Starting Over

By Thomas Kies

This will be my last blog of 2020. I certainly won’t be sorry to kick this year’s butt out the door and embrace 2021.

2020 had it all. First and foremost was the pandemic. Sitting in my little corner of the world, I felt relatively safe. A horde of tourists felt the same way. Tourist season here on the coast has literally broken records. Travelling by air seemed risky, but driving here, renting a vacation home, and sunning on the beach felt safe.

But now, covid seems to be creeping closer and closer. Our daily number of infections continues to climb, hospitalizations increase, and now people I know have contracted it. One individual, in his fifties and healthy, died from covid complications.

In addition, 2020 saw out of control wildfires devastating parts of the western United States. Fires seemed to completely consume the continent of Australia, wiping out forests, killing billions of animals.

One after another, hurricanes made landfall, battering the Gulf Coast states and Central America in particular.

Unemployment skyrocketed. Food lines continue to grow. The government seems unwilling or is too dysfunctional to help.

Winding things up this year, an RV in downtown Nashville is packed with explosives and detonated outside of an AT&T Data Center. A recording of a woman telling the immediate area to evacuate immediately is blasted over a loudspeaker on the RV before it explodes. An extravagant suicide? An attack against the communication center? As of this writing, it's a mystery.

Somehow an appropriate way to end the year.

An end of 2020 bright spot? For now, there's toilet paper on store shelves.

Strange year.

So, when I say that I’ve thrown out the first hundred pages of my next book and I’m starting over, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

Why did I do that? If I’m bored writing it, the reader is going to be bored. That’s literary sacrilege.

I didn’t have to completely trash it all though. The characters are basically the same, only better…or worse, depending on if they’re a good guy or a bad guy.

The plot is basically the same, except better. The pacing is faster, the dialogue snappier, the descriptions of the scenes more vivid. More show, less tell.

So, writing that first hundred pages that ended up in the trash wasn’t a complete waste of time. If only we could throw 2020 in the trash and start over.

Oh, wait. We are.

On Writing, the Pandemic, and Self-Isolation

I’m putting the finishing touches on my latest Geneva Chase novel and getting it ready to send to my publisher by the first week in April. They’ve asked me to put together a 250-word description of the book that could possibly be used on the back cover as well as a 650-word synopsis.

Additionally, it was requested that I send over a description of the “emotional hook” of the novel to help with the cover design.

I can’t recall ever being asked that before. After giving it a fair amount of thought, the “hook” for Shadow Hill is that Geneva Chase is trying to gain control of her life in a world that is out of control.

It struck me as being appropriate for what we’re going through right now. It’s like we’re all living through an improbable international thriller film. It has all the elements of a hell of a story: a viral pandemic for which we have no treatment or vaccine, a slow, clumsy start to testing, we’re running desperately low on hospital masks, gowns, and respirators, entire states being shut down, and a world economy is in shambles.

Don’t even get me started on the politicians.

I’m doing my best to complete my publisher’s requests as well as finishing my manuscript but finding it hard to stay focused. My attention keeps pivoting to real life. I worry that whatever I write can’t possibly compete with the story that’s unfolding worldwide.

I can’t control what’s happening in the world, but when I should be writing, I can control my immediate surroundings. I get myself a hot cup of coffee and turn on some unobtrusive, ambient music. I pull up whatever I’m working on onto my laptop and get to it, ignoring the bad news, at least for the time being.

The world that we writers create is something that we totally control.

An unintended consequence of this virus is the self isolation. I know some people have a problem with it, but I think most writers are good at self-isolation. It's how we work.

I once heard a publisher say, “Most writers are damned hermits.”

Isaac Asimov said, “My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. Creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones.”

PS...because of the coronavirus, all the schools have closed, including our local college where I was teaching creative writing. I was two weeks shy of finishing the course. One of my students sought me out and asked if I would critique the last assignment I'd given them. I took it as a compliment and told him that I would.

Stay safe. Stay healthy.

How I Found My Agent

Recently, I attended a Carteret County Writers Network luncheon and listened to a delightful author talk about her writing process and publishing. One of the questions she fielded was, “Is it true it’s impossible to get an agent unless you know someone?”

Obviously frustrated by agent rejections, he was implying that ‘the fix was in’ and that it was impossible to get an agent to represent you purely on the merits of your writing.

That wasn’t the case for me. Back in 2001, I found an agent in New York who, upon reading my second book, Pieces of Jake, signed me to a contract. I won’t tell you his name, but frankly, he was awful. He spent no time talking with me, had an editor suggest some minor edits to the manuscript, and shopped the book to only the top publishing houses in Manhattan. He never took my phone calls and never kept me informed about the publishers’ responses.

Nine months after we signed the initial contract, I got an email telling me he’d snail-mail the publishers’ rejections and that he was giving his notice that he was dropping me like a bad habit.

I was so depressed that I didn’t write another word for nearly a year. Ugh.

But a writer’s gotta’ write, so I went on and authored two more books garnering an impressive collection of agent rejections. Ugh.

