No -- what had begun to bother me was the creature I was turning into. In particular, the way this new creature -- who I’ll call Adult Me -- seemed in no way to resemble the being I once was.
Kid Me, at least the way I remember him, wasn’t anything like Adult Me. Adult Me had fallen into quite a routine: get up, get ready for work, drive an hour in the car, push pencils, paperclips, and deals for ten hours, drive another hour home, argue boisterously and for no apparent reason with his wife, spend a few minutes with his kids, decide against exercising, then maybe, on the right night, sit down at the computer for a couple hours to fiddle with a novel...then pass out, only to start Groundhog Day all over again the following morning.
Kid Me, if I recall, used to write short stories. Assemble plastic models of trucks. Paint watercolors. Play on a soccer team. Play pickup basketball with bigger kids. Stay up all night battling friends in marathon Dungeons & Dragons sessions. Collect model trains -- first HO scale, then N -- and coins too. And here’s the annoying part: Kid Me had school, too. This being the annoying part why? Because school took up just about as much time as work, right? Not quite -- but close.
In other words, there seemed no excuse, no viable explanation, for the evaporation of Kid Me -- and the horrifying appearance of Adult Me. Maybe it was just the metabolism slowing, or the cumulative effects of various disappointments, or a form of ambition seeking excellence and money rather than a balanced, jack-of-all-trades (read: poor) sort of existence. Maybe it was even noble -- in morphing into Adult Me, I’d tell myself, I’m giving my kids all kinds of opportunities to be Kids Themselves.
But there’s a reason they call people around my age middle-aged -- reason being, we ain’t dead yet. And if you’ve got your antennae up, you’ll sense it coming...there’s that moment, when it strikes, that tattoos you with a midlife crisis imprint across your forehead. It’s on your forehead so that you can enjoy staring at it whenever you look in a mirror. There I am...having my midlife crisis. Wondering what happened to the person I used to be. To Kid Me.
Some people respond by busting up their marriage. Or buying a red sports car. Or turning to the bottle. Or worse -- some ignore the tattoo painted on their forehead, then self-destruct later. One way or the other, there’s pretty much no getting around it. You hit your late thirties, or a little deeper in, and you’re stuck with facing the fact you’re halfway there. You gonna slide down the slippery slope to the end? Suck up the disappointment (if you aren’t already Donald Trump or Dan Brown) and give up on hoping for anything better with only half the game left to go?
I read something from Paulo Coelho in his own introduction to The Alchemist, and I’m sure I’m paraphrasing him badly, but what I recall of was the following rule of life: If you undertake risk to pursue your dreams, you may experience pain and disappointment. It will hurt, but you will forget the pain -- it’s only an instantaneous sting, which is gone once you feel it. Stay in a job or environment that is contrary to your character, however, and over time, the job will rack up a permanent effect -- it will turn you into a bitter, miserable person. The pain that comes when you’re pursuing what you care about can’t really change you...but failing to heed the inner voice of your dreams can, and permanently, and for the worse.
This notion rang true with me and I determined, after a while, that it didn’t matter how much money I made, or how "easy" career success might come from the “day jobs” -- the fact is, if I didn’t make a run at becoming a professional writer and filmmaker, as I’d intended to do since my teens, I’d never reverse the course of this odd, alien appearance of Adult Me. And I, as Coelho warned, would become miserable, bitter, and unpleasant. I was already well on my way.
And so -- as much in a quest for the time to dedicate to hobbies the way Kid Me used to as for the desire to write and get paid for it -- I decided it was time. The consequences be damned. I figured out how it would make sense for my employer to retain my services as a producer and writer, get more productivity out of me in the process -- and under which plan I could work from my home office and dedicate more time to writing Public Enemy and subsequent novels. I assembled a proposal; we made a deal; with that former employer as my first client, I now have a producing company, am writing a new novel, and crafting a screenplay I intend to direct.
Don’t get me wrong -- as Paulo Coelho predicted, there has been pain. There has been disappointment. For instance, I can be the first (or last in a long line of writers) to tell you that you don’t make much of a living as a novelist -- not until some freak accident occurs to land you on Oprah or for some big-shot producer in Hollywood to decide Painkiller will be Hollywood’s next big franchise.
