Geezing

OK, Thriller Guy here, gimme my damn blog back for a minute.

TG was scrolling through the channels on the tube tonight and stumbled on NPR which was having pledge week, Oh, how TG hates pledge week. When TG was young and a stay-at-home dad, because writing fiction didn't pay shit then just like it doesn't pay shit now, and his sweet wife worked full time to support the family, he depended on the public channel to run Sesame Street every day so he could park his three year old daughter in front of the set and try to squeeze in an hour of writing. But whenever Pledge Week was on, there went TG's writing time. TG's daughter, Leah, (TGDL) used to see that bank of idiots on the TV screen, the ones who volunteer their time sitting in those phone banks, and she would immediately burst into tears, knowing that her show was not going to come on as long as these dopes were answering the ringing phones. Besides, she knew that daddy would be going nuts. Oh, how TG remembers the day, Leah crying, when TG, furious, called the pledge number and watched on the television as some minion answered the phone and TG screamed, “Twenty bucks, no, fifty bucks! If you assholes will stop this bullshit and just put Sesame Street on where it's supposed to be! Right now! You're making my daughter cry! If you don't put her show on right now I'm going to come down there and kick every one of your pussy asses.” Yeah, well, that was one call they didn't broadcast over the air.

Anyway, TG scrolled onto pledge week tonight and there was Peter. Paul and Mary (if you don't know who they were/are, just go away from this site right now) and he was reminded of a moment from the dim past. It was 1964, and TG, a college student at West Virginia University, was sitting on a stone retaining wall out in front of a fraternity house smoking a cigar when a aging Buick coasted up and ground to a stop. Peter, Paul and Mary, then pretty much totally unknown, got out of the car and said to TG that they had been in town for a concert, (who knew?) and they had a check for $2,000.00 from the university but absolutely no cash money for gasoline. Would I loan them $20.00 to get out of town? $20.00? TG was a poor student, he worked in kitchens for food, his parents sent him $5.00 a week for spending money. Which meant beer money. But these three looked even poorer than he was. That was back when Peter and Paul had hair. At the time, TG figured the $2,000.00 check thing was bullshit.

But Mary was hot. Long blond hair, great body, big white teeth in a land where a missing tooth was de rigueur for females of that age, (OK, maybe it wasn't that bad). Anyhow, they seemed like nice people, so TG hopped off the wall, pulled his only five dollar bill out and gave it to Mary. So long to buying a beer for the next week. “It's a loan,” she said, smiling with those pretty teeth.

”Right,” TG said, with all the cool he could muster.

“And could I have one of those cigars?” Mary asked.

It was a Marsh Wheeling, made right there in West Virginia, the one with the wooden holder you could clamp down on with your teeth, if you had teeth. TG had an extra, so he gave it to her. She smiled and said, "Thanks, I owe you." Was there a little something extra there in that smile? TG could have said, "How bout I ride along with you?" Hey, those were the days. She could have easily said, "Climb in, we're going to New York." Things would have been different. No regrets. But she did have one pretty smile.

They drove off in a cloud of exahust fumes, the tailpipe dragging on the ground. Of course they went on to mega fame, a steller career with a few bumps along the way. In many ways they were the sound track of TG's generation.

Flash forward 48 years and TG is watching PP&M in a 1986 concert during pledge week on MTV. Mary is dead. Has been for four years. Leukemia.

It's OK, Mary, forget it. The five bucks, the cigar.

You and the guys sang a lot of cool songs.

We're even.

Tie After Time Continued...

Thriller Guy has gone on vacation. He says he'll be back when Appel is done using, or abusing, his blog.

For the long version of the story of the writing of my first published book, read the previous two blog entries.

Time After Time, now available as a Kindle book.

So I wrote three chapters and an outline as a proposal for Time After Time, and Kent Carroll, of Carroll and Graf Publishers, using the chapters and outline, sold the paperback rights for the book to Dell for $20,000.00. He gave me half as an advance to write the book while he kept half to pay for the printing of the book, or to just go into the Carroll and Graf coffers in general. This was back in 1985 when such a deal was possible. Those were the good old days. Today, you'd never get that kind of money, which was considered paltry back then. Lots of folks I knew were getting $45,000 and $50,000 advances as a matter of course. In these recession times a fiction writer, much less a first time fiction writer, is lucky to get $5,000.00 for an advance. And unless you have an established track record as a decent selling novelist and you're dealing with a publisher who knows you and who has published your books before, you are never going to sell a piece of fiction on sample chapters and an outline. You have to write the whole book before you can even get an agent to look at it, much less a publisher. The writing business, particularly the novel writing business, has become much worse place for writers than it was 25 years ago.

But I was happy to write a book for $10,000. I really liked Kent and he was willing to help me along in the process. Sort of the way Thriller Guy works with writers. So I wrote the first of the Pastmaster series, Time After Time. The experience of writing my first book, Cross, taught me how to write dialogue and exposition at the same time and incorporate backstory and a sense of place. All part of what it takes to write a successful novel. I was writing like a regular writer. I wasn't particularly good, but I wasn't shooting for good. I was shooting for a term that I have always favored: workmanlike. As in several reviews I received in the early days, “Mr. Appel's writing never rises much above workmanlike, but he's given us an exciting read.” Really, what's wrong with that? Especially since I know from experience as a reviewer for the last decade or so, in at least 25% of bestselling books by household name writers the quality of the writing doesn't even rise to the level of workmanlike. So here's a tip: you don't have to be particularly good to write a bestselling book. (What do you have to be? Well, many things can make it happen. Luck is foremost, and appealing to popular taste is right up there as well. Having a great idea is your best bet. Keep reading Thriller Guy's blog, and you'll eventually learn all the secrets.)

I wrote the book, working from my outline which I diverged from as often as I stuck to. But the outline gave me a place to start every morning when I got up to write. In those days I wrote at a white heat. I could bang out ten even twenty pages a day. Were they good. Nope. They weren't even workmanlike. But at the end of the day they were done. Here's the big lesson: write. You can always rewrite.

After six months I had finished the book. I rewrote it a few times and sent it to Kent. He went over it line by line, wrote notes all over the pages, sent it back to me, I rewrote it according to his notes. He would call me and we would go over the rewrites. Then I rewrote it by myself a couple of more times. After all of this we had ourselves a book. It was done. It went into the production pipeline, and I began planning the next book in the series, Twice Upon a Time.

Next: The UPS guy tosses a box of the just-printed Time After Time onto my driveway.

Number Two in the series of erotica covers done for Carroll and Graph. (See previous entry)