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February 09, 2005

Of Pain, Books, and Pub Dates

As this is my first-ever blog -- of any kind -- I thought I would commence by cheating. In order to overcome first-timer's writer's block, I intend simply to cut and paste a swatch from my website, wherein I track the origins of my novel, Painkiller -- the subject of this blog. This will improve my comfort level, and make me feel as though I have something important to say. But wait -- I want to accomplish something here. If you bear with me, I'll explain...although my purpose will more or less be forming itself as the explanation flows forth. (Hm -- eerily similar to how the plot is devised in my books.)

You see, I have always wanted to be a writer. A novelist -- published, working, even bestselling. I've always wanted to be a filmmaker too. Funny thing, though, is that this becomes a bit odd, having such aspirations -- saying "I've always wanted to be..." -- when you reach into your mid-30s. Then late 30s. When you become a husband, or wife, and father, or mom. Aren't you supposed to get those goddamn aspirations going in college? In your 20s? You begin to feel mildly -- okay, severely -- out of place just about everywhere you walk. But if you're meant for it, you can't stop, you can't help yourself, and you just have to keep doing it...trying...writing...imagining. It becomes harder, I think, to find the time when you become those things -- husband. Dad. So you have to want it even more than before, even to find the energy and discipline to sit down and write for an hour. Half an hour. Six hours (yeah, right). And what if you commit all that time and nobody wants your first, second, or third script? Your first, gigantic, took-two-years-to-write novel? You're growing old, your obsessed with your passion, your art...and maybe you don't even qualify at the professional level in your chosen craft? Get ready for the onset of midlife crisis like you read about . . .

Anyway, the point is I've wanted for so long, so badly, to write a book I'd pluck off the shelves and stay up all night reading, that after my first disappointment I jumped back into it and wrote something. Maybe something that could work. But it didn't work until I rewrote it so many times, with advice from so many very smart people that I thankfully took -- it was, simply, the hardest thing I've ever done. I told myself, having completed yet another draft, that if were ever to find a deal and get this thing on shelves, it would be the most earned accomplishment of my life.

And then it happened. Fortune smiled upon me -- and so did some very generous, helpful, maybe even foolish people. But I'll take it...I've worked so hard at it for so long, I'm surprised my wife even knows me any longer, let alone that she's stayed with me and seems still to like me. William Morrow will publish my first (real) novel, Painkiller, in hardcover, as the first of a two-book deal -- the "pub date" being July 1, 2005. It's hard to believe.

And so I commence to writing this blog at the beginning of "act three" of my story of aspiration to a professional life of novel-writing...and I do it only partially for me. I've got two main purposes: one, to track the six months leading up to the release of the book for posterity's sake; and second, for any, for all, even just for the one similarly aspiring writer who might stumble across this and find, in the progression of the marketing, publicity, signings, publication, and maybe even success of the book, a cup of fuel that will allow another half-hour, another hour, another six hours (yeah, right) at the keyboard. I know I needed the octane...so maybe I can siphon some off with this blog.

But this is a blog, so let me blather on for a while before I click the sin of duplication into existence and cut-and-paste the chunk of text from my website into this first entry.

First, I suppose I ought to presume that only I will read this. Be interesting to see whether this presumption will prove correct. Also, my intention is to log, on a more-or-less weekly basis, the tale of -- well, of "act three" of my twenty-year quest to become a published writer of spy novels. Act one, you see, involved thirteen or fourteen years of mornings and late nights spent scribbling bad chapters from bad book ideas, occasionally decent short stories, and unacceptably horrendous screenplays. Somewhere in the midst of that I got into film school -- USC graduate school of cinema-television -- and tossed some particularly foul short films into the bucket. The plot point ending act one? While working as a "story analyst" reading scripts for a big-time action producer in Hollywood, I sneak off to the Beverly Hills Public Library and write, on yellow legal pads, the crowning achievement of my writing life to that point: an actual completed novel which, many hope, shall never see its way outside of the box it occupies in my attic.

