ON RAISING THE DEAD
In the late 1970s I was living in the Chicago area and working in the Loop. In order to avoid taking 20 years off the back end of my life by driving, I rode a commuter train to work, about an hour each way. I used my commute time to read the newspaper and whatever mystery novels I could find at our public library. After a while, I decided that some of the books I was reading weren’t that good, and that I could do better, so then I devoted my train-time to writing a mystery novel (in longhand, no laptops in 1979). What I ended up with may or may not have been better than what I was reading, but despite having an agent (more on that in a future post), it did not find a publisher, and so I put it away in a drawer and there it sat…until this year.
Recently I was between projects, having just sent off a finished manuscript to my publisher, and was looking for something else to do when I ran across my old private eye novel from 1979. Thinking that, in the manner of Dr. Frankenstein raising the dead, I might be able to inject new life in an old manuscript, I retrieved it from the bottom of my desk drawer and read by through it. Turned out, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exactly good, either, at least not by my current standards (back then I wasn’t published; these days I am). Anyhow, I decided to see whether I could whip into commercial shape, and have spent the last several months doing just that. Setting aside the electronic sleight-of-hand needed to convert the text from Lotus Word Pro to MS Word, I’m now about 75% through bringing the corpse back to life. Some of changes are related to writing style. Others involve getting rid of fax machines, pay phones, 50-cent gas and temporal references that no longer have any currency. I will post again when I have more to report.
Meantime, my 18th title for Morning Sun Books, Louisville & Nashville Through Passenger Service, will be available January 3, 2020. Not as compelling for most, perhaps, as a good piece of detective fiction, but, hey, railroad buffs just eat these books up, and the pay is pretty good.
Recently I was between projects, having just sent off a finished manuscript to my publisher, and was looking for something else to do when I ran across my old private eye novel from 1979. Thinking that, in the manner of Dr. Frankenstein raising the dead, I might be able to inject new life in an old manuscript, I retrieved it from the bottom of my desk drawer and read by through it. Turned out, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exactly good, either, at least not by my current standards (back then I wasn’t published; these days I am). Anyhow, I decided to see whether I could whip into commercial shape, and have spent the last several months doing just that. Setting aside the electronic sleight-of-hand needed to convert the text from Lotus Word Pro to MS Word, I’m now about 75% through bringing the corpse back to life. Some of changes are related to writing style. Others involve getting rid of fax machines, pay phones, 50-cent gas and temporal references that no longer have any currency. I will post again when I have more to report.
Meantime, my 18th title for Morning Sun Books, Louisville & Nashville Through Passenger Service, will be available January 3, 2020. Not as compelling for most, perhaps, as a good piece of detective fiction, but, hey, railroad buffs just eat these books up, and the pay is pretty good.
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