THE JOURNEY

AN UNLIKELY BEGINNING:

“Let’s do NaNoWriMo this year,” my wife said, sometime in mid October, 2014. I looked up from my Kindle, “What’d you call me?” She had heard the joke too many times to even give a courtesy laugh. “National Novel Writing Month. You’re always talking about writing a book. Here’s your chance.” “Chance for what?” “You have to write fifty thousand words during November. We should do it together. It’ll be fun.” She’d done NaNoWriMo twice before. A friend of ours, a librarian who can be counted on to provide a list of websites related to the subject of any conversation had turned her on to it when Beth mentioned that she too wanted to write a book. “Hmm,” I said, “sounds interesting.

How Not to Start a Writing Career if you’re in  a hurry: On paper, this was right up my alley. I had been talking about writing since I read Lawrence Block’s Write For Your Life in 1988. Even before that, I had the idea for a super-awesome spy novel–a cross between The Bourne Identity and Nothing Lasts Forever, the 1979 thriller novel by Roderick Thorp that became the movie Die Hard–in college, but I was too busy partying and getting into trouble to stay home and write. Besides, there was a whole list of things I needed to do before I could even think of calling myself an author. I needed a worn Moleskine notebook in which to scribble ideas and descriptions of people, places, and sensations, maybe some poetry, while traveling to the exotic locations my hero would visit and gathering local insights. I also had to work out a plot and write an outline using the knowledge gained from volumes of supporting research, primary sources, and interviews with people who knew about spycraft, international finance, poisons, firearms, and knives. I would pick up self defense along the way while learning to shoot as many handguns as possible and possibly an M16. If I could manage a few years working at the CIA, acquire some lock picking skills, and develop a tolerance for Iocane powder, that would be even better.

Things Get Postponed a Few Decades: Who can say why the plan failed? Was it the lack of a burning desire to write or because the plan was unrealistic, or because I got sidetracked by life? Life does get in the way of motivation, and earning a living, especially as a recent college graduate, is always more than a full time gig. My first job out of college was as a Pier Superintendent in the port of New York where I worked sixty to eighty hours a week. Not a lot of time to write in there, although looking back, it’s clear if I had really wanted to, I would have found a way.

I spent a few years as an HMO Operations Manager in New Jersey–I was going to be a CEO someday, but realized the corporate world wasn’t for me–where my literary pursuit was more about reading than writing. Next, I indulged my creative jones as a carpenter and remodeler but needed health insurance, so I ended up going to Paramedic school and getting a job working for a private ambulance service in a city north of Denver.

Twenty five years flew by while I searched for a creative outlet. I played piano, experimented with Watercolors and drawing, built remote control gliders, and even started making custom furniture, but nothing made me want to get up in the morning and start right in. I still wanted to write but my misconceptions about the way legitimate writers did it still held me back. Besides, I had completely failed at scribbling in the Moleskine notebook, although I bought one every time I took a trip, and therefore didn’t have any great locations for plot points, or character ideas. NOr had I aquired mad self defense skills, or spycraft–Shockingly, the CIA was not interested in a guy with mediocre grades from Arizona State who was marginally proficient in English but lacking any of the prerequisites for intelligence gathering–and no plot. My wife who had heard all my excuses before, along with the whining, nodded her head. “Have you heard the term pantser?”

No More Excuses: “Why not write about zombies?” My wife smiled. I’m pretty sure she was just trying to get under my skin. “You guys are so obsessed, I bet you could write three books about that.” As it turns out, I was in the midst of a serious zombie obsession. I was working as a paramedic in a city at the edge of Denver called Commerce City. EMS attracts a lot of guys in the eighteen to twenty four demographic, and discussions of zombies became a pretty regular subject when we met for breakfast at the beginning of our shifts. It was season two of The Walking Dead, and I was reading Rhiannon Frater’s As The World Dies series (I can’t say enough good things about it. Maybe I’ll do a review in one of these posts). So, in the spirit of writing what you know, I started a zombie apocalypse novel about a paramedic in Denver who, along with his coworkers, predicts the coming zombie apocalypse. The first chapter was an almost word for word compilation of the conversations with my coworkers. The title was easy: Zombies For Breakfast.

A Writer Is Born (or at least, conceived): So, NaNoWriMo was an absolute blast. My wife and I watched barely any TV the whole month. Instead, we would sit at the kitchen table, or on the couch, or in a coffee shop, always together, and we would write our fifteen to seventeen-hundred words. Every day (most days I had no trouble with the goal, even surpassed it more often than not). Each night, we would take our dogs for their final walk, share what we wrote and discuss ideas for the next day. I was like being in one of those interactive games where you make choices and the story follows your instructions. It was a revelation like none other in my life. I finally understood what people meant when they said they had to do something creative.

Once I started, I had to write. The story just bubbled out of me. I finished November with seventy thousand words and kept going through December. By the time I decided I was finished in mid January, I had a story of over one-hundred-fifty thousand words. This writing thing was so easy. Think of an idea, type it into my computer, and repeat. I was so excited, I told everyone I knew about how I was writing a book and, yes, as a matter of fact, it would be ready soon. All I had to do was spend a month or two cleaning up the typos and the parts where things weren’t quite crystal clear, then bam, I would be an author, and everyone would read my story and be very impressed, and they would tell their friends and sometime in the next year or so there would be a movie contract. Those of you who have written anything know what happened next.

After leaving it alone for a couple of weeks, I discovered that my fabulous book had a number of ‘opportunities’ (a word I learned in my first writing class) for revision. Anne Lamott talks about the need to get through the “shitty first draft.” I had finally done something real writers did, executed an amazingly shitty first draft. The good news is that before I had subjected more than one or two people to what I had in my computer, I realized that, even at the age of forty-five, with an extensive education, experience writing memos, letters, advertising for my construction company, and countless emails, I had no idea how to write. It was time to go back to school. Again.

Now What?: I’ve since written a thriller–not international and no spies–which I’m working very hard on, and revised ZFB (Zombies For Breakfast takes a really long time to type) and learned a lot about writing. I’ll be getting into all of that in future posts. For now, check out my next post, in which I join a group of super smart writers who met in a personal memoir class. They took pity on me and let me join their group and start workshopping my zombie novel.