Some Books Are Longer Than Others

How long does it take to write a book?  To become published?

Article approved by Fincher . . . or is it?

A moment and a lifetime

If you buy me a Scotch, I'll tell you the entire tale.

Better make it a bottle.

I've been writing . . . forever? Not exactly sure. I remember sentence structure and vocabulary assignments in early grade school which I turned into full stories.  Honestly, I found such things boring.  Why focus on the nuance, when crafting something funny, or interesting, or beautiful, or silly was right there?

I also wrote a play with a friend called The Day the Robots Made Time Stand Still. As you can tell, it was a Fincher-esque drama.  We were in mid-production when irreconcilable differences over movie-rights, and recess broke out.

My first published book—PUBLISHED and AWARD WINNING!—Tears of Heaven, was written while riding the train to and from work.  I had a 3.5 hour round-trip commute, and I’d exhausted my library for reading material.  I started the book about ten years ago, and I believe it took me a year to complete.  It took me nine more years to actually publish it.  The follow-up, Hell Becomes Her, I started in July 2014 and submitted it to my publisher January 2015.

Wrong kind of 2K

Now, I make small goals of writing between 1k and 2k every day (week days).  I don't typically write on the weekends, or the evenings—those are for my family and other pursuits.  That’s also rough copy, not rewritten/edited work ready for my publisher.  However, my brain doesn’t always agree with this policy, and sometimes—usually when I’m settling down for sleep—dialogue or plot turns or scene descriptions will come to me.  I’ll jot those down, with as much detail as I feel I need to remember, in a composition notebook I keep for that purpose.

A fellow author told me I was in the sweet spot for a writer: one book published, one book with the editor and another in the works.  I should probably be a little concerned at how much she knows . . .

But I’m not.

So, about that case of Scotch?