said no, he wasn’t interested, but added, “What else are you working on?” I told him about FTSP; he said he was interested and that I should send him the first three chapters whenever I had them done.

So I began to more seriously think about this baseball novel, and how to work Mafia influence into it. Bell spoke a lot about conflict in his class, so I was thinking about how to develop more conflict.

At the same time, I had been thinking about my overseas travels and how to work them into books. Through the years I’ve read about people—politicians, writers, royalty—who had made the “grand tour” around the world to gain perspective for their life work. I was disappointed that I couldn’t make such a grand tour to enhance my writing. Then I realized: I did make the grand tour. I lived overseas for five years and visited more than 30 countries. I just did it before I ever thought of being a writer, and so needed to pull from memory those things I needed to enhance my writing.

In my dorm room in the evenings, after putting down some ideas or some actual words for FTSP, I began work on a mental sketch of a novel. Or, I should say of a plot. Or, I should say, of going through our expatriate life and travels, and trying to decide if there was anything in those times that could form the nucleus of a novel.

There were years of living in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Would American readers care about that? Based on the total lack of interest by Americans we interacted with in the years after returning to the States, I thought not. We had some good travels in Europe in 1982, our first real travel adventure after moving to Saudi Arabia. But except for one train mix-up nothing really came to mind.

Our second long trip out of Saudi Arabia was our round-the-world trip to Asia in 1983. Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, and Thailand, for a total of 30 days. Surely something from that trip would be good at the nucleus of a plot. And it came to me. I began to focus on China, as I’ll explain in the next post.

I can trace the genesis of Operation Lotus Sunday to June 2004. However, before I get to that, I want to set the stage of where I was in my writing career at that time.

The place was the Write To Publish Conference in Wheaton, IL. This was my first national conference to attend, having been to one regional conference in early 2003. I came there to pitch my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant, to editors and agents. It was completed and polished with several rounds of edits. I had another idea in my back pocket, the start of my second novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, which I was ready to share if the opportunity arose. Other than this, I was planning on attending classes, meeting other writers, and generally enjoying myself.

The first day I was able to pitch DLA to an editor, who passed on it. I had an appointment with a second editor the next day, and hoped for the best. The classes were turning out quite good (though I took a couple that probably weren’t the best for me). As we talked about each others’ books and writing “careers” I got to thinking about what my next steps would be.

For me, I was in the process of deciding if I was a writer, or if I was someone who had written a novel. DLA was done; FTSP was outlined but not started, and whether it would ever be written was an unknown. Did I have more books in me? I was working on my poetry book at the time, but I knew that was almost certainly not for commercial publishing. So where was I going?

Construction on the campus of Wheaton College, the venue for the conference, meant difficulty of moving around. There was no evening coffee shop on campus, and I didn’t want to walk off campus to find one. So after the evening sessions I went to the computer room in the dorm and updated on e-mail and a few web sites (no laptop in the family back then). And thought about what I could write. An hour later I was alone in my dorm room, and thought some more. Slowly over those four days, ideas for more writing projects came to mind.

I’ll tell about the two main ideas in the next segment.