It’s taken a long time to get to this point.
Not just the days getting this website and blog set up – I’m not exactly computer savvy when it comes to this sort of thing.
Not just my recent move across country from Washington DC to the absolute farthest corner of Texas (or the move two years prior which brought me to DC), or the weeks it’s taken to get unpacked and settled again.
Not even the year it took me to complete the drafts of not one but two books (my first full attempts), or the stretch of time while I was sending the second of those orphan manuscripts out, hoping someone might see something worthwhile in it.
I’m talking about all the years before all that, when writing was something always on my mind, but something I did very damn little of. At least real writing – constructive writing – writing with a purpose.
Work, marriage, kids, divorce; all of that stuff – you name the excuse and I’ve used it, usually more than once. I would like to say now there was some life desperation, some great epiphany; some moment when all of those early half-written pages, lost plots, ignored characters, and lonely chapters suddenly forced my hand – maybe a flash of light or a ghostly visitation by a really insistent muse, that finally got me off my ass. I would like to say that. But I can’t.
It was simpler than that; more prosaic, more mundane.
It was a newspaper article – about an ugly and strange occurrence in Zanesville, Ohio – where the owner of a private animal farm let the animals loose, and how for hours afterward the local sheriff’s office had to hunt and shoot all of those exotic animals in the farms and streets of their small community. There was an even a picture I remember, of one those roadside signs lit up all in yellow. It said something like: “Dangerous animals on the loose. Stay in your car.” One of the letters was even slightly off, like a few of the bulbs had burnt out, giving the whole picture a weirder, carnival-like quality than the text itself.
All that morning I kept thinking about that story, about that poor bastard who was somehow so lost and desperate that he literally and figuratively released all of his lions and tigers and bears (and then proceeded to get attacked and killed by them), and then that afternoon on the way home from work I got stuck in traffic for two hours on the I-95 freeway.
That article and two hours of traffic = an entire story sketched out in my head. And six weeks later, I had a book written. Not a great book, maybe, but it was done. Beginning, middle, end. All done, and all mine. And it was a story I really wanted to tell, with characters I cared about. And it started so simply – just that idea tripped by that news article, and a few idle hours on my hands. Then the physical act of just sitting my ass down and putting one word after another: but most important, refusing to let myself stop.
Yet, for me, it took a long time to get to that point; the point of putting one word after the other, and not stopping.
A few more thousand words led to my second book… the one I thought might actually be pretty good. It was filled with one of those lost plots and a few of those ignored characters from years past, and once I got up the nerve to share my real writing with the real world, I started to get some pretty positive feedback. Lots of that “close but not quite there” feedback, of course, but just enough of a good vibe to let me know I was on to something; that maybe, just maybe, my writing was getting there. That feedback helped shape revisions while I kept wrestling off and on with that story, even as I moved on to the next.
And it was while I was deep in that third book (but struggling every step of the way – sometimes even when you’re successfully putting one word after another, the story itself is failing and just isn’t coming together), that I got the call (and if you’re reading this, you probably know what “that call” is). The call was a surprise – I had all but stopped shopping the book I’d titled A SHARPER DARK – but that call turned into an hour-long conversation, and even though that version of A SHARPER DARK was still close – still not quite there – it was close enough that someone decided to take a chance not only on that story, but on me. And at the end of that call, A SHARPER DARK had a new lease on a life, and I entered a new chapter in my life – as an agented writer.
Writing, revising, and submitting A SHARPER DARK took a little over a year. Getting there, took decades.
Again, like I said, it’s taken a long to get to this point.
And there’s still a ways to go. A SHARPER DARK is just at the beginning of the revision process – a process to really get it in shape to go on submission. It’s a process I’m going to talk about here, as well as whatever else comes to mind. I still have the job and the kids and all the other things, but what I don’t have any more are excuses.
After all, it’s taken so long to get to this point, I can’t waste any more time.
Anyway, I don’t have anything more profound than that. I’m just someone who has always loved to write who now hopes to turn that passion into something else – maybe even into a career as a writer (okay, author). I’ve been given the opportunity to do just that, and that makes me lucky in more ways than one.
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