Yesterday evening, I received my first published novel in the mail. It arrived via FedEx in a plain white box, and Susan watched me open it. We were both pleasantly surprised at how good a binding job they did with it. The Band (that's the title) is a 340-page chunk of a novel. We spent the evening last night just in a state of good cheer at how cool it was to see my first published novel!!

As you may know, Mimosa is doing the cover art for The Kiribati Test which I currently have in galley form at roughly 145 pages. It really is exciting to see your own novel in print. Words can not begin to describe what a relief it is to see that. And the cool thing is, I've got five more novels completed and on my computer, which I could upload, get into print, and make available to retail bookstores like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Waldenbooks, etc. It's really happening!!

I'm excited, can you tell?

Stacey

I saw "Mean Girls" last night at the Harkins 25; it was really funny, and I left the movie theater feeling I should be nicer to everyone. It's the kind of movie that makes you think about all of the little social interactions (opening a door for someone, letting someone go before you, offering a smile, being kind) that you ordinarily don't even think about. The message is something like "We can be cruel and not even know it." And yet the movie is never really preachy; it's just a really well done, edgy comedy-of-manners.

I received a really nice rejection note (there is totally a difference between a "nice" rejection and a "thoughtless" rejection) from Space & Time magazine. The editor writes: "Stacey -- We are fairly booked up right now. Well written, but much too long for our magazine. Stories under 5K have the best chance of acceptance." Not exactly a revise and resubmit, but it would be in my interest to send them something else (something shorter) in the future. Kind'a nice, eh?

Well, there's a fresh pot of coffee on the counter and a miracle-working Plymouth Hemi Cuda to get to! So long, for now....

Well, I finished the epilogue to Claws. As it is right now, the novel is just under 70,000 words. I think I have one chapter I need to re-write (the Charlie "The Chopper" Rutledge intro chapter), but other than that, I think the book is ready for an editorial read through; once I get that done, I'll ask Susan, Shelley, Veronica, and maybe Lisa, too, if we could workshop it. I'll make the changes they suggest, and then we'll begin to send it out.

Mimosa has agreed to do cover art for a collection of four stories (The Kiribati Test, Born on the Bayou, The Big Bang, and Harvest Time), and we're going to go for something in the tradition of the old Ace Double series pulp covers. I may try to get a book-cover blurb from Joe Bob Briggs for this collection.

I checked out "Disney's World" a biography by Leonard Mosley from the Apache Junction Library, and I highly recommend it to all Walt Disney enthusiasts. I probably read 100 pages of it last night. It's slightly different than the Disney biography I read last fall by Bob Thomas; particularly in its depiction of the stress that led up to Disney's nervous breakdown and suicide attempt at 31. Thomas doesn't even mention it, whereas Mosley knew the doctor that Lillian Disney called when she found her husband out cold with sleeping pills and booze. They had to pump his stomach it seems. To read Mosley's description of the years between 25-35 in Walt's life is a dose of reality. A lot of people in the business saw this brash young kid, and they thought he was a naive simp. And to some degree, he didn't prove 'em wrong -- until Snow White, anyway. But Walt was a genius at inspiring people. He had an energy and enthusiasm -- an optimism -- that was irrepressible and contagious. With work like the early Mickey cartoons and the Three Little Pigs' "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" theme, he offered a public a much-needed lift out of the despair of the early Depression years. That ain't such a bad reason to live for....

Well, I think I'm going to work on my short story "The Cuda" -- the one about the miracle-working 1973 Plymouth Hemi Cuda -- today. The basic premise of "The Cuda" is that there's this broken down clunker of a car that if you put something broken in its trunk -- a toaster, a broken sign, etc. -- at night, and you come out the next day; the object will be fixed as good as new! It's part Rod Serling, part Christine.

I'm so mentally drained at having written seven novels these past 6-7 years that the thought of starting a new novel (even after the Hawaii trip this coming June) seems daunting. I've got the early outlines of this new Colorado novel pretty clear in my head. I'm going to try and create a story around the these two fraternal twins who have supernatural powers. I've already written the opening 5,000 words with Amber Page as a kind of comic-book-style, 12-year-old superhero who busts up three goons' robbing a Circle K convenient store in Oracle, Arizona on a dark and stormy night. The novel then goes into the twins' story -- their family is moving from Muncie, Indiana to Telluride, Colorado. And I have at least two "hooks" in mind for the early part of their story. I've been envisioning this novel for at least a year and have worked through several different strategies in Culpepper, The Miracle, and The Colorado Sequence process-wise to get me to the point I need to be at to write this "Gemini" novel. We'll see...

Stacey

It is a hot one here today in the Valley of the Sun. The high will approach 100. I'm trying to get my spirits up in order to get in there and finish up this epilogue to Claws today. Finishing a book is hard work. It's like exiting a party; that last moment, that's how everyone will remember you. And overthinking it can kill it just as fast as underthinking it.