Slowly, though -- day by day -- I’ve found myself to be more pleasant. And with the commute gone -- with the creative juices flowing for more hours each day -- I’ve also seen the creature that is Adult Me begin to infuse its life with pursuits previously relegated to the roster of activities belonging to Kid Me.
Writers need ways to procrastinate, you know. My preferred means? Four-mile runs, a model train layout beside the laundry room, and a hobby Kid Me would have had to wait till he turned 21 to pursue: I took a distance learning class, contacted a Sonoma Valley nursery, and -- thanks to a small patch of dirt my wife allowed me to seize behind the garage -- planted 35 Merlot grapevines this spring.
There’s been the pain of heavy rains so far this summer. Neither the climate nor the soil here in Connecticut are tailor-made for vitis vinifera varietals. Plus, it takes three growing seasons before you reap a half-decent harvest. And more than a few of the leaves were ravaged by aphids.
But those vines behind my garage are coming along nicely, thank you...
And so is the gradual return of that person I used to know. We’ve called him Kid Me here, but really, he’s just me.
You heard the plots of international thriller novels shattering into a thousand pieces, fading away into vapor, and blowing away in the wind.
What the hell were the likes of Robert Ludlum, Fredrick Forsyth, Tom Clancy, John le Carre, or Ross Thomas to do? Horribly, we've lost a couple of these lads since. But once Gorbachev and his perestroika, his glasnost, and maybe even Reagan and his containment took hold and shifted the balance of power, the spy novelist's art perished too.
Or so it seemed.
It's not that there aren't always bad guys, evil intentions, and -- sometimes -- weapons of mass destruction to work with in constructing plots that race to the end of stories with relentless aggression. But what you had, as a spy novelist, during the Cold War, were the secret ingredients destined to make every dish a delicacy: two parts menace, and one part fear. You see, back then, it wasn’t just cops, or spies, or secretive administration spinmeisters who knew who the bad guys were -- everyone knew. Nearly every soul in the western world had been conditioned to fear the menace that lurked behind the curtain . . . theirs was a totalitarian regime, one that controlled its people, a dark, oppressive alternate universe we knew intrinsically to be vigilant against. Every day of our lives, we, the reading populace, faced the very real prospect of nuclear annihilation, potential imminent takeover, and totalitarian domination by an evil foreign empire.
That was a time when spies had something to do.
Hell, if you think about it, working as a spy novelist during such a time of menace must have resembled the work routine of a staff writer on "Law & Order": Here, writer -- take this headline I just ripped out of the paper and give me an episode!
But those days are gone.
Crime fiction, on the other hand, has always been a rich genre in its own right, and in my "layman fiction reader's" view, it was the mystery novel that took the place of the horrible void left by glasnost. If you’re a gearhead like I am, you’ll get the analogy I'll draw to NASCAR and the Indy Racing League: the former took over while the latter just plain died. Michael Connelly, Robert B. Parker, Robert Crais, Elmore Leonard, and Carl Hiaasen now race to the top of the charts -- where before, they or their predecessors had been busy fighting for the delightful scraps you can find if you creep around below the radar of the all-powerful New York Times Best Seller List.
But for me, as a reader -- a reader, mind you, hooked on the candylike heroin of flavor, depth, authenticity, quirkiness, and character found in the works of the mystery greats -- I have missed the menace. The page-turning, sleep-deprivation-inspiring, walk-around-thinking-it-could-very-well-happen-to-you, pervasive ferocity of the classic spy novel.
Some have dared to enter the space, even fared incredibly well -- Baldacci and Silva come to mind -- but what I yearn for . . . what the kid inside me who stayed up late reading those classics through high school, college, and the years afterward when I pretended to be awake at work . . . what I crave is the next generation of menace.
And fear.
Not the real-life kind -- that we can do without. No -- what I seek are plots that bring back that dread . . . the threat . . . the dark, oppressive enemy lurking in the alternate universe behind the curtain.
Maybe Lee Child, or Vince Flynn, or somebody else new to the scene can feed this long-starved addiction of mine. Maybe Michael Connelly will try his hand at a classic espionage thriller for today. Maybe I'll write one myself. (Confession: I did.) But I'll tell you this . . . once that wall went down, and the regime that lurked behind it collapsed, I knew immediately, as a reader of spy novels, the bounty I'd be spending the rest of my late-night reading sessions searching for. You know what I'm looking for?
