Ever wonder what “25 or 6 to 4” meant?

You almost certainly know the song, but in case you don’t, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLiuMkGCOC4

The title refers to that time in the morning when you’re staring at the ceiling, wondering when your brain will stop stop STOP RUNNING AT SUPER SPEED because you have to get up to work early because the freeway is under construction and you have to take local roads and you have to pick up donuts in the morning for that big meeting and you can’t remember if Susan likes jelly donuts or if you just remember her talking about jelly one day and you’re wondering if she was talking about prOH GOD WHY AM I NOT ASLEEP???

3:35 in the morning. Twenty-five (or six) to four.

There aren’t many feelings worse than that, at that time of the night. You can literally hear your hair growing as you lie there, wondering how other people can possibly be sleeping happily when you can feel every piece of dust on your skin.

And sooner or later, you start thinking about death.

You wonder if your entire death is going to be like this, aware but unmoving, thoughts flitting past that you can’t hold on to but can’t really let go, thoughts that you can’t do anything about but you can’t stop.

And then you make the big mistake… you look at the clock.

It’s not moving.

That’s the biggest problem with digital clocks, you can’t tell if they’re moving, just by looking at them. They just glow at you. Glow and cover everything with the barest hint of sickly light that you can now see half the room with.

And you swear the clock isn’t working… so you stare at it. Stare stare stare.

Maybe a bit longer.

Dammit, the thing is broken, how did I get stuck with such a piece of AHH, the time changed.

Great. Another minute gone. What time is it now? 3:33? Either time is moving backwards or I’m halfway to hell.

Aaaaaagh.

(This is usually the point where I try to make a mental note to myself to finally call the doctor back about scheduling that sleep study. I’d call him now but he’s probably asleep, the bastard. Maybe I should call him anyway, give him a chance to really empathize with his patients who can’t sleep.)

I’d like to claim I’m up late typing because of jet lag, but sadly I’m often up at these %$#@! hours. On the other hand, this is one of the few times that typing like this has actually been on topic. The awful truth is that we all have nights like this. The causes vary– medical, environmental, or good old-fashioned paranoia– but we’ve all been there, and will probably be there again sooner than we’d like.

No, no. Don’t stay up for me. You go back to bed. I’m going to be up a bit longer, searching for something to say… waiting for the break of day.

I don’t believe in “writer’s block.” Sure, there are times a writer doesn’t want to write or isn’t happy with what they’re writing or is simply distracted by life from getting the writing done. But it’s been my experience that if you listen to that bit of your brain that tells you, for whatever reason, that right now isn’t the time to be trying to squeeze words out of it onto the page, you’ll be a much happier and, ultimately, more productive writer. If it ain’t coming to you, stop, get up, walk away, and don’t think about it. Take a walk, read a book, go see a movie, browse internet porn, watch some episodes of Father Knows Best (well…he did!)–do anything except try and force yourself to write. Odds are, when you come back to it a few hours later or the next day, you’ll be just fine and the words will, if not flow, at least come without all the angst and teeth gnashing.

Your mileage, as the kids say today, may vary.

In fact, in the case of my Crazy 8 Press novel The Same Old Story, my own mileage varied somewhat from the “few hours later or the next day” average. By several years.

It all started more than fifteen years ago, sparked by stories I had heard over the years of a, shall we say, bit of financial hanky-panky involving a certain editor at a particular comic book company. It was, not to give away too much of the story, an ingenious bit of bookkeeping legerdemain that allowed said certain editor to repeatedly bill his employer and get paid for the same stories, over and over again, without ever having to worry about having to produce those stories for publication. There’s a mystery novel in that, I thought; I just had to wait for it to reveal itself to me.

Unless you’re a comic book fan like me (and most of the rest of the Crazy 8 crew for that matter), you’ve probably never heard of Joe Maneely or Robert Kanigher. Maneely was an artist known mainly for his work at Marvel Comics from 1949 until the time of his death in 1958, when he accidentally fell between the cars of a moving commuter train on his way home to New Jersey from New York. Kanigher was a writer, predominantly for DC Comics, beginning in 1945 and going on to become one of the industry’s most prolific scripters until his death in 2002. Other than both laboring in the same industry, Maneely and Kanigher had little in common; Joe was, by all accounts, well-respected and liked. Bob was, as I knew from personal experience, pedantic, pompous, unpredictable, and often unpleasant. He was also one of the most interesting characters I ever met and I had spent hours in my younger days being talked at by him in the halls of DC Comics.

It occurred to me that Maneely’s death was a great jumping off point for that mystery novel set in the world of the comic book biz. It also occurred to me that, from all reports, no one would have wanted to kill this guy. I could, however, imagine many people having numerous reasons for wanting to throw Kanigher under the wheels of a train. So….I had the aforementioned financial hi-jinks, Maneely’s accidental death by railroad, and a great victim in a fictionalized version of Kanigher.

(And please let me stress here that neither Kanigher nor Maneely were in any way, shape, or form involved in the real-life editorial fraud. The Same Old Story is a total fabrication that uses bits and pieces of actual events and people to create a whole new story.)