The first 100 pages of a 400-page novel are a breeze. The next 100 are tricky, but navigable. The 3rd 100 are the most difficult because everything you've set up in the first 200 pages has to come together; it can't be forced. Either you did the right things in the first 200 pages or not, and pages 200-300 will show it. The last 100 pages are inevitable and can be either the most rewarding of the book or the most grueling. Of the novels I've written The Miracle had the hardest last 100 pages. Followed by Culpepper. The Colorado Sequence was just plain fun; the last 200 pages (it was a 700-page novel) were absolutely thrilling, liberating, and perfectly fun to write. I loved that novel in terms of the process that I followed to realize it. Claws has had its own unique final 100 pages. A major rewrite when I was 250 pages in slowed things down a little, but there were a couple of central images to hook the storyline on.

That's key, too. Finding a couple of central images on which to hang your hat. In The Colorado Sequence, it was the mountain Kevorak's Needle. The image of that mountain dominated the last 100 pages of the novel. In Claws, it has been 1) a mine and 2) the lake where the final battle takes place. Woman versus mountain lion.

And, now, I need something crisp, sharp, clear and true to cruise out on......

Stacey

I've decided to publish The Band with lulu.com. The whole experience has been a crash course in basic publishing skills in terms of how to: 1) make a book available to online bookstores like Amazon, Powells, Barnes & Noble, 2) format a text so that it looks like the kind of book you'd buy in a bookstore, 3) establishing an ISBN number so that your book is available to retail outlets. Throughout the whole process, I've been reminded of the three years of editorial work I did on The Concord Saunterer. But the truth is, it really is not that difficult to publish a novel.

I guess I've been waiting for an editor or agent to read my work too long. For example, I sent The Band to a publisher in North Carolina on February 1, 2003. 15 months later, I received the title page in the SASE I sent them with "Does not meet our current needs" handwritten in the upper-right-hand corner. No explanation, no apology for taking nearly a year and half to read 5 sample pages. Nothing. This reasonably characterizes the experience of trying to find a publisher when you're an unknown writer.

I'm wary of publishing all of my novels on my own; particularly the most recent ones like The Colorado Sequence, The Miracle, Culpepper, and Claws. I've got to believe that there's an editor out there who will actually read my work, but so far (in eight years), it hasn't happened. Culpepper, for example, has been form-letter rejected by more than a half dozen small press publishers, the most recent of which took nine months to respond to sample chapters and offered no explanation as to why they weren't interested in it. It's like a brick wall.

As disheartening as this sounds, it is actually kind of liberating. I've just come to realize that it is wholly possible to spend 3-6 years working on a novel only to find it impossible to place with an editor. The key is just to keep writing. One novel at a time. And continue to enjoy and do good work. Eventually I'll have a dozen novels published, even if I have to publish them all on my own.

I think you send out a novel when it's done to editors and agents, but if you haven't found one within three years of a novel's completion, you ought to just publish it yourself. Make it available to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc., and move on.

From everything that I've read, The Band should be available within 6-8 weeks via most retail book outlets. I've got to proof a copy and give my final "ok," and then within a few weeks, it will be a published novel available to the public! Pretty cool, eh?

In the meantime, I've got short stories coming out this summer at Plots With Guns and Shred of Evidence, as well as a few other stories under consideration elsewhere.

I dreamed last night that I won the Powerball lottery; I had the numbers on a ticket that matched up with the numbers on the screen. Not really sure what it means psychologically, but it was a damn fun dream.

Before going to bed last night, I worked for a couple hours on The Miracle of Amber Page. I wrote a query letter for Cyber-Pulp publishers, and it made me want to get in there and work on the last 75 pages of the revision work. I think that's what I'm going to do first today.

I could sure use prayers regarding this Michael Connelly interview. Miriam Parker from Time-Warner has agreed to forward questions onto Connelly for me, and if I'm going to follow through with it, I really need to nail it. I went to the library yesterday and found he had no listing in Contemporary Authors, which was surprising. Interestingly enough, Connelly's editor at Little, Brown, and Company is George Pelecanos's editor, too: Michael Pietsch. And LB&C is a subsidiary for Warner Books, I think. I'll bet if you did your homework, you'd find the film company that made Blood Work (directed by and starring Clint Eastwood) based on Connelly's novel is a subsidiary of the same parent company.

Well, I'm gonna work on The Miracle today, first, and then maybe get in there and work some on the Epilogue to Claws.

Well, I talked on the phone with Susan, and she seems to be doing great. She told me about her trip to Holland and how things are going over there in Breda. I miss her so much it hurts.

I got a good day's work done, some 1,400 words toward the Epilogue. I checked all the chapter numbers and made sure everything's in order. I ran a spell checker over the whole novel. Tightening, polishing. And I just got in from taking the dogs for a walk!

The weather is really awesome here today, and I guess I'm just missing my baby. To knock away the blues, I've decided to drive into town, have dinner at Rubio's, and see a movie. Don't know what I'll see yet.

And I'm not totally sure how I feel about this blogging thing. Seems self-indulgent. Time will tell whether I stick with it. Am hungry....fading fast.....need fooood....

Okay, for the past fifty minutes I've been working on this prologue for my mountain lion book, Claws! It's at that strange and wonderful place a novel gets where you think you could just about end the thing at any paragraph, and yet you go on telling about the aftermath of this thing. Rippard in hospital, new media interested in her story, her coming out of the mountains with Robert Gibson, etc., etc.

You know when the story is over, but you've got this whole denouement thing you got to hammer out.

I really should get back to work...

I am typing my second blog!

Susan is in Holland for another ten days, and I figured it's time I get around to blogging.