During act two, complications ensue: having finished a book, my passion for writing develops into a conflagration resembling the work of an obsessed arsonist. I begin to hate each of a sequence of day jobs with greater and greater passion. I write another bad screenplay, claim I will make a low-budget independent film with my day-job contacts, then ultimately, decide that I may not have the talent to accomplish this full-time writing thing after all. And then, heading into the second half of the act, I finally find my groove. (This occurs partially due to the external, inspiring factor of meeting my wife, getting married, and generally finding purpose in life.) The idea strikes: why not write a story about a man who doesn't have to deal with anybody? A guy who's checked out. Been whacked around and left for dead...until he turns the tables and extorts his way into a life of leisure in the British Virgin Islands. Then, of course, the shit hits the fan.

I write and rewrite this book for two years. I move back east. I get notes from a friend. I rewrite again. The friend gets me the best attorney and manager in the business. I get notes from him. I rewrite again. I get notes from another friend. I rewrite again. Then . . . (plot point ending act two). . . I get an agent. And he gets me a deal: Painkiller will be published in hardcover by William Morrow in the summer of 2005. They even pay me for the right to do this...twice. They want another one too -- a two-book deal based on that guy on the beach -- the man called Cooper.

And that brings us to act three -- and this blog. Between now -- the week on which the galleys have been printed, and we are distributing to a handful of high-profile writers in hope of receiving rip-roaring "blurbs" from them -- and July 1, the publication date, there is a lot to do. It will be a busy time. It will be a time of little sleep. There is a day job to worry about -- paying those bills -- and yet there is a second book to deliver...that all-important second book in a series. And one learns quickly that even with the support of an incredible editor, publisher, head of marketing, head of sales, and on down the list at the publishing house, the fact is, authors need to peddle their own books pretty hard to really make an impact and get what you hope is a bestselling quantity of readers to check it out. (Getting them to like it is the part you've already finished -- you're doing that again, you hope, on the second one...hell, you can only hope you did it on the first one...)

So there will be a lot going on; among these things will come the landmarks, the road signs of book-publishing I, and I assume you, as a reader, relish. The galleys. The jacket photo. The advance reviews. The printing number. All that stuff...all of which I'll track here, in one way or another.

So I suppose that's it -- I've figured out what the hell I'm doing with this blog. Here it comes, regular or irregular though it may be.

Now the duplication part, just to get caught up to the present:

(From the writing journal of Will Staeger, scribbled in the summer of 2004)

I once heard that Robert Ludlum said he wrote out of anger -- that his ideas came from something that enraged or infuriated him. I suppose that applies to Painkiller and my reason for writing it: first, as the years ticked by, and like everyone else, I suppose, I grew weary of working for people I disliked. I grew weary of working for anybody, in fact -- so I decided to write a story about a guy who worked for no one. Cooper, as I conceived of him from the start, is a man beholden to no one, a man who can do what he wants, when he wants, wherever he wants -- and so he has picked the most exotic place on earth in which to live, not only because he wanted to live there, but because he needed what this place -- the British Virgin Islands -- had to offer. Something had happened to him -- something requiring the pain-killing benefits of the islands for their anesthetic effect.

I was also infuriated at the hypocrisy of the so-called leaders of business and government. Infuriated at the annoying trait most elected 'officials' or 'captains' of industry tended to display: the outward, public position of working toward the well-being of all people...and the reality of being in it only for themselves. The government of the old Soviet Union embodied this principle better than any organization, providing great fodder for spy novels while the Cold War remained in effect; once the Cold War expired, I'd found that the hypocrisy had migrated a little too close to home. So that, too, is what I wanted to write about. The Julie Laramie character offered an 'insider's window' to this world, working as she does for CIA.