I'm looking for some menace.
Some good old fashioned dread, oppression, and fear.
Got any ideas?
Bring 'em on -- I've got all night.
]]>Until the last week of May rolled around.
Panicked – and frustrated at my usual laziness – I examined the calendar in search of hope. Weekends don’t work well – too much going on with the kids, and with the few friends you are able to keep when you work all the time and write the rest of the time. (Plus, somebody's got to be taking care of the kids while you're doing all that stuff all week, and that somebody needs some goddamn relief on Saturdays and Sundays). Ah-hah – I spotted a Thursday and Friday that appeared fairly open. And Thursdays, anyway, we’ve got a babysitter most of the day . . . done. I would take two days of vacation and catch up on the page count.
But then again, by day, the house is busier than the office – what was I going to do? We weren’t talking coffeeshop here – I needed hours upon hours. I'd read recently that Harlan Coben really cranks in the latter stages of writing his books – that his record was 55 pages in one day. Granted, I'm a one page per day kind of guy -- fifty-five will never happen, not even if they strap a dictation/transcribing machine directly to the synapses at the base of my brain – but I figured I had a shot at five or ten if I could muster eight to ten hours of isolation. Starbucks or the home office upstairs? Not a chance. Too many distractions. Plus I get so proud of myself after two hours of work I'm ready to throw a party or eat some lunch.
But wait a minute, I say . . . there is something I’ve always wanted to do. I've wanted to do it more as a statement of my own freedom than anything else, but I've also romanticized how cool it might be unto itself . . .
You see, I'm a train buff. (Auto racing, too, if you must know. Look, I'm a lifelong two year old kid, okay?) I even have an N-scale model train collection, which someday I’ll have the time to look at . . . probably not ever actually assemble. And so this thing I'd had the idea of doing for so long was this: jump on an Amtrak train, plug in my laptop, ride to the end of the line, and turn around and come back. Write, think, brood, eat, drink, and listen to music the whole time – all the while watching the workaday shlubs such as I usually am get on, read their paper, get off, and be replaced by another set of them . . . and another . . . and so on. A feeling of total freedom . . . with nowhere to go. With nothing to do but write, or avoid writing and think about the fact that you’re avoiding writing and there's nothing else to do but get back to it.
I procrastinated making the reservations until the morning of my first of two days off, but find just such an "out to the end of the line" scenario I did: log on to Amtrak.com, check over the routes and pricing, and there it was: $62 each way, noon departure, nine p.m. arrival, an 8:30 a.m. return train getting in at five.
The Vermonter.
Bought the tickets, went for a run to avoid a heart attack during the voyage, got the OK from my wife, booked a room at the Comfort Inn in St. Albens, Vermont – thirty miles from the Canadian border – kissed the kids and wife goodbye, stocked up with a sandwich, and boarded that sucker out of Stamford, Connecticut, bound for nine hours of forced creativity.
Funny thing is, I spoke to a few people along the way, told a few others before and after what I had in mind, and nobody, except maybe my wife, really got it. Mostly, I heard, "Man, I can think of a couple better ways to relax than that," or something of that sort. And, yeah, it got a little dreary, eight hours in, with the train delayed an hour and the sun well down beneath the horizon . . . not much of that picturesque Vermont countryside to take in after dark. But you know what? I loved it. Missed my kids by the time I passed out in the hotel (same place where the crew stayed, by the way, nice bunch of guys as worn out as me by the end of that haul), felt like a bit of a weirdo riding in the cab from the train station to the hotel and back a few hours later – Why is he doing that? Is he a terrorist? – but I whacked out ten pages on Thursday. Got up early, ran at the sports complex across from the hotel to stave off total lethargy for another few hours, hoarded some coffee, Coca-Cola, and peanut butter sandwiches from the hotel’s complimentary breakfast layout, and jumped back aboard for another day on the Vermonter.
I wonder whether it's The Vermonter when you're headed south on the thing?
Anyway, long story somewhat short, I got 13 pages in on Friday. The last five were painful, but no worse, I think, than when I spread that pain across two or three days the way I usually do.
The verdict: crossed the page count goal three days before the end of the month. Even got to take two days off from writing, or, more accurately put, I got to take two days off from getting pissed off for not writing on those days.