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place when I figured out book’s structure, a way of telling a story within a story that allowed me to dive into the mind of my point of view character, pulp magazine/comic book writer Max Wiser and play with the idea of how writers build fiction from fact and, in the process of cooking up that creative stew, sometimes lose sight of which is which. At that point, maybe a dozen years ago, I started writing. I figured I had my story, its structure, my characters and their motives all worked out. How tough could it be?

The first 15,000 words or so weren’t tough at all. But after that, it was like I’d slammed face first into a translucent glass wall. I could kind’a, sort’a see where I wanted to go, but I was damned if I could find a way over, around, or through that barrier to actually get there. Disregarding my own advise at first, I sat there for a lot of hours looking at the blinking cursor and trying to imagine what word, let alone entire sentences or paragraphs, should come next. Finally, I shoved those 15,000 words into the metaphorical drawer and decided to just let it marinate in my mind for a while longer. It wasn’t that I was having trouble writing–during this time I wrote a couple hundred thousand words on other projects, comic books, short stories, articles, essays, non-fiction books, even a couple of other novels, both based on licensed properties (although neither were ever published, not because of any quality issues but due to financial reverses on the part of one publisher and congenital stupidity on the part of the other). I just couldn’t write this book. And I tried and tried again. And again. I’d periodically open the file and reread those 15,000 words, searching for the flaw, plot hole, or misstep that I thought just had to be there and was keeping me from moving on. But I couldn’t find the problem. Nor could I find the next words to move the story forward.

What I had started with such enthusiasm and high hopes had turned into this obnoxious little creature that gnawed at my creative bone, whittling it down to a thin, fragile strand with all the tensile strength of a piece of No. 2 spaghetti. It was like an insect that buzzes around your ear that you never quite see and can’t swat away. I started to believe that if I couldn’t write this book, my first really serious go at an original novel (as opposed to those licensed properties in which the emotional investment isn’t anywhere near as high), I’d probably never be able to write one. I even considered just deleting the frickin’ thing and forgetting about it. It wasn’t happening, so why spend any more time torturing myself with the sad reality that I just wasn’t up to the task?

I was feeling really sorry for myself. I kept it to myself, but deep down, The Same Old Story was a crushing disappointment that I couldn’t shake.

And then, in the summer of 2007, came unemployment. I had left my editorial position at DC Comics in early 2006 to become Executive Editor of the fake news tabloid Weekly World News, but a year and a half later, the paper folded (see “congenital stupidity, corporate”) and I was thrown, for the first time in seventeen years, back into the freelance life. I had freelance work to do, thank goodness, but I also found myself with a lot of free time on my hands. Enough, I decided, that I should devote a certain amount of it every day to working on something of my own. No deadline, no pressure. Shoot for a measly five hundred words a day on it. Just something I wanted to write, for myself, with no expectations for it beyond the doing of the thing.

At first I resisted going back to The Same Old Story. This sumbitch had already had years to mess with me and I’d be damned if I was going to give it another chance to hurt me.

But…

What harm could one more look do? My self-esteem couldn’t get much lower.

And…

When I came again to that glass wall that had been blocking me all those years, I found that all I had to do was give it the barest little shove and it toppled and shattered. I started typing and the first day’s five hundred words came as easily as anything I’d ever written. The same with the next day’s five hundred, and the next, and the next, until, within a week or two, I was pounding out a thousand or two thousand a day and, in less than two months, I had a finished manuscript.

What had changed? Damned if I knew, but what had been for years the creative bane of my existence was now a finished book…one that I was enormously proud of, not just because I had at last gotten it done but because it had turned out to be the book I had always believed it could be.

The saga of getting it published is a whole other story…as is that of Trout Fishing In Canarsie, another novel, which I started in a white hot burst of enthusiasm several months. Only to find myself racing towards another wall…only this time, I’m hoping I learned something from my experiences with The Same Old Story and won’t plunge into despair over what I now known isn’t really a barrier at all so much as it is a bump in the road. This one, I’m sure, will get written.

No matter how long it takes.

My Darkest Night? Agent Ambush

My memory is hazy on the some of the details.

But that’s what happens when you get pulverized. Shock overtakes your system.

In the fall of 2008 I attended a Backspace writer’s event in New York City. What particularly drew me to the event was a session wherein new authors submit a portion of their work, to have it read aloud in front of a group, and a panel of agents gives commentary.

If things go well, you just might find yourself with an agent, and, even better, a book deal.

At the time I was polishing up my debut novel Finders Keepers, feeling it was just about ready for prime time. So I submitted a page from the prologue — not the version I ultimately published — but a page of manuscript that I was certain was going to absolutely kill.

It killed all right. It killed me.

There I was, sitting in a NYC hotel conference room, listening to various passages from other emerging writers, and thinking that some were actually half-way decent, and others were, well … less so. But either way it didn’t matter to me, because I knew — absolutely knew — that nobody had anything as clever and inventive as what I had with Finders Keepers. There was simply nothing like it out there.