It's probably worthy of mention that I wrote Painkiller as a reader too -- a disappointed reader. I grew up reading Clancy's early stuff, Ludlum's novels before anybody thought about making movies out of them, the old Ian Fleming paperbacks. Thing is, when the Cold War went away, so, it seems, did the great spy novel -- and no author stepped in to take over. There was no reinvention of the genre, not that worked in a contemporary setting, not with that combination of breakneck pacing and interesting roster of mysterious and frequently corrupt characters. Crime fiction sort of stepped in and climbed the best-seller lists -- I worship Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, don't get me wrong -- but the page-turning suspense just wasn't there for me in the crime genre, at least not in that stay-up-all-night-and-sleep-through-school-or-the-job sort of way I'd grown used to in the classic, Cold War espionage thrillers. And the bestselling thrillers of today' Sure, maybe there's some decent pacing, but the characters inevitably fall flat for me.

Answer: If no one else would put one out there, I'd do it myself -- write a spy novel for today, pepper it with relics of the Cold War come back to wreak havoc on the world as we know it...with at least a game attempt at odd, twisted characterization and a hermit's view of the world -- the kind of perspective only the mind of an enraged (and possibly insane) skeptic could devise. After only about a hundred drafts, I thought I might just have something to satisfy my -- and maybe a few other readers' -- thirst for that missing international spy thriller it seemed Mikhail Gorbachev and his Perestroika had taken from our midnight reading hour.

I actually began the story intending for the hero to be an anti-hero, but to be much younger -- a new CIA man fresh off the training regimen -- but soon decided you can't have much of an anti-hero unless said anti-hero has been wronged, lived too long, and ultimately checked the hell out from society as we know it. I read up on the Caribbean, set the story in the British Virgins to start, and tried my hand at an outline. Turns out my father got a consulting job in Puerto Rico -- also turns out I landed a new job but wouldn't be starting for another month -- so I headed south and paid him a visit. A long one: few weeks in PR, then a week at a place I found advertised on the Web, called Cooper Island. Along the way I verified what I'd read about Tortola, the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force, local West Indian culture, and the mix of odd-duck expats and blissfully drunk tourists who swing through the place in a never-ending flow.

A year of early mornings later (dedicated to sneaking back to that place in my imagination while I worked yet another annoying day job) and I had a draft. A really bad, incomplete draft, but it was something. A friend of mine gave me some advice on how rough of shape this thing was in, and after disagreeing in my usual knee-jerk manner, I gave in, and spent almost two years rewriting the first draft from the ground up. Only a few more page-one rewrites, and hell, I had something partially worthy of showing to somebody who might be able to find me an agent. When I showed the then-current draft to just such a professional, I was advised that maybe just one more rewrite would do. By then I'd almost gone insane, and chose, instead of departing for the Caribbean and checking out from society as I tended to want to do...well, I chose to do another goddamn rewrite. Turns out that last pass got me a great agent, who found me a great publishing house, with an even greater publisher and editor -- who might even have seen that spark of rage that had started it all, despite the writing that took place in between.

I went back to the BVIs a few months later and told the tale of the publishing deal the islands had inspired...a nice feeling indeed. I felt, watching the wake trail back behind the boats that took me from place to place, that I had been there every day for the past few years. In fact, I had, in my mind, on my laptop, on my yellow notepads I scribbled on while the Starbucks cup stained its brown rings on the paper, usually untouched, still full to the rim, after my two or three hours were over and I was forced to sneak into the office, late for work yet again. My hope is that the book connects with a few people who felt all those frustrations I felt, and still feel. Life can be tough, the daily grind can slowly kill you...you've got to do what you want to do, to take control of things, but it mostly seems as though this, for the ordinary soul, is an impossible feat. Have a read, though -- take a look at this book Painkiller -- and you'll see that you're not alone, mired as you are in that frustrated place of stasis and servitude I know as intimately as any man knows anything.

See you for the next entry...

WHS2

Posted by Will Staeger at February 9, 2005 01:56 AM

Comments

Posted by: Susan Mitchell at March 3, 2006 06:51 AM