Early June Blogs 2006

Wednesday June 14, 2006
I hammered out another thousand words or so today on the new suspense novel, bringing the total up to 34,560 at 173 pages. This while we rode out the remnants of Tropical Storm Alberto. Aside from some road flooding, there was not too much damage from the storm. Some parts of Raleigh received over seven inches of rain.

Tonight, Susan and I met with some friends to watch the Carolina Hurricanes Stanley Cup Game at Raleigh's Upper Deck/Profile Pub. 'Canes lost in overtime, and so it's back to Edmonton for Game 6 on Saturday. Tomorrow, I'd like to bang out another thousand words or so on the suspense novel. Stacey Monday June 12, 2006 Well, I didn't waste any time getting back into the new suspense novel. I hammered out about 2,200 words today bringing the total up to exactly 33,300 words at 166 pages. It has the feeling of a thick brew of elements, and I've decided on a twist ending that I've begun working toward. I've got to hit the Department of Motor Vehicles tomorrow to register the truck in North Carolina, so my challenge is going to be to get up and get some work done early, before heading out to run that errand. Otherwise, I'll get behind pace and have to make it up in the afternoon. We'll see what I can do. I went for a 45 minute run this evening. Stacey Sunday June 11, 2006 Well, Susan and I have made it home. From Wytheville, Virginia, we drove down to Galax yesterday afternoon, then to Pilot Mountain in North Carolina, and then home to Raleigh. In Galax, the downtown streets were filled with the Leaf & String Festival, which is where I snapped this video of a blue grass band. This photo was taken atop Pilot Mountain looking back toward Big Pinnacle. Pilot Mountain is located about 25 miles north of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Tomorrow, it's back to work on the new suspense novel. I've got about 31,000 words (150 pages) written so far. Stacey Saturday June 10, 2006 Tonight, Susan and I are in Wytheville, Virginia. We had dinner on Main Street in the Log House 1776 Restaurant, which was an actual log house, part of which was first built in 1776. Couple of photos from Virginia's mountains... These two are from Big Walker Mountain. And this one is of Pine Grove Methodist Church, which was established in 1866... Tomorrow, we're going to drive to Raleigh, North Carolina. It's beginning to feel like we've been on the road for a while. Stacey Friday June 9, 2006 Susan and I are in Lebanon, Ohio. We're staying with Susan's Uncle Gary and Aunt Vangie, and last night, they took us out to eat at The Golden Lamb, Ohio's oldest inn. Twelve U.S. Presidents have stayed at or visited the Golden Lamb, including, J. Garfield, W. McKinley, J.Q. Adams, B. Harrison, W.G. Harding, W.H. Taft, W.H. Harrison, U.S.Grant, M. VanBuren, R.B. Hayes, R. Reagan, G.W. Bush. The inn was also where Charles Dickens stayed when he was visiting the area on his U.S. tour in 1842. They have rooms upstairs designated for these famous people, and visitors can see the actual room in which Dickens stayed. I love this country! Today, Susan and I are going to drive across southern Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia. We may stay in the mountains near Fancy Gap. Stacey Wednesday June 7, 2006 Susan and I have reached Carmel, Indiana. We drove yesterday from Olathe, Kansas through Missouri, Illinois, to Indiana. I love this part of the country, the American midwest. Not a lot of photos, but we did stop in St. Louis at the famous Gateway Arch. There's a park at the arch, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, which is right on the Missouri River. In fact, Susan and I bought lunch on a riverboat that was on the Missouri. I had Bar-B-Q. She had a hotdog. Tomorrow, we're going to drive to Ohio. Stacey Monday June 5, 2006 I am in Olathe, Kansas at Susan's mom and stepdad's house. We had dinner tonight at the Cheesecake Factory. I managed to write another 1900 words on the suspense novel today, bringing the word count total just over 31,000. Tomorrow, we're heading to Susan's brother's home in Carmel, Indiana. It's supposed to be a stormy drive, according to the weather forecast. Stacey Saturday June 3, 2006 Today, Susan and I drove from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Denver, Colorado. We snapped this photo about an hour south of the Mile High City at a rest area... For dinner, Susan took me to this crazy place called Casa Bonita in Denver where they had cliff divers and an artificial lagoon diving pool with waterfalls. It was like a dinner theater/theme park/Mexican restaurant. Weird. After dinner, we worked off the calories playing skee-ball in the arcade... Finally, we headed across town to Denver's Tattered Cover Bookstore, one of the most