Impressions: much of the northeast, particularly the swaths that lay along the train corridors, is almost grotesquely industrial – abandoned industrial, actually. Maybe everywhere is these days. Question: what happened to all those jobs in those huge brick buildings that used to be full of work and stand now in total, decaying disrepair, too hazardous to remove or use again? Suppose Lou Dobbs would say Chinese, Korean, and Mexican citizens have those jobs now, and Americans (regardless of heritage) may never have them back. Say what you will – there's nobody in those buildings anymore, and there are a lot of them. Think I lost count around a hundred and fifty, and I wasn’t even through Springfield, Mass. when the numbers started to blur.
Impression #2: not many people travel by train any longer, and you can kind of see why when it takes nine hours to travel the same distance that takes two and a half hours by plane. I think we stopped at four stations for twenty minutes plus, at one point turned around and switched engines, and at another point had to wait half an hour for the CSX freights – seems they own and therefore control a certain stretch of track north of Springfield – to laze on by. This is how Amtrak looks to remain competitive in 2005?
Impression #3: there are actual farms in Vermont. Living in the burbs outside of New York City, and spending a few years of my life in Southern California prior to the current phase of my life, I think I had forgotten that farms even existed, let alone what they looked like. (They look pretty much the way they used to, only with bigger, more expensive tractors. Built, no doubt, in China.)
One way or the other, I had a good old fashioned American taste of freedom for a couple days in late May, and I was a writer on those days too. There is no doubt I will do it again soon . . . may, in fact, be forced to, judging from the way the page count is inching along here in the new month.
XXX BEGIN TRANSCRIPT XXX
Cooper: Let's get something straight. I've been tortured, shot, electrocuted, whipped, knifed, bludgeoned, and bitten -- by people, barracuda, and small sharks. If you fuck with me, if you don't answer the questions I'm asking, I'll take some of my first-hand experience and apply it to you right here on this porch. We understand eachother?
Staeger: Excuse me?
Cooper: Let's get on with it. I see from your travel documents that you're referring to this visit as a "research trip." Explain.
Staeger: Um, sure. I wrote a novel about a quasi-retired CIA operative posted in the British Virgins, residing there by way of a form of extortion he managed to effect, and I came here to verify facts, remind myself of the feel of the locales -- the locals, too -- and to find some new territory to use in the second book in the series.
Cooper: Something sounds oddly familiar about the book you claim to have written. Sorry to tell you, amigo, I'm not sure your idea sounds all that original. Moving on here, you refer to a second book. Clarify. What are you calling it?
Staeger: I'm not talking about the title yet. I need to deliver it to my publisher by November. It begins in the same hero's world, but takes us north and south a bit more than is the case in Painkiller. Cuba, Central and South America, and Florida, for instance.
Cooper: Painkiller? Also unoriginal. That's the name of a cocktail invented here, in the islands.
Staeger: Correct. Rum, orange and pineapple juices...
Cooper: ...and cream of coconut, served over ice with a dash of nutmeg. Save it. I'm not much of a fan. It's a tourist's drink.
Staeger: Living here, you've got to be a drinker though. What's your poison?
Cooper: I'll ask the fucking questions, author-boy. Where'd you get the idea for this blatant ripoff of my life and times you call Painkiller?
Staeger: Well, I was hooked on a string of Elmore Leonard novels there for a while. You know how you find a recent novel by somebody and you realize there are fifteen, twenty of his earlier books you haven't read? It's like finding a paradise in paperback. I went through just about all of them but the westerns. I was hooked partially because I had just completed my first novel -- a kind of Robert Ludlum imitation -- and nobody seemed interested in the thing. I was drawn to the fully realized characters and settings Leonard pulls you into -- you feel as though you're there, fraternizing with these ex-cons up to no good, smoking dope, shooting people, stealing things...the best. I thought maybe I could find my voice as a novelist by writing in that world, with characters who live in a place of -- well, greater grit, I guess you could say. Scumbags. Expats. Recovering Cold War spies and people on the lam from the law.
Cooper: "Fully realized characters and settings" -- Christ, what are you, some kind of mamby-pamby artist? Maybe you are disturbed enough to travel to the BVIs simply for research purposes. Go on.
