Kevin R. Doyle's Blog

Okay, as I'm giving Quinton #7 a little breather before the final proofreading, time to tackle something kind of major.
Way back when, I wrote a total of four books before the fifth, "One Helluva Gig," was picked up for publication. Of those four early efforts, one had a premise good enough to attract the interest of a couple of agents, but when they saw the final manuscript they were, shall we say, somewhat underwhelmed.
One in fact told me, exact quote, "To be honest, I didn't even want to keep reading."
Over the years I worked on improving my craft. I've been beyond fortunate in that, so far, everything after "Gig" has found a home with one publisher or another. (Ones still making the rounds, so this record may be marred a bit.) Even so, I've never quite forgotten that early attempt with the cool premise but the lousy execution.
A few months back, I pulled the old thing out of mothballs and dusted it off (i.e. opened it up on my computer) to see if there was anything salvageable.
Barely. After I'd gotten to about page fifty I wondered how that agent way back when had managed to keep on reading. I mean, the prose was really, really bad. And yet . . .
I still get a kick out of the basic idea, the main plot device. I decided that, once my relocation was complete and I got a little breathing room on Quinton, I'd tackle the whole thing from the ground up. Understand we're not talking just a little tweaking of the style. The whole darned thing, minus the foundation, has to be uprooted and rebuilt from scratch.
So that's my project for the spring, summer, and into the rest of the year. Redo the entire thing, from scratch, and see what comes out of it. It may still turn out to be no good, but I'm going to give it my darndest to build something cool out of the rubble of the original manuscript.
All I want to give at this point is the working title, "Regress," and the genre. It's a combination legal procedural/ horror, in the same vein as "The Litter" but of a drastically different subject matter.
This morning, I began working on the outline and hope to have the entire thing ready to present by end of the year.
Wish me luck.

Well, for the most part Sam Quinton #7 is in the bag. Completed fourth draft on Friday, which meant I spent the weekend in pretty much of a brain fog. All that's left is to print it out and proofread. Because of some stuff coming up, I'm going to wait a few weeks on that, let the brain completely rest.

Kind of wondering how I ever managed to work on two or three books at one time while teaching a full load of high-school English as just finishing one has me almost wiped out.

While I'm not ordinarily a superstitious person, last month I had a little bit of an epiphany.

It was the day of moving out of my old digs in Missouri, and the movers were doing their thing, stripping bare the place I'd lived in for fifteen years. At one point, as they were almost done, something occurred to me for the first time in the months-long buildup to the move.

All twelve of my published books were written, beginning to end, in the place I was minutes away from vacating forever. That caused a kind of bittersweet feeling, but on its heels came another thought.

Can I continued writing, at least to the level I like, away from there? At the time this happened, I was about halfway through working on Sam Quinton #7, and as I write this today I'm sitting down to begin the final polishing, tightening, etc, to get the book ready to send off.

But can I? Can I successfully complete work away from that familiar environment of a decade and a half.

As I said, I'm not usually superstitious, but this line of thinking gives me pause.

I guess we'll soon see.

Got the word today that House of Long Shadows magazine will be reprinting my short story, "By the Screened-in Back Porch," in their July issue.

The story, which first saw print in 2014, concerns some young children waiting a long, long time for their mother to return home late at night.

Really excited to see this one back in print.

Now that contract's been signed by both parties, I can officially announce that Camel Press is extending the Sam Quinton books for another three novels, which will be #7,8, and 9.

Many thanks to Phil Garrett and Jennifer McCord for making this happen.

One day away from the release of The Booker, Sam Quinton #6 (my twelfth published book).

Reality TV, the Mafia, and Murder. What more could one want?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FDCZ1NJC

There's an interesting little feature up at Literal Literary web site. Gives some insight into a couple of things about my writing journey.

https://literalliterary.com/author-fe...

Here we go. Releasing on Aug. 12 but available for preorder now.

When a production crew comes to town wanting to make a reality series about Sam Quinton's life, he considers the whole thing pretty much a lark.
But when one of the company's partners ends up murdered in her hotel room, he begins to realize the TV biz may be more complicated than he'd imagined.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FDCZ1NJC

For several years now, I've had an idea for a writing project, but for almost as long it's felt too long, complex, and above my talent level to attempt.

Around the time I retired from my high-school gig, I started thinking about it again and eventually decided the time had come. In November of '23, I began outlining the idea, and this afternoon I've completed the third, and basically final, draft.

The story is a heavily fictionalized account of certain events that took place in my hometown of Wichita, KS between the mid 70s to the early 90s that helped, for better or worse, to transform Wichita from a large town to a small city.

The numbers: 81 chapters, 402 pages, 89,000 words (by far the longest manuscript I've ever written). While the entire story ranges over a 80-year span of time, the main story covers 18 years in the lives of three main characters. Along with the manuscript itself, there's probably another thirty or forty pages of outline, notes, character bios, etc.

Going to take two or three weeks away from it before I settle down to the drudgery of proofing then it will be submission time. Because this is such a different type of work, at least for me, it's the first book I've done in several years where I didn't have a contract ahead of time.
Crossing my fingers.

This weekend, finished second draft, the major revision, of this monster project I began last fall. Second draft comes out to 414 pages (on the computer), eighty-seven chapters, and a little over 92,000 words, making it at least ten thousand words longer than anything I've ever attempted before. Going to set it aside for a month or so to let it breathe, then begin polishing it up. If everything comes together well, around this time next year may be ready to begin submitting to agents and publishers.

Definitely different than anything I've attempted before, the book is very loosely based on a trio of unuusal criminals active in my hometown during the seventies and eighties. I've taken extreme liberties with both facts and timelines, so I'm not even sure it would count as historical fiction. It's just what it is.

It's also, not entirely unintentional, kind of a love letter to the culture of the 70s.