But I knew Random Road was different. I loved the characters. I loved the story line. And I loved the first line of first chapter. “Last night Hieronymus Bosch met the rich and famous.”

Okay, that’s all well and good. How did I find my agent?

Confident that Random Road was ready (after untold number of edits and rewrites) I Googled: Literary agents, debut writers, mysteries. A fairly lengthy list popped up.

Now, my past efforts at writing queries were admittedly slapdash at best. Find the name of an agent, send an introductory email (a form letter I'd created that was the same for all submissions…just changing the name of the recipient), attach a synopsis and a few chapters. As I said, rejections. Or worse, no response at all.

But with Random Road, I painstakingly researched the agents and their clients. What were they looking for? What was their style? Were they REALLY looking for debut authors? What authors do they represent?

Then, when I queried, it was unique to each agent. I was meticulous in sending them what they specified in the ‘submissions’ page of their website. Some wanted sample pages, some wanted first chapters, some wanted the first fifty pages.

Four agents asked to see the complete manuscript. That had never happened before. I sent them the manuscript and then really did my research on them. What was it they were looking for in their clients? It wasn’t always just a good story (although I can’t stress how important that is), but some wanted their clients to be easy to work with. I understand, after all, if they take you on as a client, they’re taking a chance with their time and reputation.

Let me take a moment to talk about why I wanted to work with a good agent and not try to reach out to publishers on my own. Many publishers simply won’t look at unagented manuscripts. Agents act as the gatekeepers. Plus, they know the business. I don't.

They have the up-to-date contacts and the knowledge of what publishing houses are looking for.

The agent I signed with (I thank her in the acknowledgments of my published books if you’re curious about her name) gets over a hundred submissions a day. Every. Single. Day.

I attended a panel discussion she chaired at a mystery conference a few years ago and she talked about how important it is to grab a reader right from the very first sentence. Knowing I was in the audience, she asked me to stand and quote my first line. It was what had stopped her from moving on to the next submission.

I knew she was the right agent for me when she initially emailed me and told me to have a hard copy printed of Random Road and we’d talk about it over the phone. Then over the course of a few hours, we went over the book page by page, making revisions along the way.

She knew my book as well as I did. She was passionate about it.

Once we were both happy with the revisions, she began submitting the manuscript to publishing houses. As we received responses, she shared them with me. None were negative. Some were very positive. But publishing houses, just like agents, are nervous about working with a debut author.

She was always reassuring. "We'll find the right publisher for this," she said. "I have no doubt."

Then came the phone call. She’d gotten an offer from Poisoned Pen Press. Needless to say, I was elated. I have a terrific agent and a fantastic publisher. I’m also happy to say that my third mystery, Graveyard Bay, is scheduled to be released in July.

Yeah, it was worth all the effort.

Finished Manuscript

On Sunday, October 7, at a little after noon, I hit the button and sent the manuscript for Graveyard Bay to my editor, Annette Rogers, at Poisoned Pen Press.  I did it with trepidation and relief.

Trepidation because when you’ve just spent nearly a year on a project, you don’t really know if it’s any good until someone reads it. Especially your editor and publisher.

Relief, because it’s done.

Plus this had some curves thrown into it.  One was a curve ball I created for myself.  At the end of the second Geneva Chase mystery, Darkness Lane, I left the book with a bit of a cliffhanger.  Everyone who’s read the book has asked me what happens next.  That’s a good thing because there’s a desire to read the next novel.  There’s also an expectation that it better be damned good.

The other curve ball was Hurricane Florence.  I knew I wanted to get the manuscript done by the end of September or sooner. And I was on track, right up until 105 mile per hour winds and nearly thirty inches of rain over the course of several days halted me in my tracks. Power was out for four days.  Internet, phones, and cable were out for 8 days.  And we were the lucky ones.   The storm hit on September 12 and there are still people without power.

And there are people without homes.  Lots of them.  Houses were destroyed by a combination of the high winds, falling trees, torrential rains, flooding rivers, and storm surge.  Whole apartment and condominium buildings are being condemned because of rain damage and the treacherous mold growth. Because of the damage sustained during the storm, most hotels in the area are closed.

Getting the area back on its feet is a full time effort.

So, Graveyard Bay had to take a backseat for about three weeks.  But now the manuscript is done.  But not the process.  Now both my editor and publisher will be reading the book and sending me their thoughts and suggestions.  As the writer, I can act on those suggestions or not.

However, both my editor and publisher have been in this business for a long time and I respect them and I listen hard when they offer their ideas.  Their advice has always made my books stronger and more exciting.

Once the revisions have been made and everyone is happy with the product, it goes to a copy editor who checks the book for typos and continuity errors.

Will there be a typo or two in the finished product when it’s printed?  Of course.  You can’t have a book of 80,000 words without one or two typos.

The point of this rambling blog?  Perception.

Finishing the manuscript, a year in the making, is a big deal.  Hell, the book is already available on Amazon for pre-order and it hasn’t been edited yet.

But getting Eastern North Carolina back on its feet is an even bigger deal.  I count my blessings that we survived on our island with minimal damage when so many others inland took such a big hit.