Staeger: I'd also had this idea floating around my head for awhile and didn't know what to do with it. The idea was to take a male, CIA version of Clarice Starling -- Thomas Harris's just-graduated FBI trainee played by Jodie Foster in the film version of his book -- and post him somewhere tropical, where life appears at first to be easy, but he soon stumbles across something disturbing, and the shit proceeds to hit the proverbial fan. I'd had an internship with an agency between my junior and senior years in college that gave me at least a modicum of first-hand knowledge, so I thought I'd be pretty informed about the recent-graduate spy. Thought maybe I could invent a new Bond or something. I've seen Dr. No maybe four or five thousand times and read all the original Fleming novels a few dozen times each. Got 'em for a dime each from Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, back when there weren't a hundred collectors competing for each copy of the things.
Cooper: Hold on, hold on, there buddy. What "agency" did you have this supposed "internship" with?
Staeger: Oh, Department of Defense, or some such.
Cooper: (grumbling) Yeah, right. I'm thinking it's time to pull out my Abu Ghraib arsenal to get you to quit feeding me this line of bull you seem to think I'm buying. Think again. Get back to your story. I've heard of that Powell's Books, by the way.
Staeger: I pulled a bunch of history textbooks on the Caribbean, ran through them in a couple days, boned up on some Atlases, and came up with a rough outline of the idea. At that point I had an offer for a more appealing job than the one I was currently holding, and in taking the new position I had the chance to take a few weeks off in between. My dad lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the time...
Cooper: I know where San Juan is.
Staeger: ...so I headed there and brought a stack of legal pads with me. The stack was a little ambitious -- think I filled up two of 'em -- but I started molding the story, and in doing that, realized I was looking to tell a story about an anti-hero who, seemingly checked out from society, might just turn out to be the last, hugely unlikely hope for the U.S. if some major terror deal threatened the country. And for someone to be an anti-hero -- well, that person would probably have done quite a bit of living. So the new trainee idea went out the window.
Cooper: Quit bullshitting me. You didn't write that whole outline in San Juan. It's common knowledge you spent two weeks at a place called --
Staeger: The Cooper Island Beach Club. Correct. Like the name?
Cooper: Very funny. Total coincidence. And don't give me any of your "fully realized" crap on that one. I made up this name -- W. Cooper -- and as you must undoubtedly feel you know, I made it up by combining the name of the actor and the character in one of the only Hollywood movies I ever liked.
Staeger: (nodding) High Noon.
Cooper: High Noon. Get back to the beach club. And just to clarify the coincidence, I live and am interrogating you in a place called the Conch Bay Beach Club. So don't start in on --
Staeger: My dad and I found this place online -- www.cooper-island.com -- and it is, I can tell you nearly without reservation, one of the finest places on the planet. Quiet, small, great food, unbelievable snorkeling -- sea turtles, barracudas -- a spot that's well known among the yachting set for drive-bys -- dinner, lunch, cocktails, whatever. And there are some neighbors, some West Indian, some not, on the island itself -- the beach club doesn't own the whole of the island -- and I thought it'd be interesting to construct that anti-hero's home in the spirit of that place...although I won't reveal what I'm getting at in terms of the neighbors, and who owns what.
Cooper: Don't worry. There are certain answers I won't allow you to give. I'll interrupt you, if necessary. If I am to believe you, there is a story you've written, and we aren't looking to spoil the read by anybody reckless enough to plunk down the $24.95 to read the garbage you created -- except the parts that are coincidentally very similar to me and the place I live. Anyway, I get it -- we all get it -- the story came to you from that point on. "Fully realized," I'll bet. When do you write?
Staeger: Well, for a while, when my kids were a little younger and even before they were around, mornings.
Cooper: Let me guess, now they're a little older and up at the crack of dawn...
Staeger: Yep. Unless I'm up at the crack of midnight, I'm typically "visited" about five minutes into my morning session by my daughter sometime shortly after 6 am. So now -- and this is usually the case on the first draft of anything I write anyway -- I'm all over the place. As long as I log enough writing hours for the week, I'm happy -- an hour in the morning, ninety minutes on the train, a stolen lunch hour, weekend afternoons, and nights after everyone's gone to sleep. Lately I've been settling into 8 or 9 pm for a couple hours, when the kids have quieted down and I haven't quite passed out from the day job, commute, some actual quality social time with my family, and very infrequently, in fact alarmingly infrequently, whatever workout I got in on that particular day.