successful independent bookstores in the country. This is one of those stores that all the writers try to hit when out on tour... Tomorrow, we're going to try to make it to Kansas City. Stacey Friday June 2, 2006 Today, Susan and I drove from Sedona, Arizona to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Along the way, we stopped at Meteor Crater in the northern Arizona desert. There's a museum and an indoor movie theater that shows a movie about the crater. Here's a picture of me standing in front of a fragment from the meteorite that struck the earth some 50,000 years ago... And here's a picture of me standing on the north rim of the crater... Other than the crater, there's not a whole lot out there. I took a pan-around video, but it sucks. So, you may not want to watch it unless you have a high-speed internet connection. Tomorrow, we're going to try to make it to Denver, Colorado. Stacey Thursday June 1, 2006 Susan and I are officially on the road from Arizona to North Carolina. This is going to be quite the roadtrip, with many stops, so I am sure to be posting lots of photos on the blog the next few days. Our first stop on the way across the country is Sedona, Arizona. The picture up above was taken at the Chapel of the Holy Cross. Upon arriving at the Chapel, we saw a wonderful parking space, but just as we pulled up to it, a cowboy (pictured in shade) jumped out from the shade and plunked this cone down in front of us. I asked him if he was reserving it for us, and he said, "No." Here's a picture I took of Susan standing on the balcony of our hotel room... There's a roof-top patio area at the hotel. I also took this picture of a fire just over the hill from our hotel... Tomorrow, we're going to try to make it to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Believe it or not, I actually managed to get some writing done on the new suspense novel the past three days, bringing the word count total up to 29,145 at 147 pages. I'm going to try to do a little writing as soon as I get off of this here blog, so let's see what I can do. Stacey Tuesday May 30, 2006 I am back in Arizona. For whatever reason, on my early afternoon walk today, I found myself thinking very clearly about the path that led me to where I am as a writer. For those of you who’ve read this blog or followed my career the past few years, you’ve heard me talk a lot about how much I’ve written. While it’s probably true that I have written a lot, the timeline that has gotten me here is reasonable. For my own sanity’s sake (and for the sake of writing today’s blog), I’m going to try to give as accurate a rundown as I can of that timeline. I really mark my “career” as beginning over the Christmas holidays of 1994. I was in my third year of college, and I had to declare my major. I decided to major in English, and over the break, I wrote a short story. It was a suspense story, and it was really bad, but it had a beginning, middle, and end, and the reason I remember this story so vividly is that I gave it to someone on our dorm hall to read. I remember her reaction. Not good. There were other stories prior to that, and I should say that I did actually send out my first submission back in 1990. I sent a poem to Bantam Books by reading the copyright page of a book and getting the publisher’s address there. That I actually received a rejection at all for this submission is amazing because I didn’t know anything about SASEs, the poem was written with a typewriter, and it had to have obviously looked like something submitted by a high school sophomore. Bantam’s a big damn publisher, and either it was standard practice to respond to all submissions in those days or somebody was just being kind. At any rate, I didn’t really start writing until 1994-1995. It didn’t take me long to try and write a novel. It was titled “Third Son” and I got about thirty pages of it finished on my Brother WhisperPrint Word Processor before the plot became too convoluted for me to make sense of. What I can say of this early “novel” (which still exists because I’ve lugged that Word Processor around with me all these years) is that it was a crime novel. It was driven by a grisly murder, and the protagonist was a happily married man with a couple kids. The first page or two is actually pretty good, but it quickly goes downhill because I didn’t know what I was doing. Between January 1995 and the summer of 1997, I wrote a lot. Most of it was really bad. Most of it was short fiction. There is maybe one story from that period that I would consider re-printing. One. But I was writing a lot, and I was learning the basics of grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure. I was learning about genres, tone, and style. Things like voice and character were still a few years