Welcome to my new and improved corner of Creative Loafing Tampa. I put the old Self Publishing Notebook out to pasture because apparently blogging is dead — or so I’m told. (Was it even a blog?) For me, Self Publishing Notebook had to die because while finishing and publishing my second book has been an interesting process, it’s not always worth the play-by-play — and perhaps more significantly — I had a really hard time staying on topic. People looking for an informative commentary on publishing were learning about this airplane baby bassinet that no one has ever seen and readers who couldn't give a damn about writing a book were missing out my keen wisdom and wit.
I started tossing around new names for a column that's still about writing, but also about life, and whatever else I wanted to write about. Some of the proposed names/themes that were ridiculed mercilessly by my friends and colleagues were: Novel Ideas, Novel Nausea, The Novel Experience, Write Brained, Inalienable Writes, Writers on the Storm, Wordy McWordface, and one of my favorites, Written Hard and Put Away Wet. But none of them quite fit. Feel free to steal these for yourself. In a fit of heartbreak, I really wanted to name it A Little Space To Fill, but a fellow writer said, “Man, I will avoid reading your column if it’s going to put that Tom Petty song in my head every single time.”
My editor at CL — we’ll call her Cathy Salustri — observed the hemming and hawing over my column’s title, sharpened her pencil and licked the tip (for dramatic effect) and typed, “How about So, how’s that new book coming?"
She likes to taunt me via passive aggressive texts that typically fall within three subject categories: the amount of time since she’s heard from me (and not received a column), whether I remember how to log in to the paper's content manager (because it’s been so long) and to ask how my new book is coming. And I have to admit, it seems like the perfect setting to write about writing a book, and all the things that keep me from writing that book. I mean, seriously. Are people still buying Keurigs in 2017? Admit it. The Keurig the Air Popcorn Popper, Bread Maker and George Foreman Grill of our time, soon to be stocked abundantly on thrift store shelves. By the time I buy a Keurig, I'll be searching for K-Cups on Craiglist like Elaine from Seinfeld trying to stock up on discontinued Today Sponges.
So how’s that new book coming? Since you asked:
Great. What started out as a small revision, became a rewrite of about two-thirds of The Napoleon Bloom. For weeks, nay, months, while I nibbled around the edges of the story’s second act, I knew I had to push through a critical scene, which I couldn’t quite visualize. I knew what the end result needed to be, but I didn’t know when or how it would take place. Oh, aaaaand, it’s kind of a romantic, sexy sort of scene, which I find really difficult to write in a mystery/thriller. It’s so hard not to write something that makes me cringe when I read it back, like recalling my attempts to meet girls in college. But I think I got it, and here’s how it went down:
After weeks of planning and avoidance, there was nothing else to write and the time had come. I had about 90 minutes free and I could feel a migraine headache coming on, which would ruin the rest of my day. With a sudden clear vision of how the scene would take shape, I pulled up to a seat at Black Crow Coffee. A random man sat down at a piano in the corner of the coffee shop and began to play John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It was really beautiful, and an example of why I love where I live. And the scene just spilled out. No struggle. No write… delete… write… delete. Just 3,000 words of solid prose.
I’ve come to realize that when the writing is slow, the writing isn’t as likely to be good. When the writing comes fast, it’s usually what I want. But those hours of thought and notetaking and outlining are the foundation for solid story telling. I’m reading three books right now and I can tell which ones had good outlines. They are all good books, but two are bestsellers. Steven King once said that he knows the ending to a book before he starts to write it (or was it John Grisham? Doesn’t matter.). They both have more readers (and houses) than I do. Sitting down to write, without knowing what you intend to write, is why some writers suffer.
I met my book editor (not my CL editor) a few days later at the MFA Cafe (because we’re artsy like that.) As we discussed this new scene, we ran off a tangent about the plot of the next book after this. I haven't even begun to consider this book. But this tangent informed the arc that these characters will follow as I finish The Napoleon Bloom. It aids me as I clean up the final 80 pages. I guess the moral of this story is that it’s hard to have quality time writing without quality time thinking. Most of my procrastination is a product of the lack of thinking and note-taking that I’ve done prior to that writing session. It applies to everything I write, from books to Tweets. It’s why this column had four opening paragraphs that got deleted before the theme took shape.
My new column is about the writing process, being alive — figuratively and literally (which is not always so easy), the community, and anything else I want to write about (predicting kitchen appliance obsolescence). Through it, I hope to impart a useful nugget about writing, insightful observations on our world, and make you laugh — but never, ever, all three.
This article appears in Oct 26 – Nov 2, 2017.