Seacoast History Blog # 89
July 15, 2010  

I harbor no dreams of becoming the next Dan Brown or Stephen King. I couldn’t take the pressure. The knowledge that a few million readers are camped outside my gate anxiously awaiting this paragraph would turn me to stone. But I would like to inch my way up a notch or two on Amazon.com sales list before I shuffle off this mortal coil -- which could be pretty soon at the rate I’m going. Tomorrow I expect to turn in the manuscript for my 9^th book and begin my tenth. Two more are “in development.” Ten more are pulsing like raptor eggs in plastic file boxes all around me. (Continued below)  

To psych myself up to the next level I’ve been listening to an audio CD of Janet Evanovich’s “How I Write.” I had no idea who Janet Evanovich was until Amazon sent me a robot email suggesting I purchase her latest Stephanie Plum thriller for summer reading. No chance.  

My summer reading is a stack of 20 books on pirates and privateers, background for a kids’ book I start next week that is due at the publisher in September. This will be my fourth juvenile history title and I love these little things. But I can’t start that one until I get the current one off my plate. If this computer stops crashing, that will happen tomorrow. Oh please Lord, let it be tomorrow.  

That book, the one on the tall ship Lynx, is in the final rewrite stage. I “finished” it in May, but then I sent a draft out to half a dozen experts. They very kindly read my manuscript and their feedback arrived in June. For the last two weeks I have been ticking down their corrections, a total of almost 200 suggested changes. I’ve made almost as many tweaks myself in the process. 

This last editing phase helps me sound much smarter than I am in the final draft. But it is a tough job. Imagine patching 200 bullet holes in your car with Bondo™, then sanding and repainting the whole damn car. I’ve been at it for two weeks, unpaid, and it is almost like work. And I didn’t get into writing to go to work.  

I can’t really focus on Book B until Book A is done. I find it impossible to write nonfiction while deep into an edit job. So to keep myself sane, I think about another book altogether. This is my “secret project”, the book that feeds my imagination and fills my dreams. As a reward for editing the errors in Book A, I fiddle with Book C. I’m now on Chapter 10 on that one. It will likely never see the light of day.

Then, of course, there is Book D. The hardest part of writing nonfiction is lining up the projects so that, as one ends, another begins. As a full time writer at my income level, one can starve to death in the space between jobs. So the writer has to be years ahead in developing the next book, and then the next. When the writer stops moving, like a shark, he dies.   

Book D is in the proposal stage, which next to the final editing stage, is the suckiest step in the book writing process. It took me 18-months to massage this idea into a 40-page proposal that includes a complete summary of all the chapters I intend to write – if some publisher wants to hire me. Before writing the proposal, the writer has to know the topic cold, which means months, maybe years of research. Then there are months, maybe a year of waiting to see if anyone takes the bait. 

Which is why God invented Book C, I suppose. Not to mention books E through Z. I grow them like seeds in a hothouse. They begin as 3x5 cards, then grow into manila folders, and mature into 3-ring binders. When a book idea begins to sprout, it is transplanted into its own plastic bin. There are stacks of those fetal books here in my office, steaming up from the inside, rattling their cages and begging to be let out into the planet.  

What I do, so far, is not bestseller stuff. My topics are too local. My scope is too narrow. But I’m working on it. The fear is that just one of these ideas will grow like Frankenstein. The last thing I want to do with my sunset years is write the same book over and over. That’s the trap of the super successful author.   

Janet Evanovich has written 15 (or is it 16) books in the Stephanie Plum bounty hunter series. I read one and enjoyed it. I didn’t read another. Plum is a hardcore New Jersey character, but it appears Evanovich has recently moved her franchise to New Hampshire.  

I’m reading her first nonfiction book now on how to write a bestseller. It’s largely stuff cobbled off her web site mixed in with lengthy passages recycled from her Plum books. Very clever, but not very good. It’s the same old stuff Writer’s Digest has been throwing at us authors for decades. 

Based on the backlash to her latest Plum novel (from reader feedback on Amazon.com, she seems to be hitting a wall). Not financially, but creatively. Evanovich’s best idea is eating her for breakfast.  

Not much chance of that happening here. But then there is always Book C. Any one of my pulsing plastic boxes could enclose a baby Frankenbook. I hope not. But then again, I could use the cash.  

Copyright © 2010 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.