down the road. It was enough that I could put coherent sentences together in those days that weren’t filled with misspellings and grammatical missteps. By the fall of 1997, I had the basics down. That summer I had tried my hand at another novel. I was now writing on a computer in Word, using Times New Roman, double-spaced, font size 12, etc. The novel that I tried to write is in my collection The Kiribati Test. It is titled “The Drunk.” It’s probably the worst story in the collection, but one chapter of it was selected as a finalist for the 1998 Isaac Asimov Award (since renamed the Dell Magazines Award), and I managed to put down over a hundred pages in one story. Though the story is almost incomprehensible, it was a major achievement to me personally, and the stamp of approval from the Asimov contest sealed my fate. I was to be a writer. As a result of the contest, I went to a conference where I met Peter Straub, Ben Bova, Joe Haldeman, Sheila Williams, David Hartwell, and a number of other science-fiction writers and editors. Still, I had not really written a novel. I mean a real novel, man, one with hundreds and hundreds of pages. A stack. That’s what I wanted, a friggin’ stack. Between January 1998 and July 2001, I wrote a lot of short stories. Several were published in the university literary magazine. One or two won first prize in the student contest. I wrote for a year as an Opinion Columnist for the university newspaper, and I worked for three years as an editor on a scholarly journal called The Concord Saunterer. This was an important job (I would realize later) because it taught me how to put a book together from a technical point of view in terms of layout, headings, font, print, bindings, covers, ISBNs, copyrights, etc. Several years later, when I absolutely could not find a publisher and had to begin publishing my novels on my own, the experience that I’d learned in college served me well. I didn’t feel totally like a fish out of water putting a book together. In December 2000, I learned that my first professionally published short story would come out that next spring in CutBank, a literary magazine published by the University of Montana. I had sent out the story in a manila envelope, paper-clipped, along with eighteen other submissions of the same story to other magazines. The story was published in the spring of 2001, and I graduated with an MA in Creative Writing in May. From the summer of 2000 to the summer of 2001, I had tinkered around with another novel. It was a literary novel that was trying to be a horror novel, and by the summer of 2001, I had about 200 pages. After graduating, I moved to Arizona to write full time. Mainly, I wanted to force myself to finally finish my first novel. I had two other aborted attempts, and I didn’t want to make it three. So I rewrote the horror/literary novel from July 2001 through March/April 2002. What I had when I was done was a 130,000-word literary novel, which I titled The Band. In manuscript format it was about 600 pages long. A stack. It was my first completed novel. I tried to find a publisher for it, but it didn’t take me more than a year before I realized that no publisher in their right mind was going to publish it. During that time, I kept writing. From June 2002 through October 2002, I wrote my second novel. It was a PI novel which lapses into science-fiction and fantasy in its last 100 pages. I really thought I could publish this novel titled Culpepper because it was fun, fit a pretty clear genre, and had all the basic ingredients that a novel has to have. I submitted it to a lot of places, tinkered with different titles, but I just couldn’t find a home for it. Two years later, in October 2004, I learned that it was selected as a finalist for the St. Martin’s Press/PWA Best Private Eye Novel Contest. This was a big deal for a young writer, looking to get his first break. St. Martin’s Press has a history of publishing writers’ first novels, writers who go on to huge bestsellerdom sometimes (Dan Brown’s first novel came from SMP). At any rate, they didn’t publish it; it was only a finalist, not the winner. But it was still a huge breath of fresh air to a writer who felt like he’d been underwater a long time. From October 2002 through May 2003, I wrote my third novel. It was originally titled The Miracle, and it felt like a miracle that I wrote the damn thing. It was a fast-paced, crime fiction, comic-book-style, YA, action-thriller (you can say that again!) that utterly failed to find a publisher, but that actually isn’t that bad of a read. I self-published it as Amber Page and the Legend of the Coral Stone and have managed to sell nearly fifty copies via bookstore signings, friends, family, and a handful of fans (I think there are two) who bought it