Cooper: Got any writing-discipline gimmicks up your sleeve?
Staeger: At one point toward the end of one of my last pre-publishing-deal rewrites of Painkiller I grabbed a pitcher, inscribed "5:15 - $100" across its face, and placed it on the bookshelf near where I wrote. Each morning I was up and writing by 5:15, I deposited a $100 bill in the pitcher. An advance on the theoretical advance I hoped to soon receive from a publishing deal...at the end of that rewrite I bought myself a PowerBook, on which I'm writing my next novel. I hear you've got a PowerBook of your own...
Cooper: I've got the 15". Sitting on the floor in the bungalow behind you. Right beside my Louisville Slugger, I might add. What about yours?
Staeger: 12". That was all the pitcher fund could procure.
Cooper: Too bad. I once heard Dennis Lehane couldn't afford to quit his day job until three, maybe four books in. This a common phenomenon? I mean, do you really expect us to believe you aren't already hanging out on some beach in the Caribbean as a result of this two-book HarperMorrow publishing deal you've got?
Staeger: I've heard that too. And you seem to have a pretty solid grasp on the latest branding in the publishing industry...
Cooper: Get on with your answer.
Staeger: Well, life ain't cheap. Plus there are probably twenty or thirty million guys out there who would willingly shoot somebody to take my job -- it's a pretty fortunate thing I managed to swing, working on original entertainment programming for ESPN after fleeing Hollywood with utter glee some years back.
Cooper: We don't get ESPN here. You can grab it from San Juan if you point the satellite in the right direction, but then again...
Staeger: ...You don't watch much TV.
Cooper: None, in fact. But you mentioned Hollywood, so that's my next question, big fella. I'm thinking the, um, "anti-hero" character you've created in Painkiller might make a great leading role in a film. Might even contend for my number-one favorite motion picture, now that I'm mulling it over.
Staeger: Painkiller, #1, High Noon, #2?
Cooper: I'll ask the goddamn questions.
Staeger: You may need to set up a second interrogation and bring your Abu Ghraib tools if you want to hear my opinion of Hollywood. Cut me a big enough check, we'll talk, but unless Clint Eastwood has a read while he's watching the sheep graze up at his Mission Ranch in Carmel, I'm planning on making it myself someday. Independently financed films are inevitably the best anyway.
Cooper: Ever hear of a guy named Bartleby? Suit, tie, totally out of place in the Caribbean?
Staeger: Bartleby? Sure.
Cooper: Maybe he'll pay you a visit.
Staeger: I'll keep an eye out.
XXX END TRANSCRIPT XXX
It is also the first "second book" I've had to write while also, thankfully -- blessedly -- happily -- rewriting and copy-editing the "first book," reviewing cover art revisions, press releases, copy edits, and flap copy, building web sites, meeting and strategizing with "inside" and "outside" publicists, meeting booksellers, mapping out a potential signing tour, and managing foreign and film rights representation activities, a whole world of stress, rejection, and hope all over again.
And oh, yes, I forgot something: there remain in my life all the same factors that made that "first book" take five years (okay, seven) to get right, namely, a demanding "day job," at least two hours a day of commuting, a couple of kids, a wife I like seeing at least once in a while --
You get the idea.
It's funny -- I will never grouse, ever, about the good fortune that fell into my lap and resulted in the Painkiller publishing deal. I am living my dream. And I suppose I enjoy working hard, maybe even take the most pleasure at tackling the hardest possible challenges available to me. But I do find it funny that upon achieving one key item on my short, simple list of dreams I hope to accomplish while in this world, my life, in the short term anyway, has become one hell of a lot more challenging, and exhausting, rather than easier and more peaceful. My publishing house was kind enough to offer a two-book deal, and I jumped all over that like flies to the proverbial pile -- a writing career! I've done it! Two books! I'm in! -- and well I should have. I was practially willing, in fact, to agree to a super-aggressive deadline for delivery of the second book, partially because I understand at least a couple things about the publishing industry -- not many, but a couple -- for instance, that, unless you're Dan Brown, publishers love to build a series around the annual coinciding release of the new hardcover in the series with the prior installment's paperback...and, with this being what I want to do when I grow up and all, far be it from me to do anything besides make life easy on the generous souls and their employing corporation who've seen fit to actually pay me to write. A second Cooper novel? You got it! In one year? No problem! Sign me up! Deal! Let's rock!