About a dozen authors had been presented, and finally, I heard my name.

The butterflies came, and I semi puffed out my chest with pride, semi slunk in my chair, because it was show time after all, and no matter how good you feel going in, adrenaline does funny things to a person. But still. I was feeling good. I was excited, I was having visions of wild applause and the beginning of a huge career. This was my time. This was my time. This was my time.

Only…not so much.

As soon as the ‘reader’ began, I knew I was sunk. Her cadence was wrong. She brushed passed the humor, she fumbled some words. But more so … the passage I submitted … which was still pretty good, wasn’t quite where I finally got it to.

The “expert” agents on the panel had a slightly different assessment. One agent in particular.

Again, my memory is hazy, so I forget the specifics, but essentially her critique was this:

You suck. You suck big, you suck in every way. You suck, you suck, you suck. And more so, you really really suck. You have no skill, your story makes no sense, it’s not funny, and it’s wildly derivative of several other stories done far better (that one was a real head scratcher).

And the agent delivered this critique with glee, with an American Idol-esque look-at-me I’m-the-real-star-here moment, and, essentially used my words as toilet paper. In front of everyone.

So rather than stand up for my ovation, I sunk between my shoulders, and used every ounce of restraint I had from bursting out of the room and breaking things. Was I humiliated? Oh yes. Did I have elaborate plans to find this “agent” in a dark alley and unveil a critique of my own, using a lead pipe and motorcycle chain? Thought crossed my mind.

But instead a slunk off into the Manhattan night, devastated.  I won’t go so far as to say tears filled my eyes, but I was pretty close.

And if you’re wondering if I thought about quitting my dreams of being an author?

Yes. Yes, I did.

But only for a moment. Because I knew that I still had a unique story on my hands that I thought people would really enjoy, and with just a few minor tweaks, it would be right where I wanted it.

And that’s essentially what happened.

I spent a day revising the opening sequence, subsequently landed an agent, and was close to three different book deals – which all went sideways because the economy crashed. But I ultimately published Finders Keepers, to acclaim from Publisher’s Weekly, and on my own landed a national distribution contract, which included Finders Keepers landing in 25 or so Barnes & Nobles throughout the U.S.

You bet I had a dark night, but rather than allow that little troll of an ‘agent’ derail me, I worked my way through it to enjoy much brighter days indeed. So much so that the sequel to Finders Keepers is on its way. With a third book in the series coming right after that.

My memory might be hazy, but my author mojo is better than ever.

It was 10:00, maybe 10:30. I was sitting across a big metal desk from my editor at Warner Books and for a seriously painful twenty minutes he kept calling me “kid.”

As in “That’s a great idea, but we’re going to be able to do any more books together, kid. You know how it is, don’cha, kid? That’s the way it goes sometimes, kid.”

He was about five years younger than I was. Something about that made the “kid” thing sound more than a little irritating, and would have done so even if this editor wasn’t using the term to fire my behind.

(Since then, only one person has called me “kid” repeatedly, and that’s my dentist. Usually during root canal. There’s a certain resonance there.)

Anyway, I had written four novels for Warner, a trilogy and a standalone. None of them had been promoted real well. The first one, which was by far the most important as far as my career was concerned, never showed up in one of the biggest book store chains in the country. At all. Ever.

Whoops. That happens sometimes, kid.

So after four books’ worth of so-so sales, Warner was cutting me loose. Along with a bunch of other new and mid list authors, no doubt. Hey, publishing can be as cruel as any other business, sometimes more so, and nobody had told me I had to choose that way to make a living.

So it wasn’t a matter of my feeling sorry for myself. It was just so…what’s the opposite of  uplifting? It was that.

My first reaction was to beg. I could write better. I could take less money. I desperately didn’t want to stop being an author, especially so soon after I had begun.

Fortunately, I stopped short of the begging thing. Instead, I did something I never would have expected of myself. I got angry.

Screw you, I thought at the editor, though I didn’t say it out loud. Who are you to pass judgement on me? Because that’s the thing about writing: You can accept constructive criticism, sure, and you can actually learn something from pretty much anyone, but in the end the only one whose judgement counts is your own.

I’ve told my kids this a thousand times: Don’t let anyone else define you. That’s your job. Only you get the opportunity to tell yourself who you are.

So even before I walked out of that editor’s office, I was working on a very healthy anger. And it paid off. It helped me keep my head up through that long, grey subway ride home. And before terribly long, my agent called and asked me if I had ever thought about writing…well, Star Trek novels…which turned out to be a pretty good gig for me for a nice, long while.

Now, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t some dark days in there, days when I cursed God and man. Times when it looked like my best days were behind me, and maybe I was lucky to have had even that little taste of success.

But in the end, I think those times made me a stronger person and a stronger writer. They made me appreciate what I had even more. And when the next dark time came along, I was able to cope with it a little better.

Because that’s the writer’s portion, folks. It ain’t all roses. But when it is…boy, do those suckers smell sweet. And they make up plenty for the bad times.