online. Here’s where the story gets interesting, though. Finally all that hard work was beginning to pay off. I knew I could write a novel. I knew what it took, and so I started a book titled The Colorado Sequence in May 2003. I had more fun writing that novel than any other novel to that point. I knew it was an action-thriller in the Michael Crichton, James Rollins tradition, and I just had fun with it. I never let it get me down. I finished The Colorado Sequence in January 2004, and I was sure I had something big. It was 143,000 words, and it ran on high adrenaline from start to finish. For sheer entertainment value, it may be one of the best novels I’ll ever write because I never stopped and questioned what I was doing while I was writing it. And it’s all energy and clear thinking. All the stars were aligned to break through with it. Once done, I started querying literary agents. I sent out twenty-two letters in one sending in May 2004. I got one positive response, from the Donald Maass Agency. Donald asked to see the first thirty pages, and he actually responded and said he liked some aspects of it. He declined to represent it, but I took the personal response as a sign that I was on the right path. From January 2004 through May 2004, I wrote my first suspense-thriller novel Claws. In March of 2004, I’d gone to HorrorCon and served on my first panel. With Claws, I think I finally found the genre that worked best for me. When done, it was a lean, mean 70,000-word suspense novel that my wife was certain would be the novel to break through with. I revised, workshopped, edited, and waited a half year to query agents. In January 2005, I sent out 22 letters. No takers. In March, I sent out 52 more and finally got an agent who a) wanted to work with me, b) had sold books to major publishers before, and c) was convinced this novel would find a home at one of the 4-5 largest publishers in the world. After working on it for a couple of months with the agent, we submitted it to the biggest publishers in New York and the biggest editors in the business. They nearly all responded positively to the initial query. They nearly all read the book. At one major publisher, it earned a champion who took the novel to an editorial review board meeting where it got struck down by senior editors. And then reality set in. Though they all read it and responded positively to it, no one was convinced enough to publish it. It’s a tough business, boy. From summer 2004 through March 2005, I muddled through a monster of a novel titled Dr. Plant. Worn out, I took a break from it in March 2005 and hammered out a short novel titled Maggie Redcrest, Alias Inferno. Boosted by the agent’s confidence, I started Claws 2 in summer 2005. Things were beginning to turn to mess, though. Novels were overlapping. One week, I’d think I was going to find a publisher, the next week not. Starting a novel and stopping it midway was a lesson I had to learn. By December, it was clear that Claws had failed to find a publisher, and the sequel became something of a living nightmare to write to completion. I took a break this past January and February and tried to finish Dr. Plant (a massive 800+ page tome), and finally said the hell with it, and forced myself to write the ending of Claws 2, which I just finished less than a month ago. Since then, I’ve started a new suspense novel (currently titled “Death Cabin”) and I think I’m pretty much convinced that suspense is the genre for me. There are deviations of the suspense genre (mystery, crime, and some science-fiction go hand in hand with suspense), but I think, at least for the time being, I know what I feel a suspense novel should do, and I’m just going to try to deliver some of the best ones that I can. So, that’s where I am. I’m working on novel nine. There’ve been ups and downs and highs and lows, and I’ve learned a hell of a lot about this business since submitting that poem to Bantam Books in 1990. What’s around the corner from here? Hopefully, more writing... and who knows, maybe a book contract. Stacey Sunday May 28, 2006 Outstanding day today. I wrote another 2,213 words on the new suspense novel, bringing the total to 26,110 at 131 pages for exactly two weeks of writing. Tomorrow, I fly out of Raleigh/Durham for Arizona, and I'll be on the road the next couple of weeks. I got done writing around 5:00 pm. Afterwards, I rode my bike along the Reedy Creek Greenway from my house to NC State. It's about five miles away, and once over at State, I rode all around the campus. School is out and there was hardly anyone on campus, and so I checked out all the buildings and just rode around everywhere. Made it back home around 9:00 PM, and then drove to Char-Grill for dinner. I feel very lucky to live the life that I live. Stacey