The mind, however, is not good at remembering pain. It's kind of a fortunate flaw for human beings to possess -- allows us to remain just irrational enough to actually accomplish things. You forget, for instance, how hard it was to survive the first year of child-rearing with that first kid...once you clear the forest, and you're sleeping again, and this nice little two-year-old is smiling at you, you think only of the joy, and you decide to have another one -- and then you remember that you forgot how hard it was, at least until you've got another two-year-old smiling at you again.
I forgot the pain of Painkiller.
I forgot how I wore myself down to the nub, waking up at four every morning -- I am not a morning person -- to rewrite the whole goddamn thing over the course of another nine months because the prior draft wasn't fit to show to the family dog. I forgot how I did that again, and once more, and again, before I had something I was reasonably proud of. Forgot those hilarious moments, reading a book to my daughter at six-thirty at night to put her to bed, and suddenly being awoken by her: "Daddy, quit snoring! You're supposed to be reading my story!" Forgot how, when you're riding on no sleep, no energy, too much food, and too little exercise, that you catch every cold that comes anywhere near your household -- a kid sneezes in your son's daycare group and you're laid out with the shakes, hooked on Sudafed, for a week or two.
So here I am, the genius who thought he could do it all, trying to write a much better second book than first, in about one-fifth (okay, one-seventh) the time. I put things off for a couple months there -- a page here, a page there -- but I've kicked back into the deadly sleep-deprivation routine, mostly out of a fear of sheer embarassment...either of delivering late or, worse, finding out I'm not anywhere near the writer that two-book contract supposedly proclaimed me to be. So at least if I finish a draft early enough, by sleep-depriving myself now, then maybe I'll have to time to assess, and decide whether I need to pull a Tom Wolfe -- throw out a few hundred pages at a time because it ain't working, and head back into the mill to churn out some more.
Suppose being this busy makes for efficiency anyway...be nice if it turns out such a lifestyle makes for a good second book too.
]]>I'm happy to report that the bestselling author type appears to be a charitable sort of person, or at least friendly and willing to help: to date, I've been fortunate enough to receive "advance praise" from the likes of James Patterson, Clive Cussler, Christopher Reich, Gregg Hurwitz, David Morrell, and there remains hope for a couple other of my heroes we've sent the request out to. You can check out the blurbs on my website, willstaeger.com.
And that's the thing I wanted to say: what has been most enjoyable about this stage -- at least outside of actually receiving positive blurbs from these guys -- is that I had the opportunity to write thank you notes to some of my biggest heroes and role models. Not a thank you note for their blurbs -- I mean a note thanking them for their work. For their pinpoint-accurate choice of words, or rollicking plot turns, or universally appealing, cool, wisecracking characters. For showing me how to write; for keeping me awake many a night with tales of espionage, adventure, anti-heroes, extortion, victory. How often do you get a chance to write a note to the handful of most influential professionals in your life, each of whom you've never met, and yet, in writing the note, you know there's at least a fifty-fifty shot they'll read it? In each case I simply indicated it would be great to have a kind word or two if the writer had time to read and liked the thing...but mostly I wanted to say thanks for the beacon of light you provided with your work. Cool stuff. We only have a few more out there, and it doesn't take more than a few to give you what you need: some comments on the back jacket, or for use in delivering greater interest from booksellers. So we're doing well.
The other event that has taken place in recent weeks is that the vote has taken place on the use of a subtitle on the cover, and the decision was to go with one. I believe it will be "a cocktail of rum, rogues, and revenge" -- i.e., the title of the book is Painkiller, and instead of the typical "a novel" that follows in smaller print somewhere on the cover, we'll have the above-mentioned subtitle. Provides a little more texture, atmosphere, and grit. I'm all for it.
Meanwhile my second Cooper novel plods along...my deadline is later this year and there's this little something in between now and then -- the release of Painkiller. And I don't happen to fall into that group of people who believe that sleep is overrated...
This posting was a little short as I'm pressed for time today. Hope to get more down next time -- we're beginning the planning of the tour to end all book tours, including the filming of a documentary tracking the trip, along with a few other things along the way. More later.
]]>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